The Sharp Time (19 page)

Bradley is making a sharp right into the church parking lot and I am sad to be done sailing along the snowy streets, but here we are: the steeple shooting up into the gray sky, the tasteful red brick, the arched windows covered with a milky gray substance. All around us families are getting out of their SUVs and sparkling charcoal-gray wagons, a tableau of shiny swinging hair and dark wool coats and gleaming teeth. Everyone is white. If not for the upscale vibe, it could be a Ku Klux Klan rally. The Catholic church in my neighborhood is Our Lady of Guadalupe, so I am not used to this sea of white Catholics slip-sliding across the parking lot. They grab hands like strings of cut-paper dolls before they take hold of the handrail and parade up the stone steps.

I think of my mother abandoning her principle of
Give No Money to the World’s Most Corrupt Corporation
by buying tamales and fanciful dolls at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Fiesta each summer, how she would dance in the church parking lot with the believers, beautiful in her embroidered Guatemalan dress and espadrilles, hands flashing over her head.

The lump in my throat is more like a goiter.

And Catherine Bennett asks if I am paying attention and my mind goes sour and swirling and why, oh why, were the only calls I received this week from telemarketers and an alcoholic looking for her beloved guinea pig? Why is my mother dead? And every grief is mine, but then there is the pleasure of another person, the pleasure of Bradley sitting next to me in the front seat, a rueful little grin on his face as he finally finds a parking spot.

Bradley takes the key out of the ignition and says, “My parents got married at this church.”

“Yeah?” What I decide not to say—infected as I suddenly am by my mother’s lefty sarcasm—is
Your parents got married at Our Lady of Mercedes? Kick-ass!

“My dad loves to tell the story: they did their premarital counseling with this sort of deluded middle-aged priest who tried to give them sexy advice about the wedding night.”

“Yuck! Ack!”

“Because who is the priest to say, right?”

“Uh, yeah, like, did he read
God’s Guide to Getting’ It On
and share the knowledge?”

Bradley rewards me with a crescendo of sudden, snorting laughter. The snow starts falling in earnest, covering the windshield in a fast, flecked pattern, and I think of a white cotton dress my mother made me when I was in kindergarten. The dress had demure raised polka dots.
Dotted Swiss
, my mother told me, and in memory those words come out of her mouth slowly, the last
S
soft and lingering. The car fills with the hot electrical smell of her old Singer sewing machine.

Bradley laughs a final time. “The priest told my parents not to be nervous, not to worry, that it is a shocking thing for everyone to encounter for the first time.”

“And … again, he would know … because?”

“Exactly. And so my parents were stuck in his hot little office that smelled like beer and feet, trying hard not to laugh about his assumptions of their virginity, because as my mom says, ‘This was the early eighties and everyone liked to “party.” ’ ” Bradley does one of Henry Charbonneau’s finger-hooks around the word
party
and shudders.

I cringe, empathetic. “One time my mom was describing this old boyfriend and she said, ‘He was a very
giving
lover.’ ”

“How very enriching for you to know such an intimate thing about your mother’s
lovah
,” Bradley says. “Truly, there are things we are not meant to know. Anyhow, the priest finally tells my parents, these two eighties kids who have ‘partied’ a lot, that if they become anxious about consummating their love, they should remember one very important thing: the King of Kings will be there with you,
all
night long.”

“Oh God!” I make many a retching sound. “Jesus in the boudoir? Is he lighting incense?” I do my best
To Sir, With Love
cockney accent: “Tell me, love, is the savior wearing silky knickers?’ ”

“Right? And so my mom is about to implode with laughter, when my dad looks at the priest and says, ‘Well, Padre, in the words of the great Oscar Wilde: In bed, two’s company, three’s a crowd.’ ”

“Did he die? Did the priest fall down and die?”

“I don’t know. Dad’s always pissing himself by the time he gets to the punch line.” Bradley nods up at the church. “Shall we?”

“Well,” I say, feeling nervous now that we are actually at church, my performance anxiety kicking in. “I’m not actually Catholic.”

“That’s okay! I mean it’s actually preferable, I would think.”

“My grandparents were Catholic. They died when I was in junior high. When I was little they lived in Florida, and when I visited them during the summers and at Christmas they always took me to their church: St. Mary, Star of the Sea.”

Bradley smiles sadly, gives a knowing nod, because of course he shares my aesthetic sense and is envisioning the Mother of Christ breaking the waves, her slick black hair braided with seaweed and shells. And of course I think of my own mother, of all the beautiful ladies lost at sea.

“And my mom was Catholic … earlier in her life … when she was in school, when she was a child. She went to St. Scholastica’s, the whole deal. But she was sort of
way
not into it by the time I came along. Excessively not into it.”

“Yeah,” Bradley says. “That can happen.”

“She didn’t want me to go to a Catholic school—I guess some weird things happened at St. Scholastica’s in the eighties. She was all like, ‘You need to go to a public school where there’s some goddamn accountability, where they don’t sweep all the crazy shit under the rug.’

“Bradley winces.

“I know, right? See also: overblown irony. See also: Catherine Bennett. See also: Sandinista Jones. Thanks, Mom.”

“It’s like the assholes are everywhere. The assholes have the power. The assholes with their lame advice, their pompous lectures. The assholes who never apologize. No matter what you do, no matter where you go.” When Bradley starts to blink, it’s more like a tic. “You cannot outrun them.”

I feel a little panicked that he’s going to start crying. My mother taking me to the Unitarian church with the poster that said
FEELINGS ARE NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD, THEY JUST ARE!
was a big waste of time. Apparently I am some kind of android who fears all human emotion. I don’t know why I hate to see a boy cry, why it’s such a knife.

“But I’m happy to be going with you,” I say quickly. “I mean, I haven’t been to any kind of church in ages and ages. Probably the sight of me will surprise and disgust Jesus Christ in equal measure. Jesus will float down and vomit on my dress because I’m such a whorish hoodlum and all. Plus I smoke crack and worship the devil on alternate Thursdays.”

And it works, my lame humor works, just a little: Bradley smiles.

“And I think it’ll be really interesting to go to Mass with you.”

Bradley sighs. “Yeah … yep. I guess it’ll be that if nothing else.”

And then we get out of my car like any other couple and walk through the snowy parking lot. As I button my coat—trying to look proper and all despite my platform shoes—I slip on the slick curb and Bradley reaches for my hand. Then we go up the marble steps, rock salt scritching beneath our shoes. When we pull open the front doors to the vestibule we are greeted by a stone Virgin Mary holding a font of holy water. Bradley dips his fingers in her bowl and makes the sign of the cross—forehead, heart, shoulder, shoulder—and we enter the next set of doors.

Inside the church it is a continent of stained glass, an aisle of deep blue carpet splitting the rows of polished mahogany pews in two clean halves: BC and AD, the bride’s side, the groom’s side. On the altar is an old-school crucified Jesus—no contemporary look of neutral sadness at having to die for our sins for
this
particular Son of God. He is not having it. His mouth has gone slack with agony, his carved eyebrows draw together in dramatic perplexity:
WTF?

Flanking the altar are carved saints staring me down with their moon marble eyes, and to the left is a separate little altar for Mary, resplendent in her standard-issue baby-blue robe, bouquets of red roses at her feet.

The church is quiet, save for some pleasant infant babbling, and warm with the smells of candle wax and spent roses. A tiny, ancient nun in a street-length black dress, short habit and Birkenstocks welcomes me, a hand on my back, a plain, pale mouth saying “Good evening, thank you for joining us.” And I certainly understand why people would sign on to marry Jesus, to rest in this perfumed Eucharistic high without the normal worries of STDs or the Guy Who Doesn’t Call You Back.

And so it is my pleasure to shake the nun’s hand; it’s my pleasure to follow Bradley into Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, to have the feeling of belonging to something and someone. Bradley bends deeply on one knee at the end of a pew toward the back, and I do a slight dip too, a sort of church curtsy, and then I sit beside him. He pulls down the cushioned kneeler and kneels. I stay seated and take a long look around—the beautiful elderly couple in front of me, a frail old doll in a red wool coat with a fox collar, her skeletal husband looking starched and nautical in pinstripes and a blue blazer. A beefy-looking Irishman with weedy eyebrows sits down next to me, the flash of smile before he kneels, like Bradley, to pray. On the other side of Bradley is a family with three little girls decked out in zebra-print jumpers and black patent-leather Mary Janes with matching purses. The mother absently strokes the middle girl’s hair; the littlest girl eats Cheerios out of a plastic purple tub patterned with princesses.

I feel at peace.

Everything feels so holy and real to me, though, according to my mother, all of Catholicism is a beautiful enigma wrapped in a layer of bullshit, stuffed inside a layer of abuse. Still, the inside of this church is so pleasing—I run my hand over the polished roses and crosses carved into the pew, over the soft leather choir book with the word
missalette
stamped in faded, flaking silver. To be sure, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is pure loveliness. It is the Pale Circus of churches, so undoubtedly there are a few rats, but it’s so hard not to feel stoned on the physical beauty of it all.

Mass starts with a blast of organ from the front of the church and, without warning, French horns and a trumpet from the choir loft. Viva Las Vegas! But then a beautiful white-robed altar girl starts down the aisle, grinning and embarrassed, holding a brick-red Bible aloft over her head. Behind her is an altar boy, and then the priest, singing out of his missalette. And then there’s a smorgasbord of sitting and standing, and singing while kneeling on the padded kneelers, and altar boys and girls floating around the altar in their angel clothes. The first two Bible readings are done by a regular guy in a suit—he appears to be a layperson (here, my brain cooks up some junior high fun: a person who gets
laid!
), but then the priest goes to the podium on the altar. He takes a dramatic pause, and says, “A reading from the gospel according to Matthew.”

Bradley makes a little cross over his forehead, lips and heart—I look around and everyone is doing this, and it’s all sort of sort of sexy/creepy but nonetheless fascinating, and I realize that I have not thought about the whole Catherine Bennett debacle since I stepped into Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

But of course noting this simultaneously ruins my peace and I’m now thinking about all of it, the school and Mrs. Bennett and no one calling, and I am not
paying attention
, the gospel according to Matthew is completely lost to me.

But the handsome priest, a tall dishwater blond with bangs falling into his eyes and a square jawline, steps away from the podium on the altar. The priest wears a red cassock. I know this garment is called a cassock thanks to Honors English III, thanks to Ms. Lisa Kaplansky, lover of Leo Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius.”

Lisa Kaplansky, Lisa Kaplansky
.

When I look over at Bradley, I see that he has his own sorrows, I see that he is chewing his thumbnail, the cross tattoo on his thumb pressed to his mouth.

I lean in close and assume a serious expression, as if about to enquire about last rites or fire exits. Bradley smells sporty and clean, like men’s deodorant. “I love the priest’s flaming-red dress,” I whisper. “I think somebody’s in possession of a Big Bad Wolf obsession.”

I would like to make Bradley laugh out loud in church, to see him dip his head and double over. But he only fake-smiles, his lips drawn tightly over teeth.

The priest walks to the front of the church, his red cassock swishing behind him, the bloodied bride of Christ, and he speaks casually, as if hosting a game show or giving an impromptu dinner-table soliloquy.

“When I was growing up, the Feast of the Epiphany was traditionally the day we took down our Christmas decorations. My family was always a little crabby that day. I remember one year the tree tipped over, the glass ornaments broke—little shards everywhere—the brown shag carpet in our family room was a minefield and all of us kids learned some new words from my father.”

Raucous laughter from the pews, the choir loft: the parishioners at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception have never heard anything so exquisitely hilarious. I try to give Bradley a secretive eye roll, but he is completely focused on the priest. And Bradley is not laughing; he’s not even smirking.

The priest collects his praise, smiling, before he starts again. “Now,
epiphany
comes from the Greek
epi phanos
, which means ‘to appear.’ We tend to think of the Feast of the Epiphany in terms of the wise men, the magi, making their dangerous journey to come and adore the baby Jesus, who of course is the promise of our salvation, the word made flesh. But the real Feast of the Epiphany is not just for the wise men, but for each of us, every day. Christ wants to be seen, to be loved, like we all do. He came to us a human being who had to submit completely to the joys and terrors of a human life, as a baby who would be wrapped in swaddling and worshipped, an adult who would be stripped of his garments and nailed to a cross.”