Although I have been on a blog hiatus for the last two months, I have been writing like a mad woman – creative short fiction. And I finally have the balls to share a bit of it.
Holy Week
School mass was for special occasions. My mother and I went to church every Sunday but to get out of class for an hour meant that Jesus had either been born or had died.
Christmas was celebratory but was usually only one school mass. Easter was a runway of services with the build up of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday and finally Easter Monday that was less holy and all holiday. It meant time out of the classroom to be religious which most students both rejoiced and bemoaned.
Lucy and I were in 7th grade the year our church was being renovated leaving us to observe, celebrate, repent, and pray as required in the school gymnasium. It was hard to consider those glazed hardwood floors sacred, our school loafers clicking loudly in a chorus. Church smelled like oiled pews and incense and still air. The gym didn’t. It was missing the stained glass stations of the cross that filtered the sunlight and caught the dust making the church sometimes look smoky. It didn’t have the vaulted, wood-ribbed ceiling either that reflected the hymns we sang making the few of us who bothered to sing sound like many. Music just floated up in the gym and disappeared. And the altar was missing entirely leaving Father Rose at our eye level. That hiss of cool fluorescent lights, the staccato of shuffling chairs and lingering sour smell reminded me of exactly where I was.
It was the Holy Week marathon and we were both grateful to dodge mathematics for the third time in two weeks, especially to secretly enjoy some of the pageantry around Holy Thursday. It meant twelve students, representing the twelve apostles, would be selected to have their feet washed – a long standing ritual that had our poor Father Rose on his knees cleaning the feet of the likes of Robbie Richmond who never wore socks. Father Rose thought the feet washing brought him into line with the image of Jesus and reminded us every year of his humility. We thought he looked homeless hunched over in his robes with a pan of soaped water, mopping the feet of squirming children. The students loved it because it replaced the homily and was a welcome change of message as Father’s sermons usually served only to remind us all of how terribly we fell short of God’s prayer for us.
“I wouldn’t ever want to be a priest,” said Lucy under her breath.
“Because of the foot thing?” I asked.
“There is that for sure but what time would you have to yourself? Someone is always wanting forgiveness or needing a sacrament or some last rites,” she said. “Would be way better to be a nun.”
St Jude’s’ Middle School had nuns who were old and spotted like rotten fruit. They were sour about everything, even Christmas and acted like the Catholic life was something they were nailed to. They flicked the ears of the boys in class when they weren’t paying attention and offered condemnation as the long-lasting result of pretty much everything. But Sister Holly was different. She was beautiful and bright and shiny and floated when she walked, her smooth stride never catching her habit. Lucy and I thought she must have wings. Sister Holly acted like she knew God, like she had him over for dinner and she provided us with a religion that was spiritual and light without that serving of guilt. Diet Catholicism. Lucy was talking about Sister Holly.
“I think I may become a nun.” Lucy was serious. Father Rose was still on his knees working on Robbie’s grimy feet.
I asked why but I already knew.
Right around Easter the year before, Lucy’s older sister Heather had jumped off a bridge. She was found by someone she didn’t know and despite surviving the fall, died soon after with that stranger panicked on a cell phone as likely the last thing she heard. It all left everyone brittle. My mother slept with me for weeks and her eyes would well whenever we talked about Lucy. I noticed she tried to hold my hand more and would always make time to read with me before bed. She was even lighter on my older brother who was around Heather’s age and not living up to anyone’s expectations with the sweet smell of marijuana forever in his hair and his always closed bedroom door. It was obvious that she was trying to hold us all together like a pile of feathers in her arms.
My mother started countless letters to Lucy’s mum that were never mailed. She knew her words were short and read like confessions and no matter how she tried, they felt pointless so she kept them in a neat pile on her desk. She inevitably stuck to greeting cards with simple vanilla messages like “We are thinking about all of you” or “You are in our prayers”. She mailed one each month and brought over a casserole every Friday until she was asked to please stop.
“It isn’t crazy,” said Lucy. “I want to be something other than myself. I just want everything to be about something other than me.”
Lucy wore her grief like an itchy sweater. She tried to continue, resuming school and sports and music immediately following the funeral, but she dragged her mourning behind her. Her life since Heather died had been lived in everyone’s focus. People were either too kind or too accommodating or all together awkward. And then that softened into fear, like suicide was contagious. She instantly became “the girl whose sister took her own life” and nothing else. Lucy folded in on herself.
And then Sister Holly floated in and carried her. Lucy’s parents were so weighted with their own bereavement that they forgot they had another daughter. Either that or they were afraid of breaking her the way they thought they had broken Heather. The friendship Lucy and Sister Holly formed was part sister, part mother, all savior and it made Lucy full again but different.
The piece that made her the funniest person I knew became serious after she lost Heather but she eventually slowly found peace. I rationalized that it was a fair trade – humour for sound mind. It was around that same time that Lucy started praying the loudest in mass and singing every word of every hymn, not just mouthing the words like some of the kids did. I think it made her feel closer to Heather, like she was praying and singing for both of them.
“This is where I feel the most kinda outside myself, like all of the dark stuff matters less,” she said and then closed her eyes and started thumbing the rosary that she always kept in her pocket. I rolled around in my brain, trying to make a list of what would make a good nun and realized quickly that very little of what I had God would want.
Father Rose was finally done with the feet washing and it was time for the Eucharist. Before Heather died, Lucy and I would ring our hands at this point of mass and pretend we were starving, like that thin wafer could sustain us and that it didn’t taste so beige. It never crossed our minds that it was meant to be the body of Christ. That had all changed in the last year. The Eucharist and the mystery of the transubstantiation was now cause for somber observation.
Because we were in the gym, there wasn’t a proper crucifix or tabernacle to genuflect to – just a mesh metal bin filled with volleyballs and a stack of greasy gymnastic mats – so most of us shuffled to our seats and waited after receiving the host. But Lucy still did. It slowed our line down to get back to our seats. And then she kneeled on the hardwood, her socked to the knee legs not providing any cushion. It was a penance. Lucy wouldn’t slack into her chair either until Father Rose was done with the after-Eucharist show that was a bit of pageantry itself. He swirled the left over red wine before taking deep gulps and ate all of the leftover Eucharist stacked into neat decks like cards. We would have laughed at this too. Lucy might have joked that Father Rose needed AA or Weight Watchers. Instead, we sat quietly as he packed his portable mass picnic away.
“What are your long weekend plans?” I whispered, leaning forward and breaking the quiet. “Why don’t you come over tomorrow or sleep over tonight? My mom bought like three dozen eggs to colour and all of these stupid kits to tie-dye and glitter up eggs. We can make a total mess.”
“I can’t,” said Lucy, her eyes forward, following Father Rose. “I promised Sister Holly I would attend the Good Friday 3 pm mass and that I would help with the children’s service preparations.”
I sat back in my chair and let my eyes float up. The light in the gym was changing in that early-April sort of way. Grey clouds and sunshine and intermittent rain all in an hour. I watched the shadows change and then snap back, the basketball net shading parts of Father Rose’s face.
After the final blessing, Sister Holly made her way to the pulpit which was actually just a desk disguised with a long, white table runner and a small portable crucifix to address us all. Her voice barely rose above a whisper but the gym was hushed. She almost sang when she spoke and I could swear she glowed.
“Thank you Father Rose for today’s service,” she said, gesturing in his direction. “We can all learn something from this gospel about humility and about kindness.” Her eyes were soft and she moved like water. “I challenge everyone here today to do something out of the ordinary for someone you may usually ignore. We all do it – knowingly or not. And this isn’t about washing anyone’s feet but it is maybe about including someone at recess that is sometimes overlooked.”
Sister Holly was good that way. She always translated the bible into something we could all live by: easy, digestible bits. The usual wide lens gospels we were served by Father Rose left me feeling insufficient.
“And on that subject, I need a couple of volunteers to help stack all of the chairs and set up the volleyball net for next period. Anyone….anyone….” she said, her eyes tracking from one side of the gym to the other.
It meant giving up any chance of getting something decent from the cafeteria, probably losing half of our recess and getting further socially marginalized but Lucy’s hand shot up. A year ago, Lucy may have tugged my arm up with hers or tickled my under arms but her eyes remained trained on Sister Holly.
“Thanks Lucy,” said Sister. “We can’t do this alone, guys. Come on. One more?”
I raised my hand.