Popular Short Story - First Prize
A TIME FOR SAINTS Marylou Fusco
Julia fills the bathtub with tepid water, brings a hardboiled egg and paperback copy of The Lives of the Saints in with her, and locks the door.
I hold my breath and stand outside the door. I strain to hear the waves lapping against the chipped porcelain. I listen for the crack of the eggshell and the whisper of water-spotted pages. I am eight years older than Julia, and when I hear silence behind a locked door, I become afraid.
"I hear you out there," Julia calls out.
Julia came out of the hospital four months ago and has been living with me ever since. "Good Christ," I said to her the day she stepped off the bus. The doctors had said she was well enough to go home, but it looked to me like she should still be strapped to some bed with a feeding tube inserted in her. I could see every bone, every shadow in her face. They said she had gained enough weight and her body was no longer in danger of consuming itself to survive. The only thing it looked like she consumed was her lips. The soft pink meat was gnawed away until blood formed in the corners.
Hardboiled eggs and apples were the only things she was eating back then. My mother would call and describe to me the process. She told me how Julia would make a huge batch of eggs, the steam filling our tiny kitchen. Then she would line them up in neat rows on the counter top. She would take one, just one, crack it, slice it in half, sprinkle it with pepper, and eat the half.
"She boils them herself. Won't let me near them. She's the same with the apples. All this cutting and slicing! I fall asleep to the sound of it."
After she told me all that, I scraped together some money for the bus fare and told my new boss that I needed to take off for a few days. I told him the truth. I told him a crazy sister in danger of starving herself into oblivion, that her bones had become weapons, capable of slicing anyone who got too close. I told him that our bathroom smelled of vomit.
"Crazy sister, huh? Yeah, I got one of those too. Yeah, you better go," he said to me.
As far back as I can remember I have been saving Julia. When she was six and I was fourteen, she almost drowned at the Atlantic City beach. I remember that she didn't cry out when the waves swallowed her. The lifeguards didn't see, my parents didn't see. I was the one who saw the bit of red from her bathing suit being thrashed in the surf. I was the one with the clumsy dog paddle who managed to snag her straps and haul her back to shore.
Saint Julia we called her.
"Where's your church?" she asked after she first came to live with me.
Saint Cecilia's is just around the corner, a great stone building that I shamefacedly approach some Sundays and most holy days. I don't tell her that, though. I don't want her around the overbearing priest with his sickly sweet cologne. I don't want her around the widows hovering in their black dresses and muttering their prayers in the alcove and never, never singing.
And I sure as hell don't want her near the life-sized statue of Saint Cecilia. Another beautiful virgin martyr. Last fall, one of the widows swore that she saw the statue crying real tears. Later she said she was mistaken, some trick of the light on the stain-glass windows. Still, the old women brought flowers and candles and scribbled prayer intentions and put them at the statue's feet for weeks.
I told Julia instead about St. Michael's. I thought an archangel would do her more good than a slaughtered innocent would. I have seen the women of St. Michael's bringing platters wrapped in tinfoil for the soup kitchen they hold in the basement once a month. They balance the great steaming dishes with one hand and haul their children into order with the other. They wrap their hair to ward off the smell of bacon, and their laugher is loud and slightly dirty. Bar room laughter.
This is what I told her, but I think she sneaked off to St. Cecilia's anyways. I don't go to church anymore. It is my only day to sleep in. I usually rise before the sun and get dressed, shivering in the dark. I am an apprentice at a pastry shop. I spend hours watching my boss's hands, listening to his voice. I cannot say for certain what color Mark Delucca's eyes are, but I know every nick, every wrinkle on his hands. I recognize the sounds his fingers make in wet dough and know by the inflections of his voice the most important part of preparing butter cream icing.
My bakery talk does not entice Julia. She does not believe in human perfection, but she has never seen Mark remove a golden pastry shell from the oven. She has never seen his care in designing miniature roses so lifelike they could have been plucked from the stem. She does not like that I leave when it is still dark and wrinkles her nose when I come home reeking of burnt sugar and butter.
"What do you think you want to do?" I ask Julia when we go to the park.
Julia wriggles, trying to find some spot that does not press against her many bones. She pretends not to hear my question.
I pick a blade of grass and chew it. "How about college?" For a while she was on a photography kick. She visited rural cemeteries and took pictures of the headstones at dusk.
She snorts. "Can you see me at college?"
|