Any Bitter Thing (8 page)

That’s not a problem of faith, Vivienne.

No
, she agrees, smiling.
Faith has nothing to do with the Church.

I wouldn’t go that far.

No. You wouldn’t.

They have their customary debate about the Pope’s unyielding reign. At the end he leans across the desk as her co-conspirator:
I agree with you, Vivienne. Don’t tell.

I was testing you, Father. From time to time I must remind you what you really believe.

He blushes, which he does too easily, and her eyes crease merrily at the corners. He minds, very much, that he amuses her sometimes, but he doesn’t know how to make things different. Vivienne knew Lizzy’s father back in grade school; for this alone he needs her. For this, and their mutual memories of Elizabeth and Bill in this house for Sunday-night cook-outs, the two baby girls gabbling in the twilight. Sometimes Ray wandered over to join them, toting his own six-pack and sitting on the steps, wrapping his big hands around a can and popping a top, that distinctive summer sound. The babies crawled over the grass with the mothers standing watch; Bill helped grill the steaks. Ray mostly kept his own company—not unfriendly, exactly, but perhaps cowed a little by the presence of the priest.

They had been family and neighbors, assembled on a pretty stretch of yard beside a river. Such happy times, these bouts of normalcy, these glimmers of God’s ordinary gifts. He and his sister reminisced about the Island, but never for long. There was too much here-and-now: the tiny girls, the rising moon, bloody steaks spitting on the grill.
How did we land here, Mikey?
Elizabeth would say, astonished.
Why such beautiful luck?

Elizabeth is gone, but Vivienne remembers. For this alone he loves her.

When they emerge once again from his office, Lizzy waylays him:
Here’s your badger
, she cackles, handing him a shoe.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Her little teeth make him feel bitten.

Is this what people mean when they claim to have fallen in love?

I don’t want this particular badger
, he informs her,
I don’t care for the sunglasses he’s wearing.
He waits for her face, the entire apple-shaped miracle of it, to crinkle hilariously.

Is it normal, this feeling of bursting, this sustained longing? She pitches herself toward him, her stick arms branching around him, the smell of soap or snow or dirt or strawberry ice cream rising from her coppery hair. Is it normal, this monstrous, engulfing anguish that feels like no other thing? Like no other single thing?

He nearly ate her once. She was so small, so newly arrived in his life, he’d just lifted her out of the bath, warm water dripping from her ringlets and the lobes of her flushed ears, one pink leg dangling from the towel he’d wrapped her in.
Arrgharrgh-arrgh
, he growled, hoping to make her laugh, kissing at her toes, pretending to be a monster—a nice monster, the one they’d invented and named Biggy.
Arrgh-arrgh-arrgh
, and then he was nipping her,
arrgh-arrgh-arrgh
, one pink, beloved toe at a time. Then—this is what troubles him—he took in her entire foot as if he meant literally to devour her, to swallow her whole, to eat her up. Expecting laughter, he found her gaping at him instead, her eyes big and blue and startled. He spit her out, ashamed.

Is this normal? To feel so ravenous, so heartsplit? He’s heard prayer described this way, but has found the opposite to be true. Prayer is his journey toward stillness, a calm, white hollow, a noiseless comfort, the opposite, in fact, of the mysterious, disquieting
forwardness
of parental love.

He does not want his love to be desperate, the result of having lost his family. He does not want his love to weigh too much.

Vivienne steps into his kitchen now, to copy a recipe onto a pad he keeps hidden from Mrs. Hanson. Lizzy is trying to sell them another badger and also a kangaroo. Sometimes he
fails to distinguish between his love for her and his fear of losing her.
Too
, he adds in his head.
Losing her, too.

It is he who requires advice.

He admires the quick strokes of Vivienne’s handwriting, her confident presence in another person’s kitchen.

Of course
, she will say.
Of course it’s normal.
But he does not ask.

EIGHT

On my first day back, the school seemed like a place remembered from a dream. From far down the hall came the staccato notes of a new term, the slam-bang of teachers flinging open cabinets, filling trash cans, stapling lists to bulletin boards, dragging desks into optimistic configurations. The students weren’t due back for a week, but already the place ballooned with the sound of industry, destruction, hope, effort—the main ingredients of any school year.

I stepped out of my office and into the guidance lobby—a misnamed cranny containing the reception desk, a cranky copy machine, and a walk-in vault that sheltered a few decades’ worth of student records. Another door opened into a shabby conference room that we shared with the school nurse. Our school district had more hope than money, and the discrepancy showed especially in the high school, which had been converted, unconvincingly, from a defunct shoe factory. Oxblood dye still showed in the floor planks outside the cafeteria.

Jane Rodgers, an old-fashioned secretary who’d been trained in the fifties, was installed behind her desk, talking on the
phone and stapling orientation booklets.
Stay put
, she mouthed, and I did, pouring myself a cup of coffee. I had been home for three weeks, had slept in my own bed—my sheets, my pillow, my husband—but only now did my former life begin to seem familiar.

“You all right?” Jane asked, hanging up. She gave me a worried squint from above the tortoisey rims of her half-glasses. “You look paler than when you first got in.”

“I’m fine,” I said. In truth I felt a little sad, wanting to call Drew. Breakfast had been a tense affair even though the word “forbid” didn’t formally enter our conversation.

“That was the Harmon girl,” Jane said. “None too happy with her course schedule, big surprise.”

Andrea Harmon was none too happy with anything. “Jane?” I set my coffee down. “Why isn’t this place hopping?” I was the sole guidance counselor for a population of three hundred and fifty kids; on a normal pre-opening day, the place would be a-clamor with complaint.

She set her mouth, her pink lipstick puckering. Jane remembered me as a child and retained her right to mother me. Usually I didn’t mind. “I thought you’d want to wait until Rick got the schedules unsnagged,” she said. “He balled them up, Lizzy, he can vet them himself.”

“Excuse me,” I said carefully, “but isn’t this my job?”

She lifted her eyes without moving a single muscle in her face. “You look as if you just escaped from a labor camp.”

“This
is the labor camp. I escaped from Limbo.”

“Mariette says—”

“Mariette doesn’t have a medical degree.
Actual
doctors have cleared me for takeoff.” I looked down at my blank appointment book. “Apparently I have openings.” Then I limped across the hall to reclaim the schedules from the main office. From there I detoured to Mariette’s classroom, moving as nimbly as I
could without my cane just to prove a point, but as a result the plates in my leg seemed to be heating up.

Mariette looked surprised to see me. “I thought you were staying home today.”

“The only people who thought that were you and Drew.”

She was in the back of the lab, uncrating boxes of rats. “I love these guys,” she said. “I hate like hell to feed them crap.” She picked one up and kissed its pointy, polka-dotted, disobliging face.

The rats, which would be named for famous scientists, were the stars of her single-quarter, one-credit elective course called “Our Magnificent World,” a garage sale of her favorite topics, ranging from the properties of light to the effects of junk food on unsuspecting rodents. Every year she managed to accidentally kill one of them—Madame Curie drowned in the janitor’s water bucket, Copernicus expired in a heating vent—occasioning her annual, suspiciously canned, sermon on accountability.

“You could sound a little more sorry,” I said. I glanced around her classroom, an underfunded lab that brimmed with life. Literally. A village of gerbils, two tanks of fish, and a bashful chinchilla had joined their rat brethren in the aid of scientific inquiry. “I don’t know how you keep this up.”

She put up one finger, obviously rehearsing. “It is the ever-marching quest for knowledge that separates man from beast.”

I set my schedules on the lab table. “Mariette, is it my imagination, or are people looking at me funny?”

“Who?

“Jane,” I said. “And both janitors. And the new guy in English, who dropped off a syllabus and acted as if I had rabies. Tell me the truth. Do I look that pitiful?”

“No.” She carried the rats to a six-foot cage outfitted with rat-sized chutes and ladders and let them go,
plop, plop, plop
, into a heap of wood shavings, like a platoon being released on a beach. “People hear things, that’s all”

“What things?”

“Some people around here still think of you as the town orphan. And now this,” she said, grazing her eyes over my creaky body. “Maybe the thing with Father Mike came up again in certain quarters.”

I closed my eyes. During my first year back in Hinton, I ran into parishioners, former friends of the family, certain shopkeepers in whose memory I had continued to exist as the damaged child. I endured their tiptoeing conversation, their undisguised amazement that I had not wound up on the street conversing with phone poles. “What did you hear?”

“I didn’t, my mother did.” Mariette closed the cage lid. “She told the offending party to shut her fat face, if that makes you feel any better.”

I laughed. “It does, actually. It’s nice to know she’s still got some of the old spit and polish.”

“Sometimes it comes back,” Mariette said. The intervening years had thwarted her mother’s natural effervescence, aging her in ways we could not have predicted. Fire to ice. Mariette blamed her father.

She opened a cabinet and began to unload glassware—petri dishes, beakers, test tubes—and arrange them on a slate table that lined one wall. With no small effort I hoisted myself onto the table and watched her rattle test tubes into a rack.

“Remember our first year here, Mariette?” I said. “That girl Everett sent over? Amy Frye, her name was, skinny little freshman. She’d been hauled back home by the cops after a two-week runaway. They figured she’s afraid to start high school, she’s got the wrong friends, she’s a spoiled brat, get her insolent little butt back in school where it belongs, and pronto. So Everett shuttles her across the hall to the new counselor to work out a course schedule, but I can see she’s a mess, I’m not an idiot, for God’s sake, I graduated
first.”

Mariette cocked her head. “You’re amazing. I don’t know why you still talk to me.”

I blinked, caught short, for Mariette had not spoken to me in this, her old way, since my accident. A reprieve is what it felt like, because we were standing not in a hospital corridor or even on my front porch but in this classroom, this starting-over place, at the glossy beginning of a new year. “So,” I continued, “I’m with this kid, this kid I’ve never met, and it’s my first month into my first job, sure, but I’m not so green I can’t recognize a few things, including that crushed look in the eye before the truth comes tumbling out. So I wait. She’s sitting there, the schedule’s done, and I’m waiting, because I know she wants me to wait, it’s going to take her a while to say it. Which it does”

“I remember that girl,” Mariette said. “It was the mother’s boyfriend, right?”

“He ended up in jail, but it took two years. So I call the mother, alert the police, get the
DHS
referrals lined up, set the kid up at her grandma’s house for the meantime, and at the end of the day Everett saunters back into my office to congratulate me on a job well done. ‘You really had her pegged,’ he says, like it’s this big compliment, only he says it with this morose, drippy smile that means, ‘Of course you had her pegged, it takes one to know one.’”

“Everett’s an idiot,” Mariette said.

“It’s not just him. I don’t want people thinking I’m good with kids because I’ve
suffered.
”

“People don’t think that,” Mariette said quietly.

“I’m good because I studied my ass off. Because I’m
suited
to the job. Is it too much to ask for full credit?”

“In real life?” she said. “Yeah.”

“What am I supposed to do, go around telling everybody, ‘Hey, speaking of fall schedules, nothing hideous happened to me in childhood.’” I slid off the table and faced her. “How guilty sounding is that?”

“Nobody thinks you’re guilty of anything.”

“They think
he
is,” I said. One of the rats had paused at the cage door and appeared to be listening to me, though probably it was merely enchanted by the rattling test tubes. I stuck my finger through the wire and petted its head, which felt like much-washed cotton. “It took me so long to figure out why they sent him on that so-called retreat,” I murmured. “Can you imagine a kid nowadays being so dense?”

“I was just as bad,” Mariette said. “I had to ask my mother what ‘molested’ meant.”

Father Mike had been sent to someplace called Baltimore to think about his sins—that’s how Celie explained it, refusing to elaborate. When she broke the news of his death a few weeks later, her voice went mild and squashy, but her face did not. She believed in sin and punishment. Father Mike died of a premature heart attack like his father and uncle before him, she said, implying that God Himself had set into motion this genetic calamity to ensure an instant penance should one ever be required. Penance for what, I had no idea, until four miserable years later when my boarding-school roommates passed around a copy of
Lolita
and I thought, Oh my God, that’s what they think
we
did. The questions that nun-woman asked me, they were about
this.
Until then, I had believed the Church exiled him because he let me eat chocolate pie for breakfast, because he danced at weddings, because he let me act like a baby, because he said son of a bitch. Now, in my own exile at Sacred Heart School for Girls in Bryce Crossing, Minnesota—where Celie had sent me after a short, edgy stretch in her care—I could see that my uncle’s heart had buckled under the weight of false accusation.