Shaking herself from her dream, Teresa pulls off her rubber laundry gloves. Rosa offers up a skirt for her inspection, a green paisley pattern with wide swirls that Teresa recognizes as the old coarse fabric from the basement curtains.
“Look at the stitches, Tera!”
Teresa examines the cloth, turning it over and inside out. The stitches are firm when she tugs. Obviously nervous, humming to herself and tapping her good leg, Rosa beams when the stitches hold.
“Very good. Really good,” Teresa tells her, the spin cycle rolling on behind them, and it is. Rosa is good with her hands, learns quickly if you show her exactly how. There are times Teresa thinks that Rosa has the most talent, and could make a wonderful wife, if she just wasn’t the way she is. In a certain light, Rosa appears almost grandmotherly, her thighs loose like after childbearing, her breasts down to her stomach if she isn’t wearing a bra. It makes Teresa wonder what kind of children she will have, if she might resemble Rosa more afterwards.
“I made it for you to dance in. Put it on.”
Smiling, Teresa slips the skirt over her pants. Rosa’s firm hands zip it up in the back. The skirt is a little formless for Teresa’s taste, and the pattern is faded lime in a couple of spots, but it fits and rests pleasantly at the knee.
“Thanks, Rosa,” Teresa says, taking it off and placing it in the laundry basket she will use later to carry the clean clothes.
Rosa sways her arms and pounds her foot on the ground to the thumping of the washing machine until the strap on her brace comes off. Grimacing, Rosa bends down to fix it, the canvas strip tight in her fist like rope.
“I’m not too good at dancing.”
“Sure you are, Rosa. You’ll dance soon.”
When Rosa has retied the strap securely, Teresa picks up some wooden pins. “You did a fine job, Rosa. Now Mamma could use some help outside.”
Rosa accepts the pins as they drop into her hand. Teresa waves her on and Rosa obeys. Mamma’s worn running shoes pass by the window.
The washer goes into a fit, the little shelf holding the cleaners suffering a tiny earthquake. But Teresa knows the routine. It always does this moments before resting. Coughing and spitting up water, banging against the concrete wall, it sweats itself dry. Then there’s the silence that means it’s all over. But this time, when the silence arrives, Teresa abandons her dreaming and runs upstairs to check on Papa.
The Boy Next Door
If I told you my mother ran away with the boy next door, I wouldn’t be lying. Except that he was a man, not a boy. And a priest, not my father. But he did live next door. And my mother did run away with him. Although it was more like walking, very calmly, an organized exodus.
I had thought my mother’s keen interest in church was a direction of her energies toward my soul. My first confession was coming up in the next few months and as with any big Catholic event I believed she wanted to make sure I would perform it properly in front of the neighbourhood. She had been a regular churchgoer before then and wrote for Our Faith, the church bulletin, articles about bake sales and ads for seniors who were looking for companions to take them grocery shopping. She wrote her pieces at night, pulling out the extension of the dining-room table, laying her typewriter on top. She was a valued member of the congregation and we attended every Sunday, sprinkling ourselves with holy water and kneeling on the smooth pine floor. Then, over the course of that spring, she started to take on extra parish duties: helping clean the pews, baking cookies for the prayer group and the choir, passing out flyers, and arranging rummage sales. She didn’t seem to pray more that I knew, but she started spending more time in church than at home. I assumed Father Marcus approved of her as a good neighbour, or concluded that she had felt the good grace of God between the hedges separating our houses from one another.
Father Marcus was not the pastor. That was Father Brown. He had been the main pastor at Resurrection for thirty years and was well-liked by the parishioners, especially the older ones, who seemed to see him as a direct link to the heavens. The other priest had only been preaching for two years before he left for another town, to be closer to his family we were told. His job was to take over the lighter times of worship and help the children at my school with catechism. Father Marcus replaced him and moved next door because Father Brown liked living in the church. He had gotten used to it, though a church widow had died and left her house for him. That’s how the story goes and how he came to live beside us. I didn’t mind. He was young and seemed nice, and he countered Father Brown’s solemn hymns, like “The Lord is My Shepherd” and “Lamb of God,” which we would sing as if our throats were made of shame, with lively psalms of joy like “He is the One” and “We Are the Children.” Sometimes I had to restrain myself from clapping as I sang these new songs, and besides, he wore only his collar and would play murder ball with the boys at recess and hopscotch with the girls. He spent a lot of time outside, his skin tanned and taut, his legs flexible for the sports, with hair dark and even without a touch of grey. Before school, if he was around, he would turn the end of my skipping rope on the driveway so I could jump if none of my friends were outside. He had even learned some of our songs, “Steamboat Sally” and the “Big Bad Wolf,” and his strong voice slammed down with every slap of the rope on tar. He carried home lots of food, plastic bags hanging like extensions from his body. Loved to cook. If our kitchen window was open we could smell his peppers and tomatoes, chicken and beef, frying or steaming, turning colour. After Communion, which tasted exactly the same to me as biting the rim off a Styrofoam cup, was the only time the church was full of food. Mostly sweets, cakes and tarts and watery tea I would sip while waiting for my mother. The smell of the church basement snacking was sterile, nothing like the aroma from next door that stung the eyes and rose in the air, inviting.
Once confession lessons started, it was another story. I tried to think of what sins I could tell Father Marcus, and every time I saw him I was reminded of the secrets he would know about me. I played farther away from the house, thinking God was too close to my thoughts before I could work them out, figure out how to explain them properly. He could watch my whole family from his backyard while we swam or barbecued or he worked on his vegetable garden, his legs bending like grass, straight-edged and graceful, pulling up carrots and cucumbers in his gloved hands. He wore white shorts on truly hot days, and I was amazed by the thick dark hair that curled all over his legs, forming a kind of coat around him, making his almost black eyes seem even more piercing. I wondered if he was keeping tabs on sins I didn’t remember, some commandment I had violated like not honouring my father and mother, or lying. I wanted to ask him if some sins were more forgivable than others, or whether there were any sins that couldn’t be forgiven. On a tour of the confessionals, those boxes painted like small houses and without the stained-glass pictures as on the rest of the church, I noticed the screen was thin like the one on our gazebo. I could tell it was Father Marcus, so I’m sure he could tell it was me inside. I wanted to change what he knew about me, imagining what joy there could be in shocking him, repeating dirty words or telling him I sometimes wished my parents were dead. I felt tantalized at the whim of hearing him gasp, afraid for a moment of the girl next door who skipped in the mornings, that he could think I was dangerous.
At the same time, I had begun to find out about kissing. I knew about it already, seen my mom kiss my dad quickly on the lips, watched longer full-mouthed kisses on television, but had never felt what the fuss was about. You would need to confess kissing at my age, I knew. God did not approve of us kissing, but at recess we would sneak behind the monkey bars to the brick wall and play a game. You would ask for a kiss, and then everyone else would choose who was supposed to kiss you. You would close your eyes and wait until they had decided. Silently, someone would approach, the heat of their mouth close as the silence of expectation rose, and press down. The rule was you couldn’t open your eyes and couldn’t tell who had been delegated with the role of kisser, but we did, of course. And some kisses were better than others, I understood that, and sometimes they weren’t from the boy you liked.
The kissing game had been a source of prayer for me. I asked God to forgive my lips of their sins and to wash me clean before I went