Any Bitter Thing (33 page)

Drew steered us through town, driving slowly. “Hey, isn’t that whatshername?”

So it was. Andrea Harmon, strolling past Hinton Variety, squashed against Glen Seavey like a sock stuck to a shirt in the drum of a dryer. “Pull over for a sec,” I said, rolling down my window.

“Hey, Mrs. Mitchell,” Andrea called, waving mightily, which was quite a trick considering the restrictions imposed by the straitjacket of Glen Seavey’s forearms. The sight of Andrea, a living reminder that I’d managed to do something with my life besides wait, pleased me. Not that Andrea Harmon was the greatest exemplar of my success, but she proved that at least I’d been trying, and against long odds.

“They’re up early,” Drew said. “Don’t teenagers sleep till noon?”

“Up
late
, is more like it,” I said. “To them it’s still Saturday night.”

Approaching the car, Glen twisted Andrea’s unblemished jaw skyward so that he could kiss her, ostentatiously, for my edification—
you can stuff your “in loco parentis,” lady
—before allowing her to proceed.

“Long night?” I said. Andrea’s lips looked mauled, and Glen’s grip gave her the lopsided bearing of a hostage being lugged out of a held-up bank. The fact that Glen was wearing fatigues under a long black coat didn’t help.

“We’re looking for Glen’s truck,” Andrea said cheerfully.

“Blazer,” Glen corrected her.

“Ty Sprague borrowed it around three-thirty but we forgot where he said to come get it.” Andrea looked cold, and as usual didn’t have enough clothes on. High thirties under icy
sunlight, yet there she was, bare-legged beneath eleven inches of fake-leather skirt, her vinyl jacket flapped open to reveal a scalloped tank top and a tattoo of a bleeding heart lodged between her breasts.

“My burka was in the wash,” she said, reading my mind.

“Hell of a party over at the Dusons’,” Glen offered, his lip curling in that way I hated. “Music sucked, though. Destiny’s Child all night long. Andie likes girlie-bop music.”

“I do
not
,” Andrea squeaked, banging flirtily on his chest with a lightly closed fist. Glen’s medallions rattled like padlocks.

“Girlie-bop, girlie-bop,” he chanted. I detected a low growl from Drew, who was watching all this with his hands still on the wheel.

“Quit
it, Glen!” said Andrea, in a whiny, squealy, girlie bop way.

“It’s Andie’s birthday,” Glen said. His eyes went tin colored and mean.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“It’s not till January, we’re just pretending,” she said, giggling—buzzed, obviously—then Glen laughed, now that I had duly noted the pharmaceutical provenance of their expansive spirits. He looked straight at me as his hand roved beneath Andrea’s half-zipped jacket. Then he turned his face and licked her ear, his other hand clamped against her backside as if palming a basketball. If they’d been in school I’d have sent them both home.

“
Quit
that,” Andrea snarled, pulling away. She looked momentarily irritated, and even had the grace—or the minimum required sobriety—to look embarrassed.

“Well,” I said, “much as we’d love to see the whole show, we’ve gotta scoot.”

Andrea looked at me. “Where were you on Friday?”

“Away.”

“Are you sick? You kind of look it”

I shrugged. “After thirty you start aging in dog years”

Drew leaned across me and said to Glen, “Offer the girl your coat, for chrissakes.”

Astonishingly, Glen shed his coat on command, dropping it onto the frail rack of Andrea’s shoulders, then stepped away from her to cross his arms.

To Andrea, Drew said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Drew,” I said softly

So he pulled away. Before I got the window rolled up I heard her laugh again, a falsetto ripple so full of desperation that I had to count the seconds until it vanished in the distance.

“You missed your calling,” I said to Drew. “Rick could use you in the office.”

“Guys like that make me sick. What is she, twelve?”

“Fifteen. She breaks my heart.”

He put his hand on my knee. “Who doesn’t?”

I watched Andrea recede in the side-view mirror, looking more and more wretched as her image diminished. She seemed to have been standing there both a very long time and no time at all. Her image was getting smaller but more present, and we seemed to be driving both slow and fast, and the laws of time and space lost their authority, as they had so often since my accident. I was sitting here in the car with my husband and our new beginning, and I was also standing on the sidewalk with Andrea, my arm around her where Glen had taken his pointedly away, and I was also lying in my childhood bed, listening to my uncle and the cats move safely through the house’s well-remembered rooms. Like childhood itself, this moment of simultaneous experience lasted and lasted.

The church at St. Bart’s had been painted inside, everything an uneven, sickly yellow—walls, ceiling, trim, baseboards—the obvious result of a close-out sale. Probably the Improvement
Committee had hoped to spread sunshine, but the result looked more like jaundice. St. Bartholomew himself, standing at the entrance in life-size plaster, had undergone a political correction, blue eyes dyed brown, fair hair painted over in a more Mediterranean hue. As before, his robe glinted gold and red, and a symbolic flaying knife rested ominously at his feet. The face-lift made him look slightly less smug about having led his brother to Christ and slightly more mindful of his imminent death by skinning. The patron saint of surgeons and tanners looked more like a Hebrew with second thoughts than the vaguely Nordic know-it-all from my childhood.

“Surgeons and tanners?” Drew said. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Nope. Some books add taxidermist to the list.”

“Didn’t your uncle think it was kind of gruesome, booking this guy as the maitre d’?”

“Maybe. Nobody ever mentioned it. I figured St. Bart died like all the other martyrs—a pleasant little burning at the stake. I thought the knife was a bookmark that dropped out of his Bible.”

Drew and I slipped into a back pew. The trifling snowfall had prompted the faithful to don their winter goods, so the church bloomed with the wet-wool smell I associated with winter Masses. The priest was not the hale fellow who’d sold us our first Christmas tree but a man in early old age with nothing of the actor about him. He shouldered through the liturgy in an indifferent monotone, his bald head absorbing the fluorescence of the upgraded fixtures in the sacristy. In my former place, far down the aisle in the front pew, sat a family of redheads with two grinny babies. Behind them, the extended family, also ruddy and carrot-topped, politely inclined their heads for a lugubrious homily that I could not quite make out despite the addition of a microphone, an accoutrement that Father Mike’s honeyed tenor had not required.

Comparison was unavoidable. The new priest, slope-shouldered and weakly spoken, managed to look smaller than life in his dazzling vestments, like a turtle posing unsuccessfully as a bird. Father Mike had so easily risen to the costume and transformed himself in a dozen intangible ways, understanding that religion was not the same as faith. Religion required a touch of theater even in God’s own house. He had an actor’s voice, high color, and a theological certainty that doubled as charisma. He created an illusion of eye contact with scores of people at once. My uncle’s hands were short and square, but from the altar they appeared long and luminous, lifting the chalice to the soft jangling of bells. There was no explaining the sudden breadth of his shoulders in his immaculate vestments, or the uncommon span of his arms. God’s presence transubstantiated more than bread and wine.

At the end of every Mass I raced to the sacristy door but never caught sight of the haloed specter who held up the host. Week after week I flung open the door and found no one but my only uncle shrugging off his vestments or adjusting his watch. I suppose this was both a relief and a disappointment.

Drew and I sat through the Gospel, the sermon, the Offertory—Drew standing, kneeling, and sitting a few beats behind everybody else. I’d forgotten nothing and was glad. At the Sign of Peace, the air eddied as seventy-five people turned to shake a neighbor’s hand.

“Peace be with you,” I said to my startled husband, holding out my palm.

He glanced around, saw what was happening, and smiled. “You too.” He kissed me. “Peace.”

TWENTY-SIX

After the initial Monday rush, I ducked into Mariette’s room, where she was standing over a granite lab table grading a set of quizzes. Behind her hovered a ten-foot-wide paper mural depicting the universe as seen from, apparently, the Eye of God. Above the speckle of gold that signified Planet Earth was written, in red paint:
YOU ARE HERE. LOTSA LUCK.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Home.”

“Home? I called you like fifty times.”

“I know I’m sorry We needed the time alone”

She studied me for a moment. “If you came in here to tell me you guys are splitting up, I swear to God I’ll let the rats out of that cage and command them to go straight for your eyeballs.”

“We’re not splitting up. Just the opposite, in fact.”

“You’d better mean it.”

“I mean it.”

“Good. Some good news for a change.” She turned once again to her grading.

“Hey. Are you mad at me?”

“A little,” she said, refusing to look up. “He
meant
something to me, in case you forgot.”

“Who?”

“Father Mike. Who do you think? He left us, too, you know. My mother, my little brothers. We loved him. And now he gets miraculously resurrected from the dead, and we’re full of questions, and you pick that exact time to disappear for three days.”

I pulled up a stool. The lab table was pocked with acid burns from experiments gone awry. Mariette’s marking pen moved furiously over some luckless student’s quiz. “My mother drove me nuts all weekend long with questions,” she said, “but what did I know? And Paulie’s pestering me to go back and see the kitty, see the kitty, see the kitty, and in the meantime I’m picturing you on your way to Mexico or South Dakota or the North Pole for the big reunion without a word to the people who might give a damn.”

I reached out to still her pen, but she resisted my advances.

“People ask me how you are,” she said, “and I tell them I haven’t the faintest idea.” Now she looked at me. “I don’t know anything about you.”

“Mariette, you know
everything
about me.”

“For all I know you’ve found him already and forgot to tell me.”

“I haven’t even started to look.”

This seemed to surprise her. “Why not?”

I thought it over. “Why haven’t you looked for your father once in all these years?”

“Because some people are better off gone. You spare yourself their excuses. What could my father possibly have to say to me? He left my mother with three kids and half a job.” She marked a quiz and turned it over. “The world is full of missing fathers, Lizzy. They don’t deserve to see us again.”

Cowed by her anger, I got up and wandered toward a big sign that read
DO NOT FEED THE RATS. THEY ARE SERVING A CAUSE FAR NOBLER THAN YOUR MISGUIDED, KNEE-JERK, BUNNY-HUGGING “POLITICS.
” The junk-food rats looked pretty good, considering; except for slightly greasy coats they seemed as unfazed by Mariette’s culinary gulag as the rat-food rats.

“There’s a carrot in the junk-food cage,” I said.

“Some bleeding-heart keeps slipping them a lifeline.” She set the quizzes down. “Tell me something. Anything.” Her eyes welled. “I don’t even miss you anymore, that’s how long it’s been.”

A few students had begun to drift into the lab ahead of first bell. Mariette’s homeroom roster comprised fifteen freshly armored sophomores: lipstick newly applied, jackets zipped exactly halfway, caps pulled low over foreheads. Toting a flapping shoulder bag, Andrea Harmon muscled through the door, her neck so mutilated by violet hickeys that she appeared to have survived a hanging. She looked more sullen than usual, shooting me a look I couldn’t quite read. She sat roughly an arm’s length from the junk-food rats, who, incriminatingly, rose on their haunches at the first creak of her jacket against the chair back.

“Okay, I’ll tell you something,” I said softly. “I met the bad Samaritan.”

Mariette’s mouth dropped open. “What? How?”

The students were talking amongst themselves, oblivious of us. I lowered my voice anyway. “He called me here, right after school started. We kind of got to be friends.”

She squinted at my forehead, as if brain damage could be seen if you stared long enough. “You ‘kind of’ got to be
friends?”
A couple of the kids looked up, interested. Mariette swept me out of the room and we stood amidst the din of slamming lockers. “How could you not tell me this?” she demanded. “School started over three
months
ago.”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Not even Drew?”

“Not till a few days ago.”

“You used to tell me everything first. I’m the best friend. Drew’s just the husband.”

The bell rang. We had no choice but to surrender to the day’s momentum as the corridor churned with students who, at that moment more than any before or since, felt like fellow hostages—each of us privately held, more or less humanely treated, and unlikely to be released anytime soon.

Mariette held me by the arm, articulating in the way of a person expressing a dying wish. “Is your whole life a secret?” Then she waded into her room, shouting instructions, readying for another day of cracking open the physical world. It struck me that teaching science to teenagers required enormous, fundamental reserves of hope.

The computer lab, two doors down from Mariette, was a gloomy, nearly windowless kingdom ruled by a rotating band of unqualified Ed Techs with spotty attendance. The lab was empty but for Wally Tibbetts, a persecuted sophomore whose chief distinguishing feature was a pair of amphibious, pool-blue eyes. Because of our problem keeping Ed Techs, Wally had installed himself as the unofficial
chargé’ d’affaires.
I’d arranged for him to take homeroom here, his sole refuge from H-S Regional’s merciless pecking order. He also took lunch in here, which was strictly forbidden and yet permitted by Rick, who expected public gratitude at such time that Wally collected his Nobel for inventing a brain-chip that allowed idiots to speak instant Japanese.