so disappointed in us, in me.”
“I’m bubbly?” I asked, embarrassed to own up to the other.
“Yes, you’re the girl lovin’ up the camera in our home videos,” she said, referring to the one when I was about five. On one reel, it’s New Year’s Eve, the only holiday my father was home for, because he loved his lobsters. I have a party hat on and my doll in my arms and am doing a fast can-can next to Dick Clark on the TV, and Papa is sitting on the edge of the couch in chinos and white tee, looking at me as if I’m his only daughter, which makes me tilt my hat and ham it up more. In another reel, we’ve stopped for a picnic on our way to Niagara Falls, one of two family vacations we took, and Papa’s chasing me around our big, brown boat of a Cadillac. I’m running as fast as I can, pretending I don’t want him to catch me. When he does, I squeal as he scoops me up in his arms and holds me in the air like his prize.
“Do you think this has to do with the fact that I’m convinced Papa’s absence hasn’t affected me?”
“Him, yes. But also, things in our house were never talked about,” Julie said. “And each one of us deals with it differently... ” It sounded like she might be talking about something involving our mother, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. She also said I shouldn’t be embarrassed about going to a therapist, so a month later I tried. When I told the therapist that I felt I wasn’t meant to get married, she said that I just hadn’t met the right one yet. Had she said, “Okay, so let’s explore why you feel that way,” I might have trusted her enough to show up again. I was convinced no one would understand; yet I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to, so I didn’t try another therapist. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to a nun or a priest. However, after Janine introduced us to Father Infanzi on Easter, I did officially register as a parishioner at St. Stephen’s. I even went to a new parishioners’ meeting, but I left right after Father finished speaking. I was too intimidated and attracted to talk to him. His homilies were smart, interesting mini-lessons from the time of Christ, and he opened them with adorable anecdotes like the time his older brothers lowered him by his ankles into a sewer to get a baseball. Maybe when I joined a dating service the following month, I was hoping there’d be someone like him out there. I told myself it’d be fun. If I didn’t like the men, I’d have one drink and leave. But I was angry it had come to this. If it was meant to be—if God loved me enough—He would’ve already found me someone.
My first date was scheduled for when I got back from a short trip to South Beach with Nellie. Initially I was thrilled to be in such a beautiful, bustling place, but by five on Friday, the scene on Collins Avenue overwhelmed me. Roller-bladders in thongs wove through the crowd at dizzying speeds like Adams and Eves on wheels, and in the street, guys and girls dressed the same way sprouted from cars that blasted techno and hip hop so loudly the bass pounded my skull. The next day while Nellie was on a towel thumbing through the catalog of the college she was attending in the fall, I was in the blue-green water with my eyes closed trying to feel peace. As a child I loved how weightless I felt in the ocean, how if I rode the waves at the exact right moment, they’d raise me up and carry me safely back to shore, but now I felt alien and unmoored, pulled apart from the Source like the flute in Rumi’s poetry. I didn’t realize that at the heart of my unhappiness was my deep distrust of God. I opened my eyes and walked several steps farther into the ocean when I felt what I thought was seaweed. Looking down, I saw something stringy and purple coiled around my calf like a snake as a horrible burn shot up my leg. I started screaming and trying to run, but the ocean floor felt like it was sucking me in, though when I looked back down it was completely still except for where my effort was forcing up little volcanoes of sand. When I finally made it to shore, I collapsed, gripping my swelling, reddening leg. I looked up at people whose faces were wobbly and closing in on me. I heard Nellie ask, “Ri Ri, What happened? Are you okay?” felt paramedics hovering, laying compresses, announcing, “This sure is early for man-of-wars.”
A few Friday nights later when my TV blew, I was convinced God had broken it. I was also sure He was behind the man-of-war and the fact that I didn’t feel a connection with any of the men from the dating service. I’d never been attacked by nature before, and it felt so personal. For the first time since that night after the cruise two years earlier, I tried reaching for Christ. I grabbed note paper and pen and began writing Dear Christ, feeling foolish like I was writing to a ghost, but then the words poured out. I’m not happy. I’m embarrassed. I feel trapped. I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t know why Your Father is doing this to me. What have I ever done that’s so wrong? Why are all these things happening? You’re the one who is gentle and loving, you’re the one who suffered. You’re so perfect and good. Please help me, Jesus, please, please help me. I’m not even sure what my dreams are or ever were, Lord, just that this is not them, not what I thought my life would turn out to be. I’m crushed. I don’t know what else I wrote, just that my tears made the ink run down the paper. I took a deep breath and signed the letter, Love always, Maria. A few days later feeling no better, I tore it to pieces.
Why was God asking me to give up the powerful sex drive He’d given me? How was I supposed to have any intimacy without it? Was my life just supposed to be work, being a dutiful employee for the college? Why was I expected to walk into every family occasion without someone who belonged to me? I even felt left out and strange at church where all the petitions and announcements were for married couples and families, where the only other single people were seniors. This is why I felt increasingly drawn to Father Infanzi, especially one November Saturday when I saw him lovingly greet a little boy with Down Syndrome after Mass.
Father was shaking people’s hands, his green chasuble swaying slightly as a breeze came in the door, when I saw the little boy step toward him. He was four or five with a round face and brown eyes with wide, heavy lids. Father extended his hand to him, and he shook it, looking up at him as if he was a superhero. Then Father knelt down to meet the boy’s eyes, and they smiled deeply at each other. They looked so pure and happy that I lost sense of myself. The picture of Cardinal O’Connor holding his miter in both hands became an 11 x 14 blur of red on the wall, the last snatches of conversation slurred, and everyone but the two of them faded away. They didn’t care that the other was strange; all they saw was each other’s light. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel odd or guilty or afraid. Father made being celibate look beautiful, painless. As he stood back up and the boy’s mother put one hand on her son’s shoulder and they said goodbye, he suddenly felt deeply familiar, like I’d known him forever.
A month later I was sitting in a training workshop to become a lector, the lay person who reads at Mass, hoping Father was in the building, that he’d stop by. As I heard the back door open, I kept my eyes on Charles, the coordinator, afraid someone might detect my attraction. Sure enough, the deep voice from the back of the room was Father’s. My heart sped as I turned around. There he was, all 6’1” of him in black pants, white collar sitting below his Adam’s apple, and black shirt rolled up to his elbows accentuating his biceps. He looked even more handsome without his robes, like a young Cary Grant. “Don’t let me interrupt all of you. I just wanted to say hello,” he said taking a deep breath, which I found endearing, until Charles continued speaking, and Father folded his arms tightly across his chest like he was offended. A couple of women kept their eyes on him, but I quickly looked back at Charles. Just because he walked into the room everything was supposed to stop? He didn’t seem like the humble, holy priest I’d spotted a month earlier. He seemed a touch arrogant, childish. I struggled to keep his body out of my mind for the rest of the night.
The next time I saw him on the altar with his hands pointed in prayer, I thought him adorable again. Each time I was the lector at one of his masses—which happened every month or two—and he stood behind me in the processional, I worried that he might be looking at my rear end. Just the possibility that he could be attracted to me was unnerving and exciting. After Mass I walked out the side door not the front, trying to avoid him and the nagging question of my own vocation. But then one Saturday in April, he showed up on my doorstep at work. All the interviews were over, and I was waiting for the student tour guide to finish up with the last family when I heard creaking from the front steps and the screen door open. I assumed it was the family returning, so I continued the call I was on, but then he appeared in front of me.