Authors: Jackie Lee Miles
My mother announces at breakfast that she has exciting news for me. Whenever my mother has made similar announcements in the past it has been something totally gross, like the time she enrolled me in a foreign language class that had me conjugating verbs every Saturday morning at 8 a.m. I got out of that by convincing her I’d hang myself.
I’m sure she has something equally disturbing to share with me now, but have no idea of the extent she will go to make my life miserable, regardless of her intentions to the contrary.
“You have been selected to be an altar server!” she exclaims, like I’ve just been named America’s Junior Miss. She stops stirring her coffee and waits for my reaction. The look on her face tells me she expects me to dance around the room while hugging myself.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she says.
About as wonderful as having a terminal case of acne, I want to tell her. My father clears his throat and nods at me, a clear signal I’m to show my gratitude; I’m to thank my mother profusely, like a good daughter.
“You start your training on Saturday,” my mother continues, her cheeks glowing. “Over one hundred candidates were considered and only six were chosen, Andi. Isn’t it exciting?”
Absolutely—all my life I’ve wanted to dress up like a Cossack and be an altar boy. When Gloria Steinem burned her bra, did she give any thought to the Catholic Church, and what it might lead to? Obviously not—but then, I think I read somewhere that she was Jewish, so what did it matter to her that altar boys would eventually no longer be boys, but girls, as well.
“Just think,” my mother is babbling. “You will be carrying the cross during the processional and ringing the bells during the Eucharist Prayer. Can you imagine?”
I can imagine, I assure her. I can see it all so vividly that I have to get up and leave the table.
“Where are you going, Andi?” my mother calls after me.
“I’m going to throw up!”
“Oh, dear,” she says. “I had no idea you’d be this excited.” She tucks her napkin neatly at the side of her plate and quickly follows me.
We are doing okay with the holidays. It’s our first without Alex, but it’s not nearly as depressing as I thought it would be, which I should find disturbing, but really, I’m happy for the grieving to be less intense and so relieved to find that it is, and say Hail Marys and Our Fathers all day in gratitude, hoping it will stay that way.
My father has the entire house decorated inside and out by At Your Service, just like always. They bring and store all the items and obviously take very good care of everything. The lighting is as beautiful and shiny and opulent as ever. Our home looks like a hotel. Even the iron gates leading up to our front door are covered with piles of greenery. The smell of fresh pines is everywhere. I breathe in deeply. It sticks in my nose for hours.
Rosa is singing and baking. She’s like Mary Poppins, bouncing around the kitchen. She is extra happy this time of year. Her family is coming to visit from Mexico and will stay through the holidays. My mother insists that she take home some of everything that she makes.
“So make plenty,” she says, opening up another bottle of wine.
Rosa barely rests, working from morning through dinner. Heavenly smells spread like fire to every corner of the house, filling the rooms with cinnamon and nutmeg and yeast bread and cookie dough. My mother is busy shopping and wrapping gifts in shiny foil paper with elaborate bows. They’re for the less fortunate, so that’s good. No one in this house needs another thing for at least twenty years. My mother’s a bit tipsy all day long, so Mr. Porter, the gardener, drives her when she goes shopping. She gives him a large tip for doing so.
“Mum’s the word,” she says, placing one finger over her lips, like no one will ever know she’s half-smashed if he doesn’t mention it.
My father is gone long hours as usual, but passes out hundred-dollar bills to Beth and me like there’s no end to them.
“There isn’t, silly,” Beth says. She’s home from Vassar and driving everyone nuts with her wedding plans. She has six months left so I don’t understand the problem, but she’s frantic every other hour, checking things off her list and rechecking with my mother to make sure the right cake was ordered; she changed her mind again, remember? She hasn’t once made plans to see Parker. This is the guy she’s marrying. You’d think she’d be crazy to call him. Oh no, she’s worried about the gifts for the bridesmaids—have they arrived? And if they have, where in the world are they? On and on she goes, so I leave the house and go see Bridget, who is busy packing for school. She leaves right after New Year’s, so for once I don’t want it to show up. It hurts to see that she is excited. Of course, I don’t really want her to be miserable—she’s my best friend in the whole world. Still, it would feel really good to walk in her room and find her lying on her bed sobbing—at least for, say, a half-hour.
The door to her bedroom is open, so I walk in.
“Hi,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.
“What do you think?” she says, holding up Westwood Academy’s uniform.
It’s a navy blue jumper with short pleats at the bottom of the hem, and has a fancy gold crest on the right breast pocket. Bridget is beaming.
I suck in my breath, let out a deep sigh, and offer a weak smile. Finally, the sobbing starts, but I’m the one doing it.
All those Hail Marys and Our Fathers have paid off big time! The most amazing thing has happened and I have my mother to thank for it. I will never second-guess her decisions again, ever. This is in stone.
I am now an altar girl, thanks to my mother adding my name to the list of those to be considered. I started the classes at St. Lucy’s, and just as I figured they are a zero. Then the first Saturday after New Year’s, Father O’Malley says we have one more addition to the class, Anthony Morelli. His family has just joined our parish, having transferred from Our Lady of St. Catherine’s.
“Anthony has been an altar boy there for over three years,” Father O’Malley explains proudly, as if he had something to do with it, which is okay by me if he did, because who do you think walks in the door? My future husband is all! And he is the most gorgeous creature God has ever created. He has black hair and black-brown eyes the size of quarters and olive skin. Obviously he is true Italian, and a magazine article in
Cosmopolitan
said Italians make the best lovers, which doesn’t concern me yet, except to say that I do get a warm feeling down there a little bit, when I think about it, but that is for much later—I don’t want to be a slut, so I remind myself to keep my thoughts pure. Basically, I can hardly breathe when I think of Anthony, and when he accidentally brushes up next to me, like when we are passing the cruets of wine and water for Father to put in the chalice, I can hardly remain standing. Somehow the floor is no longer under my feet. If that isn’t proof that Anthony and I are meant to be man and wife, what is? All this is unfolding directly under the crucifix. It’s a totally holy and incredibly sacred moment. All because I am an altar girl. And to think I was mad at Gloria Steinem.
My mother is right: It’s best not to draw conclusions and much better to reserve judgment. You just never know who you will be grateful to.
It’s eight o’clock. I’m doing homework when the phone rings. I’m convinced it’s Anthony and my heart flips right out the window.
“Hello?” I say as whispery as I can.
“Andi? Is that you?”
It’s Bridget, who I am very happy to hear from, yes, but I was prepared to hear Anthony, so it takes me a moment to get my real voice back.
“Ah, yeah, it’s me—”
“You sound funny,”
“Oh, I was, just, just deep in—into my homework, is all,” I lie.
“Well, you will never guess. Listen to this,” she says.
She’s all excited about school, having joined the Equestrian Guard and is now after only three weeks jumping hurdles. I am thoroughly convinced she will break her neck and end up a mega-quadriplegic and tell her she must reconsider this dangerous sport immediately.
“You will not have any fun in a wheelchair,” I say.
“Don’t be silly. We have experts teaching us.”
I want to tell her I am getting married probably sooner than I ever imagined and would very much like her to remain in one piece for the wedding as she will be my maid of honor. I don’t get a word in. But it’s okay. I haven’t heard Bridget this happy in a very long time. And who’s to say. Maybe she was born to jump horses over perfectly manicured hedges. I decide to say extra Hail Marys in her honor in case that is not the case and let it go.
“I’m bringing a new friend home for the weekend,” she adds.
“But I thought you and I were going to the mall.”
“We can still do that,” she says. “She’ll come too. You’ll like her. Her name is Madeline. She’s from Savannah.”
“Great,” I say, thoroughly convinced I’ll hate her.
“Well, we’ll see you this weekend,” Bridget chirps.
“Right,” I answer and hang up the phone.
Madeline—she sounds like a spoiled rich girl. Then I realize, she’ll probably think the same thing of me. This is all Donna’s fault. If she wasn’t screwing my father, Bridget would never have been sent to this school and no one named Madeline would be moving in on a perfectly wonderful friendship. I have to get Donna and my father to stop seeing each other. Not just for me—for everyone, my mother, Bridget’s father, not to mention Donna and my father’s eternal souls. It’s a matter of life and purgatory, plain and simple. What won’t be is finding a way to do it.
There’s a small problem concerning Anthony Morelli. It seems the fact that we are meant to be man and wife—by divine order I might add—has not occurred to him. He is playing up to Rachel Martin. It’s almost like a mortal sin, going against holy orders. Normally, I would turn to Bridget and talk things over before determining what I am to do about all of this, but Bridget is totally preoccupied with her new school, horses—who would have thought it, she used to get hives just watching them on TV—and Madeline, who she says is just so cool. And granted, that’s not an exaggeration. I was prepared to totally hate her, but she is a very interesting person to be around. She knows everything about makeup and skin care and she can look in your closet for about three minutes and put together an awesome outfit right under your nose from what was already in there to begin with and you never even noticed before. It’s like magic.
So now, I have four perfect Madeline-inspired ensembles to tantalize Anthony with, but do you think he notices that I have just the right fashionable clothes thrown on in just the right order? Oh no, his eyes are glued to Rachel Martin. They have sparks flying back and forth between them and all I can wonder is how did this happen? I was standing at the altar doing perfect altar girl duties, experiencing a complete hallowed moment regarding Anthony. How could he not have felt it, too?
I decide to talk it over with Bridget and Madeline next weekend. They have been alternating weekends at each other’s houses, which thoroughly annoys me, yes, but now I have more important matters to concern myself with—like a future husband who is already cheating on me.
My mother is really losing it. Now she has decided that I am to be an Angel. Not the heavenly kind, mind you. An Angel is a teenager who volunteers their time at Sunny Meadows Nursing home—the very one my grandmother Nana Louise resides at, which is how my mother found out about it. Mostly, the Angels go to the rooms they are assigned to and read stories to whoever they find there, which is sometimes not the person who belongs there. These elderly people, even those in wheelchairs, wander all over the place. Which makes me wonder immediately: is anyone watching them?
This Angel business started when a local girl volunteered to read to a person at Sunny Meadows that she was no relationship to, and she just happened by chance—at least that’s what she told the newspaper reporter who wrote the article for the local paper—to select a room that had a resident that was a former school teacher and loved books, but her eyesight was failing her, and when the girl was reading to her she said, “Oh, you are an angel,” and it just so happened that a nursing assistant overheard this and mentioned to another visitor that wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were more “angels” around here, and wouldn’t you know, that particular person that this nursing assistant mentioned it to was none other than the Woman Volunteer of the Year and so, of course, she organized a squad of volunteer “angels,” and now my mother has volunteered me to be one.
Do I object? Before I answer that, let me explain that my mother always announces what she has in mind for me in the presence of my father. This time, it was not at breakfast, like when she gave me the news that I was to be an altar server. This time it was at dinner, which is even worse. When my father manages to be home for dinner he is so wrung out he could wipe the table down. So, no, I do not object. It would be pointless. My father would simply lose it, and my mother would ask Rosa to open another bottle of Chardonnay.
“Andi,” my mother says, naturally over a glass of wine, “I forgot to mention; you are now officially an Angel at Sunny Meadows.”
How does one forget to mention she is ruining her child’s life?
The details of my assignment are not complicated. I am to show up each day for an hour after school and read. One hour. How can I possibly get out of this? Let me tell you: I can’t.
I am here now for my first day. Reading to Nana Louise is not a problem. I was doing that already, just not on a regular basis. Being an official Angel—I have a little gold badge with those letters spelled out that I must wear while I’m here—I have been assigned to an additional room that I go to after I finish with Nana Louise. They’ve given me Room 225 which is home to a married couple, Howard and Mavis Sterling.
The Sterlings are close to ninety; they have to be. They have so many lines on their faces they could both be road maps. I’m not trying to be unkind here, just honest.
This is how my first day with them goes:
“Hi! I’m Andi and I’m—ah—an Angel,” I say, feeling very stupid. I point to my badge. “And I’m going to read to you for a while. How will that be?”
“Say what?” Mr. Sterling shouts.
“She’s going to read to us,” Mrs. Sterling shouts back.
“Well, tell her to speak up. I can’t hear her.”
I’ll have laryngitis after two days, guaranteed.
Now I know I stated that I would never question my mother’s judgment again—after meeting Anthony—but I am thoroughly convinced that I lied.