The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (18 page)

“Right this way,” I say as we enter the backdoor of the empty convent. I take Tess’s puffy parka from her and set it down on the back of a peeling black ladder-back chair after she absentmindedly plugs in the large space heater that warms the bottom floor of the house during the Halloween festivities. Despite my offer to further lighten her load, she won’t hand over her lucky purse because the location is unnerving her, even though she’s the one who’s selected it.

I say, “That’s my sister, Hope, that I mentioned to you on the ride over,” and point to a sweet-looking, thin-faced woman in a black habit who’s stirring a soup pot at an avocado-colored stove. A crown of pink orchids is nestled on top of her wimple. “And that,” I nod to a middle-aged roly-poly woman wearing a grass skirt over her black dress who is standing at the entrance of the dining room, “that’s Faith.”

Tess has a serious case of sphenisciphobia—the fear of penguins—but she needs the nuns in order to work on her new To-Do List, especially number seven: Have a religious epiphany, so number eight—dying—will be okay with her. But she hasn’t figured that out yet, so she hides behind my skirt and says, “Your sisters are sisters? Oh, shit,” as she is swept back to her and Birdie’s days at Blessed Children of God School.

The Finley girls would’ve put their mother on the top of their fear chart, but the nuns were number two with a bullet. The women with the excellent posture and rosary beads holstered at their sides reminded Tess and Birdie of a gang of Western-movie bad guys who rode into town tall in the saddle with nothin’ else but murder on their minds. And they weren’t the only ones who quaked in their boots at the sight of the sisters.
All
the students at the school lived in terror of the mysterious and law-enforcing ladies who were the subject of many a recess conversation.

“I heard they aren’t born with boobies and that’s how they know that they’re s’posed to be nuns,” a kid would say during one of their numerous chats on the blacktop. “And they can’t have babies either because after they sign up they get hung upside down in the bell tower and their delivering holes are filled in with cement by the Archbishop,” the son of a mason would toss in. “Do you think they have hair or not?”
Not
, according to Hughie Fitzpatrick whose father owned the barbershop on 79th Street. Hughie had heard that after the nuns’ tresses were shorn, the cuttings were swept up and saved in a special “hair” room located in the basement of the school until enough had been gathered to call in the midget priest from St. Cecilia’s, who would spend all night weaving their locks on a spinning wheel into sharp-looking pork pie hats that got sent to pagans in steaming hot Africa as an added incentive to convert to Christianity.

My laugh interrupts her flashback. “Yup, my sisters are sisters. And that’s our dog.” A fine-boned golden retriever, the spittin’ image of Garbo, is lying in the corner of the pretty peach-and-green dining room. A white Frisbee imprinted with purple letters—
St. Lucy’s
…
we’ve got one heck of a
Lost and Found Department
—cradled between her legs.

Sister Hope enters from the kitchen and sets an ornate soup tureen down on the pine dining-room table that’s been laid out with care. Pink peonies sit in a Depression glass vase. The china pattern is a replica of Tess’s, same for the silverware.

“Grace tells us that you have two children,” Sister Hope says as she takes her seat.

“A boy and a girl?” chubby Sister Faith asks as she settles across the table with an “oomph.”

Proud mama Tess beams. “Henry and Haddie.”

I ladle out the soup and place the bowl in front of my friend, who places a pale-pink napkin on her lap, and plunges in. The corn is roasted, and the crab is fresh, like it’d been picked off a beach moments ago. The loaf of potato bread is warm on the inside and crunchy on the outside.

Sister Hope asks Tess, “Do you taste the basil in the soup? We grew it in our garden.”

That’s Sister Faith’s cue to rise abruptly and sweep aside the chintz curtain hanging across the four-pane dining-room window. Outside, no more than twenty feet away, there’s an amazingly detailed re-creation of Tess’s garden complete with white picket fence. “Can you imagine what this looks like in the summer?” the nun asks her.

“Ha!” I say with a snort.

(She came up with all this, didn’t she?)

Tess nods and says, “I love gardens. They’re good for the soul, but…not always.” Before she can even try to stop the flashback, the summer of ’60 comes barreling into her brain.

It was the summer you couldn’t go anywhere in Milwaukee without somebody saying, “Hot enough for ya?” Even in June, a month that usually took its time to warm up, the Finley sisters perspired so profusely in their duplex bedroom on 66th Street that they had to take turns sucking on ice cubes and blowing on each other’s backs to stay cool.

When Tess’s little feet hit the ground the morning of June 8, she was fired up. She couldn’t change the fact that her daddy was gone, but she’d come up with an idea that she believed would at least help her recapture
some
of what the Indian podiatrist had mentioned. Her “passed life.” After seeing
The Time Machine
movie at the Tosa Theatre, Tess wished for two things. That she had hair like Yvette Mimieux’s, and that she and Birdie could leave the here and now and travel back in time to the Sunday afternoons that they’d spent with their gammy and boppa who they missed so much after their mother had struck them from the lives.

Normally, eleven-year-old Tess and her sister were inseparable, but the morning that she decided that they didn’t need a fancy, futuristic machine transporting them to the past, that a garden would be just the ticket, she had to get the ball rolling on her own because Birdie and Bee had slept over at Doris Franken’s house. The kid had an “imaginary friend” too, named Jane Doe, so the girls had that in common. (Doris’s father was a police officer.)

Tess jotted down the details of her plan on a piece of scratch paper while she ate a quick bowl of Wheaties.

1. Get permission from Louise and Mr. Lloyd.
   
2. Borrow a rake and a shovel from neighbors.
   
3. Buy seeds from the Five & Dime.
   
4. Water and weed every day.
   

The owner of the property, Mr. Hank Lloyd, lived downstairs from them, but they rarely saw their landlord because he kept his curtains closed tight after his wife of thirty-one years got hit by a car on her way home from the Red Owl food market last year, so Tess wasn’t sure how he would feel about her digging up his backyard. Her fingers were crossed as she rinsed out her bowl and went in search for her mother, who she found in the backyard hanging wash.

Louise’s auburn hair was pulled atop her head like a cresting wave. She was wearing white Bermuda shorts to show off her shapely, tan legs, and her matching sleeveless blouse clung to her full breasts. Like always, Tess was filled with wonder when she laid eyes upon her gorgeous mother. She guessed that just like people said, you could never judge a book by its cover.

After she told Louise the garden idea, she quickly added on, like she hardly cared one way or another, “Just an idea. No big deal,” for she had learned the hard way not to reveal her innermost desires to her mother. If she discovered what was really in Tess’s heart, she would figure out a way to use it against her.

“What about tools? Seeds?” Louise asked slyly as she jammed wooden clothespins into the collars of Leon’s work shirts. She was attempting to stump her daughter, and in a way she had. Tess was stunned to learn that she knew anything about growing things.

“I’m gonna borrow tools from the neighbors and they got seeds at the Five & Dime. I’ll use money from my piggy bank,” Tess said with a shrug.

Louise smirked and replied, “No skin offa my nose,” and went back to her hanging.

Tess thanked her many times, as was required, and was sure to add on, “Could you please be sure to ask Mr. Lloyd if it’d be all right with him?”

She skipped up to the Five & Dime, planning out the rows in her mind. She selected carrots and radishes because she and her gammy loved them with a little salt. And there’d be daisies, her sister’s favorite flower, and climbing morning glories would cover the falling-down fence between the yard and the alley.

When Birdie and Bee returned from their sleepover at Doris’s later that morning, the three of them went looking for donations. Mrs. Jackson contributed an old shovel and Mr. Glovarnik from the next block over told Tess she could borrow one of his hoes, but to not leave out in the rain. Mrs. Wily gave her a rusty sprinkling can.

Since Tess spent half of her nights fretting over her “weird” sister or feeling guilty for not trying to save her daddy on the day he drowned, and the other half making hand shadows on the bedroom wall or singing
Favorite Things
because she needed a talent when she entered the Miss America contest, most mornings she got up on the wrong side of the bed. But once she’d sowed those seeds in the backyard? That child was joyful, and in tune with the Creator again. She’d race to the garden, stroke the carrots’ fragile green tops, and imagine them pushing their pointy orange ends down into the dirt. The fast-growing radishes were doing great, and the daisies weren’t dawdlers, not like the morning glories that had barely begun to find purchase against the back fence.

When the Assumption rolled around—the important August 15 feast day when Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary’s ascension into Heaven that also just so happens to be the day of the Finley sisters’ shared birthday—Tess woke Birdie up with a tickle and a joke, the same way their daddy always had on their special day. She told her, “Be right back with a surprise!” then scrambled out the back door to pick the daisies that she’d planned to set in a jelly jar on their bedroom dresser to celebrate, “Their day.”

An exuberant Tess was singing the chorus of her daddy’s favorite fishing song, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,” but as she peeled around the corner of the garage on her way to the garden the song got stuck in her throat. Where the morning glories had been doing their darndest and the daisies had been begging to be picked, a three-inch thick, six-foot square block of cement held three brand new aluminum garbage cans that were so shiny that she could barely make out the tops of the flowers that’d been crushed from the waist down.

Tess let forth a scream that was so bloodcurdling that it even managed to penetrate her mother’s self-absorption. Banging out of the backdoor of the house, Louise marched toward her shouting, “Pipe down, for godssakes! You’re gonna wake the dead. What’s wrong?”

Tess lifted her small, quivering arm and pointed.

The beauty of the garden had been so pure and sincere that the destruction of it dented even someone as hard as Louise. She yelled, “Goddamn it,” and even felt a moment of fleeting guilt for not asking the landlord’s permission to create the plot the way Tess had asked her to.
Like a peasant asking a king for permission
, she’d told herself.
The hell with that
.

She grabbed Tess by the wrist and stormed to Mr. Lloyd’s door.

He answered the irate knocks in shiny black pants, cracked leather bedroom slippers, and a T-shirt splotched with food stains. Grief dressed him now, not his lovely wife.

Yes?” he said like he hadn’t used his voice for a while, or like he wasn’t exactly sure who they were.

After Louise finished her tirade, Mr. Lloyd slowly reached deep into his pocket and gave her mother something. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I didn’t know,” and closed the door softly in their faces.

For a moment, Tess thought Louise might cry, but she thrust out her chin and told her, “Let this be a lesson to you.
This
is what’s important to people. Open your hand.” She dropped into her daughter’s palm what Mr. Lloyd had given her to make amends for the demise of a little girl’s heaven on Earth. It was a fifty-cent piece.

Tess bolted out of the yard and threw the coin down an alley sewer along with the religious medal she wore around her neck. She didn’t return home until dark. She might’ve never come back if she didn’t need to check on Birdie.

“Tessie?” I place my hand on her arm to bring her back to the convent dining table.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Did you say something?”

“That’s such a sad, sad story in so many ways,” Sister Faith says as she passes the bread their guest’s way.

Tess rips another hunk off the loaf that never seems to dwindle. “Yeah. Well. Took me a lot of years before I got up enough courage to try growing something again.”

After Sisters Faith and Hope share concerned looks with one another, I slide back my chair and say upbeat, “How ’bout we continue our chitchat in more comfortable surroundings?”

The convent living room has been decorated with a Hawaiian motif because my friend is attempting to work out a coupla things that’ve been troubling her for a long, long time. It goes back to the volcano picture on the cover of
The Freaks of Nature
that always reminded her of her mother. Tess has nightmares set in Hawaii. Sexy scorpions surfing waves of lava chase her through jungles of smothering orchids. Lepers limp after her through the streets of Molokai, their begging mouths lying in their outstretched hands. Nothing quite so horrifying today, just Don Ho and his ukulele giving it their all on the pointy-legged blond hi-fi. Tiki torches burn in all four corners. Palm-tree shaped pillows are arranged on nearby armchairs. The room smells of warm sand and a large body of water, and a coconut-smelling breeze ruffles Tess’s long bangs as we sit side by side on a couch the color of a conch shell.

After Sisters Faith and Hope get cozy in the overstuffed armchairs, I withdraw from the pocket of the parrot muumuu I’m now wearing a small green box that I set atop the driftwood coffee table. “The sisters and I want you to have this, Tessie.”

“Really? How nice. You didn’t have to,” she says. Giving the moment its due, she slowly lifts the top off the gift box, carefully removes the contents, and let’s it dangle from her fingers. The medallion is swinging from a lovely gold chain that’s a replica of one that Will had given her on her fortieth birthday.