I am yanked through the opened gate. The courtyard fills with the shushings of women struggling under the weight of a drunk. I am that drunk but am too drunk to feel bad about it. My inebriation is ebullient, wide enough for everyone. I forget about Sister Georgia because I have come up with a brilliant idea.
“Let’s do bell kicks.” I throw out my left leg and wag it. What I succeed in doing is not a bell kick, but the effect is pleasing to me. I request the attention of Sister Helena.
“Admire my kick.” I do it again.
Helena’s mouth is knotted.
“You’re not even looking.”
Scuffling at the basement door. Which sister has the keys buried in her vestment and who should hold me while they look?
“Flip a coin!” I demand.
Finally we get in.
The sisters of Saint Joseph carry me down the stairs to my room. They arrange their shoes into a perfect line by my door. I hurl my boots on top. They carry me to bed. I am certain they have asked me to list every commercial tagline I know, so I, supine, call out to heaven:
Cardinal Bank. Named after a bird because Birds. Know. Money.
Kiwi Air. If you can beat these prices, start your own damn airline!
I hear rustling by the foot of the bed as the sisters root through my drawers. Then into my vision intrudes the head of Sister Charlene.
“Where are your pajamas, Ruby?”
“You’re not Sister Helena,” I inform her.
“No, dear. I’m Charlene. We want to get you into your pajamas.”
I say, “Put Sister Helena on the phone!”
After what feels like a year, Sister Helena appears with a towel wrapped around her head.
“Thank god.” I lean forward, attempting to make a private space where we can gossip. “There are all these people pretending to be you.” I hoist my head in the direction of the doorway, where the blurry form of Sister Charlene leans in the shadows.
Sister Helena looks disappointed. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
I have the rationale of whiskey. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
She gives me an aspirin and I sit up to take it. Immediately I feel it dissolve and fill my insides, making every atom in my body quake.
“This aspirin is frying me!”
“It’s not in your system yet, Ruby.”
“It is in my system. I feel it in my system.”
“You’re not making sense,” she says.
“You’re not making sense,” I say. “You’re the patron saint of not making any—”
“Try to sleep.” She pushes my shoulders into the pillow. Then she sits on the bed while I try to get my scrambling atoms in order. Fall in, ducklings. After a while my quivering head slows. I begin to wonder what Sister Helena is thinking, if she feels she is wasting her night with me, a drunken sinner. I want to give her something so her time with me is worthwhile. An invaluable tip she will benefit from and later be able to trace to my good counsel.
“Leave the S off for Savings,” I tell her.
“I will,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
“Today,” I insist.
“Tomorrow, Ruby.”
“See the world in your Chevrolet,” I say.
“I will,” she says. “I promise.”
“You say that.” I close my eyes. “But you never will.”
I don’t remember anything else.
…
Dawn. I wake up with a headache. My limbs are attached to an invisible system of weights and pulleys. When I move them a glacier of pain descends on me.
I munch a palmful of aspirin and lie with a damp towel on my head. At noon the pain has not receded. Sisters Charlene and Mary visit after lunch with a bowl of onion broth and salted crackers. They adjust the curtains. Before they leave, they bow their heads by the foot of the bed and I catch a few words of Latin. By four, when I should have been helping Sister Mary with dinner, my headache, as if acquiring strength from the advancing night, takes possession of my entire body. I throw up into a bucket viciously, like I am trying to prove something to the bucket. I can’t keep my vision straight. I am slipping off the earth. This earth will go on without me, I think, swing on after I’ve swung off. I am the patron saint of shit. My symbols are a pogo stick, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a tomato. Then the bucket is full so I throw up onto the floor, my throat shifting into new gears to rid itself of every poison. I can barely keep up. I am flattened by sweat. I am stark naked, with no memory of taking off my pajamas.
“Teresa of Avila!” I cry. “Patron saint of headaches. Release me!” It is the closest I’ve come to prayer.
Around midnight I pass out, still in pain. I have brief, thrilling dreams about apricots. I wake up, it is dusk, and I realize with a different pain that I have missed Sunday school.
I find Sister Helena in the garden, where she is harvesting the last of the tomato plants, smiling into each tomato’s small mug.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
A smile she has extended to a nubby tomato is still on her face when she looks up. She holds a trowel.
“God told Saint Teresa, No longer do I want you to converse with human beings but with angels. Teresa felt different from everyone else. She had fire in her. She prayed for it to go away but it is good to have fire. Not to be eaten by it.” Sister Helena could pull it off, starting a conversation with a quote, because she was so frustratingly sincere. “Ruby,” she says, “anger keeps you from God.”
As always she speaks in the quiet voice that makes it impossible to gauge how upsetting or special I am. She employs the same level of intensity to tell me we need more oatmeal as she uses to promise I will get in to heaven. Ruby, they are showing Roman Holiday at midnight. Ruby, place your anger beside you and sit with it.
I squirm where I sit, holding a gnarled tomato between my index and middle fingers. I picture it with arms and legs. I can teach this tomato how to walk and dance. Anything so I don’t have to look up and face Sister Helena’s disappointment in me full on, and in facing it, accept it.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” I say to the tomato.
…
With the last of the tomatoes we make gravy. It simmers for hours, filling up the hallways and courtyard, picking up the corners of an otherwise regular Wednesday. That night we feast — lasagna, pizza, gnocchi. The sisters are giddy with good food. Even fat Sister Georgia eschews the constraints of her own personality to soak a hunk of bread in the gravy and bite into it with an erotic moan.
Good job, tomato plants.
…
One afternoon a storm collects around me as I sweep the courtyard. Dusk descends though it’s two o’clock, and the wind picks up, negating my match as I try to light a cigarette. Sister Helena calls, Ruby, better get in. She has the news on and there are advisories. Record-breaking winds and flooding. Biblical rains start and we can’t hear the television anymore. Thunder makes Sister Helena jump. I laugh every time.
Two quick pops, then a sound like a boulder detaching from the center of the earth. An explosion in the courtyard. The convent rattles. We rattle too. What was that and will there be another one? Sister Charlene darts in, cries “Teresa!” and darts out. Sister Helena and I look at one another then we dart too. The courtyard is gray and swirling. It takes a moment to figure out what we are looking at.
I scream.
The glowing Teresa has performed a swan dive into the courtyard, head-planting into the tomato garden. She has embraced the garden with her concrete arms and broken the fence on two sides.