Lamb of God,
You take away the sins of the world.
Have mercy, have mercy on us.
That was the song I was singing that evening as my mother and I walked from the high school to Pearson’s for dinner. I didn’t realize I was singing until my mother stopped on a street corner and looked at me as if goldfish were dropping from my mouth.
“What’s that song?” she said.
“What song?”
“The one you were just singing.”
“ ‘Lamb of God,’ ” I said, and my face went hot. I’d been singing a song about Christ. Carney had taught me the song because it was what everyone would sing while she and the other kids received Communion. It had seemed all right to learn it, because it didn’t actually contain the word
Jesus
or
Christ,
but I’d never meant to sing it in front of my mother. She was giving me a hard look, her arms crossed over her chest.
“You’re not turning Catholic on me now, are you?” she said.
“No,” I said, indignant.
But she seemed thoughtful as we walked on toward Pearson’s, and I worried again that I’d somehow jeopardized my afternoons with Carney. I didn’t want to go back to doing my homework in the auditorium while my mother directed drama practice. Though the high school girls fascinated me, with their eye shadow and their bone-straight hair and their whispered bathroom gossip, I hated to see them snickering at my mother. It wasn’t just the way she spoke. She wore crocheted berets and batik dresses and talked with her hands too much. When we’d lived in New Orleans it had never occurred to me to be embarrassed of her, but here in Iberville Parish I saw how people looked at her, and it made me want us both to disappear. What made it worse was that she seemed not to notice or care. Years would pass before I could admire her for that.
At Pearson’s neither of us felt much like eating. It was Passover, so we couldn’t even order the things we’d usually have. My mother had cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf, and I had a baked potato. I was thinking about the Communion and about Dale. I suppose my mother was thinking about my father. I still got to visit him twice a month, at his small brick house on Park Street in Old Metairie. Sometimes we cooked and sometimes we went to the Audubon Zoo and other times we just sat by the river, watching the barges haul their cargo toward the delta. My mother never saw him at all now, though. On the first night of Passover we’d always had a family seder, just the three of us at home, even when my mother and father could hardly bear to be in the same room together. This year my mother and I had a tiny seder together in the room we called the breakfast nook. We had both pretended to have a good time, but afterward I went to my room and lay in the dark and my mother took a long bath, the only thing that made her feel better when she was depressed. Now she ate tiny bites of cottage cheese and talked about
Twelfth Night,
the play she was directing. She’d wanted to do
Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?,
but the superintendent of schools had asked her if she was crazy.
“They keep doing their lines with English accents,” she said, shaking pepper onto her cottage cheese. “ ‘
Foh
-tune fohbid my outside have not
chahm’d
her.’ I’ve told them fifty times it sounds absurd, but they won’t stop doing it.”
“It
is
an English play,” I said.
“Whose side are you on, anyway?” my mother said. She twisted in the booth, looking for the waitress. The waitress was standing by the jukebox, talking to a tall boy in a red cap. They both laughed. My mother sighed and turned back to the table. She pushed at her cottage cheese with a fork. I watched her, trying to think of something I could say to distract her.
“Carney has a cousin who’s a love child,” I said.
“Oh?” My mother raised an eyebrow. “A love child, eh?”
“His dad was black,” I said. “I don’t think his parents ever got married.”
“Oh,” my mother said. “And what do you make of that?”
“I don’t know. I feel bad for him, I guess. Carney’s supposed to meet him for the first time this weekend. He and his mom are coming to the Communion.”
“You feel bad for him?” my mother said. “Do you think he needs your pity?”
“I don’t feel bad for him because he’s black,” I said.
“Is he black?” she said. “Why not white, if he has one parent of each color?”
I knew my mother didn’t expect an answer. I looked at the salt shaker with its tiny holes, the napkin dispenser with its waxy napkins.
“It’s his mother you should feel bad for,” my mother said. “Imagine what she must have gone through, raising a child all by herself.”
I heard the accusation in her tone, the reminder that she too was now raising a child by herself. I couldn’t understand what had happened, why she’d gotten mad at me. I’d just been trying to make conversation. There was more I’d wanted to say, too, questions I wanted to ask, but now we weren’t talking. It made me angry at all three of them, my mother and Aunt Marian and Dale.
We finished our dinner in silence, and my mother paid the bill. As we walked home I was thinking how strange it was that some people were Catholics and others were Jews, that some were prejudiced and others not. I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another. I thought myself highly original for recognizing that paradox, and I felt proud of my own indignation. I knew the word
hypocrisy,
could almost feel it, salty and crackling, on my tongue. When we got home my mother took a bath. I lay in my room with the light off, feeling like a traveler in a strange and unforgiving land.
That Easter Sunday, for the first and only time in my life, I went to church with my mother. The church was St. John the Evangelist, and it was Carney’s First Communion day. Outside, my mother explained that we were there as guests, that we should act just as if we were at synagogue. If I had questions, she said, I should make a mental list and ask her later. We should be quiet and respect the prayers of others. I nodded, half listening, anxious to get inside that mysterious building and see what would happen at the Communion. I was so excited I’d almost forgotten about Dale.
The church was high and white and packed with lilies. Families in Easter clothes crowded the pews. My mother and I slid into a pew near the back, near a stained-glass window that showed Jesus bending over a sick girl. He looked like a worried father, his hand on her forehead as if he were checking for fever. At the front of the church there were racks of tall white candles, and a gold crucifix high on the wall. The Jesus there wore nothing but a gold cloth around his private parts. He looked sad and dead, his chest bleeding, his forehead crowned with thorns. There was a long white cloth draped over the arms of the cross behind him. The church smelled like wax and spice and the mingled scents of all the women’s perfume. I hadn’t expected to feel holy there, but I did.
Just before the service began, a woman and a boy slid in beside us. At once I knew that this was Dale and his mother. The boy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, wore a crisp dress shirt and navy pants. His skin was a pale walnut-shell brown. His small silver-framed glasses gave him the look of an older boy, though I could see he was about my age. His mother’s hair hung lank and blond against her shoulders, and her arms were white against the blue of her dress. There was a fierce, open look in her eyes, a kind of challenge. She held Dale’s hand tight and whispered something to him. He seemed embarrassed by what she’d said. When he glanced at me I took a hymnal and opened it, not wanting him to know I’d been watching him.
A priest and some boys in white robes entered from the back. They walked up the aisle slowly as a great red swell of music rolled out into the church. I knew it was a pipe organ— I’d heard music like that on Sunday TV—but nothing had prepared me for the deep layered resonance I felt in my breastbone. I turned around to look up at the balcony, and there was a choir in white robes, and racks of silver organ pipes, some reaching to the ceiling, others so small they looked like little flutes standing on end. Behind the priest and the boys came the Communion children, each with a pair of adults whom I’d learned were their godparents. They all walked slowly and wore somber expressions. The children carried their white candles, the light falling gold on their chests. Carney came out last of all. Her hair was dressed in ringlets and she smiled with her mouth closed, her eyes lowered, as if she knew a holy secret she would never tell. I wanted her to see me but she wouldn’t look up from her candle. Her godparents, high school friends of her mother’s, smiled down at her as if she were their own child. Carney’s mother and father stood beaming in a pew near the front of the church. Her little sisters Patty and Eleanor crowded forward to see her, and her three-year-old brother Jonah reached out to touch her skirt as she passed. Carney didn’t look at any of them. She walked all the way to the front of the church, her face composed into that private sacred expression, and lined up with the other children on the altar steps. Dale’s mother bent to him and whispered, loud enough so I could hear, “That little girl all the way on the right is your cousin.”
The congregation sang hymns and said prayers, and the priest spoke about Jesus. He talked about how Jesus and his disciples took the Paschal meal together, and what Jesus said at dinner. After a while, I came to understand he was talking about Passover. The last supper had been a seder. Jesus and his disciples had eaten matzah, and that was why the Communion wafer was unleavened. I’d known Christ was a Jew, but I’d never pictured him having an actual seder. I imagined him singing “Dayenu.” It almost made me laugh. I nudged my mother to tell her what I’d discovered, but she put a finger to her lips. Instead I stared at Carney, trying to make her look up from her candle. After a few moments she did look up, her eyes moving over the congregation. When she saw the boy standing next to me, beside a woman who looked like a sadder, slimmer version of her own mother, her holiness seemed to drop away. Suddenly she looked like the Carney I knew from the playground at school, someone who liked to stir things up.
At the altar, the Communion began. The priest made his way down the row of children, starting at the left. He said their saints’ names and made each one of them eat a wafer. He drew an invisible cross on their foreheads with his thumb. Carney was still looking at Dale when the priest got to her, but when he said her new name, Caroline Veronica, she became holy and serious again. She opened her mouth and took the wafer. A shiver went through me as I imagined what was supposed to be happening at that moment: The wafer was supposed to change to Christ’s body, there in Carney’s mouth. The organ sent its blast of sound out into the church and all the congregants began to sing about the Lamb of God. Dale, too, knew the song. He moved his mouth, but I couldn’t hear his voice among the other voices. My mother took my hand and pressed it.
“You can sing if you want to,” she said.
At Carney’s house we all got Easter baskets. Mine was wrapped in pink cellophane and had three chocolate eggs with the real-looking white and yolk, a net bag of tiny pastel-coated malt balls, two boxes of marshmallow Peeps, and a rabbit in gold foil—all the things I’d seen in the grocery store, things that were not supposed to be for me. My basket was as big as Carney’s, bigger than the ones that belonged to Carney’s little sisters and brother. Dale got one too, just like ours. He took his basket out into the backyard while Carney and I opened ours on the porch, our mothers watching us. I began to unwrap one of the chocolate eggs, but my mother stopped me with a glance.
“What’s wrong, Lila?” Carney’s mother said.
“She can’t have that chocolate yet,” my mother said. “It’s still Passover.”
Carney’s mother gave my mother a quizzical look. “I thought y’all just gave up bread.”
“It’s not that we give things up,” my mother said. “It’s that certain things are forbidden.” She started to explain how most chocolates contained corn sweeteners, and why corn sweeteners weren’t considered kosher for Passover according to Ashkenazic tradition. I wished she didn’t have to make it all sound so foreign.
“Well,” Carney’s mother broke in, laughing. “I thought I had it bad, giving up ice cream for Lent.”
“We don’t feel like we have it bad,” my mother said. “Do we, Lila?”
I sat there looking at the chocolate egg in my hand. I wondered what would happen if I said,
Yes we do!
But my mother wasn’t going to give me the chance. She gave me a sharp look, as if to remind me I’d better not sneak any chocolates behind her back, and then she and Carney’s mother went into the house to set up the drinks. I stayed on the porch and watched Carney eat her Easter candy. She unwrapped two chocolate eggs and ate them quickly, not looking at me. I could hardly bear the smell of chocolate coming from her wrappers. She tore open her package of Peeps and bit into one of them, the marshmallow pure white inside its coating of yellow sugar crystals.
“You’re lucky, actually,” she said, chewing. “You’ll still have all of yours to eat when I’m done with mine.”
It was the kind of thing Carney said sometimes, the kind of thing that sounded like it was supposed to make you feel better but actually made you feel worse. I pushed my basket under one of the porch chairs and stood up as if to leave. Carney dusted the yellow sugar from her hands and folded the cellophane over what remained in her basket.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go out back.” She told me her mother had said she was supposed to mingle with the guests, but I suspected she was looking for Dale.
On the patio, the ladies drank cold drinks and the men smoked cigars. Carney’s father stood beside an outdoor propane burner and stirred gumbo in a tall pot. Her mother arranged trays of corn bread and miniature shrimp quiche. Aunt Marian sat at a picnic table alone and smoked a cigarette, looking out across the backyard as if she wished she were somewhere else. My mother was drinking lemonade and talking about
Twelfth Night
with Carney’s godparents, describing some elaborate problem she’d been having with the set design. Carney’s godparents nodded politely and sipped their drinks. It was clear they were only pretending to be interested, but that didn’t stop my mother.