The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [22]
This, of course, was too much for the fly-children to handle, and they all swarmed to tattle to Sister Mehitable. “Ezekiel Goldstein took the Lord’s name in vain!”
In my fantasies, I became one of the fly-children. I stuck up for Ezekiel Goldstein, saying, “He’s right.” Or at least, “Leave him alone.” But what good would it have done for Freaky Frances to stand up to that mob united against the scrawny mop-haired boy alone on the playground? I had my own cross to bear.
Last bell, and all those spongy-mouthed kids buzzed into their little clusters, loosely grouped by race and age, to catch buses home or BART trains to Stonestown Mall or the Esprit outlet. “Don’t you have anyone to walk home with, Freaky Frances?” they’d call after me. Or, “See ya later, Lonely Only!”
But truth told, I wasn’t so lonely. When my classmates started circling into their little swarms after the initial social anarchy of kindergarten and first grade, the saints became my companions. They’d leap from their stained glass or stone statue perches in the chapel, follow me to the cafeteria to eat lunch with me at the far corner table. They’d walk me home, making me invisible to the tough fly-girls who wanted to pick fights, invulnerable to the pushers at the corner bus stop on Dolores. We’d walk, they in their weird flowing white or brown capes, me in my plaid skirt and starched white cotton blouse. We’d talk about this and that, life, all the crazy things they’d done in their youths, self-mortification and flinging themselves into tombs and whatnot, about what it would be like when I got my driver’s license. They’d point out the different species of birds perched on flophouse rooftops, admire the healing herbs that forced themselves up through tiny cracks in the sidewalk.
To me, the saints weren’t church people, exactly. We lit candles for them in cathedrals and shrines, sure, but the saints existed separate and alive from school rules or Father Michaels’s Sunday admonitions. They required no confessions, didn’t seem to believe in any kind of hell a girl couldn’t claw her way out of. They’d leave me at the doorway to my apartment building, between the iron gate and the dirty red carpeted stairway leading up. “Until tomorrow, Frances Catherine!”
“See you tomorrow.”
I hardly ever studied for religion class—couldn’t quote scripture to save my life—but I impressed even pinch-faced Sister Mehitable with my vast knowledge of the saints, their wild maudlin lives, their miracles. Of course I knew the answers—my friends whispered them in my ear. Sometimes I had to edit their explanations to please the sisters, of course:
Why did the saints intentionally make themselves uncomfortable, sleeping on stone beds and pricking their fingers?
To better identify with Our Lord’s suffering, I’d say.
But according to my saint friends, it was more complicated than that. Clare of Assisi, who wore a hair shirt under her rough Franciscan habit in that cruel Umbrian heat, told me it amounted to a kind of joy training. “If my happiness is so weak it can be destroyed by an itch, a mosquito, a foul wind, is it really happiness? The risen Christ taught us that we needn’t ever let suffering have the last word.” She cocked her head to the side, gazed upward. “Hungry, ill, and overworked,” she said, “my joy is thick.”
Sometime around the sixth grade, Ezekiel Goldstein got transferred to a secular school for geniuses. I did not say goodbye. Soon my classmates’ taunts dwindled to the occasional “See ya, Freaky,” and by the time eighth grade was winding down and we were all getting ready for high school, even the fly-girls with the very neatest cornrows or the biggest feathered do’s had started getting caught in the bathroom with boys, sent to juvie, busted behind chapel with little plastic baggies of cocaine stolen from their now-divorced parents’ glove compartments or film canisters of weed they’d bought on the panhandle. I learned to gossip, made a few friends—foreign exchange kids, mostly, and transfers who didn’t seem to notice my eyes being so far apart.