Authors: Susan Palwick
That was the first time Mandy ever called me crying, when she found out about Bill and Genevieve. That was the girl’s name, a movie-star kind of a name, the sort of name most wives around here wouldn’t trust even if she hadn’t been twenty-two and blond, with the kind of figure you usually only see on swimsuit calendars. She said the whole thing, too, Genn-eh-vee-ehve, didn’t shorten it to Jean or Jenny, so everybody thought she gave herself airs. God only knows what she thought she was doing in a little town like this, aside from making trouble. Somebody said she came here after college—of
course
Bill would fall for a college girl, even if she only majored in phys-ed—to work and save enough money to go to California and be an actress. Seems to me like if she’d really wanted to be an actress she wouldn’t have settled down in Muncie with Bill after the divorce, but what do I know? Maybe she really loved him. He was handsome, Bill was, even then. He’d kept himself fit all those years when Mandy and I were getting bigger and bigger, Mandy from having four kids and me from sitting around Yodel’s Yarns, eating candy bars and dreaming about the day when Hank would come home from ’Nam and walk through the door and ask me to help him pick out a nice wool blend for a cable sweater because it’s cold back here, away from the jungle, and what are you doing tonight, Cece? Want to help me stay warm?
I’d been dreaming about Hank all those years, and Mandy had been dreaming about Cindy, and Bill, it turned out, had been dreaming about platinum-blond secretaries with 38C cups and twenty-four-inch waists who took
Penthouse
letters in the nude at the hot sheets hotel on the highway. The kid who worked the front desk told his girlfriend, who told her cousin, whose hairdresser gave Mandy’s godmother her monthly perm. It made it a lot harder on Mandy, that all those people had known before she did, and of course she was beside herself. Who wouldn’t be? But when she called me crying and started ranting about Genevieve, calling her a slut and a bitch and a little whore, I still thought,
This isn’t the Mandy I know
. Because she never used words like that, and they were the kinds of words her parents had used about Cindy, the words that priest would have used if he hadn’t been in a church. “I hope she rots and dies,” Mandy hissed at me. “I hope she gets hit by a truck. I hope she burns in hell.”
Mandy wanted me to be angry too, to keep her company, and of course I felt sick about the whole thing. But mostly I was sad, listening to her, because I felt like everyone I knew had died somehow, changed into other people when I wasn’t looking, people I didn’t like very much. The Mandy who’d cared about people even when they got into trouble had turned into her mean mother and into that horrible priest both, and the Bill who made promises turned into the Bill who broke them, and the Cece who was smart and pretty and deadset on marrying Hank turned into—well, what I am now. Not pretty, except maybe in the face, and not married, and not much of anything, really, except somebody who runs on at the mouth and runs a yarn store, helping people who still know how to knit pick out patterns for baby blankets. I’d turned into Aunt Cece—that’s what Mandy’s four girls always called me—just like I really was Mandy’s sister, just like Cindy really had never existed.
I couldn’t spend a lot of time being sad, though, because there was too much else to do. First of all, I was mad myself, mainly at Bill. Mandy wanted Genevieve to rot and die and I wanted Bill to rot and die—or part of him, anyway, the upstanding part. And I knew I had to stop hating Bill and concentrate on loving Mandy and the girls instead, because that’s what they needed now. That’s what Bill had taken away from them: knowing that they were loved, the way you know the sun will always come up, the way you know there will always be air to breathe whether you’ve done anything to deserve it or not. And right then, I had to keep Mandy from doing anything that would make her hate herself later on. So I said, “Mandy, honey, I know you want that woman to die right now, but when you calm down you won’t feel so good about saying so, I know you won’t, and you have to think about that. You have to be careful now, because you’re so upset. You have enough to feel bad about, without adding anything that doesn’t have to be there. I don’t care a fig about that woman, or Bill either. All I care about is you and the kids. You just sit tight, Mandy. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
So I went over and stayed there, shut down Yodel’s Yarns for a solid week and did what Mandy needed me to do: cooked, did laundry, answered the phone and the door. News got around fast, the way it always does about something like that. I kept the people Mandy didn’t want to see away from her and made coffee for the ones who were welcome. I looked after the kids and tried to help them make some kind of sense out of what had happened. I helped Mandy find a lawyer and went with her to talk to him, because I knew I’d hear more of what he was saying than she could. I did the same kinds of things that Mandy had done for me when my father died. But that makes sense, because when a marriage dies it’s pretty much like a person has, anyway.
Mandy’s parents had moved to Albuquerque for their arthritis years before that—and good riddance, if you ask me—so I was really the only person around who could do all those things for her. I did whatever I could to help, but the whole time I felt like I didn’t know Mandy at all anymore, like there was this new person where my best friend had been and I just had to keep pretending she was the person she was supposed to be, because otherwise what would I do? There I was, in this house I knew as well as I knew my own, better maybe—it was the house where Mandy’d grown up; she and Bill had taken it when her folks left—doing all the things I’d known how to do my whole life, like making sandwiches and telling the kids stories, and I felt completely lost.
So now maybe you can understand a little bit how I felt the second time Mandy called me crying. That was four months ago, about five years after Bill left, and I’d gotten used to the new Mandy by then but sometimes I still missed the old one, the one who loved everybody and never cursed anybody out, even the people who’d hurt her. The new one was a lot tougher, I’ve got to give her credit for that, but she was colder too, more selfish, less able to be nice to people just for the sake of being nice. I guess she had to be that way. Maybe she missed that earlier part of herself too. People who didn’t like Mandy, before Bill left, always said that she’d never grown up, that she was just a little girl inside, and that’s what they meant, I guess: that she was so sweet to everybody, that she always tried to think the best of people. Mandy grew up fast, after Bill and Genevieve, and the people who hadn’t liked her before started to like her better. They said she’d finally found her backbone. Seemed to me she’d lost her heart, or thrown it away because it hurt her too much, and I wasn’t sure she’d made such a good trade.
So I was almost glad, when she called me crying again, because it meant she’d gotten her heart back, whatever else had happened. Oh, I was scared too, and guilty about that first flash of gladness. All three of those feelings went through my head in the minute between the time when I picked up the phone and the time when I could understand what she was saying. Because she was crying so hard I couldn’t, at first. I thought something must have happened to one of the kids, or Bill had come back—I didn’t know what. It was 9:45 on a Sunday morning, and I’d just started a donut and my first cup of coffee. I was standing in the kitchen in my robe, holding the phone in one hand and my coffee mug in the other, saying, “Mandy, what’s wrong? Mandy, you have to slow down, I can’t understand you, what happened?”
“Cindy’s come home,” she said finally, in a great gasp, and my knees went weak and the coffee mug shattered on the floor—my favorite mug, too, it was the one my father always used, all the way from Hawaii. It had bright fish and flowers all over it. I don’t know where Dad got it; he’d never been to Hawaii. I always meant to ask him, and a few months after he died I was drinking coffee out of that mug and I realized that I never had asked, that I’d forgotten to ask, and that now I never could. And I started bawling like a baby, just like I was bawling now, with the mug in a zillion pieces on the floor and hot coffee everywhere.
“Oh, Mandy,” I said. “Oh Mandy. I’ll be right there. Just let me get dressed. Is she—is she—”
Is she happy, I wanted to know, does she have the life we made up for her? But Mandy said, “No, no, don’t come here, meet me at the church.”
“What?”
I said. Mandy hadn’t been in that church since her wedding, because of the priest. She said she never could believe that Father Anselm knew any more about God than the tomatoes in her garden did, probably less. She said she’d go back when the church got a new priest, but the last I’d heard Father Antsy was still there, even though Catholics usually rotate priests every five years. Bill always made it into a joke and said the Church had forgotten about Innocence, but Mandy thought we were stuck with Antsy because the bishop couldn’t find anybody else who wanted him. So it seemed to me that church was the last place she’d want to go.
“There?” I said. “Why? I don’t—”
“Ten o’clock Mass,” Mandy said, still crying. “Hurry.”
Then she hung up. I looked at the clock; it was 9:50. “Oh, Lord,” I said, and ran to get ready.
Well, you can imagine how fast I drove to get there. If I was ever going to get a speeding ticket in my life, it would have been then, and I don’t know what I would have said if I’d been stopped. “I’m late for church, Officer.” But nobody stopped me, even though I was zooming along at about seventy miles an hour. I thought Cindy would be at the church too. I kept wondering what she’d look like, after all this time.
I got there after the service started, of course, and had to sneak in those big doors, feeling like some kind of thief, thinking about Cindy sneaking into the wedding so long ago. It was dark inside, except for the stained glass and the candles. I didn’t think it was pretty, today. The place stank of incense, and the organ howled and rumbled and wheezed like something out of some old movie, probably one with Vincent Price. There weren’t many people there: two or three families, some old ladies, and Mandy. I saw her right away, sitting in the third pew.
By herself. I hustled up and slid in beside her. “Mandy! Where—”
“Shhhh,” she said, and reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed, hard. “She wants us to pray for her.”
“Us?” I said. “Who, us?” Mandy knows I’m not religious. “Where
is
she?”
People were glaring at us, by then. “Home,” Mandy whispered. In the candlelight I could see that she was crying again. “Hush, Cece. Just pray. Pray for her to be well.”
Which meant she wasn’t, which meant, as far as I was concerned, that we had no business sitting there in that stink, that we should have been with Cindy, taking care of her or taking her to a doctor or doing something that would do some good. I couldn’t see how this was going to do any good, sitting in this cave listening to Father Antsy droning about the temptations of television. When he got going on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as the four reptiles of the Apocalypse I whispered to Mandy, “Look, I can’t stand this, I’m leaving, I’ll go to your house—”
“No,” she whispered back, and grabbed my hand again. “She asked for you to be here. Because I told her—how we used to talk. How we used to tell ourselves she was happy. It meant a lot to her, that you did that. She wants you here, Cece. She asked us to come to Mass because she couldn’t. Please.”
Well, I didn’t feel I could leave, after that, but I sure couldn’t pray, either. I just sat there, fuming, wondering what was wrong with Cindy, trying not to listen to Antsy—he’d started in on soap operas—staring at that horrible cross up front, with that Jesus looking like he was going to open his mouth and scream in agony any second. Which was pretty much how I felt, just then. I heard Antsy saying something about body and blood and thought,
Well, now he’s talking about
TV
movies
, and then everybody stood up and filed out into the aisle and I did too, I just followed Mandy, I was so distracted I couldn’t think straight, and I took the stale biscuit and the sip of wine and then I remembered, when we sat back down again, that I wasn’t supposed to do that, that at Mandy’s wedding she’d said you were only supposed to take the communion if you were Catholic. I couldn’t see that it mattered. Father Antsy wouldn’t know the difference—I hadn’t been in that church for twenty years and he wasn’t exactly a big yarn buyer, so for all he knew I was a Catholic cousin visiting from another state—and anyhow I hadn’t had much breakfast, not that a tiny little stale biscuit helped much. Mandy had said the wine and biscuit were supposed to be Christ’s body and blood, I remembered that now, and the whole thing made me a little sick to my stomach, and even angrier. This priest lectures about the sinfulness of the body and then he makes people eat stale biscuits that are supposed to be pieces of a body—what kind of sense does that make? It’s no better than those mountain climbers who eat each other when they run out of food, in my opinion. I don’t see how anybody can believe that about Jesus’ body anyway. The biscuit’s just a cracker; it’s not even meat. If they fed you hamburger, well, maybe that would be different, but they don’t, and thank goodness too.
So anyway, finally the Mass was over and we drove back to Mandy’s house, with me shooting questions at her the whole way. Cindy’d shown up at five in the morning, just knocked on the door and there she was, standing on the porch, said she’d taken Greyhound from New York, said she didn’t know where her baby was, it had been a boy and she’d left it in a train station where somebody would be sure to find it, said she’d done a bunch of things since then, in New York and Florida, wouldn’t say what they’d been, but from the sound of it they hadn’t been anything good. She hadn’t been doing anything like what we’d imagined for her, that much was sure. “She’s very thin,” Mandy said, trying not to cry, “and she looks very tired, and she has a terrible cough. She wanted to know if I thought I could still love her. I told her, of
course
, Cindy, do you have any idea how much time I spent looking for you? And she said, but you didn’t know I’d look like this, and then she asked me if I thought God could still love her.”