A Memory of Thirteen

(from Harper's, August 1991)

By eighth grade, Jesus Christ had been bone meal and rumors for most of 1,969 years, but we were only thirteen. We were daredevils, gangsters. I had a girl's name, Francis, and a hernia.

School and church occurred right down everybody's street at St. Francis of Assissi, the two buildings joined at the elbow by a glass bridge. My best friends, Scott and Steve, were serving Mass that Sunday, kneeling on each side of the priest in their cassocks and wayward purple socks. I watched from the farthest pew, beside my mother. We'd been late again. To see the altar, I had to rock side-to-side behind the orchard of shifting heads.

Father McGrew was praying, his Irish mumble amplified by the PA system into the voice of God. He pinched the Host out of the chalice and raised it like a man admiring a silver dollar, Scott's cue to shake the bells. He thrashed them, brass clashing brass so harshly that heads flinched. McGrew flung Scott a thunderbolt glare. Scott stiffened his face.

Jesus hung crucified on the pink marble behind them, rolling up plaster eyes.

The bell signaled that the bread wafer in McGrew's fingers was now the flesh of Christ. You're supposed to be amazed, but I was an altar boy too and had suffered Mass about three times a month for the last two years. It was no more mysterious or astounding to me than delivering newspapers had been. We called this the Magician's Assistant Syndrome. We were something like atheists by then.

Gathered behind a microphone to the left of the altar were two men with beards and guitars, an obese guy hunched over a piano, and a woman dangling a tambourine. They were there to make music for what the church was calling, in those days, a Folk Mass, an attempt at timeliness which I considered as pitiful as an adult using teenage slang.

McGrew raised the wine chalice in front of his face, gold cup haloed by steely hair, and turned it into Christ's blood. Tim rang the bells again, reasonably. I stopped listening. Some numb part of my brain answered the prayers for me.

Mary Montague was kneeling in the pew ahead of me. Her wicked brother Dan was in my eighth-grade class. Mary had grown steadily beautiful all year without alerting the popular boys, and I'd been falling in love with her although we'd never spoken. I only knew that she'd been an honor student and shy and that last summer she had sliced her wrists with a razor blade. Something in her life was more important, more terrible, than anything in mine.

Mary wore a sleeveless white silk dress so fresh and pretty it caused my stomach to ache. She was pale, but rosy around the eyes, nose, and cheeks, as if she stayed indoors all the time, crying, an image I found appealing.

The rear doors of the church were open, and a breeze came in and proved itself on Mary's hair. She wore it curly and wild. All the other girls wore their hair straight, rolling it around orange juice cans or ironing it somehow. Mary looked careless, gorgeous.

Across the aisle Stephanie Hart, head full of bows, spread the fingers of both hands and admired her nails. Our athletes bloodied each other's noses over this specimen, that year's Homecoming Queen, as if I cared, and she certainly never wasted a though on boys like me. But for Mary I would've done anything, though she didn't seem like the type to require that. I wanted to protect her from something, anything. I bowed my head and inhaled, trying to smell her.

Beside us, the windows caught sunlight and thickened it into burning colors, stenciling the carpet with sacred symbols in reverse and the names of dead patrons thrown backwards. Serpents and winged lions and unicorns fell from the glass, sprawled in the aisles. The dragon window was my favorite. I knew the air bubbles in every jigsaw pane. Saint George, in armor, had sunk a lance into the dragon's belly and rested his booted boot on its back. I pitied the dragon, but I envied his slayer's heroics.

In an elaborate, blood-spattered daydream I rescued Mary Montague from an alligator that crawled out of the pond across the street. She tore a strip from her hem, baring her thighs, to clean my wounds. There's this poem in the middle of this story we had to read in school called "The Open Boat" and in this poem there's this legionnaire dying in a foreign country and he will never see his homeland ever again. If Mary were there, I'd die heroically and with her tears falling on my face turned towards the setting sun.

Meanwhile, Father McGrew had arrived at the part where he told us to "offer each other a sign of peace" and you shook hands with people you ordinarily ignored and said, "Peace be with you." I began praying for Mary to turn and take my hand, godless convictions suspended for the moment. I angled slightly towards my mother to appear unconcerned. The old man on the other side poked my arm, and I was obliged to pump his soft, damp hand while he stared at my mother.

I turned back, and Mary was glancing at me, then the old man reached over in front of me and caught Mom's hand and petted it, grinning. There would've been an awkward, desperate stretch to get to Mary. she turned forward. My heart flattened. Then Mom gave the old guy a shame-on-you wink and retrieved her hand. She touched Mary's shoulder, and then they shook. Mary's eyes bumped mine. She held her hand out to me, her wrist fragile as a swan's throat and crossed with a thin white scar which caused that pain in my sinuses like I was about to cry. I took her hand, She looked away. Then she looked at me, and our eyes locked, and the tiniest smile possible passed over her face, barely entering her eyes. My mind drained. She said, "Peace be with you," then my name. I watched her say, "Francis," and liked hearing it for the first time in my life. Her hand in mine felt like something radioactive.

Her fingers slid away, and she drew back and turned towards the altar. My eyes fell from the golden hair, along the bare shoulders and down the new curves of her hips to the white-stockinged, rounded calves. I bunched my hands in my pockets to disguise the embarrassing extra. I wanted to run out alone and spend hours thinking about her, carve our initials into something. Her actual presence seemed like too much to bear for now. Every time I looked at her, my heart went off.

My mother was smiling at me. I frowned. We chanted with the priest, "Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us," three times, rapping our breasts at each mention of the lamb. I was vigorous, producing a healthy thump. McGrew unclipped his microphone necklace, causing electronic thunder. The folk musicians began the Communion hymn, It was a popular folk song that I like, and they played so well it startled me. The plump guy's fingers rippled at the keyboard, the bearded men started strumming, chords chiming in and out of the wood with the piano's sweet notes rolling all around it, then one man began to sing crisply, the girl rang the tambourine against her swaying hip, and behind the singer the other three mouths moved with a single shape and harmony, and I thought, God, what wonderful creatures humans are. My neck hair rose like a thousand needles.

And then something ran past our pew. A black dog.

This large, slippery-looking mongrel padded up the aisle along the wall. The ushers were surprised out of the their hands-behind-the back poses and began to walk after the dog. The dog slipped through rainbow pools of light, tags clinking, then rolled near the altar rail and paddled its ribs with a hind leg. It was obviously male. The priests and deacon ignored it. The heads were all bobbing, and I could see between them, the dog panting, cartoon eyes wide. His smile melted out over his teeth and slobber trickled out. Scott and Steve's cheeks hollowed and their lips disappeared.

An usher with an overgrown mustache grabbed for the dog's collar, and the dog torpedoed down the center aisle, pausing halfway to insert his snout under a woman's dress and throw his head. The usher's mustache stretched in amused apology. He genuflected at the altar rail and came towards the dog, the others following, bent over as if that made them invisible. I watched Mary watch them. Her eyes narrowed into bright slices.

The dog leapt past the crouching ushers and ran towards the altar again, and the men turned like a wave. They would've had to sprint to catch him. The dog slunk under the altar rail, swinging his head back to watch for them. Father McGrew and young Father O'Conner stood over the dog, ready to give Communion. People began to rise. The dog put his nose to a railing post and snuffled, spun around, crooked his hindleg, and priests skipped aside, and the dog squirted a glittering stream that spattered the marble, darkening a circle into the creamy carpet beneath. He stared gloomily out at us, mouth open. The congregation hung back. There was nice music underneath all this.

Steve jammed a fist against his mouth and sputtered behind it. Scott turned his back and vibrated. McGrew shifted the chalice, stepped forward, and swept his hand back like a bowler and slapped the dog's rump so hard that the animal jumped the railing and slid into the aisle yelping, popping his eyes, and bounded past the ushers and out the doors. The ushers closed them behind him and the wind died.

Father O'Conner's eyes slid towards McGrew. McGrew's jaw was rigid. O'Conner squeezed the smile from his own lips.

I laughed in an excruciating whisper, the edge of my watery gaze on Mary. My hernia was aching. I opened my mouth and breathed. My mother was peering over a missalette, eyes huge, then she snorted and pressed it around her face. Mary's hands were steepled over her mouth, hiding, I was sure, a grin. The musicians had used up all their lyrics and were playing instrumental. The first- row people began to kneel along the altar rail as a line formed in the aisle.

I rose, leaving two craters in the cushioned kneeler, and squeezed past my mom to follow Mary up to Communion. A man wedged between us, poisonous with sweat marks under each arm pit. Twice I saw the corner of Mary's eye, as if her attention was directed back at me. The people kneeling left a gap, marked by the deacon's handkerchief, where the dog had puddled. I shuffled up and kneeled one place down from Mary and tilted my face up. Like a celebrity, her presence made everything else small.

McGrew sidestepped to me, held the Eucharist out like a tidbit, and said, "The body of Christ." Steve, holding the metal plate under my chin to catch holy crumbs, had blanked his face, but his neck swelled with plugged-up laughter. I said, "Amen," and the priest laid the wafer on my tongue.

I followed Mary back to the rear. Her style of walking made me feel weak. I kept my head bowed while an usher slide the second collection in front of me, full of paper money and envelopes with families' names on them. Mom dropped our single quarter in the first basket. Dad, broke and hungover, had stayed home with my brother and sisters in protest of the church's materialism.

I held the Eucharist in my teeth, away from tongue and saliva. We played this game to see how long we could keep it from dissolving. A strange thrill resulted from keeping the alleged Jesus trapped in your teenage mouth.

The folk song ended with the guitar picks scratched slowly across the strings, and final chord shimmered out and died beautifully with the piano trembling down around it into a final humming that seemed to make sense out of the world. the microphone whined briefly. Mary's shoulders lifted, with a breath, and relaxed.

McGrew sliced a cross into the air with his hand, blessing us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost (younger priests always said Spirit). Two-Hundred voices amened. I didn't, because I still had solid Jesus in my mouth, breaking all my records.

"The Mass is ended," McGrew said, "go in peace." Then he hugged the podium and made announcements, asked for money and volunteers. Steve and Scott carried cruets of water and wine into the back room. Out of sight, they'd suck down most of the wine. They'd be pouring a few innocent drops into the storage bottle when McGrew got there.

The musicians began to play "Dominique," a silly tune from the movie The Singing Nun, but instead of singing the words they exchanged guarded, ironic looks.

The rest of the day belonged to me. It was paid for now.

Everybody paraded towards the doors. They dipped two fingers each in the font of holy water at the vestibule and dabbed themselves with the sign of the cross: forehead, breastbone, left shoulder, right. I reached into my pocket and palmed my rabbit's foot, dunked it into the water as I passed, increasing its magic and trade value.

Outside was so bright my eyes squinted. Sun blazed up from the pine trees, forest green grass, and in front of me, Mary's hair bouncing with each click of her heels on pavement.

Mom stopped to trade complaints with Mrs. Flores, a thick-legged woman who was always swollen with babies. Her husband was in Vietnam, his second tour. Mary stood beside her mother, who was talking to Father O'Conner near the sidewalk. I wanted to say something to her so badly it was like a hand squeezing the back of my neck, but I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound stupid or pathetic. Already, I doubted anything had been shared. I'd been looking at it all through a microscope, as usual.

Scott and Steve would be coming out the back way soon. I started towards the corner of the church, past the black dog licking himself shamelessly near the Indian family that wouldn't look at him. I turned for a final glimpse of Mary. She was looking at me. We looked down. I watched my shoes press into the grass, and then, as I turned the corner, I periscoped back to dare another look, and she caught me again. She smiled and raised her hand, sprinkling her fingers at me, and her fingers might as well have been brushing my heart.

The body of Christ dissolved in my mouth, a gooey melt of starch, and I swallowed him, happy, miserable, in distant love.