The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [45]
I guess I closed my eyes because just then a stark dream juts into the afternoon. Two severed hands on a granite rock at the side of a grassy trail. I stop to check them out. They’re a woman’s hands, surely, with short, rounded nails. A silver ring on the right thumb. I guess they’ve been here a long time because they’re not bleeding at the severed place. But they’re pink, as if still alive. I crouch closer. They smell like violets. I pick one up, turn it over. A dark pink scar in the middle of the palm, a deep life line, a faint love line. I grab the other one. My hands.
I sit up too fast, shield my eyes from the sun. I check my hands to make sure they’re still attached.
The voice of a little boy floats up from somewhere below. He’s singing “Oh, Susanna” at the top of his lungs.
Chapter 17
WHY GOD HAS SO FEW FRIENDS
I was seventeen years old when it finally dawned on me that God really had to be an asshole.
Nana had seemed tired the night before, so I let her sleep in. I left a fresh butter croissant on her bedside table, called Peggy downstairs, and asked her to come up and check on her midmorning. It wasn’t a big deal. Nana hadn’t been well since she’d fallen and broken her hip when I was in ninth grade. After two weeks at San Francisco General, she was a shell of the woman I’d called Nana. Never regained the little strength she’d had, walked only as if leaving.
Each week she could do less, and each week she imagined that more had to be done. “Did you sterilize the apples before you sliced them?”
“Yes, Nana,” I said, swishing the red fruit under a jet of cold water. I took on the housework, the laundry, and the cooking, tried to let Nana alone with her quiet rosary prayers and her rest. We exchanged her old twin frame and mattress for a hospital bed she could adjust up and down. She watched Peter Jennings on TV.
That morning, it took everything I had not to doze off in calculus. Social studies was all crusades and conquests, democracy versus empire, murder for money dressed up as murder for God. Someone slipped me a note: U R not gonna believe who Annie made out with at Aaron’s party. Take a hall pass and meet me in the bathroom. But as soon as I stepped into the hallway with my wooden pass, here comes plain-clothed Sister Roberta click-clogging down the hall in her big black shoes.
“Frances Catherine!” She said it like it was the answer to some trivia question. “Urgent call for you in the office.”
Sister Roberta had always hated me.
“Hello?”
Peggy’s voice was a siren wailing down Van Ness. “Get home now, Frances.”
I’d left my backpack in social studies but had my bike keys in my pocket. I put the phone down, didn’t even look up at Sister Roberta. I dropped my hall pass on the desk, sprinted out of the office and down the long fluorescent-lit hall, through the double doors and out to the bicycle rack. Unlock the clunker and pedal. Those hilly streets never felt like such mountains.
Bent over the white-sheeted hospital bed, Peggy had her ear to Nana’s mouth. “We got her back,” she said, breathless. “She was down for the count.”
Peggy could have been such a volleyball coach.
Nana moaned something as I took her fleshy hand.
“The ambulances in this city are a joke,” Peggy mumbled. “I called ten minutes ago.”
“He’s not coming,” Nana whispered, pale and confused.
“Who’s not coming, Nana?”
Peggy adjusted the blankets covering her feet.
“Our Lord,” Nana whispered. She didn’t open her eyes. “He promised…”
“It’s okay, Nana. I’m here.”
Her breath heavied. She opened her mouth, pushed the words out. “There’s no one here.”
After all those years of penance and prayer, God, of crossing herself and confessing, of churchgoing and rosary-bead counting, of cake baking and tithing that ridiculous chunk of our Social Security check, of Hail Marys and mea culpas, would it have been so damn much trouble for you to send someone to meet her? Maybe Jesus was busy—fair