Body Leaping Backward Page 3

  The next year, Sally, Joanne, and I devised our own crime-themed costumes for the Girls Missionary Guild Halloween party. We’d been recruited into the GMG by our neighbor Sherry Stewart, whose mother held weeklong Bible camp in summer, which we attended mainly for the candy. Sally, Joanne, and I were the Odd Squad, after our favorite TV show, The Mod Squad, about three teenagers who avoided jail by working undercover for the police. Pete had been arrested for stealing a car, Linc for rioting in a fictionalized version of the Watts race riots, Julie for running away. The show debuted in 1968 after the end of the Hays Code, which decreed that criminal acts onscreen must be punished: “The sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” In the first season of The Mod Squad, Julie, Linc, and Pete busted a gang of thieves working in cahoots with crooked cops, a plot which presaged the 1970s around the corner, when it became increasingly difficult to discern the good guys from the bad guys.

  In our Odd Squad, Sally, the tallest, was Linc. Joanne was Pete, decked out in striped bell-bottom pants and a fake mustache. I was Julie, in a minidress and love beads. Our costumes won first prize, a King James Bible, which I read one afternoon like an engrossing novel filled with stories of thievery, murder, sin.

  On Sundays we attended Mass at Blessed Sacrament, a beautiful, imposing neo-Gothic brick church with wide granite steps leading to two tall wooden doors, the apostles carved into their panels. Inside, past the narthex, where you dipped your finger in holy water, stained glass windows along the side walls depicted the stations of the cross. Sometimes I took the framed print of Jesus off our wall at home and stared at him—his brow dripping blood, hollows beneath his eyes—trying to feel something more than pity, more than curiosity. My memory of church is bathed in blood, the carpet on the chancel and altar, the stained glass, the wine, the wounds. Beneath the vaulted ceilings of Blessed Sacrament, religion was infused with a somber sense of shame and guilt: the stain of sins, the murder of Jesus.

  My father always led us to a middle pew, never the front, which seemed overly pious, nor the rear, which seemed disrespectful. The middle pew perhaps symbolized my father’s growing disillusion with Catholicism. I’d catch his slight eye roll as the Richards family, gloved and hatted, strolled to the front pew every Sunday. Except for singing alleluia, Mass was intolerable, broken up by the ritual of placing coins in a straw basket attached to a long pole, shoved into each row by an impatient old man. I fantasized grabbing the money from the basket as it passed under my nose, all those dollars people foolishly gave away.

  When we’d been slothful and had missed the last service at Blessed Sacrament, we raced to St. Jude’s, a Catholic church just past Norfolk Prison, for the last Mass of the day, at 11:15 a.m., Saint Jude the patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases. St. Jude’s was to Norfolk Prison as Blessed Sacrament was to Walpole Prison: less strict. St. Jude’s didn’t even look like a Catholic church, with its sand-colored facade, tiny windows, and plain decor, no bloody Jesus anywhere.

  In catechism we learned the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal—these I understood. But thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife? I thought of the neighbor ladies, Mrs. Peterson with her raspy cigarette voice, or Mrs. Gibson, with her soap-opera-watching ways, or mean Mrs. Wagner. Why would I covet those wives? There was one sin I committed, though it wasn’t a commandment: pride. One day in first grade, Joanne and I knocked on the Gibsons’ door, calling for Peggy to play. When Mrs. Gibson opened the door, I told her that I’d earned straight A’s on my report card. At home, Joanne told my mother and my mother scolded me for bragging.

  On Saturday mornings my father took us to confession in Blessed Sacrament’s annex, a miniature version of the church with a dozen pews, a small altar, and confessional booths with velvet curtains to draw for privacy. At your turn you entered the booth, kneeled, and spoke into the screen, behind which you could see the shadow of Father Cummings, could hear his wheezy breath. You’d say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been——days since my last confession.” Ideally it should be a number of days, not decades. Tracking a week of sins was difficult. I couldn’t remember all that had happened, so mostly I confessed generic sins, acts I was likely to commit, a kind of preemptive confession: stealing a quarter off my father’s dresser, hitting my sister, lying to my mother.

  I was honest once, telling the priest I’d done nothing wrong. I don’t remember what the priest said, but I sensed that I was not going to get out of that uncomfortable, stuffy booth and off my suffering knees until I offered something. From then on, instead of the ridiculous task of tracking actual sins, I began to confess made-up sins. I sometimes wished I had bigger and better sins to confess, but I was not yet an accomplished liar; I was an apprentice liar. I tried to be honest, to say what I thought, but I was learning, albeit slowly, that honesty resulted in a slap, a scolding, soap on my tongue, or pepper. Penance.

  After the first couple of times saying penance—five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, for example—I realized that no one checked whether you said the prayers, or said them right. The church used the honor system. Why did the priest trust someone he knew to be a sinner, someone who regularly—every Saturday!—arrived with a fresh litany of sins? Did he really think this person, this incorrigible recidivist person, was to be trusted carrying out her own penance? I must not have believed in God, or else I’d have worried that he was watching. Could I have been agnostic at the age of seven, eight? Instead of repenting, I kneeled at the altar for a certain amount of time, studying the intricate frescoes, Jesus on that cross, nails pounded into his living flesh, the ignominy of hanging alongside two thieves, his slow, agonizing, cotton-mouthed, miserable death.

  My mother was deeply religious, beyond being a practicing Catholic—she’d perfected it. Lent, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday—I observed the holy days and rituals without understanding them. Why did the priest press his ashy thumb on my forehead and leave his mark? I didn’t know and didn’t care, but my mother lived her faith. She taught my third-grade catechism class and cooked and delivered meals for the elderly and shut-ins. One year for the church bazaar she constructed a Barbie dollhouse from an appliance box, laboring after dinner each night for weeks. The house had a bedroom, living room, bathroom, kitchen, the rooms wallpapered with decorative contact paper, with tiny ruffled curtains she sewed for the windows. She fashioned a couch and an easy chair, cutting forms from cardboard and upholstering each piece, the seats lifting to reveal a storage place for doll clothes. The house was like the dioramas we made in school, though in comparison to our shoeboxes, my mother’s house was a mansion.

  Night after night as I watched my mother work on the house, I begged her not to donate it to Blessed Sacrament church’s annual bazaar and white elephant sale.

  “But Mom,” I’d say, “why are you going to just give it away?”

  “It’s for the poor,” she mumbled through straight pins clamped in her perfect white teeth. I imagined “the poor” as Doreen Randall, the girl Peggy Gibson had banished from her property.

  I thought that through sheer persistence I would convince my mother not to donate the house and instead give it to someone who’d truly appreciate it: me. I believed my relentless pleading would change her mind, even as we transported the dollhouse to the church sale and set it on a table next to a raffle jar. When the raffle was drawn, I watched the parents of some little girl cart the house away. She doesn’t look poor, I thought. Nor did she look thrilled, I observed. She didn’t see the beauty of the house, only the old appliance box it had been.

  My mother had her own set of cardinal rules, like a tailored version of the seven sins. Never throw stones. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Never ever say the n word. Don’t cheat. Don’t talk back. Don’t hit. Only adults could hit. At first my parents’ system of discipline was orderly. When we were still spanking age—up until five or six, after which there was the occasional empty threat: You’re not too o
ld for a spanking—during the day my mother calculated our misdeeds on an abacus in her mind, and when my father came home from work she presented him with the sum. My father sat on the piano bench and we lined up to receive a spanking, like the orphans receiving gruel in Oliver Twist. One night I stuffed a book down the back of my pants, something I probably saw Alfalfa do on The Little Rascals. Did it hurt my father’s hand? Is that why he didn’t think me clever and instead doled out an extra ration of punishment?

  My parents abandoned the system by the time I was seven, perhaps because our misdeeds were too numerous to track. Probably the system simply broke down, entropy being the inevitable end of all systems. Then punishment took the opposite form, not regimented but random. When we fought, my mother punished everyone involved. She wasn’t interested in our pleas for justice, that the punishment was not fair because she started it. On the two- or three-hour drives to our annual weeklong vacation in some rented cottage in New England, if we fought in the backseat, my father threatened to pull over and give us a spanking. He never did this, though, not once. Instead, while driving sixty miles an hour, steering with his left hand, he’d flail wildly with his right hand into the backseat, striking innocent and guilty alike. From this random, hit-or-miss punishment, I learned that it didn’t pay to be good.

  From early on the world seemed violent; my eye was drawn to violence, my psyche disturbed by it. There was Billy Wagner next door, and then on my first day of first grade, after my mother dropped me off (Joanne, Patrick, and Barbie still at home), I stood in line outside Fisher Elementary waiting to enter. When the bell rang, Jill Fletcher wailed and clung to her mother’s leg, snot bubbling from her nose. Her mother spanked her, whack whack whack, her arm swinging at her daughter’s behind. The more Jill cried, the more her mother scolded and hit. Jill’s mother seemed embarrassed to have this messy daughter, who was finally pried off her leg and who sat sniffling and hiccupping the entire morning, the only girl besides me who cried on the first day of school, we two crybabies. My mother told me later that I was her only child who cried on the first day of school for many years.

  Neil Kelleher lived near Barnes’s corner store, situated between our neighborhood and the projects, a collection of twenty or so small ranch houses. Neil had black hair and close-set brown eyes and overlapping front teeth. One day I stood in Barnes’s parking lot unwrapping a Bonomo Turkish Taffy. I wasn’t supposed to be eating candy, especially since I’d bought it with quarters I’d stolen off my father’s dresser, so I had to finish the taffy there in the parking lot. I saw Mrs. Kelleher step outside. “NEIL!” she called, then waited. “NEEEEE-IL!”

  The Turkish taffy pulled at my teeth as I watched Mrs. Kelleher in her driveway, curlers in her hair, hard spiky hot electric curlers like my mother used, the suburban housewife’s crown of thorns. She cupped her hands to her mouth, her voice shrill, and finally Neil careened into his driveway on his banana bike. When he skidded to a stop his mother pulled him off the bike, which clattered to the pavement. As she swatted him he fell to the ground, crouching, covering his head with his hands as she beat him with her shoe, thwacking him across his back.

  I stood riveted, thinking of how she’d removed her shoe, how odd that was, turning an ordinary object into a tool to beat someone. Did she fear that if her own hand touched the flesh of her son’s back in rage she might realize what she was doing? That she might connect the back she was pounding with the back she’d patted when Neil was a baby? I felt sick from the gooey taffy I shouldn’t have been eating. I couldn’t seem to swallow or get the taffy out of my mouth, the awful repetitive thump of a shoe on a boy’s back like a stick against a rug, the sickening sweet taffy gluing my mouth shut.

  Neil Kelleher was Patrick’s friend through high school, until Patrick took off for California and then Hawaii, as far as he could get from Walpole without leaving the country, and Neil became trapped in Walpole, in prison on a drug conviction.

  Growing up, I was almost never alone. The house was filled with those others, my mother and father, my sisters and brothers; between them I filled a space, a shape of an identity extruded through the crowd. “There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple, unmixed with other human beings,” writes sociologist Nancy Chodorow. Each of our personalities, she says, is “a company of many,” a composite formed of “never-ending influences and exchanges between ourselves and others.” In that house I was hardened into being. We were close in age, like a litter, with slight differences like markings. In every direction I pushed, someone was there. The two sisters above me, Susan and Sally, “Irish twins” born ten months apart, had straight black hair, plump lips. The two sisters below me, Joanne and Barbie, were taller and thinner, with straight black hair and small heart-shaped mouths. I was the middle of five girls, but different, with lighter curly hair, a mouth somewhere between the plump lips of Sue and Sally and the cupid’s-bow lips of Joanne and Barbie. My two brothers, Patrick and Michael, both younger than me, had my mother’s big dark-brown eyes and long eyelashes.

  Sue was extroverted, a people person, a leader in school. Sally, the sister I was closest to in childhood—she’s a year minus five days older—was reticent and moody, artistic and bookish. I was like Sue and Sally both, a hybrid. Joanne was quick-witted, always smiling and happy, but hesitant, not a risk-taker, and stubborn. Barbie was detail-oriented and intuitive, with a touch of the sixth sense—nobody could beat her at Concentration, that card game where you find matching pairs from memory. Patrick was bright and handsome and athletic, like my father, but he was at times overwhelmed by five sisters (four older), especially if we clustered, sprawled on my mother’s bed, poring through boxes of hand-me-downs from our cousins, one of us modeling the outlandishly unfashionable clothes, all of us laughing hysterically. Patrick would see us gathered and flee. He longed for a brother, and so my mother had her only planned pregnancy, delivering on her promise to Patrick. Mikey was six years younger than the next youngest, Barbie. I was ten when Mikey was born, so he was like a living doll, a chubby happy baby, ten pounds at birth.

  My mother strived to treat us equally, dividing M&M’s into mathematically even portions. Equality was an abiding principle impossible to follow, but she tried, each of us an enforcer (at least for our own benefit), complaining if we were slighted in the slightest way—an M&M could launch a tiny war. Certain things presented problems: only one shotgun seat in the car, only two legs on a roast chicken. One had to look out for one’s interests. When my mother came home from shopping, I helped her put away the groceries with the ulterior motive of squirreling away food for the lean days at the end of the month, the days of peanut butter crackers for lunch. For years I stockpiled cans of Progresso lentil soup in my underwear drawer. (Patrick hid the beef barley.)

  When there was nothing else to eat, I’d plunder a loaf of Wonder Bread, which helped build strong bodies in twelve ways—the girl in the TV ad growing before my eyes as if she’d eaten a magic mushroom. I’d tunnel my hand through the loaf like an earth-boring mole, grabbing the soft center, wrist-deep in the yellow, red, and blue polka-dot plastic bag. I’d compress the bread in my palm, making a dense golf ball of dough, grayish from my dirty hands. Then I bit the dough ball, satisfied by the tracks my teeth left. My mother hated this ruination of the loaf, but she could not catch the culprit, the girl who stole her family’s bread. Having siblings taught me to steal, to hoard, to share.

  On weeknights when we were small, my siblings and I would race out of the house to greet my father when he came home from work, one kid sitting on each of his shoes, clinging to his calves as he walked into the house weighted down by children. After he changed out of his suit, the aroma of roast chicken or pork chops filling the house, he played boogie-woogies on the piano, an upright Wurlitzer, songs like “The Worry Man Blues” or “Bill Bailey Rag,” as we danced around the living room. He played songs that were popular during his childhood, like “Barney Google” with his goo-goo-googa-ly eyes, which I asso
ciated with Joanne, with her big round black eyes and eyelashes so long and thick they clumped with sleep sand.

  Some songs were so sad—like “500 Miles Away from Home,” about a lost soul cold and tired and all alone—that I felt a hollow in my chest, like when a tooth fell out and there was just an empty hole and tenderness. And Tom Dooley, a poor boy who must hang down his head and cry, for tomorrow he’ll be hanged from a white oak tree, even though he claimed innocence—Tom Dooley, always forever about to die. My favorite was an Irish ballad, “The Wild Colonial Boy,” just sixteen when he left home, robbing the rich to help the poor, shot to death by police.

  I had a little crush on the Wild Colonial Boy, who I imagined as the actor Jack Wild, who played the artful dodger in Oliver!, the first movie I saw in a cinema, in 1968. I cried at the horrific scene of Billy Sikes clubbing Nancy under the bridge, embarrassed to be crying in public, even though it was a dark theater; my father was surprised when the lights came up, and he put his arm around me. “Faucets,” my family teased, because I cried easily. The Wild Colonial Boy and Tom Dooley and that lonesome stranger so far from home—they worried me as I sang along with my father at the piano, both of us off-key, his body swaying, my heart wrenched open.

  At night as we watched Ed Sullivan or Family Affair or Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, my mother summoned us one by one to lie on the kitchen counter and hang our heads in the sink as she vigorously shampooed our hair, deaf to complaints. On that same counter she slapped slices of bologna onto an assembly line of buttered bread for school lunches, forgetting sometimes that I preferred mustard, and on those days I couldn’t eat the slimy bologna made slicker with slabs of butter.