Absent a Miracle Read online

  Two months before the WBLT debacle, I had lost my other part-time job, teaching high school English to troubled girls at Our Lady of Precious Blood Academy. The semester had barely begun when Mother Apollonia told me the diocese had radically altered the English curriculum. Henceforth, my extensive knowledge of the writings and lives of the Catholic converts, especially, but not exclusively, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Thomas Merton, was no longer required. Henceforth, the school would be sticking to the tried-and-true narratives of the saints: Augustine's Confessions, Theresa of vila's Interior Castle, Thérèse of Lisieux's Story of a Soul, and John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. I was as big an admirer of those texts as anyone, as I told Mother Apollonia, but I thought the girls in her care might need something else, something slightly more contemporary and accessible. And even more than that, I thought they needed to read stories that made it clear just how flawed most Catholics and most humans were, and yet all still deserving of grace. I argued for a more nuanced and entertaining view of the Mystical Body of Christ, and I was turned down.

  I was fond of my students at Precious Blood. They were resilient and vulnerable, full of wisdom and full of shit. We had developed this weird pattern—which may have been another reason the diocese got rid of me, but how could they have known?—such that in almost every class one girl would make a great show of resting her head upon her desk and sobbing, twitching, or groaning. Then another girl would solicitously ask what was the matter. A long narrative would ensue, usually involving a cruel, fickle, and witless boyfriend; or a terminally ill mother; or an imprisoned brother; or a drunken, abusive father. Presumably the first time this happened, the story told was true, and probably even the second and third time. But soon they were complete fictions. It's true that I realized this long after the girls did, but I did finally realize it. Yet we continued. The girls continued with their theatrical poses, and their earnest questionings. We all continued to listen, even and especially as the stories became more and more outlandish. In my last month of employment at Precious Blood, my eleventh-grade class was regaled with escalating stories that went from the perfidious boyfriend who seduced the student's younger sister, to a boyfriend seducing a student's fraternal (as in "male") twin, to a boyfriend seducing a student's mother. It was beyond my capacities not to admire their inventiveness: details that included the contents of the boyfriend's pockets and his brother's favorite TV shows, and dialogue that was elaborate, colloquial, and often derivative of great literature ("I smell a hamster" or "You're nothing but a handful of dust"). These Homerically inclined girls would have great futures, if only I knew what they were. If only I could help them get there.

  For almost four years I'd had these two part-time jobs, both of which had seemed ideal, as part-time jobs went, if you didn't consider how little I was paid. Aside from that, they were interesting and worthwhile—I thought they were worthwhile—and allowed me to be home by three in the afternoon, when Ezra and Henry returned from school, hungry and briefly ebullient. Was it that I'd been too pleased with myself? Had I neglected the all-important knocking on wood that Mami had drummed into us along with a fondness for nuts and figs? What if I had brought this double-whammy of dismissals upon myself?

  One of my favorite girls at Precious Blood was Angela Sitwell. Angela made Mother Apollonia nervous; the mother superior knew Angela was up to no good, but she could never catch her in flagrante. Angela had a style all her own, and unnerving courage. She had two distinguishing marks, and she wore them both proudly: a vivid port-wine stain shaped like the Central American isthmus on her left temple, and her missing sixth finger.

  One day I brought Ezra and Henry to school with me. The first thing Angela said was "Have you guys ever shaken hands with someone with six fingers?" Of course they had not, not that they knew of, not that I knew of, and suddenly their lives seemed emptier and paler without that very experience. In one moment Angela had created in their contented, privileged lives a void that only she could fill.

  Angela let them trace with their small fingers the almost invisible scar that was all that remained of the sixth finger of her left hand. They couldn't get enough of it. Ezra in particular begged me to take him with me to my classes at Precious Blood, but scheduling was always hard. After all, he had school too.

  So when I was canned from Dream Radio I had the sick satisfaction of assuming that now, finally, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, and in spades. I'd lost two jobs for which I'd had no recognizable qualifications but was good at anyway. I had no idea what I would do next. If Waldo was such a great inventor, and I had no doubt that he was, couldn't he invent a job for me? If he could invent open-space videos for MRIs, magic magnetic moving picture hooks, a battery-operated wind-resistant umbrella, self-folding tortillas, and the Automatic Auto-Suction Friend, then surely he could come up with something I could do, that I might be able to do.

  Apparently, putting me to use was a lot harder than inventing a device that allows one's car to automatically vacuum itself.

  2

  Monkey in the Middle

  I WAS THE MIDDLE child. I was the one who came after Annabel and before Audrey. I was born two years after Annabel and two years before Audrey. In those days, almost everyone I knew or went to school with was separated from his or her siblings by two years. If someone was not, it was regarded as an interesting anomaly. If he or she had come several years after the previous sibling, the child was invariably referred to as "the Surprise"; if he or she was an only child, "Poor Thing" was the epithet.

  As I was to learn with Ezra and Henry, this two-year interlude meant that almost as soon as one child was weaned, the next was conceived. Not exactly an epiphanic observation, or even rocket science. More like a time-honored pattern that kept restless young women on a hormonal high. This, at least, was my interpretation of the procreative activity of thousands of years of human history. For four straight years I was awash in hormonal surges. I was dangerously blissful. For four straight years I could have been a poster child for hormonal surges.

  That I was the middle child was not something people spoke of in Santa Barbara or anywhere else I'd been before I came to New England. Mami and Pop always called me their second daughter, never the middle daughter. I never knew if this was deliberate on their part, if they had consciously decided to spare me the stigma of the middle child, or if it was just cluelessness.

  So when the taboo was broken by the New Englanders, not generally known as taboo-breakers, my sisters began to refer to me constantly as the one in the middle. Before that I had been the hapless one in need of entertainment and social intercourse, all because I had once complained of being bored when left to myself one evening. For them, this phenomenon of birth order suddenly explained a whole gamut of behaviors. "She's the middle child, that's why she's so flexible," Annabel would say. Audrey would agree. "Like Gumby." Or Audrey would say, "Alice is pathologically social, you know. It must be because she's the middle child." And Annabel would add, "She can't bear to be alone. She needs to develop Inner Resources." You would have thought they were the first people in the Western world to notice that birth order matters.

  That I was a middle child was the first thing Waldo told his parents about me. Or it may as well have been for all the attention they'd paid to anything he'd said before that. Waldo said, "Alice is her parents' middle child. They have three daughters." And both Posey and Three pressed their lips together even more tightly than usual before parting them to say, "We have no middle children."

  Waldo said it might be a good idea for me to consider Maine and California as separate countries—which they surely would have been in any other part of the world, like Venezuela and Chile, or Germany and Spain—and then to think of myself as a foreigner; that way I would not expect to understand his parents' behavior, and I might even find it interesting, the way we found the rituals of Oktoberfest or Semana Santa interesting, or the Castilian lisp quaint.

  "Why? Do you f
eel like a foreigner in California?" I once asked him. We were living in New York City then, on opposite sides of Spring Street. It was good that Spring Street was not too heavily trafficked, because many of our conversations took place in the middle of that thoroughfare.

  "No, but that's because New Englanders never feel like foreigners, not anywhere. We can go to Turkmenistan or Timbuktu and know that we are the standard by which all others should be measured. We look around, comment on the habits and hygiene of the natives, on the foreignness of their language and attire. If they don't understand us, we just speak louder, because we know lots of people who are deaf. We are the norm," he said. "Plus, we are Red Sox fans, and Red Sox fans will always occupy the moral high ground because they lose, gloriously."

  "You exaggerate everything," I said.

  "You met Posey and Three. I hardly think I am exaggerating. Simplifying perhaps, but not exaggerating."

  "You're a New Englander," I said. "Do you feel like that?"

  "Let's just say that I never feel like a foreigner, which is either a curse or a blessing. But I don't think of you as a foreigner either. Of course, I am the rebel in the family. I've moved out of Maine, and I don't have a vegetable garden, and I'm marrying a papist from California."

  "That's the first I've heard of it," I said.

  "You thought I did have a vegetable garden?"

  "Stop being amusing. If you even are. About getting married: I think I should be consulted."

  And then Waldo shocked me completely. It wasn't like all the previous shocks of strange family stories and quirky behavior. It was physical. It was like walking into a plate-glass door headfirst. He fell, he crashed, really, down onto both knees, and said, "Alice Ewen of the western shores, O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?"

  I don't remember what I said. Unlike Waldo's words, mine were neither memorable nor in rhyme. Of course I loved him to distraction. Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined a scene quite like this one, on a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan. The fact that he spoke to me as Pussy-Cat once did to Owl made it, somehow, only more profound. At one point I finally told him to get up and he confessed he might not be able to. He had done something to his knees, I forget now if it was the patella or the meniscus or the mysterious ACL. But the pain was excruciating. After two weeks of moaning and limping like the grandfather on The Beverly Hillbillies, he had arthroscopic surgery, and magically, the pain went away.

  If Posey and Three ever warned him that a marriage between a first and a middle child was a dangerous reef, or that a marriage with a Californian of foreign extraction (more or less a redundancy) would be fraught with conflicts of values and misunderstood allusions, he never told me.

  3

  Poor Sick Dandy

  FOR MONTHS, WE HAD been planning this vacation to the Consummate Caves in New Mexico. Henry had been reading books and mastering the vocabulary of spelunking. Ezra wore his headlamp to the dinner table. But then plans had had to change, because Dandy was very sick, and even though I longed to witness Ezra's and Henry's spelunking adventures and hear their pithy commentary, I would stay home with the dogs. We all agreed there was no alternative. Not if we loved him, which we did, and if we wanted him to live, which we did.

  Dandy became sick right after Christmas. He stopped eating, he stopped moving, and he was pale as a ghost. I'd never thought a dog could be pale, but then I saw how very possible it was. His tongue and gums were gray. His eyeballs receded into his skull. Because Donald, our vet, and his wife, Thelma, were taking their first vacation in six years—a Caribbean cruise sponsored by the American Agoraphobia Foundation—we spent New Year's Eve in the animal emergency room, along with an asthmatic cat and a lame Great Dane. Dandy then spent six nights at the Winifred Bates Memorial Animal Hospital. After Dandy had had two blood transfusions, a bone-marrow aspiration, steroids, and antibiotics, the hospital staff sadly sent him home to die. But he didn't die. We found a veterinary hematologist who prescribed a very experimental and expensive drug that required me to wear latex gloves when I administered it, which didn't strike me as a good thing. It struck me as a dangerous thing, and as a sign of all the dangerous things afoot in our medicated world. It struck me as a warning, if only I would heed it. But then Dandy's condition stabilized, and that was a good thing. Every week Waldo or I took him back to see Donald to get his blood analyzed. I made Dandy hamburger and waffles and scrambled eggs. He slept on Ezra's pillow, nose to nose with him. He was a long way from well, but he was far from dead.

  There was no way we could leave him and disappear into underground caverns. We thought about it for a minute and a half. We considered the options. No kennel with an insurance policy, not even the Ritz of kennels, would take him. Our neighbor Bogumila, who was Polish and our street's enthusiastic advocate of herbal remedies for everything, offered to take Dandy in. But that was just too well-meaning by far. Dandy was too sick, and his medications were not simple. Nor were they herbal. And, really, who in her right mind would take on a family pet that could croak at any minute? What sane person could stand the guilt, even when it most certainly would not be her fault?

  Speaking of guilt, we did briefly consider sending Posey a round-trip ticket and asking her to come and stay. She loved dogs and she was guilt-resistant. Waldo said if she wanted to, she could even bring Edgar Cicero, if he cared to come. Mr. Cicero was her second husband, and he didn't like to travel. In fact, he had not left the state of Maine in more than a decade. But it took mere seconds to imagine all the good reasons not to go down that path.

  "She may not suffer from pangs of guilt," I said. "But I would never forgive her if anything happened. I wouldn't want to blame my children's grandmother for the death of their dog. That seems like a bad dynamic."

  "There you go, Mom, anticipating the worst. Predilection is not always a good idea," Henry said.

  "I assume you mean prognostication? Waldo said.

  "Or just plain prediction" I said.

  Henry glared at Waldo from under eyebrows that were already darkened and fast becoming a dominant feature of his face.

  More discussion followed, and even some useful suggestions. All were rhetorical. Some were whimsical (the Plaza).

  "I'll stay," I said. "I could use the peace and quiet. I can read a ton of books, and when I'm done with them, I can read the want ads."

  "Promise you won't brood," Waldo said.

  "I wouldn't know a brood if it bit me," I said.

  "Seriously, Al."

  "Seriously, I'll be able to eat anything I want."

  Waldo said, "You already eat anything you want."

  "How do you know? All these years I've been denying myself okra and garlic so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities."

  "You hate okra," Waldo said.

  "That's what you think," I said. "But really, really. It makes good sense. I don't even like caves. They're too slimy and—suggestive."

  "I grant that it makes sense," Waldo said. "But not if you're going to be a martyr."

  "I promise not to be a martyr. I rejected martyrdom decades ago," I said.

  "You know what I mean," Waldo said.

  I really did plan on enjoying myself, but I didn't want to entirely admit that. While I didn't want to make them feel bad, I could see the advantage of gaining some small foothold on the moral high ground in my relationship with Waldo and the boys.

  Certain things were especially appealing. Like anyone who daily produced nutritious meals after consultation with the FDA food pyramid and epiphanies in the produce section of Stop & Shop, I longed to abandon that propriety and be left to my own devices. I could imagine a vacation of solitary sloventude: drinking coffee in bed and not changing the sheets if and when I spilled on Waldo's side. I could imagine scavenging in the fridge for those beckoning almost-moldy items tucked way in the back, and then daringly playing my own domestic variation on Russian roulette. I could imagine myself eating smoked oysters straight from the fl
at tin with the rolled-up top as I stood at the counter and read the obituaries and marriage announcements, ignoring the oil that spattered and soaked through the death at ninety-eight of a pioneer vaudevillian, or the merger of a Harvard MBA and a Princeton PhD in international affairs. I could imagine myself winning at Jeopardy!, night after night.

  Besides, I was always looking for an opportunity to prove to Annabel and Audrey that I did in fact have Inner Resources. I planned that after the fourth day I'd call one of them and casually mention that I had been completely alone (I wouldn't mention the dogs) for days and say how much I had enjoyed my own company. I would tell her that I had taught myself a new skill, bookbinding or snowshoeing, that I had learned how to make pie crust and graft plants. (Maybe not plant grafting. Wrong season.) I would explain that I had taken up stamp collecting. I really had always wanted to take up stamp collecting, and somewhere in the attic was a box full of stamps I'd torn off letters, back when stamps were used on a regular basis. Stamp collecting was a thing of the past, because stamps were things of the past, which was all the more reason why I should take it up. And if Annabel or Audrey ever again referred disparagingly to my addiction to social intercourse at the cost of Inner Resources, I would mention my vast stamp collection and hint at all I had learned about small, obscure countries with no natural resources.