The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (16 page)

Sister George was fat, and she had a little brown mustache. When she laughed—and the kids in the class made her laugh all the time—she sounded like a clockwork cuckoo. Every time I heard it, almost every Sunday for two and a half years, I had to look at her face to see if something was going to pop out of her mouth, do a little pirouette, and slip back inside. Once, sensing what I expected, she stuck her tongue out at me and winked. She surprised me so much, I jumped. I loved her and the smell of cinnamon on her breath. She ate buns every Sunday morning.

When I was six, my third year in her CCD class, we began the serious religious training needed to make First Holy Communion. In September we learned the prayers for confession. In October Sister gave each of us a Children’s Missal to use at Mass. It had a soft black cover and a pink ribbon glued to the spine to mark our place. A month later Father Murray, the assistant pastor, came to hand out copies of the Baltimore Catechism from a brown box he blessed and sprinkled with holy water right in front of the class. Father Murray had pink skin like a cheap rubber doll and white hair that looked like cotton candy. Even his eyes were pinkish in the center. They reminded me of pig eyes from storybooks.

“Why did God make you?” he asked me as he offered me my catechism. I was the first because of where I sat. We had been studying the answer to that question for the last four Sunday sessions. It was the second question we learned, the one right after “Who is God?” We all knew the answer by heart. It began to play in my head—God made me to know Him and love Him in this life and to be happy with Him in the next—but I knew a better answer, a truer one. It had made Cassidy laugh when he heard me say it at supper. So I proudly presented it now to Father Murray. “He just likes to make stuff. He’s like my granddad, Ned. He can’t stop tinkering. Sometimes Ned forgets a nail or a screw. So does God.” I held up my hands and nodded knowingly.

Father Murray started to withdraw the proffered book but stopped to look at my face. I saw his eyes go to my ears. Then he studied my still-extended hands, their eight outstretched fingers twitching in expectation. At last he withdrew the book and held it next to his chest, right over his heart. To Sister George he said, “I think this candidate is in need of further preparation. Perhaps it would be best if we put her off for another year.” The nun’s face drained of color so quickly, so completely, it seemed her mustache grew thick and dark. She put her hands on her hips— or where her hips should have been under her pleated reddish-brown habit—and glared.

I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. My face burned and my palms got sticky.

The eleven others in the class managed jumbled but apparently acceptable versions of the correct answer and received their books gracefully.

Not so graceful was the argument Sister and Father Murray had in the hallway. I didn’t think you could fight with a priest. Mother had told me that when I wanted to know why Cassidy didn’t often go to church with us on Sundays. But now, through the closed door of our classroom, the noise of their voices came into the room loud and sharp. After a few minutes of shouting, Sister George stuck her head in and asked me to come into the hallway. Father Murray stood with his arms folded across his chest. His skin was like a sunburn at the beach, it had turned so red. His head was tilted back as if he’d just taken a whiff of the contents of an old bowely diaper and had withdrawn to loftier, sweeter air.

“And why did God make you, young lady?” he repeated with a tone that mixed superiority with impatience. From where I stood I could see right up his nostrils. His cartilage was bent far to the left, and he had not a single hair in his nose. Those passageways looked like twin caves, naked and barren. More evidence, to me, of the Assembler’s passion for imperfection. Or at least for variety.

I hesitated. Sister George nodded slowly. “Tell him what you’ve learned, Jessica. It’s alright. Just tell him what you know.” She put a hand on my head.

What I know, I mused silently. Here is what I know. “I have constellations and a sea on my ceiling. And animals and a clown there, too. I have Mother and Father, Nana and Ned, baby Jeanine and Cassidy. These are the things He made because He’s the Maker, the Assembler. That’s what He does. That’s His nature. To assemble. But He forgot my ears and my thumbs and the hair up your nose. Or He didn’t forget, He just wanted to leave them out. Whatever He makes, He does it just to make
Himself
happy. That’s why God made me. I make Him happy.” After a pause, I added, “That’s what Cassidy thinks, too.”

I felt Sister’s hand grow heavy on my head before she removed it. Father Murray raised an eyebrow. It looked like a pale quarter moon rising in the sky of dusk. “Joe Cassidy? Is it Joe Cassidy, now? Is that the Sadducee you learn from? Joe Cassidy?”

“Joe Cassidy.”

The priest dropped his arms and squared his shoulders. “I will not allow this candidate to go forward until I’ve met with her parents. I’m sorry, Sister, but this now borders on heresy.” He bent to retrieve his box, squared his skinny shoulders again and turned sharply away. I could see the dark wet circles of the sprinkled holy water like a pox on the light brown cardboard.

“What’s heresy?” I asked Sister George. Her maroon robes trembled like a bowl of black cherry Jell-O. All she did was shake her head and look sad.

The meeting was arranged for Monday night. Mother and Father didn’t want to tell Cassidy the real reason for it, but they needed him to babysit after supper. They told him, instead, they were going to an organizational meeting for all the parents of children preparing for First Holy Communion.

Cassidy was happy to stay. We fed Jeanine a bottle and I burped her on my lap. She was almost a year old by then, and felt heavy as an anchor on me. She had already learned the signs for “more” and “good” just by watching me. So I tried teaching her how to say “Mama” and “bottle” and “book.” “Bo-awk,” I’d say over and over. “Bo-awk,” holding
Goodnight Moon
between my palms for her to see. It made Mother laugh when Jeanine answered with a sound that wasn’t right. When Jeanine sat on my lap, she liked to stroke the slippery plastic of my left ear’s hearing aid. Her fat fingers would slide lightly over its arc, stop for a second, and slide back again, over and over, until she fell asleep. The movement caused me to hear a sound like the tumble and crash of the big breaking waves at the ocean, one after another, building, collapsing, crashing, retreating. She had Neptune’s hands, with fingers that sloshed the sea. It was beautiful.

That night she fell asleep doing just that to me. Cassidy carried her upstairs. We changed her diaper and put her in her crib. He boosted me up high enough to wind the pony mobile I had let her have. We left her door partly open to hear her if she cried.

We had just settled on the couch with a plate of chocolate after-dinner mints and
The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends
when I remembered the word.

“AceyDee, what is heresy?” He laughed so hard I could see his whole chocolate-covered tongue.

“Heresy, Jess, is somethin’ you never need ta think about. It’s for old folks, like me.”

“Father Murray said I border heresy. He told me yesterday.” Cassidy swallowed his candy fast and turned on the couch to look at me.

“He told you what?”

“That I border heresy.”

“Why would he say that?”

“I gave him the wrong answer in class. He asked me the second question in the Catechism and I gave him my own answer. He didn’t like it.”

“Why did God make you? That’s the second question, right?”

“To love Him and serve Him in this life so I can be happy with Him in the next. But I didn’t say that. What’s heresy?”

“It’s sayin’ something—well, probably it’s believin’ something—that’s contrary ta the Church’s teaching. What’d you say ta him in your answer?”

“That God made me to make Himself happy. That He just likes to make stuff. People and stars and babies. He makes them just the way He wants. Just to make Himself happy. He made Father Murray with no nose hairs. That makes God happy. A nose without hair where every other nose has it. It even makes me happy.” I thought for a second, shrugged my shoulders, and added, “Or maybe He just forgot to give it hair and He’s saying, ‘See, it doesn’t even matter. I’m still happy.’”

“Are your Ma and Pa meetin’ with him over the heresy just now, Jess? Is that why they’re out ta the church?”

“Sister gave me a note.”

He was quiet for a while, just sitting with the big book on his lap and his eyes narrowed to slits like the eyes of Cleopatra’s asp.

“Jess, don’t ever let a man of the cloth convince you otherwise about God and what He is, what He done and why. Just don’t. Anything you say about Him and His ways is as good as what those old, dried-up Pharisees have ta say. Especially Father Murray and that Father Larrie. They’re nothing but mouse farts in black sacks.”

“He told Sister I shouldn’t study anymore for my First Communion. He said I wasn’t ready.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said. I began to open the book.

“What’s a Sadducee?” I asked him, just then remembering the word.

“Someone who don’t take any crap from a Pharisee,” Cassidy said. He looked off into the distance for a second, then down at the book. “Grendel,” he said low and rumbly. “Let’s read what happens ta Grendel.”

Beowulf reminded me of Theseus. I guessed both were Sadducees, like Cassidy.

I was in bed in the dark with my stars when Mother and Father returned. Even with my door closed, their voices were loud. “I will, too, Ford. I will, too! I’ll settle with Murray and then go on ta Larrie. I will!” Jeanine woke and cried for a minute and their voices faded. On my ceiling the constellations shone. They made me happy, the Horse, the Crab, both Bears, the Water Bearer. The joy I took from their existence convinced me I was right about God. Somehow, the stuff He made, stars and people, even Minotaurs and Grendels, made Him happy. Sometimes He was a show-off.

It was my short brown hair that finally got me expelled from the preparations for First Holy Communion a month later. Initially, Father Murray relented, at least a little bit, and let me continue taking instruction with the class. Provisional time, he called it during that meeting with Mother and Father and me later that week.

“Provisional, provisional time,” he intoned from behind his big black desk. I counted three crucifixes and seven likenesses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He seemed to keep his head bent, reverently perhaps, in the presence of all that religious symbolism, but really maybe so I couldn’t look up there again. What he meant was another wrong answer, another lapse into shadowy theology, and I would be switched to a different and younger CCD group, forced to wait out the year singing and coloring. No white dress, no lace veil, no patent leather pumps, no red rose wrist corsage for me in May.

Every week he came into the room, skinny, pale, and pink as raw bacon, and asked his questions. Sister had drilled the answers into us the week before.

Who is God?

What is sin?

What is grace?

What is confession?

Who is man?

I did fine, always the first to be asked, the first to answer, the first to chant the responses: the Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen. (He made my unseen thumbs, or my thumbs unseen. But I held back.) Sister smiled. Father Murray nodded gravely, hoping for more. I stilled my lips.

It is an offense against the law of God. Venial sin is lesser, mortal is grave. (But truth was never a sin. Timmy was ugly. He was that, and fat, as I was deaf and shy of bones. No sin in any of that, I thought. But I held back.) Sister nodded. Father nodded. I nodded.

It is a sharing in the very life of God. Sanctifying. Sacramental. (But it was actual grace I prized, the grace in being. It was this I gave God, this grace from me to Him. What Maker doesn’t take the life and soul of all He makes to His heart? It’s what makes the Maker happy. But I held back.) Sister’s face was beatific, the priest’s soft as snow.

It is when we confess our sins to a priest and ask God’s forgiveness. (The hardest one, but I fought to contain myself. I prayed for grace. I was almost seven. I had been full of forgiveness since the moment of my birth. In the cold of the delivery room, with blue fingers, only eight, in the silence of the new breath in me, I had forgiven my doctor, had forgiven my God, for what I was, was not. I was proud of this. It was my first act of faith, my first creation, a forgiven God. But for Father Murray, forgiveness bent only in a single direction. My tongue was still.) Very good, said the nun. Yes, added Father Murray, his first word to me since provisional, provisional.

Man is a being created in the image and likeness of God. (The easiest one for me, because it explained so much about the Assembler, about me. If all men are created imperfect yet reflect the image of the Assembler, then He, too, surely must share in those same imperfections. Why else would He be so quick to forgive? Why else would we?) Yes, he said, we are all God’s children. More words that came without a smile.

Then, the following week, came transubstantiation. My undoing. It was the sixth Sunday in Provisional, Provisional Time. Sister George showed us the drawings of the priest consecrating the bread and the wine. She told us how that became the Body and the Blood of Jesus. Still looks like bread and wine, tastes like bread and wine, but the priest changed it into something entirely different, in a second, with some few words of blessing. Now the bread wasn’t bread, the wine wasn’t wine. The power of the priest’s blessing prevailed over the power of nature. I was fascinated. Transfixed, with the idea. The power of blessing over the power of nature.

That Sunday night and every night that week, I stood on the side of the tub and fixed myself in the mirror with my gaze. I could have worked on my too-small chin to enlarge it like Mother’s, or on my too-wide eyes to draw them closer like Father’s, or on my flopping ears. Instead, I extended my hands and fingers before me and blessed my reflection. “Platinum blond hair,” I intoned with the same grave authority I’d heard from the altar each Sunday. I moved my hands like the priest at Mass, slicing my fingers through the brittle, reflected air. “Below my ears and soft as cats’ fur,” I concluded my blessing.