After This (28 page)

cars. They had ridden to school this morning with the metronome

 

shush of windshield wipers thrumming at their temples, erasing one

 

thought, then another, then another as it formed again. Riding the

 

school bus or in their fathers’ cars with their sleeves and shoulders

 

damp, their loafers and the crowns of their heads darkened with rain.
They felt the dampness of it still at 10 a.m., second period, as they

 

moved into the classroom, their books in their arms.

 

The overhead lights had not yet been turned on, nor had the

 

teacher arrived, so here was an opportunity to sprawl, for a minute.

 

Put your head on the desk.

 

Outside the mullioned window was a slate-gray sky, a dark lawn,

 

a black hedge that hid the road, although they could see the headlights

 

of cars behind the tangled shrubs, low beams moving as if through

 

water. There had been general consensus this morning, on the radio at

 

least, that were it not for the unseasonable warmth of the day, there

 

would have been two feet of snow.

 

The raindrops ran in fits and starts across each pane. The morning light, filtered through the rain-spattered glass, turned the colors in

 

the unlit classroom into various shades of gray.

 

Clare Keane folded her arms across her books and rested her

 

forehead in the crook of her elbow. She closed her eyes and the sound

 

of the rain and of her shuffling, murmuring classmates grew hollow

 

and distant, veered from noise to echo to dream.

 

Beside her, Barb Luce slumped at her desk, then stretched her legs

 

to straddle the chair legs of the seat in front of her. Idly, she took

 

inventory: penny loafers, navy kneesocks, dimpled knees, bare

 

thighs—winter pale against the pleated plaid wool of her skirt—a nick

 

of dried blood between knee and skirt hem from this morning’s razor.

 

She licked a finger and put it to the scab, assessed the smoothness of

 

the shave with her fingertips. Knees were always tricky.

 

There was a general yawning, a leaning forward and a leaning

 

back. A lethargic unclipping of hair clips and a clipping back up again.

 

A roll of Life Savers was passed around, its plume of unraveled

 

wrapper like a lengthening stream of smoke as it went from hand to

 

hand. A clicking of candy against teeth. A general whisper, Did we

 

have homework in here? Did she give us homework?

 

Monica Grasso shuffled her books and said out loud, “I don’t

 

want to be here,” but opened her notebook anyway and reviewed (the

 

Diet of Worms, the Council of Trent), just in case.

 

The rain was steady, no particular wind to drive it or to vary its

 

rhythm. Cynthia Pechulis pulled her hair up into a ponytail at the top

 

of her head and Dawn Sorrento, sitting behind her, saw in the lovely

 

declivity between her neck and spine the fine blond hair Cynthia had

 

been born with.

 

They were all fourteen or fifteen in identical plaid skirts and navy

 

blue blazers, white blouses with soft collars.

 

Kathleen Cornelius, her large face drawn, her lips parted, no-
ticed that the blackboard glimpsed through her lashes bled a little at

 

the edges but snapped to again when she opened her eyes wide. She

 

tried this a number of times until her attention was diverted by the

 

floating dust motes that appeared in the gloom of her lowered lashes.

 

They were perfectly round, transparent, either dust motes or sloughed

 

skin cells, bits of dandruff, perhaps, or perhaps merely an optical

 

illusion, her own blood moving behind her cornea, illuminating the

 

defects, snags, infinitesimal genetic mutations in the sticky fabric of

 

her eye.

 

The interval of idleness grew longer. Was it possible there would

 

be no class today?

 

Clare Keane dreamed she was still at the breakfast table. Her

 

father was watching the coffee percolate on the stove. Annie (who in

 

the dream was not really Annie) was stirring her cereal. Pauline was

 

spreading soft butter on a pinch of sweet roll, covering her fingertips

 

with it. Much to Clare’s surprise, Annie picked up her cigarette lighter

 

which she had unaccountably left beside her plate and struck the flint

 

three times.

 

“Good morning, all,” Sister Lucy said. She stood at the door, her

 

index finger held under the three light switches as if (Clare thought)

 

she was hoping to keep three little noses from sneezing. “In the name

 

of the Father,” Sister began, as she walked in, not blessing herself

 

because she held her crutch in one hand and her large leather briefcase

 

in the other, “and of the Son.”

 

Overhead, the trio of fluorescent lights merely buzzed, then

 

clicked, then flashed angrily, before coming to full, obedient light as

 

Sister Lucy limped into the room. One by one, the girls raised their

 

heads, touched a pencil, stored some books beneath their desks,

 

praying with her all the while. Clare Keane had a red spot on her

 

forehead, marking the place where her face had heavily met her

 

forearm. Kathleen Cornelius closed her mouth.

 

Now the long windows pressed back the dreary day, reflected
rather than filtered—showing them now, as they glanced toward it,
their own white faces, dimly described—foreheads and cheeks, some
chins, only blond hair, nobody’s eyes.

 

Sister Lucy’s desk at the front of the room now seemed as yellow
as an egg yolk. She leaned against it and pulled the cuff of her metal
crutch off her wrist. She rested the crutch beside her and then turned
back with one uneven step to lift herself, her small and slightly twisted
torso in its black dress, up onto the desk. She rearranged her body,
palms pressed to the desktop, lifting her thighs once, twice, getting
comfortable. Her legs in their black shoes and black opaque stockings
swung girlishly.

 

This was not remarkable to them. They had seen her do this many
times before.

 

She placed her folded hands in her black lap. Sister Lucy had a
round face, dark though graying hair drawn back into the white band
of her headpiece, large, deep-set eyes, and a small nose. Her full
cheeks were pocked delicately with scars, as if marred by rain.
“Today,” she said, softly, beginning. And then paused. She had a
slight overbite, a delicate fuzz above her lip, small and perfect teeth.
She was known never to raise her voice, although what she did
instead, for discipline’s sake, was described by the girls as “the hairy
eyeball.” But there was none of that in her look now as she waited for
their attention.

 

“Today,” she said again, her feet no longer swinging but hooked
together and drawn back a bit, beneath her desk. “Today, girls, marks a
terrible anniversary. The anniversary of the decision that allows
women in this country to kill their own children.”

 

In the stillness that followed, the girls moved their eyes toward
each other. Barb lowered her head and murmured, “Don’t tell my
mother,” into the soft collar of her shirt, which caused one or two of
the girls around her to lower their heads as well.

 

The sound of the rain only made the silence in the classroom
seem more deliberate and profound as Sister Lucy waited, once again,
for their full attention.

 

“I was three years old when I came down with polio,” she said. It
might have been another topic altogether. “My father left us as soon as
I got sick, even though my mother was expecting. Her fifth. He moved
in with a woman he’d been visiting since before my older brother was
born. My father was a welder,” she said, as if that explained
something. “Subways and bridges. Dangerous work, but he was very
good at it.” She shrugged, looked briefly at her hands, which she half
opened, as if offering herself something from her own palms. “He had
needs my mother couldn’t meet,” she said before she looked up again.
“That’s all we were told about it. And the fact that if he had gotten
polio, too, we would have been destitute. But he took care of us. He
sent money, he visited. He still took my brothers to ball games. He
just never lived with us again.”

 

She closed her hands. They were pale white against the black lap.
The girls had their eyes on her now. Barb Luce wrote something in her
notebook and moved the book to the edge of her desk so Clare Keane
could see. It said, “As the World Turns.”

 

“My mother was given a series of exercises to do with me. They
involved lifting and bending my legs. They were painful. I don’t
remember that they were painful to me but I’m sure they were painful
for her. She would sometimes strap me down on the dining-room
table. Or have my brothers hold on to me. My brothers have told me
how I would scream. And how my mother would cry, just tears
running down her face as she was lifting my legs and bending them,
and pressing them down again, the way the doctors had told her. All
the while she was expecting.”

 

Sister Lucy’s little chin moved up and down, the way it did when
she wanted to be reasonable, consider all sides. “Of course, we weren’t
alone in the world,” she said. “I had an aunt and an uncle and a
wonderful grandfather. We had some very nice neighbors.
And people from church helped out. It was really only later, as an
adult, that I realized how hard it must have been. For my mother.”
She straightened her spine, pulling her hands closer to her waist,
as if she felt a chill. “In the first place, I think she must have been
humiliated,” she went on. “Four, five children in a row and she hadn’t
met his needs.” She smiled a little, only one corner of her small
mouth. It was clear she did not expect them to get her full meaning.
“And I know she worried. Every mother worries, but what worries my
mother must have had, in those days. I don’t know when she slept. I
remember seeing her, long into the night, sitting up at our bedroom
window with her rosary.” Sister Lucy stopped again, peering down at
them all from under her thick eyelids. The sound of the rain had
mixed itself with her tale so that the girls were imagining polio,
pregnancy, bridges and subways and long nights at bedroom windows
as all a part of the same dark weather.

 

She smiled once more. Her lips were pink and smooth. “But my
mother took me to the clinic and she took me home and she did the
exercises the doctors told her to do. And she fixed our meals and
washed our clothes and kept the apartment clean. All the while she
was getting bigger and bigger with the new baby. All the while she
slept alone and woke alone and sat alone through the night after she’d
put out our lights.”

 

One of the girls made a sympathetic sound and Sister Lucy’s eyes
briefly fell on her. “Girls,” she said, as if to correct something. “In an
abortion, a child is pulled from a mother’s womb. If the child is very
new, an embryo, it is a simple enough thing to do. There is more
blood than flesh. If the child has grown any, arms and legs must
sometimes be broken, or a skull must be cracked. There are some
procedures, I am told, in which the mother’s womb is filled with
saline, salt water, the baby essentially drowned like a kitten and then
flushed from the mother’s body.” She paused only briefly.

 

“In college,” she went on in her soft way, although she saw how
Kathleen Cornelius’s open mouth had reshaped itself in horror and
how Monica Grasso was glaring at her from under her bangs, the class
wit, the class iconoclast, on guard, as Monica was always on guard,
against Catholic double-talk and propaganda, “you will probably read
the story of Medea,” glancing at Monica to indicate that she might
learn something here. “It is a play by Euripides. If you know the story
of Jason and the Golden Fleece, you already know something about
Medea. She was the sorceress who helped Jason defeat the dragon and
gain the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea marry. They have two sons.
But then Jason leaves her to marry the young daughter of the king. To
form a more advantageous alliance, he tells her. More power.
Especially for their sons, who will have as their half brothers the royal
sons he plans to have with his new wife.” She smiled again, mildly.
“An advantage for them all.

 

“But Medea doesn’t think so.” She raised her pale eyebrows. “She
is outraged. Humiliated. And in her rage against her husband, she
murders their children. She chases them down. Stabs them to death,
her own children. It’s a terrible scene. The chorus—remember how in
every Greek play there’s a chorus?—the chorus calls her a woman of
stone, or iron, to have done such a thing. She is hateful beyond all
other women. She has put a sword through her own children.”
Now Sister Lucy looked outside, to the dark lawn and the black
hedge and the rain striking the windows. She watched a pair of
headlights as they moved dimly behind the hedge. It seemed to her to
be something like her own idea, the point she had hoped to make,
moving through the black tangle of memory and emotion and outrage
and words.

 

She turned her eyes back to the girls. “Of course, I thought of my
parents when I first read
Medea.
I couldn’t help but see the parallels.
That’s the thing about the Greek tragedies, isn’t it? Centuries
later, there are parallels.” She paused and then added, sounding more
like herself. “Although, as we il see tomorrow, Saint Augustine had no
use for the Greeks.”