The Divine Economy of Salvation (24 page)

“Don't you want to remember Mother?” I ask as Christine opens the bag of chips and flips the tabs off the cans of pop.

“What good does it do to remember? Why remember all the painful stuff? It's what I really can't stand about your religion, you know,” she replies, shoving a few chips into her mouth.

“Please don't get crumbs in the bed,” I say sheepishly, not wanting to acknowledge her insult, knowing how hard it is for her to sleep in the same room as me, let alone the same bed.

“OK, sure. I'll clean it, don't worry. Angela, I didn't come here to visit Mother, I came here to visit you. And I know it's a big anniversary coming up, but I don't want to be a part of it. And don't phone Dad to remind him either, OK? He's had it hard enough. Here,” she says, handing over a cola, and I sip the sugary liquid, enjoying the fizz in my mouth despite myself. “Be bad for once.”

I grab the package of Swiss-chocolate rolls, ripping open the plastic in a grand gesture. “Is that better, Christine? Is that what you want to see me do, be bad?” My voice begins to rise, and the little civility we have established in each other's presence vanishes. “You have no right to judge me and my decisions. You have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

She takes a bite out of a roll, and then another, devouring the dessert from end to end. The action is routine, although I do not recall her having a sweet tooth when we were younger. It was Mother and me who liked sweets; she and my father loved salt.

“I didn't come here to fight,” Christine replies, shaking a few crumbs off her blouse. “I came here . . . I came here because I needed to see you. There's a lot you don't know. There are still too many secrets between us.”

“You have a secret?” I ask. “I thought you couldn't keep a secret if you tried.”

“Is that what you think?” Christine eyes me offensively. Even when we are attempting to be lighthearted, none of our exchanges are very pleasant. She guzzles back some pop and makes a hiccup noise. “You don't trust anyone, do you? Except maybe your God!”

She knows where to hurt me. She thinks I throw Mother in her face, that I think I am as good as Mother because I've followed in the footsteps of the women who took care of her when she was orphaned. She thinks it's my trump card. Maybe it is sometimes, but not always. Tonight it's hers.

“How little you know about me,” I counter sadly. “You're right. There are still too many secrets between us.”

“Not just between us, Angela. Did you know Dad wasn't a Catholic before he met Mom?” Her eyes glower at me as I adjust the grey wool afghan on the bed, ironing out the creases with my hands.

My manner instantly betrays me. I shake my head in the negative and she fluffs the pillow and replaces it to the small of her back, leaning against the headboard. Then she shifts the waistband on her skirt, which has sagged beneath the bulge of her belly. Her clothes don't fit properly. She has red lines on her skin where the elastic had rested.

“Dad was an Anglican, and not a fervent one either. His family couldn't have cared less what religion Mom was, but Mom told him he would have to convert to Catholicism. He went to her parish and spoke to her priest. He did his catechism, was baptised, all before he even proposed. His parents never understood any of it. They basically concentrated on Aunt Heather after that, especially when Mom and Dad moved to Canada together.”

I knew Father had recently retired from his construction work, work he wasn't suited to perform after designing tables and bed frames, chairs and chests in his tool shed, then doing the varnishing and finishing work, his tools carving the wood with a surgeon's precision. But after he moved to Toronto, he was forced into manual labour. He had no money and needed to live and bring up Christine and me. The last time I saw him was at the party for Leonardo. He shook my hand like a business associate, his attention on the baby dressed in a ridiculous sailor suit, a scarf with an anchor on it around his neck. He wasn't exactly cold; he thanked me kindly,
I recall, for bringing him a beer, but he kept his legs crossed in the other direction, uncomfortable whenever he dared look into my eyes. He didn't search me out to say good night when he left.

“He told me she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. She was gentle and kind and had a way of making him believe in something beyond this world. He wanted to share in her God too.”

“And—”

“And he came to hate Him, not her. Him.” Christine fiddles with the discarded plastic of the dessert packaging, crunching it and letting it open back into its original shape in her hands. She hates Him too. She doesn't believe in anything except what is directly in front of her, proven by scientific principles. Graphs, statistics, polls. These things assure Christine there is a pattern to the universe.

I want to open up to her, tell her I hate Him too. That I don't understand His ways any more than the next person. That I am only trying to find the same peace Father found with Mother. I want to love Him like she did. But all the studying, the praying, the social work, the community of believers—none of it has revealed His face to me or made Him more human. He is a ghost, invisible; an infamous rumour. I want to tell her He frightens me, with His judgements and His evaluations, with His horrible voicelessness. That I haven't discovered Mother's kind and loving God, but am desperate to prove her right. I want to tell her about St. X. School for Girls, Mr. M., the candle holder, Rachel, all of it. How it is for me. How when I entered the convent at twenty years of age, Mother Superior took me aside, sensing something amiss. How she tried to make me confide in her. Questions about the men in my life.
Whether I had been hurt. Turned down. Jilted. The men in my life. Never the women. No one asked about the women. And then she asked the worst question of all: “Who has come for you?” We were in the orchard, the same orchard I now visit regularly to touch the autumn leaves in their seasonal bleeding and water the still-blooming flowers, trimming vines and stems, collecting the dead matter in my hands, worrying over the buried heads in the winter-time. I looked Mother Superior straight in the eye, without a quiver in my voice or a shake in my limbs, and said, “He has. Him.” It was a bold-faced lie. I'd never heard Him speak or felt Him beside me. I didn't even love Him. It was Her, Her. She was the One I prayed for. She was the One I wanted to know. The only One who could bring me redemption. My mother, frozen in the snow.

“Why didn't he ever tell me?”

“Did you ever ask?”

Ask and ye shall receive.

My choices. I want to tell Christine, but I don't. It is too late. None of this can make a difference now. “They say God provides what we need, whether we know what that is or not.” I take another sip of the pop.

Christine snorts, removes a Swiss roll from the cardboard tray. “They say a lot of things. Nothing gets done without other people, without money. Does God provide everything for you?”

“I don't know what I want,” I reply, startled I would tell her the truth. But she doesn't take the statement seriously, treating it as part of our usual banter.

“I want my house paid for and my children to grow up bright
and protected, for Father to be happy, and never to die. Do you think I'll get it?”

There is no right answer when arguing with Christine. I am reminded of the re-enactment of Confession in catechism lessons. The priest would ask a string of questions for which we would be prepared to provide the answers. The right answers. “Do you love your God?” “Yes.” “Do you love your mother and father?” “Yes.” “Do you love your sister and brother?” “Yes.” “Do you love those who do not deserve love?” “Yes.” “Do you love yourself?” There is no right answer to that one. The question is a trick. If you said yes, you would be accused of pride. If you said no, of ingratitude.

“No,” I say. “But who wants to live forever, Christine?”

“We all do,” she replies, settling back onto the pillow propped against the headboard, putting distance between us, alarmed I should ask such a thing as she licks melted chocolate off her fingertips.

WITH THE NEW YEAR I
still possessed a voice as unlike an angel's as before and was placed, once again, in the last row of the choir. I thought I would give it another try for the first few weeks back at school, but Sister Aline reiterated that God would appreciate my silent devotion as much as he would if I could express it. Francine was also stuck in the back row on the opposite side, whereas Rachel and Caroline were in the middle row. Bella returned to her solitary position in front of everyone, one step down, close to the altar. Her voice seemed to have grown even stronger over the break. Sister Aline's could no longer hold a candle to Bella's. “She must have been born singing,” Sister Aline proclaimed to us, shaking her head in awe.

After Rachel's birthday party, we spoke more about Bella at Sisterhood meetings than we had the previous term. Instead of pretending she didn't exist, we mocked her—not for anything she did wrong, but simply because we could. We were tired of hearing the teachers praise her constantly. We were tired of comparing our voices to hers during choir. Caroline imitated Bella holding up her
hand in class, echoing Sister with her answer to every question in class. Francine laughed at the way she ate her lunch, consuming each portion separately. I poked fun at her thick black eyebrows and predicted they would grow together into one when she got older and she'd have to shave the middle like a man. Rachel boldly claimed she'd be a virgin until her wedding day as the greatest insult. But our ridicule was nothing more than how we spoke of others in the school. It was a routine game. Bella was just added to our list.

The previous weekend, Bella had been a Leftover. Her mother and father were out of town and Bella stayed behind. Her parents wanted her to accompany them on the trip, but Bella insisted her schoolwork was more important. I couldn't believe she'd give up the opportunity for a brief vacation to stay at St. X. School for Girls, but she did. “What an angel!” Rachel cried in ridicule. “More angel than Angela!” It was the only time in Rachel's memory that Bella had stayed for a weekend in the three years Bella had been at the school. But it wasn't the same as for us. She was here out of choice, and for a single weekend. It wasn't enough to make us equals.

Mr. M. took us to a movie and invited Bella to come along. “I haven't been to a movie since summer,” she said to the nuns, who had informed Mr. M. of her parents' trip. Mr. M. was happy to include Bella in his daughter's activities. “That's quite a girl. Her mother must be proud,” he said to them.

Bella was shy with Caroline, Francine, Rachel, and me, staying close to Mr. M. He told her how much he enjoyed her performance
in the pageant as we shuffled our boots across the slushy winter downtown streets to the theatre. “You've been given your gift for a reason,” he said. “You don't want to waste it.” She nodded with an adultlike understanding, though I wondered if she heard regret in his words, as I did. I had the urge to take Mr. M.'s hand, but he wasn't looking in my direction. He hadn't asked me how I was, or what I had accomplished in class this week, or any of the usual things we would talk about as a group on our way to the movies. His attention was on Bella. There was no physical reason to believe Bella was more womanly than the rest of us, but I sensed she was as she walked side by side with Mr. M. With a few more years added to her face, a passerby, noticing their comfortable gait and speed, their pleasant exchanges, might have thought they were lovers out on a stroll.

Waiting out in front of the theatre while Mr. M. bought our tickets, we shivered and jumped up and down in our coats and boots. Francine kept rubbing her nose in her mittens, and Rachel called her gross. Caroline pointed to a purple evening dress in the window of a store, her hands smudging the glass, while I noticed a woman pushing a metal shopping cart along the sidewalk, full of plastic bags in which there seemed to be clothes and blankets, her hair hidden by a knitted skullcap. We'd seen her before on our way to the theatre. Mr. M. had told us to ignore her. Once, Rachel had offered her some change, but she had refused it. “I do not take money from children. What have you ever done to me?” she'd said. It was difficult to watch her trudge along in the brutally cold winter, open sores on her lips, her few possessions grey with slush, and I turned my face to the window.

The movie was about to begin. Mr. M. and Bella emerged from the theatre with the tickets. They barely interrupted their own conversation to collect us. “You should spend more time with my daughter. You're such a good girl,” Mr. M. said, his arm wrapped around Bella's shoulder.

It was unfair, I thought, for Mr. M. to make such a fuss over Bella when she would never need to go out with us again. He had yet to compliment Rachel, and she was wearing a necklace he had given her for her birthday, leaving it on her pillow as a surprise for when she returned from playing in the snow. Rachel tried to hide her frustration by covering up the necklace with her scarf, pretending he hadn't seen it when she put it on. But she had worn it especially for him. She had even asked him to help lift her hair. “Could you get it, Angel?” he had asked me. And so it was I who had lifted her soft blonde curls to reveal her neck, securing the clasp. How Rachel could be obscured by Bella when Bella wasn't singing astounded me. Besides, Bella didn't need Mr. M. Rachel needed him. I needed him. Maybe I could even understand that Esperanza needed him. But Bella certainly didn't need him. We were the ones who needed parents. We were the ones who were practically orphans.

“Let's invite the little bitch to a Sisterhood meeting,” Rachel said, joyously swearing under her breath in the church as we took a break, sitting on the stairs, and Sister Aline approached Bella to praise her for her solo of “Lamb of God.”