The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (28 page)

“They do,” said Tabitha. Hogan looked at her hatefully. “I mean, they do think that,” she said.

“Mom’s off her rocker and goes playing the Curse of the Mummy every Sunday in the Catholic church. Kirk’s gonna slice off his nuts so he can sing the high notes in Catholic hymns for his new boyfriend, and you’re giving out our family phone numbers to some Catholic nun?

What the fuck is wrong with everybody?”

“Chill pill. Don’t get on my case. That nun said Mom needed to get back to her roots, since she’s sort of brainwashed about the present and isn’t really here. I thought it made sense, so I gave Sister Alice the phone numbers. Look, Hog, I can’t help it if Daddy Wally isn’t answering his phone.”

“This is not about Daddy Wally, you cretin.” He went to the doorway and screamed,

“Mom, will you cut out that racket before I strangle you.” His voice had wobbled with its own treble panic, matching her own. There was a moment of strange, curious silence. Then Mrs.

Scales began again, down in the lower register.

“This is called going back to her roots? Do you mean going back to baby talk? She hasn’t said a word in English for three days.”

Tabitha picked up the bag again. “Let me go talk to her.”

“Something’s gotta break here,” said Hogan.

Her skull, thought Tabitha.

“I’m gonna go assassinate that nun, first off, and then I have the evening shift,” said Hogan. “Don’t wait up.”

“Mind yourself.” It just slipped out.

“Mind myself?” said Hogan. “You want me to mind myself?”

“I mean, I’ll mind Mom, leave me alone, will you?” And what, she thought, what will it do to my baby if I accidentally hit Mom too hard and kill her? They talk about original sin, does that mean anything to this baby, being part of me now, no larger than a—oh, how do I know, a lipstick maybe? Is this little baby going to have to share in the blame?

She was glad Hogan was getting ready to go out. She didn’t want to have to explain the box of Pampers to him. She started to work it out. She could use two diapers for the gentle application of force, and if they didn’t rip or tear under stress she could put them back in the box and save them for applying to the baby when necessary. Having a project gave her a kind of rush she liked.

Working in her room with the diapers and the staple gun, she could hear Hogan in the garage, cursing because the dryer had stopped mid-cycle again and his grease-suit was still mostly damp. A string of unimaginative profanities issued, at a volume to challenge their mother’s, from where Hog was no doubt standing in his grimy jockey shorts, his stomach pouching forward like his own pregnancy. He’d be wanting to beat the crap out of the dryer. She knew exactly how he felt, and she secured the Pampers with extra adhesive tape. She murmured

“Holy, holy, holy,” under her voice just to be contrary as she tiptoed into her mother’s room.

Sitting up in bed, Mrs. Scales was dressed in a housecoat that dated from the dark ages. It had pictures of a hundred identical dusky Jamaican women with big bee-stung lips the color of cranberry sauce; each woman stood beneath a palm tree and slung her hips at an angle. On each turbaned head balanced a tray with a whole produce section of tropical fruits. The housecoat had been washed so often that the lime green piping was reduced to a white frayed coil. On her head, perhaps in sympathy with the tribe of fruit ladies, Leontina Scales had wrapped a bath towel.

Had she had some sort of premonition about what Tabitha intended to do? Or had she merely washed her hair? If the latter, Tabitha could look on this as a sign of improvement, maybe, and abandon the current campaign. She skootched the paper bag with the padded staple gun in it along the floor with her feet so that her mom wouldn’t see it. “Hi there, Mom,” she said, as brightly as she could, which wasn’t very.

Her mother didn’t look over. She did, however, reduce the volume of her wails. She had two hands up to her face, one at each cheek, as if feigning an expression of abject surprise. Her feet, in bunny slippers that had once been pink but now were gray with old age, were tucked one on top of the other, as if the bunnies were comforting each other before being butchered.

“Sheez,” murmured Tabitha. Her mom wasn’t going to make this any easier for her, was she.

“What, you got a mess of hair there, Mom? You’re going to catch your death of cold.” Or of something.

Tabitha pulled a bit of toweling away and felt at her mom’s scalp. This felt halfway between assisting Linda Pearl at an unwrap and testing a diaper. The hair was dry but there was a funny crinkle, a feel of dry raspy coolness. “What the hell you got up here?” A loaf of bread in its wrapper, bundled up in the towel. Two slices were gone and the twistie replaced like a topknot. “God almighty, Mom, you’re wearing day-old baked goods now? I can’t take this anymore.” Tabitha removed the loaf of bread and brought it to the kitchen. Her mom began to wail again, louder.

“What’re you doing to her, she was settling down,” snarled Hogan from the garage. He was trying to iron his uniform dry, and he was farting in his underpants loud enough to be heard over their mother’s ululations.

“I’m going to read the Bible to her, leave me alone,” said Tabitha. “I thought you were gone already.” She scooped up the Bible from the folding table in the living room. Something long and boring. Mom might fall asleep and then, clonko. Tabitha could arrange a broken lamp on the bedclothes and concoct some story about a housecleaning accident.

And then? And then what? Mom could sleep in heavenly peace. They’d ask for a Catholic funeral. And Tabitha could have her child without fear that her mother would sniff it down and ruin it too.

“You want a story?” said Tabitha. “Something to listen to. Shut up and listen.” She snatched up the stool from her mother’s kidney-shaped makeup table and dragged it next to the bed. Then she balanced the Bible on her lap with her left hand and let her right hand fall into the paper bag. She had to stoop a little to graze her fingers against what she was beginning to think of as Mother’s Little Helper. “Let’s see,” she said, looking in the table of contents for the shortest chapter of the Bible. She settled on something called Tobit and began to read.

Mrs. Scales dropped her hands from her face and plumped up her pillow and lifted her head a little bit, and only then did Tabitha realize that her mother could probably see her in the mirror of the makeup table. Damn. She’d have to read until her mom actually nodded off.

But the section—accidentally, of course, for God hadn’t inspired the Bible to be interesting—the section wasn’t too bad. It was sort of like a fairy tale. A magic fish in it, if she was getting the point, and a guardian angel.

The story was too good. Her mom’s eyes looked bright and gummy, like coffee candies after they’ve been sucked for the first couple of minutes. She was training her gaze on her daughter like a hawk. Double damn. Tabitha tried to make her voice sound boring, but Mrs.

Scales just seemed to listen all the harder.

Tabitha had picked too compelling a section. She purposely flipped over a couple of pages and began to read from something more suitably dreadful—the top of the page said KINGS—but her mom began to moan and paw at the book. She was actually following the story of Tobit, then. Tabitha had to turn back and find out where she’d left off.

When the story was done, her mom closed her eyes in satisfaction. She wasn’t asleep, but at least she wasn’t looking. Tabitha reached down and gripped the staple gun. On your mark. Get set.

The phone rang. Triple damn! Mrs. Scales’s eyes flew open. “Waaaaaaah,” she said, like I Love Loooosy screwing up again.

“Tabitha!” It was Hogan. Goddamn it, wasn’t he gone yet? “Tabitha, it’s for you. It’s Daddy Casey.”

She dropped the Bible. She pulled the towel down over her mother’s eyes, and ran out of the room, hugging the paper bag with the staple gun to her belly. Before she got to the phone she knew already that Daddy Casey was going to be no help. Dads didn’t do
help.
Ask Jesus Christ himself. Hanging on the cross, hung out to dry, he must have waited and waited for his Heavenly Father to come in the nick of time.
Ha.

AFTER MASS ON the Sunday following the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Jeremy headed across the parking lot. It had snowed the night before, three powdery inches, and the old geezers were being cautious on the blacktop. Polly Osterhaus and Peggy Mueller caught up with Jeremy as he waited in the line snaking toward the doors leading into the downstairs Assembly Room of the Radical Radiants.

“If Thebes had anything that approximated a real mall, instead of that strip mall wannabe called Crosswinds, we hard-boiled holiday shoppers wouldn’t have to make do with Radical Radiant handicrafts,” muttered Peggy. “Ames is all well and good, but a trip to Syracuse and Watertown can be treacherous this time of year.”

“Face it,” whispered Polly, “the Radiantics have better small muscle coordination. Their potholders are in peppier colors. More fringe on their afghans.”

“Hey there, we Catholics do better macramé remote sleeves,” objected Jeremy.

“Yes. And just who needs a remote sleeve? You can’t see through them to change the channels.”

“Then you use them to store your extra bacon. Of a Sunday morning.” The atmosphere was one of manufactured mirth. Jeremy thought the Catholic husbands, trailing behind their wives, were looking dubious. Probably, he guessed, their Catholic wives spent money in the name of ecumenism and because this was a better grade of goods. The Pentecostal wives seem to have perfected a semblance of shyness and even indifference—“Oh, do you really want that old thing? Mercy, you’re being charitable again; let me wrap it up for you ’cause I just can’t stand even to look at it anymore.” Jeremy heard one Catholic woman say to her husband, “You old grouch. They send all their kids to Our Lady’s June Fair. It evens out.”

“So,” said Peggy Mueller, “I hear that someone else is doing the music for your wedding, Polly.”

“An old friend,” replied Polly with, thought Jeremy, supremely well-calibrated nonchalance. “Irene Menengest. You don’t know her, I think?”

“Does she go to Our Lady’s?” said Peggy, who must know that if Irene Menengest went to Our Lady’s and had a singing voice she’d be in the choir already. Jeremy would have insisted on it.

“No, she’s not a Catholic.”

“Oh is that so. Jeremy, is that allowed?”

“Of course it’s allowed,” said Jeremy. “Really, Peggy. Polly can have the Village People if she wants. The only restriction comes in the choice of material, and Polly’s chosen some nice stuff.”

“I hope you’re coming, Peggy,” continued Polly. “We’re still waiting for your RSVP.”

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away, but unfortunately I didn’t marry into a family of wild horses. I married into the Mueller clan. There’s talk of a post-Christmas Christmas party that weekend.”

“I figured there’d be lots of that type of complication. Which is one reason I didn’t try to engage the choir for the wedding. After all the holiday rehearsals, the concert material leading up to the midnight mass, and so on—who needs another obligation?” Peggy said, “How thoughtful you are. Now Caleb—it is Caleb Briggs, isn’t it?—he’s not Catholic, is he?”

“He’s thinking of converting, but we’re not waiting for that.”

“In the old days you’d have needed a dispensation to marry outside the faith.”

“You aren’t old enough to know the old days,” said Jeremy. “Really, Peggy.”

“My mother needed a dispensation to marry my father because he hadn’t made his Easter Duty the year before.”

“Shocking,” said Jeremy, “I didn’t know you were a child of sin.”

“He was in a wheelchair for eighteen months following an industrial accident at the paper mill. Don’t change the subject. I want to hear more about Caleb. How’d you meet him, Polly?” The line moved forward bit by bit. “All the good stuff is going to be snapped up by these sharp old ladies,” replied Polly. “Oh, I met him around town. You know, he’s not even religious.

He’s … he’s sort of nothing.” As if eager to change the subject, she swiveled to Jeremy. “How’re the rehearsals going with Irene?”

“She’s got a nice voice,” he answered. “I can see why you trust her. She’s a little tentative in the upper registers, but she’s got decent volume and a pretty sure pitch.”

“Sounds lovely,” said Peggy. “You should sign her up, Jeremy.”

“I don’t know, we don’t see eye to eye.” And besides, he thought, maybe pretty soon it’ll be someone else’s problem.

They were in at last. The queue snaked at the pace of a buffet line. It was embarrassing to spend five minutes in front of a card table selling old Barbie dolls with crocheted hoop skirts
à la
Scarlett O’Hara, beneath which you were intended to store an extra roll of toilet paper.

“Bathroom Barbies,” they were called. Their legs fit right in the cardboard tube. But Jeremy didn’t want to spend eight dollars on a Bathroom Barbie, and he didn’t want to meet the eye of the clever Radical Radiant Pentecostal craftswoman who had spent all year buying old Barbies at Catholic yard sales and turning them into moneymakers for the Cliffs of Zion.

“Are you still rehearsing with Irene?” said Polly after a while, considering a sad little potholder that looked pre-scorched.

“One time more, maybe two,” said Jeremy. “I had to order some sheet music from Iowa City, and it hasn’t come in yet. So we’ve got stuff to work on still.” The line advanced along a display of potted cacti made out of stuffed denim. “Pin cushions,” said the saleswoman. “Cacti are already prickly, you see, so they don’t mind being pricked some more.”

“Me either,” said Jeremy. “But I don’t sew much, myself.”

“Your wife?”

“Well, I don’t have a wife.”

“I should get it for you and show you how to sew,” said Peggy, leaning forward.

“Someone without a wife shouldn’t suffer so.”

“I’m not exactly
suffering,”
said Jeremy, but thought, Really, what other word would I use?

“Hi, hey, it’s you,” said someone, in his face almost, and Jeremy reared back to register the kid brother in that basket case of a family.