The Divine Economy of Salvation (20 page)

“Later, Angela,” she replied, a little sadly, pulling the blanket on the couch up to her chest. “You just got here.”

“I like the wig,” Christine offered. “You look glamorous.”

Christine had also changed in the past couple of months. She was wearing rose nail polish on her fingers, and her bangs were held back with a stylish matching barrette. She had gained none of the visible signs of womanhood—the budding breasts or shifting bone structure—as I had in the last year, but she appeared less childish to me in some way. Maybe being on her own she had gained confidence, giving her strength I almost admired. She didn't seem distressed by Mother's appearance, nudging her calves playfully, then taking her tired toes into her hands and rubbing them.
She'll be a good mother,
I remember thinking.

The house was spotless, smelling of cleaners and disinfectants, the floors freshly mopped, their tiles slippery, the windows washed and the mantels scrubbed. There were only a few decorations: a pinecone wreath on the inside of the door with a bright red velvet bow, a plastic vine resembling fresh holly outlining the edge of the hallway, a few hanging cinnamon sticks that gave the room's air a spicy taste, and our simple red stockings hanging over the fireplace. Yet the entire house was transformed by their presence, bespeaking
comfort. A green mat with “Merry Christmas” stitched on it lay in the corner by the window. A place to the left of the fireplace was reserved for the tree.

My father went into the kitchen to make sandwiches, and my mother asked me to bring her knitting bag out of her bedroom. In it were balls of yarn and an assortment of smooth brown sticks. She laid out the yarns on the couch according to their colour.

“We're going to make some Christmas presents with these,” she proclaimed. “Look at the great colours you can get nowadays.” She had balls in yellow, green, blue, red, and white. “There's more in the bag. Purple and pink, multicoloured yarn. Fantastic.”

Her rose-coloured glasses, together with her wide smile, gave her a clownish appearance. The rather stark features of her face—the high cheekbones and long thin nose, her triangular chin—added to the effect. However, she had rarely seemed so light to me, so beautiful. Her hands moved as if skimming through water, effortlessly pulling out the strings. She held up a finished example of what we would be making: a star woven around the wooden sticks, crossed in the middle, the tightly wound yarn fanning out to the four points, front and back identical.

“Did you make that, Mom?” I asked, impressed by its exotic flair. We had made ornaments for the Christmas tree at the school—pieces of cloth pinned in sections to Styrofoam balls and clay cutouts of angels and trumpets—but this was a shape I'd never seen before.

“Yes, I did. They're quite easy, really. You'll see,” she said in
excitement, her words rushing out of her. “At first I didn't believe the nurse—I mean the neighbour, that I could do it. My hands were very sore the day she taught me. But once I got going, it was simple.”

Christine was already rummaging through the knitting bag to find the purple yarn, and Mother passed me a large ball of yellow.

“Wool is a little more elegant, but it's more expensive,” she added. “There's only two rolls in there. You can have one each if you like.”

“Wool makes me itch anyway,” I replied.

“That's right,” she said, patting my head as she did when I was small. “I'd forgotten that. Well, the yarn's easier to work with too. Wool doesn't like to be separated.”

Father came in with the sandwiches and some eggnog and sat in the recliner beside the fireplace, his eyes fixed on my mother as she demonstrated how to tie the first knot to keep the sticks in place and the way to wind the yarn in order to keep the pattern consistent. She had given up sewing and crocheting, and it was the only time in the last year I'd seen her use her hands with such concentration besides saying her rosary. In fact, the rosary was curiously out of sight for once, and its absence gladdened me as I thought that even my mother was capable of forgetting about Him once in a while and thinking of herself first. But the illusion soon vanished when she told us the name of the objects we were crafting.

“They're called God's Eyes,” she said. “Those are the empty spaces.” She held up her original piece and poked the air with her slender fingers. “His eyes.”

Father got up from his chair to put some Christmas carols on the record player. “I think the name's strange,” he said with a mischievous glance in my mother's direction. “Making God's Eyes. How about God's Legs or God's Hair or God's Lungs or God's Toes . . .”

Christine and I started giggling. I thought of what God's legs might look like. I tried to imagine them with hair like my father's, dense as mesh.

“You're not making the empty spaces,” he continued.

“Joe, you're so silly. Don't encourage him, girls,” said my mother, and she tilted her head back to chastise him. “We are making the empty spaces. That's what the threads are for. You can't create the space without the yarn. But the yarn's not the creation. The creation is something unseen. God's Eyes. It's a perfect name.” Her explanation was so sincere in her belief that she reminded me of Sister Aline.

“How come I've never heard of them before?” asked Christine, who had inherited Mother and Father's love of working with their hands. She was almost finished her first piece, albeit a bit clumsily, while I was still trying to get the rhythm of the turning.

“They're Mexican, I think the neighbour told me. They just hadn't been imported here yet.” She said the last part with authority, directing a smirk at my father, who shrugged his shoulders and poured her a glass of eggnog from the jug.

The word “imported,” brought from another land to ours, made me remember how Sister Aline had told us the Apostles travelled from land to land bringing their new customs with them,
converting people to their beliefs. I envisioned thousands upon thousands of Mexicans in the heat on the equator, which Sister Marguerite had pointed to on her map in Geography class, running in the sands on the beach collecting branches and twigs in little baskets, picking up their sewing thread, and weaving their way into heaven. Conversion, Sister Aline had taught us, came when one spoke the Word of God. Becoming a witness, as in court. You had to speak for it to count, in front of everyone. The way we needed to speak at Confession or Confirmation to the priest. Yet performing an act of conversion instead of speaking thrilled me. Speaking with one's hands, as these faraway Mexicans might be doing, was better than studying catechism and reciting prayers, memorizing the words and writing them out ten or twenty times in lined notebooks, the nuns upset with any error. Conversion was a word I could use to make sense of what I had seen between Mr. M. and Esperanza in her room beside the furnace. Conversion by speaking through one's hands. But then, as my mother held up Christine's newly finished God's Eye, the empty spaces filled me with dread. Why were God's Eyes empty? Why did we need to frame them in order to see their emptiness? Earlier I had worried God was watching us twenty-four hours a day, but now I thought it must be the other way around. We were looking for Him. And He, instead of clearly showing us the way to follow Him, was showing us holes.

My mother continued to curl the yarn around the wood, sliding her glasses down her nose and then back up again to shield her eyes from the harsh sunlight, her motions monotonous. Christine
was well equipped to follow suit. Being with my mother was what I'd wanted, and I didn't care for God or anyone else to share in what we as a family were enjoying together. My mother hummed, and I was determined to believe her song was for me and for me alone. She had lost her hair; she took pills and wore her glasses as she was told; she did everything as she was told, and she wasn't getting any better. At least she was spared the pain in her hands that day, weaving with serenity. I was slower with my craft, and I aimed to fill in the entire surface of my cross with the thread. Determined not to leave a single hair's breadth space open for anyone to see through.

The memories of that Christmas you would think should comfort me. My mother in such high spirits, my father's extreme tenderness towards her and her every need, his own laughter back and double in force. The whole family under the same roof during the holidays, making crafts and singing carols, eating and drinking seasonal treats, playing in the snow, staying up late, and the lights, the decorations, the smells designed intentionally to enchant the senses—pine, cinnamon, peppermint, chocolate, nutmeg. We played games and went sliding down the hill in the park in our snowsuits, pushing our bodies into the coldness. Throwing up the snow or packing it into our palms. Waving our arms and legs, making snow angels. Snow Angelas, my mother said when we returned, and I laughed at the thought of my own imprint in the snow, a snow fossil of me.

As one who believes in ghosts, it isn't surprising that I also
believe in magic. Yet whose magic transformed those few weeks for us into normalcy and comfort, I do not know. Maybe my father did, with his wishes and his dreams, his love for my mother and for us. He bathed the house in light and warmth, keeping the fireplace burning day and night, the flames like pillars. He kept us busy making cookies, getting our hands sticky and sweet in the dough and chocolate chips, icing and sprinkles; or going outside to throw snowballs, stroll up and down the street peeking in at the holiday decorations in other people's homes, or walk down to the mini-mall to buy little gifts for each other. Maybe it was my mother or us kids, unwilling to give up on the holidays, bent on creating a foundation of happiness stronger than the frame of the weather-beaten bungalow on Ashbrook Crescent. My mother capable of moving from one room to the other with little fuss, up in the mornings bright and early, her wig washed and brushed, her clothes ironed. She may have watched television when she got tired, or asked us to read the newspaper to her when her eyes were sore, but she was with us, alive and full of conversation, her world re-energized. Maybe it was simply an act of faith, unnerving, unspectacular, but miraculous all the same. It almost had a sound to it—the sound of a quiet, humble joy. Not the noisy joy from Christmas trumpets or carollers, but the sound of paper crackling in a hearth or a child sleeping in a manger of hay.

Still, for those of us who love magic, but lack the skill to perform it, underneath all such joy lingers frustration. Magic comes in small doses. Someone else holds on to its secret, so you can never
force it to materialize at will. And Christ was the master magician of them all. Coming back in the flesh. Not in a memory, or in a vision, but in the flesh. Come to earth, where his adopted family lived. He was not content with His spirit alone. He wanted a body. As I desperately wanted my mother to have another body, to be rewarded for her belief in God by Him transforming the sickness inside her into health. I knew the day I left, back on the bus to St. X. School for Girls downtown, that my mother's body was very weak. She could barely put her arms around me to hug me goodbye for another term. She removed her glasses. Her eyes were unable to focus. She said she hadn't slept the night before, because she wanted to remember this holiday forever. There was some part of her that was already floating away. But I loved her then more than I believe I've ever loved her. For a moment, I even loved her God for making her so beautiful, while I also cursed Him for making her so sick. I held her tightly. I caressed her fake hair and kissed her cheeks, and I was full of hope for the possibility of a cure, for a new life she could almost make me believe existed. “I'll see you soon, Angela,” she promised. “And when I see you again, I will be better. I don't think I'll be allowed to suffer much longer. Have faith.” Regardless of the evidence before me, telling me it wouldn't be, I did have faith in her words, until I reached the iron gates of St. X. School for Girls and realized my mother could no longer do anything for me. But for a single moment, daughter in her mother's arms, I knew faith. And I tell you, I can barely contain the memory of the happiness I felt on that Christmas as I have contained the guilt of my youth,
hoarding it for all this time from others. The happiness is harder to forgive myself. Without her, the happiness has lost its meaning. Suffering ends; Christ on the cross rises again. But tell me, how do we forgive ourselves, O Lord, for the times we've been happy?

white birds are rare, except for doves
and those who have lived out the winter
hanging against the sky like crosses

—
PAUL-MARIE LAPOINTE
, “Poem for Winter”

 

WHEN THE GIRLS RETURNED
for the winter term at St. X. School for Girls, the festivity continued. Mr. M. organized an elaborate party for Rachel's fifteenth birthday. The party was held on her actual birthday, a school day, so every girl in the school could attend. The nuns were more than happy to oblige, and all the girls in the school, whether friendly with Rachel or not, were excited and made a point of mentioning the party to her, asking numerous questions about what activities were planned and what they were going to eat. The younger girls were particularly thrilled to be invited to a party with the older girls. “I asked for an ice cream cake,” was all Rachel could say. “The rest is supposed to be a surprise.”

Classes ended early so we would still keep curfew and have lights out at a decent hour. Mr. M. managed to enlist the cafeteria staff and Esperanza to help out with decorations. When we entered the cafeteria, it was as if we had been transported to another world. Blue and green streamers hung from the ceiling the entire length of the hall, twisted into spirals and merged at the centre of the room, where yellow, green, pink, and purple balloons formed a cluster like
enormous multicoloured grapes. Yellow bristol board cutouts of stars were attached to the walls, high and low, in no apparent pattern, creating the picture of a night sky. The lights were dimmed. An area to the left of the cafeteria was cleared of tables and chairs to provide a space for games. There were presents with shiny wrapping and bows on the table beside it, which weren't for Rachel as we first supposed, but were for the winners of each of the games.