IGMS Issue 8 (17 page)

I realize I'm whining. I don't care.

Big Ma tells me to meet a nice boy at church. I remind her about the Catholic boy who took me to lunch at 7-11. He told me, between slurps of his Big Gulp, that I was lucky he was so open-minded. Most religious folk don't want to date people with DSAs for fear that the moral taint might be hereditary. After all, if Big Ma had been a good Catholic, she wouldn't have ended up in Limbo. That was his feeling.

I now avoid Church.

"Have you thought about trying one of those dating services?" my sister asks. "The ones where everyone has a DSA?"

I groan. I never thought I would need a dating service, but I also never thought I'd be sharing my body with a geriatric shoplifter.

"Found it," my sister says, holding up the Enigma jewel case in triumph. She runs around my kitchen with her hands over her head like Rocky. "Yo, Adrienne!"

I try to get her attention. "Listen, if I go to a dating service, will you go with me? You're not getting back together with the S&M guy, so why not?"

"I'm done with men."

"Right," I say. "Henri, help me out here."

"Henri is a monk. He thinks I should enter a nunnery. You're on your own, sis."

I flip through the phone book.
Dharmic Dating
.
Kindred Spirits
.
Past Life Passions
. I let Big Ma choose. She picks a service called
Spiritual Connections
. The lady at the office asks a lot of intrusive questions, like whether or not Big Ma killed anyone while she was alive.

Liability issues, apparently.

Big Ma's answer isn't something I can politely translate.

I sign forms, write a flirtatious blurb, and allow myself to be interviewed on video. Within a week, I have a date with a nice-looking policeman named Kevin O'Brien.

I meet Kevin for a picnic. I am thrilled with his choice of venue, because there's nothing in the park for Big Ma to steal.

Big Ma doesn't like that Kevin is Irish. She doesn't like that he is a policeman either. And though he impresses me by telling me that his father was a policeman and his father's father was a policeman, Big Ma calls them a family of jackboots.

Kevin unwraps a ham sandwich for me, and puts it on a plastic plate. The only kind of ham Big Ma can stand is
cappicola
, but I force her to eat it anyway. It's pretty bland, but Kevin made it himself, and that's nice.

"I've never met anyone through a service before," I confess.

"Me neither. But it's hard to find a girl who understands this spiritual shit if she isn't going through it herself."

I like that Kevin uses the word
shit
on a first date. It makes him more real. Big Ma thinks he's crass.

Kevin's DSA is his Uncle Pat. Uncle Pat died when Kevin was little, but he grew up with the pictures. "My mother and Uncle Pat were close. It was his liver that went."

Kevin laughs as he pops the top off two beers.

Inside, Big Ma nods knowingly, as if her every stereotype about the Irish is now confirmed. I sip from my beer and bask in the sunshine. "Was your Uncle Pat the religious sort? Big Ma loves angels. And my sister's DSA is a monk  . . ."

"Uncle Pat wasn't religious while he was alive," Kevin says. "But now he drags me to every church, synagogue, and mosque he can find, looking for the answer. I guess nobody in Limbo knows what the right religion is, otherwise they'd know how to get out," Kevin says. "Maybe none of them have the right religion."

Big Ma starts getting agitated at this possibility, so I remind her about our deal. If she behaves, I'll let her decorate my apartment. "Maybe the afterlife isn't about what you believed, but what you did," I say.

"Of course it is," Kevin says with certainty. Amazingly, he's already on his second beer. "Like I tell Uncle Pat, you gotta serve your time until you get paroled."

It's nice to be able to talk about our DSAs so naturally. No awkward silences. No lectures. Kevin wouldn't normally be my type, but a girl in my position can't be too choosy.

My sister is standing in front of my fridge eating yogurt. "Let's order pizza. Henri keeps throwing out my food. He's become an ascetic."

Big Ma complains about wasting money on take-out and insists on whipping up some
pasta faggioli
. She's a great cook and watching her use my hands, I learn the tricks she'd forgotten or wasn't willing to teach me while she was alive.

"You look awful," I tell my sister as I peel the garlic.

Her eyes are bloodshot. She's paler than usual. "Effing Henri had a midnight confessional."

"What did he confess?"

Big Ma wants to know too, but she pretends to be absorbed in bringing the pasta water to a rolling boil.

"Well," my sister says. "Didn't you ever wonder how we could possibly be
descendants
of an 19th Century monk?"

I gasp. "I always thought Henri was an uncle or something."

"No," my sister says. "He ran away from the monastery. He literally ripped up his bed sheet, made a rope, and climbed out the window to take up with a village seamstress. He's sure that's why he was sent to Limbo. Now he's scourging and starving me to atone for his sins."

"What did you tell him?" I asked.

"I told him the whole religion thing is bogus," my sister says, hovering over the skillet where we're frying up beans, garlic, onion, and basil. The scent is mouthwatering.

"How can you possibly think religion is bogus?" One would think that our undeniable proof of spiritual manifestations would have put that matter to rest.

"How can you
not
think it's bogus? Shouldn't an omniscient God have anticipated a shortage of space in the afterlife?"

My sister has a point. I'm curious about what Big Ma might have done to get sent to Limbo. I try to get her to tell me while we test the pasta for firmness, but my question makes her so belligerent that she throws the pot of boiling water and pasta into the colander.

The steam nearly scalds my hands and Big Ma feels guilty for burning me, so she murmurs something about problems in her marriage. I know she's holding out on me, but talking to Big Ma as a spirit is different than talking to my great grandmother. At least my sister never knew Henri, so she doesn't have to make the adjustment. I figure Big Ma will tell me in her own time, and in any case, I'm not sure I want to know her secrets.

On our second date, Kevin takes me to a baseball game. Baseball bores Big Ma even more than it bores me, and once we've had our hotdog, she's out for the count.

I tell Kevin about the monk's confession while he gulps down his fourth beer. I think Kevin drinks too much. Or maybe it's Uncle Pat that's doing the drinking. It's hard to tell.

"You know what I think?" Kevin asks. "Our DSAs have to get our forgiveness. That's why they've been sent back here. So, did you hear that, Uncle Pat? You'd better suck up to me."

"I'd forgive Big Ma if she were a serial killer, just to get her out of my head," I say. "I think maybe they have to forgive themselves."

"That's your book-learning talking, Adrienne. Self-forgiveness is just pop-psychology shit," Kevin says.

I don't like that Kevin uses the word
shit
on the second date. I don't like that every time he cheers for his team, his hand shoots out and I have to duck out of the way. I don't like that when his team loses it makes him so angry that he almost gets into a fistfight with the man in front of us.

I shouldn't find fault. Kevin is the first guy that's wanted to take me on a second date in forever. A person in my situation has to compromise. I realize that.

I have the day off, so Big Ma and I paint my living room. The color is
Soft Fleece
. At the hardware store, it was grouped with whites, but as we put it on the wall, Big Ma is pleased by the unmistakable pink undertones. She informs me that in her day, pink and gold décor was all the rage. She tells me they were Eleanor Roosevelt's favorite colors. I have no way of disputing this, so I allow her to mount four gilded angels on the wall.

While we paint, we have the television on. We're watching soap operas together. Somehow, in spite of the language barrier, Big Ma has always enjoyed
General Hospital
. She missed a bunch of episodes after she died, but now that she's back, it isn't hard to catch up with the storyline.

Three hours later, the paint is up on the wall and Big Ma is emotional. She won't tell me what's wrong, but I keep hearing a keening noise in my head. She puts Pavarotti on the stereo. We go through fifteen cycles of
Ave Maria
before she tells me that she once got divorced.

"From Great Grandpa August?"

When I ask about Great Grandpa it upsets her even more. She is crying, actually crying, and her tears are slipping over my cheeks in big fat droplets that splash on my hardwood floors. It's hard to comfort her when my own hands are shaking.

There was another man, before Grandpa August, she tells me. She got married very young, and she divorced him and moved away so no one would know; so the Church would not excommunicate her. She's so ashamed of having left her first husband that my skin turns bright red as she tells me about it.

I'm bewildered that this is what she thinks kept her out of Heaven. People in other religions get divorced all the time. But I can't comfort her by telling her that her worries are outdated sins. So, instead, I ask her why she left her first husband. She tells me she just didn't love him.

And then she cries again and refuses to say more.