The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (17 page)

I had hoped—no, expected—to wake and see the silver-yellow hair grown magically in the night. At four a.m., I watched Mother’s face as she accepted my water, hoping to see the surprise in her eyes. I returned to the bathroom and tried again. A new hairbrush I bought at the drugstore with Nana’s birthday money, a bright white one never before used, lay on the sink ready to stroke the long shiny strands to the blessed count of a hundred. I slept. Morning came and my mouse-brown hair sat like a mop on my head.

I was saddened by my old looks that first morning. Later, after school, I talked to Mother about what I was doing, and to Father over supper and to Cassidy between stories. Mother thought it was sweet, Father foolish, and Cassidy, a start.

“But you don’t need different hair now, Jess,” Mother said peeling potatoes at the sink. “And when you’re a grown-up woman you can grow it long and color it at the hairdresser’s.”

When, an hour later, I passed Father those same potatoes, albeit in a different state of being, now mashed with butter and sour cream, I asked him simply if transubstantiation would work on my hair. If I wanted it long and platinum blond. “Jess, we’re not much on that sort of foolishness in this family. Hair is what hair is, is what I think. You’ve got perfectly fine hair for a young girl. Don’t go thinking about dying it. In time it will naturally go to a shade lighter just like your Mom’s. Some of that gravy, please.”

As she handed him the boat, Mother’s eyes were fixed on mine.

Cassidy considered my question at length before replying. “I don’t see a change just yet, Jess. But it takes a priest years of trainin’ before he gets the hang of it. I say keep tryin’. What’s the harm in it?” He opened the book.

“Was the Minotaur transubstantiated?” I asked as he flipped through the colored pictures on the pages. “Did he start out as a bull and make himself half man? Or a man and make himself half bull?”

“I don’t think so, Jess. It’s just the way he was made right from the start. Maybe he’s meant ta show there’s some bad parts in all men. All people.” He looked at me as I fingered my hair where it came to the tops of my ears. “Could be a touch lighter, now that I study it. Hard ta say really. Where’d we leave off?”

“Jason has just taken the Golden Fleece.”

“So he has. So he did.”

Beginning that night, I added dimples to the blessing. I’d wanted them since Jeanine had been born. She had them and they made her look cute. What was the harm in trying? My fingers flashed and flew in the mirrored light, cutting away the unneeded flesh of both my cheeks, as, standing on the rim of the tub, I prayed the blessing for the loss of substance.

By Saturday night, though, a new thought had overtaken me as I stared at my familiar face in the mirror. Perhaps my hair had become as lustrous as that shiny silvery blond mane I wanted, but I just couldn’t
see
it. Just like the bread and the wine. It wasn’t a change you could see. Perhaps the
nature of my hair
had changed, but its outward sign remained the same. I sensed in my heart at that moment the full understanding of the mystery at hand and went armed with it to Sister’s class the next morning.

As always, we practiced our answers with her, in singsong unison, before Father Murray opened the classroom door, walking stiff as Moses’s staff, as if there were nothing more important in all the mystical world than reaching the Mount Horeb of a desk at the front of the room.

We stood and said together, “Good morning, Father Murray.” He smiled and gently touched the cross of his handheld rosary to his thin lips. “Good morning, children. Please take your seats.” Sister extended a hand toward us and we sat. “Well. Now you’ve had a full week to learn transubstantiation. I’m sure it will be an easy morning here then.” He walked to my desk. “Jennifer,” he said. I stood, only because his slitty pink eyes were fixed on my face. “What is meant by ‘transubstantiation’?” His eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. He repeated, “Transubstantiation.” The word was slow in coming out of his mouth, like a long train coming out of a tunnel.

I swear I didn’t mean to say it. But it was the sight of his nose hairs—I mean, the absence of their sighting—that spurred me on; the dark, devoid cave in the center of his face that pushed me. That and the error in my name, as if to him I had been transubstantiated into someone else entirely, a Jennifer. I thought all at once, “Maybe he does have nose hairs. Maybe he transubstantiated that hair-naked space into a garden of dense black growth, but no one can see it.” He was a priest, an old priest, after all, and well practiced in these things, an expert on transubstantiation. So I answered in a way I thought would impress him about my depth of understanding.

“I have platinum blond hair. And it’s long and soft, way past my ears. I did it every night last week. In the mirror in my bathroom, standing on the side of my tub. With my hands and a blessing.” I moved my hands in well-practiced slashes through space. “That’s what transubstantiation is. Changing things into other things. I bet you really have nose hair. You transubstantiated it, so it’s really there but we can’t see it. Transubstantiation. The power of blessing over the power of nature.” For effect, I fluffed the dagger ends of my new long locks with my fingertips. “Do you like my dimples?” I smiled coyly.

Father Murray’s face flashed. He started to point a bony finger at me but lowered his hand and took a big step back. “What?” he managed to say after a few deep breaths. “Hair and dimples? Transubstantiation? This is the kind of heresy that sends people to an eternity of Hell, Jennifer!” His voice rose in pitch.

“Nobody goes to Hell,” I said with certainty. “Cassidy told me that. It doesn’t make sense that God would send anyone He made there. Even the Minotaur or Medusa. Especially the Minotaur. It wouldn’t be fair because that’s how the Assembler—uh, I mean God—made them. Imperfect in just the way He’s imperfect. So He’s got to forgive. And Cassidy says Hell doesn’t even exist.”

The priest’s breath stuck in his chest. Finally, he let it out. A little line of sweat had broken out on his neck, just above his white collar. “Oh, Hell exists, young lady. I assure you it exists. And it exists just for people like that drunkard Joe Cassidy. And you can tell him that the next time you see him for a discussion of theology!” He dug at his pale neck with the side of his thumb.

“But what about God’s forgiveness? He always forgives. He said so. And I forgive Him.” I held up my hands for the priest to see. “So we’re even.”

Father Murray bent low so his face was just opposite mine. Slowly, so the words were separated by great gulfs, he said, “Not. If. You. Go. To. Hell. There. Is. No. Forgiveness. In. Hell.”

Two or three of the other children had begun to giggle. A girl in the first row smiled and said, “Jessica’s going to Hell,” but Sister clapped her hands three times to get our attention. Even Father Murray rose from his crouch to look at her.

“Thank you, Father, for coming this morning. Perhaps we shall continue next Sunday. Time to sing some songs, children. Say good-bye to Father Murray.” She walked to the door and held it open. He left at a brisk pace. She slammed the door missing his retreating left heel by inches.

Since he was associate pastor of St. Anthony’s Church, Father Murray’s decision was law. I was not allowed to make my First Holy Communion the coming spring. I was sent back a class to relearn the dogma that had eluded me. He would follow my progress carefully before deciding to let me begin again on the route to that sacrament the next fall. He was worried, he told my parents, that my “mental capacity” was diminished to such an extent that I may never qualify for Communion. And he warned them, keep me away from unsavory, heretical influences. Pagan influences. The Minotaur. Medusa. In Heaven! “What kind of Heaven does she see,” he nearly shouted, “if it’s populated by monsters of myth and legend?”

Cassidy was steamed when he heard about it. He tried to get an appointment to meet with Father Murray but was denied. He managed to get Father Larrie on the phone. Father Larrie listened patiently, but wouldn’t meet with him either. Father Larrie merely said he would look into the question of my suitability for Communion training.

At the dinner table that Sunday night, Cassidy kept repeating, “diminished mental capacity” and then shaking his head in bewilderment. He told Father when they started clearing, “I’ll diminish their goddamn teeth, I get in a room with them alone. Like I shoulda done nineteen years ago, Ford, over Joey. They were a pair of jackasses young and are a pair of jackasses old. Diminished mental capacity, those dried-up old bastards.”

“Joe,” said Father, nodding in my direction.

“I mean it, Ford. The time of reckoning has come.”

That night we read the myth of Perseus and Medusa again. And Pegasus and Andromeda. Later in bed they were there with me, shining down from the plaster sky. Except for Medusa the Gorgon. She was dead by Perseus’s arm and Hermes’s sword. Good. God, give her a new head in heaven, right from the box. I went to sleep seeing her gleaming hair blowing in the wind as she stood on the ocean’s perch. The hair was like silver strings, but soft like cats’ fur.

First grade was an easy year, except for CCD and soccer again. We went two and four. Timmy twisted his knee. Not playing soccer, but walking to the oranges and Gatorade table at halftime. Lexi became goalie for two games while he healed and ate potato chips with his parents on the sidelines. We won them both. Her body bath replaced Timmy’s creosote in the air. I watched her more than the action on the field. Her hair was platinum blond. Long and gleaming like the night moon’s silver trail on the sea that led Odysseus home.

She told me to turn around, face the play, thirty-seven times during those two games. She had hair like Pegasus’s tail.

I left my regular class and went to third grade for reading and math every day. I learned cursive at home from Father and Cassidy. I couldn’t draw to save my life, but I was good at naming colors. I would always spot the gray in greens, the teal in blues. I just couldn’t draw a sailboat.

Spring came and went. Jeanine was walking and talking. She stopped learning new signs as she learned to speak. Cassidy read to her, now, at seven thirty while I did my homework. Then it was my turn at eight. If he couldn’t come, Mother or Father read to me. I followed the words with my eyes. Sometimes I couldn’t stop my hands from moving. Usually I just made the signs for the story we were doing. But sometimes, my hands moved like they had in the mirror of my bathroom when I tried mastering transubstantiation. I didn’t say it to anyone, but sometimes I wanted the myths and legends to be real. To come alive. Right off the page, out of the brilliantly colored pictures. My thumbless hands were hungry for magic.

In late summer, just before second grade was to begin, we drove to Florida to visit Nana and Ned. We drove for two days, stayed with them for three, and then drove two more days back home. Jeanine slept and then cried, or sometimes cried and then slept, in the car seat next to me, unless I read to her or she was eating. I read her nine books eleven times each on the way down. She received three new books as travel presents from Nana and Ned, and I placed them in rotation for reading on the way home. Most of the time, Mother, who sat in the front seat next to Father, dozed off before Jeanine’s eyes had fully closed. Then I placed my pillow against the door window so she could sleep with her head supported. She had announced her pregnancy the night before we left. Father stood behind her, smiling with his hand on her shoulder. Jeanine cried when she heard the news. To be fair, at almost two, Jeanine had taken to crying at the drop of a hat. Or the ring of the doorbell. Or the smell of pepperoni pizza. Cassidy told her he was buying us ice cream cones one hot Saturday afternoon and she started crying.

It was hotter in Florida in early September than in Bethesda, Maryland, in the height of the summer. But Florida had better clouds. They were bigger and whiter and faster than our clouds. We’d all go to the beach in the morning before the day got too hot. I couldn’t get wet above my waist because of my hearing apparatus, so most of the day I sat in the shade of a red-striped umbrella and read, or lay on my back watching the clouds sail by. Most were too round and fat to be anything but clouds, but often in late morning, as the breeze off the ocean stiffened, some of them were torn into strips and bits. These I could piece together into familiar shapes—boats, animals, major gods of antiquity, a can of mushroom soup. The wattle neck of Father Larrie.

Nana and Ned had a dog, a golden retriever named Jed. They let me take him for walks in the evenings, along the beach, all by myself. Jed could get wet and swim whenever he wanted, and if I threw a stick into the surf, he’d charge right in and get it. When he came out and ran to me with his mouth clamped on the wet wood, he shook his yellow coat till it reminded me of Lexi’s hair when she ran with her ponytail untied. Except Jed sprayed me with sandy sea water that smelled faintly of gasoline, whereas Lexi was dry and all Jean Naté.

I walked the beach those late afternoons, scanning the surf for Aphrodite rising up on a cushion of white foam. Every porpoise playing in the evening waters seemed her in disguise, smiling at me at the top of her leap. I was tempted to hold out my hands and move them in a blessing through the air, but I had promised Father, so I didn’t.

On my last afternoon walk, the west wind was high. The sound of the wind-driven water was bright green whisperings in my ears, hollow and luminous like the low notes of a sad song. That music brought me to the water’s edge. I stepped in a few paces, and the coral foam gripped my ankles. The gurgled green song of the sea grew louder in my ears. The foam then was to my thigh. The water was warm and soft like the music in the wind. I bent slightly and brought my face to the skin of the sea. A swell rose to meet me. I kissed its lips. I felt the tug of the receding waves pull at me. I stepped once, twice, three times further out. The music softened to a golden voice made weak by the sight of beauty. I looked to my yellow bathing suit darkened to my chest by the sea. The song now was the whisper in a shell. I covered my ears with my hands. The whisper was light as a feather, soft and shiny and alive. A wave moved past me and seconds later began its strong retreat. My right foot rose from the sand, drifted forward an inch. The whisper in my ear was a sad, certain yes. I will dive into the sea and swim out, far out, to the whispering song, I thought. Then I felt a creature scrape past my back. Frightened, I turned. Jed began to bark and growl as he paddled around me, placing himself between me and the wind and the waves and the whisper. His bark was loud and guttural, wet and incessant. The whispered song of the sea was stilled. I turned and walked to shore.