so low in Helen’s front yard it’s hard to see the brown bungalow Helen’s grandfather left her. Her sunflowers and zinnias are spiking up already in the one sunny spot in the yard, the planter box over the septic tank. Gopher, Helen’s chocolate Lab, comes bounding out to the car, tail wagging so hard his body wriggles all over.
Helen gets out of the car, patting Gopher with the hand holding her cigarette. “Flim Flannigan died last night. Did you know?”
“I knew someone had. He’s suffered so long. And he had to be lonely after Louise died.”
The dog’s tail beats a knocking rhythm against the car door, and Rose fears dents. She wishes Helen would discipline her dog. Helen bends over to look in the window. “It’s too bad you have to go right now. Rob asked for you.”
Rose waits anxiously by the window for the deliveryman. She has cleaned the little room off the den that stores miscellaneous items: the boxed-up Mr. Coffee, albums of old photographs, a file box of bank statements and insurance records, a noisy window fan, two antique chairs with broken-out cane seats and three boxes of Christmas decorations. It took ten minutes to move the stuff to one side. Then she hung a picture of Our Lady with a mother-of-pearl rosary draped over the frame and a photo of Valley and herself stuck in its bottom corner.
The truck turns in, crunching gravel. Two men come to the door carrying the frame and spring between them. She leads them to the storage room and points to the corner where she wants it set up. They hand her the Mary Theresa tag, lay the metal spring between the head and foot frames and screw it together. They make a second trip to the truck and return with a thin mattress. This they lay in place, performing their duties solemnly, as if part of a ritual. Rose wonders where such men come from—men who don’t roll their eyes at a woman’s faith. Such a man would sit beside her in church. He would lead her up to Communion. Pray aloud at the dinner table. She can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not marriage as she knows it. She’s not sure what it is. First Communion practice maybe, at age six. The boys and girls processed up the aisle, and the priest putting Necco wafers on their tongues so they could practice holding the host in their mouths without chewing.
Rose watches the men leave, then makes the sign of the cross over the bed.
She looks at the tag. Under Sister Mary Theresa’s name is a quote in cramped handwriting: True love grows by sacrifice, and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction, the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes—St. Theresa, the Little Flower. It’s uncanny—exactly why she bought the bed. It even came with directions, in case she didn’t understand.
This room, the simple bed, feels removed from her doubts about a God she cannot see. She covers the mattress with line-dried white sheets and smooths the rumples. She covers the sheets with a white-on-white quilt from her hope chest. It’s one she made in Home Ec before she learned how to piece. Never before has she used it. The stitches are big and clumsy, but there’s an innocence to them that helps her begin again. She tucks the overhanging edges under the mattress with perfect hospital corners. A clean envelope it is, and she the letter that will fit inside. A petition. To Jesus.
Rose kneels down and runs her hands over the quilt top. The fabric is soft like the batiste of her First Communion dress. After the service, her parents gave a party with a cake covered in white frosting roses. A photographer followed her around that afternoon, telling her to smile and snapping her picture in her white dress and lace veil. The veil was gathered on a plastic headband that pinched over her ears and made her head ache.
When she and Everett eloped, her only veil was the lace curtain she’d swiped from her mother’s linen closet to wrap herself in for their first night at Beetley’s Hotel on Indian Lake. She wore it wrapped sari-style and flung over her shoulder. Everett had unwrapped her gently, handling her like fragile lace, as if she, too, needed to be returned, untorn. Everett was different from Rob.
Oh, Rob. Only her head had been above water when they got to kissing. She had hardly noticed when the straps of her two-piece slid from her shoulders. They never found her bathing suit top, and she’d worn Rob’s T-shirt home, her beach towel wrapped around her shoulders so her mother wouldn’t notice.
Rose shakes her head. This is why she bought the bed—to purge those memories. She’ll stay in this room and pray to the Holy Mother who bore a child and yet was without sin. She’ll persevere until her heart is pure, not divided. Until her flesh is subdued. Maybe Rob will leave town meanwhile so she’s not tempted. That would be a mercy as great as Everett’s having left town for the day. That in itself was a miracle.
She ticks off the items she’ll need for her retreat and rises obediently to collect them. Her missal is in the drawer of her bedside stand, dog-eared and stuffed full of the holy cards her mother collected at funeral homes and tucked into her birthday cards. They spill out on the floor—haloed images of Mary in blue drapery, Jesus with a lamb slung over his shoulders, Saint Francis feeding the birds and Saint Clare, barefoot and wearing sackcloth, placing the Blessed Sacrament between a soldier and the convent wall. Rose puts Clare on top to keep her marauder away.
The screen door bangs shut down in the kitchen.
“Valley? Is that you, lamb?” she calls down the stairs.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How’d you make out with Joey?”
Valley appears in the doorway, pulling her fingers through her sweaty hair. “He puked all over me. I’ve got to take a shower.”
“Babies spit up all the time. Especially formula-fed babies. That’s why breast feeding is best.” She likes to talk about these things with Valley, to pass on the womanly arts.
“Mom? How long can a person survive without oxygen?”
“How would I know that, lamb? I’m not a doctor.”
“I just thought you might have read it somewhere. You’re always telling me stories about kids getting shut up in old refrigerators or car trunks.”
“Were you thinking of hiding in the trunk?”
There’s silence for a moment, then Valley giggles a bit too loudly. “Bach didn’t know that flutists need air. I wondered how long I can play without breathing. You know, without brain damage.”
“I told you to take the summer off, lamb. You need a break sometimes.”
Joey’s mucous is all over the front of Rose’s dress. She puts it in with the dry cleaning, removes her slip and looks down at the bulge of flesh pooching from the waistband of her satin panties. They’re not exactly nun’s underpants. As she peels them down her body, her belly protrudes with its silvery stretch marks, as if she’s swallowed a winter squash. She pokes through the snarl of undies in her drawer, burrowing beneath the skimpy nighties Everett buys, and picks out a modest white cotton bra, panties and a plain half-slip. She stands behind the door to put them on, in case Valley should come barging in with more silly questions, then chooses a shirt and denim skirt as closest to what the nun’s wear now that they’ve shed their habits. She likes skirts anyway. It’s not that she thinks it’s wrong to dress like a man, though her mother didn’t own a pair of pants. It’s that jeans dig into her waist and hug her thighs when she sits down. She’s cooler and more comfortable in a skirt.
Her best rosary is under her pillow, one her mother kept draped over the radio through the fifties when Bishop Sheen came on every day to address the faithful. It was made by a monk in Normandy after World War II and feels like a piece of history. The beads are made of melted-down bullets, and large iron nails form the cross. The contorted Body is hammered from brass and welded to the nails at the hands and feet. As a child she liked to finger it, to peer through the tiny space between the Body and the cross.
Downstairs, she lays her supplies down on the table, next to the fabric she’d been cutting for a Jacob’s ladder quilt. Planning it seems long ago, though it was really only a day. She had been excited about the project, so excited she’d forgotten to eat lunch while she’d graphed it out. Then she made a cutting mistake on a flocked purple remnant she had been saving for just