had never been inside our home, but it would be easy enough to guess that we had original paintings by esteemed artists on our walls, or that we laid elaborate Oriental rugs on our floors. But Marianne saw my discomfort and apologized, putting her hand on mine. “I say things without thinking,” she said. “It’s a fault. One of the few things I have in common with Marty.”
“You don’t curse as much as he does,” I said, very aware of the feel of her hand on mine, and she laughed.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. He gets that from our father.”
“Did he—Marty—say anything about me?”
She said, “He told me you were a bit strange.”
But why had Marty said this? Could he have been watching the bloat of my sagging eye-bags, the same eye-bags that evidenced my nights of insomnia? Were there not infinite reasons for not sleeping? Did I betray myself more than I thought I did? Why did I already care so much about what Marianne Orlich thought of me?
“Strange? Really?”
“He did. So far, I don’t see it.”
“Did he say why?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He says whatever comes into his head most of the time.”
We fell into a natural silence. Finally she removed her hand, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “If you are crazy,” she said firmly, “that’s not so bad. So many of the saints were thought to be insane. Only later were they canonized.”
“I’m not a saint,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“I didn’t say you were.” She laughed. “You’re a very serious kid, you know that?”
“Yes. I don’t know why—it makes life difficult.”
She turned the pages of the atlas, stopping at Egypt. “Here,” she said. “Someday, I’d like to go here.” We stared at the full view. I tried to imagine her there, a missionary of some kind, her milky skin gone leathery from sand-soaked wind. She would ride camels and pet the trunks of elephants; she would be exotic beyond my American imagination.
That winter—an unusually cold one—was the winter of the Orlichs. I saw Mrs. Orlich at the butcher’s, clutching her purse to her side. I saw the family at church. Here and there they appeared, all of them holy by virtue of being related to Marianne. Even Marty shone. Here he was, her brother, who had seen her grow up. Who had probably bathed with her as a child.
Caroline Orlich was Marianne writ large, taller and with thicker bones and a face covered in cracking makeup, including her lips, which were heart-shaped like her daughter’s and peeled in the winter. In the dawn of my ardor I saw Caroline as the future version of her pious daughter, so I loved her, too. I did think of it as love; what else could I call the connection I’d felt so immediately, and with nothing like it before her? I barely knew the girl, but it was this precise fact that made her so easy to adore. She was a churchgoing, compassionate girl, and I took this to mean that she had deep thoughts about morality, God, and how to live. But I did worry. Her accountant father, through social manipulations like those committed by her mother, began to play weekly poker with Mr. Pawlowski, and I assumed that Mrs. Orlich gleaned any and all information about me through her gossipy husband. And while I tried to keep my neuroses hidden, there were certain things that I absolutely could not help. I won a Winter Latin prize in the first week after the holiday, which was as much a triumph for Ojciec as much as it was for me; yet my mind had grown increasingly confused outside of my fascination with Marianne. Already, back then, there was a sickness growing. I worried about my body and its dividing cells, because the idea of my skin covered in invisible pores repulsed me in the way that gaping stomata repulsed me in biology; and then I became afraid that my soul would leak out through those holes, and the abandonment would leave my body a shell for me to prop up through the endless, terrible days. I popped my pimples till my skin was spotted with scabs, and then I picked those scabs with the conviction that immaculate skin would be underneath, but such ministrations only made my face painful and wet and inviting infection.
Nothing looked right on my newly gawky body, either. At times I peered at myself in the mirror, and reflected back at me was a dwarf stretched squat, wide, and obese, and no matter how I turned and posed, I couldn’t make the horrible image change. How could I have gone for so long without knowing that this was what I looked like? The first time, I ran to the bathroom and double-checked my reflection there, not knowing what I would see, and there I was, seemingly myself without the distortion; but the feeling that I had transformed, or been lied to, remained. Was there any way that I could know for certain if any mirrors were honest, and how had I gone through life believing that these flat and magical pieces of glass would reflect my true self? I describe the expression of these neuroses with the bewilderment of someone who still can’t understand them, and the embarrassment of someone who knows how ridiculous they sound—but if I didn’t check the mirror, pick the scabs, change in and out of clothes in hopes of winning back a normal body, and so forth, the problems would only multiply. The only control I had over them was to be watchful and to attend to them.
But why these strange rituals? I was able to dress for school easily; thanks to the uniforms, I had no conflict or confusion about what to wear on weekdays. Weekends, and particularly Sundays, were another story. The idea of choosing clothes appropriate for Mass seemed almost an insurmountable task. What should have taken a few minutes dissolved into hours. Increasingly, Matka had to pull me out of the room, rushing me downstairs where my father watched the clock, and me, dubiously. Even though we both knew I was too old for it, Matka took to organizing my Sunday clothes for me on my bed. In some ways, her suggestions only made things worse, and we suddenly found ourselves tussling over my wardrobe, my mother fighting with her adolescent son as if he were a toddler. When I finally refused to go on a grim, late January morning, my father said nothing, and he and I both watched as my mother trudged disconsolately out the front door, which Ojciec next shut behind him without so much as a glance in my direction.
Would it be so unlikely to claim that I didn’t want to attend Mass, I didn’t want to worship, I didn’t want to sit with the waves of Latin rolling over me, I didn’t believe in God, and God knew—as well as my dead relatives, including my grandfather, rest his soul—that I was making up this ridiculous problem that wasn’t actually a problem, what with my hidden loathing for God and all that was holy, this secret blasphemy hiding so deeply within me that I could delude my conscious self, though I could not delude my parents, and of course not God, which would inevitably lead to damnation? Such convoluted explanations allowed me to make some sense of my idiosyncrasies, but my beliefs and behavior were ultimately attributed to a disordered mind rather than some kind of religious antipathy. I am not sure which is preferable.
While I fought with my clothes, poor Matka, who had no idea what to do with her strange son, removed the mirror in my room (“Boys don’t need mirrors anyway,” my father snapped), and I sensed my body stretching like taffy while I simultaneously feared Hell, or feared that I was already in it.
My February and then March absences from Mass spurred the gossip machines to begin whirring; such chatter finally alerted the Orlichs, and in particular Mrs. Orlich, that something was wrong with me. My parents’ friends ran the gamut from purely cultural Catholics to the extremely religious, most of whom were immigrants born and bred of the Polish Catholic denomination, and while neither of my parents was strict observers of the faith, my parents prayed, said grace before meals, never missed church, and were self-conscious about how they were perceived in the churchgoing community. That they’d given up on trying to get me to attend meant that I was lost, despite my efforts. I sat in my underwear atop the covers on Sunday mornings next to a pile of cast-off clothing, daring myself to try on another shirt. Just go ahead! I told myself. Just go ahead and try to take it off—I’ll knock your teeth in! But I always took it off, my parents left, and when my paralysis let up I wrapped myself in Matka’s terry-cloth robe and went to the kitchen, where I sat at the table and waited for my parents