Ellen McGrath Smith fiction short story Alone of All Her Sex
Detail from Aseo Flammeus by Nancy Panganiban, 15.75″ x 18.5″, Acrylic on birch panel, 2017
Alone of All Her Sex
“Too bad Mom’s not here to see this.”
Mary Fran Horvath, a statuette of aging chastity, repeats this frequently, like a liturgical response, most frequently when the telecast of the Olympic women’s basketball game breaks to a commercial.
Theresa Horvath agreed with her sister the first five or so times, but by this point, the platitude grates on her nerves, even though she has begun to feel a nice buzz from the Iron City she has been drinking since the six o’clock news ended—always her signal for drinking to commence. The sedative only works so well tonight, though. They are watching the girl next door, Patty O’Mara, the girl they’ve known since she was a bump in her mother’s abdomen, play starting forward for the U.S. team in Barcelona. Our Patty, Mary Fran mutters.
♦ ♦ ♦
There were too many children in the O’Mara family. In truth, the O’Maras were fine with their seven children until they had only six—when one of the older boys, Patrick, was killed in Vietnam—which caused the O’Maras to fall apart, half of the kids not yet even 10. Then, even no child at all was too much for the parents, Louise and Billy, who could no longer even take care of themselves very well, let alone the six children who were still alive.
Louise grieved so much over Patrick that she stopped dressing for the day and, sometimes, the Horvath women suspected, didn’t get out of bed at all. It was clear that she wasn’t shopping or cooking meals for the kids, either, judging by how ravenous little Patty was when she visited their house.
Theresa blamed Billy, Patty’s father, which put her at odds with her sister (and her mother when she was still living), both of whom, like many devoutly Catholic women, saw men as infallible — even if Billy was a heavy drinker whose recklessness could no longer be hidden once Louise crumpled. It had been Louise’s job as a good Catholic wife and mother (such women believed) to make up for and conceal Billy’s irresponsibility.
Theresa had little patience with either woman’s Rosary-clutching pieties. As far as she was concerned, she had been to the front lines of Catholic piety, having been in the convent for ten years. She could run circles around them in doctrine, dogma, and scripture. She had logged more hours inside a church in one month than either could claim for one year. And when she was 33, she simply came home. She did not tell them why, and they did not ask. It was like that in their household, shrunken as it was after their father passed away and the other four siblings married and raised families of their own. The two unmarried sisters and their mother pushing pieces of purgatory around with vacuum cleaners, dustmops, and Brillo pads.
Whenever Patty O’Mara came inside, a lid was lifted from purgatory.
♦ ♦ ♦
She was five. Theresa’s mother had begun, nearly daily, to call Patty over in time to kneel beside the console of the hi-fi and pray the Rosary, which was always broadcast at 7 p.m. over an AM religious station. It took some time to get Patty to kneel still for the entire half hour, but Theresa’s mother inspired fear in the little girl and added the incentive of a reward afterwards—a plate of cookies, a small bowl of chips. Like a shadow, Mary Fran always joined her mother and Patty, handling logistics like tuning in the station, addressing static problems, getting the snacks ready.
Theresa, on the other hand, would have just gotten home from her job as a social worker at the V.A. Hospital and would be enjoying her initial, unwinding, beer out on the back patio, enjoying it as much as an ex-nun could enjoy the sound of the hi-fi eunuch tearing through the sorrowful mysteries and leading off on all of the prayers, which were then completed by his studio harem of humble, stalwart female voices, her mother joining in with her lilting Hungarian accent.
One night, right after she heard the last chord of “Immaculate Mary, My Heart Is on Fire,” Theresa headed inside with an idea. She would give that little girl a chance to be a kid. Palming a pack of cards, she said, “C’mon Patty, let’s get you a big glass of pop and we’ll play a game of cards.” Her goal, ultimately, was to teach the kid Blackjack. It was summer; come winter, Theresa’d have a bit of competition on cold nights.
“Can we play Go Fish?” Patty asked, delighted at Theresa’s proposal. Theresa’s heart sank. But the child, she remembered, was only five. “Don’t you know how to play 500?”
“No. Just Go Fish.”
Okay, it’s a start, Theresa thought. She poured Patty some Pepsi and got herself a fresh bottle of Iron. Her mother hobbled into the kitchen, followed by her shadow. Theresa cut her mother a look that forestalled whatever commandeering thing she was going to say. It terrified Mary Fran, but, since she had left the Sisters of Caritas and come back home, Theresa absolutely refused to be pushed around or barked at by her mother. “Don’t start,” she would say when she saw the old woman even beginning to form the words they had been raised by—words of judgment, words of fear and shame. Sometimes, their mother would start anyway, but it turned into a shouting match. As she aged, their mother only had a certain number of these shouting matches in her per week so, very often, all Theresa had to do was give the “Don’t start” look, and their mother would stop. What was left in the air, however, was a sort of I.O.U., a sense that, some time very soon, their mother indeed would start. And Mary Fran would toss between them like a helpless dishrag while dishes were, in fact, being banged about and sometimes broken.
That night, the Pepsi was poured, the beer fisted, and the two went outside to play their game. Theresa pulled a chair out for Patty. She dealt the cards. The other two women hovered in the kitchen. A window over the sink looked directly onto the covered patio, where the card table was. So, of course, Mary Fran and her mother got very busy with doing dishes, even though, due to the heat, all they’d eaten for dinner were cold sandwiches and potato salad.
“Wait a minute,” Patty piped out, sliding from the aluminum chair and scampering inside. The bathroom, Theresa thought, lighting a Pall Mall.
When Patty returned, she was holding the six-inch statue of the Madonna that stood on the hi-fi when the lid wasn’t up. She set the statue on the side of the table that wasn’t occupied. “Mary’s playing,” she said. “Can you deal her some cards too?”
“Why don’t you just keep Mary next to you—you know, to help you play, Patty?”
“No.” This was the firmest no Theresa had ever heard uttered by a child, especially inside that house. Patty’s wide, pale face, with just a dozen or so freckles spaced across the tops of her cheeks, was set.
Why do women have children and live like slaves to men? Theresa found herself thinking. At the same time, she thought about how, before she went to bed that night, she would need to put precisely three more bottles of beer into the fridge for the next night.
And so the game began. Patty asked Theresa if she had a six. Theresa had a six. Theresa then asked Patty if she had a king. Patty didn’t have a king. Theresa fished for one, but got an ace instead. Then, it was Mary’s turn.
Patty wrapped her small, bony hand around the base of the statue. “Theresa,” Mary said, in a tone only slightly more formal than Patty’s regular voice, “do you have a three?”
If she weren’t so aware of her mother and sister jockeying for a view from the window— which filled her with disgust—Theresa might have been struggling to hold back her laughter, the kind of laughter that, held back so many times during community room meetings with the order, would eventually erupt in a violent snort if she so much as looked at Candace Weill, whose sharp green eyes, just by a quick flash, could register the absurdity of whatever was being discussed at the meeting.
It’s come to our attention that someone may be drinking directly out of the milk bottles in the refrigerator.
Clare has suggested that we devote more time to closely reading and discussing papal encyclicals.
Some of our sisters have been complaining about having to answer much more than their share of phone calls, even though most of the outside phone calls are not for them. Should we reinstate regular phone-answering shifts?
“No, Mary. I don’t. Go fish.” Promptly, Patty pushed the statue the few inches to the fish pond and picked for Mary. Mary got her three, and Patty at first put the quarry next to her own recently-won pair. Before Theresa could form a protest, Patty herself recognized the problematic ethics of this and moved the two cards, face down, over to the feet of Mary. They lay there like doormats.
Right after she’d left the Order, Theresa made a few outside phone calls into the walled fortress, hoping that Candace would answer. When she didn’t—when it was Claude of the sandpaper voice or Geneva of the saccharine wheeze—when it was clearly not Candace, not ever Candace, Theresa would mumble that she had the wrong number and hang up.
♦ ♦ ♦
Team U.S.A. is behind by twenty points at the half. Mary Fran is anxious, keeps saying that it’s because the game began at 7, causing her to skip the Radio Rosary. If she had only said the Radio Rosary, Mary Fran repeats, Team U.S.A. would be winning, not losing. “Maybe,” Theresa says. She is going into the kitchen to make herself a roast beef sandwich and open another beer. The phone on the wall in the kitchen is olive green. It almost never rings, except with parish people calling Mary Fran about cleaning the sacristy, or Catherine Clark, calling to make arrangements with Mary Fran for the High Point of the Week (next, of course, to Mass on Sunday)—the church bingo. The call was unnecessary, really, as they never deviated from the arrangements. Catherine’s husband drove them every week in the same sky-blue Buick. The two women played the same number of cards every week, bought the same hot dog and Pepsi. And, only recently, Theresa discovered that Mary Fran took the Mary statue with her to bingo each week.
Always a bit protective about how her older sister appeared to the outside world —She’s slow, not retarded was the official family response delivered to any and all who used the word in reference to Mary Fran—Theresa tried to stop her a few months ago from taking the Mary statue to bingo. To this end, Theresa posted herself on the La-Z-Boy near the hi-fi, her eye fixed on the statue. The sun was setting, and through the combination of maroon drapes and white sheers on the front picture window, the framed picture above the stereo—of the Sacred Heart of Jesus—seemed to change colors. The blood looked purple, then a kind of white, not blood at all in the odd light just before the sun slipped away altogether. Mary Fran was busying herself with bingo preparations, assembling quarters and dimes and putting them, one at a time, into her little change purse, testing her daubers on an old Pittsburgh Press and putting one and a backup into a canvas totebag that read “Junior Achievement.” Then, in a furtive sweep that Theresa had never noticed until a week before, she deftly stuck the statue into the bag. She cradled the bag in two arms near her chest as she stood dutifully by the door waiting for Catherine Clark’s husband, Dutch, to pull up in front of the house.
“You’re not taking that, Mary Fran.” Theresa’s voice was firm. She’d taken over her mother’s direct command over her sister. Mary Fran gave her a look identical to Patty’s Go Fish look. The statue seemed to have that effect on the young and the innocent.
“Give me your bag, Mary Fran, or you’re not going to bingo tonight.”
“No, Theresa. I’m the older sister, Theresa.”
When Theresa grabbed the bag, her sister socked her on the side of the face. When Theresa pulled the statue from the bag, her sister seized it by its base. Theresa held onto the head, which was circled by a crown of stars. They tugged on Mary. Mary Fran was strong and wasn’t going to let go. Call it sick, but Theresa let go suddenly, which sent her sister backward against the hi-fi, the statue hitting the edge. A huge portion of Mary’s face, including all of her nose, fell to the floor like a very heavy snowflake.
Mary Fran gaped at the piece of face in shock. The last time Theresa had seen her sister like this was when she had taken her in to see their mother, lying dead in the bed at St. Clair Hospital.
“Honey, it’s OK.” Now, Theresa was afraid, recalling how shock was the first stage, for Mary Fran, of something that ran very much like a seizure. So she dashed into the kitchen, pulled glue and Scotch tape out of the junk drawer, and flew back to where her sister stood, her eyes shut and her mouth moving rapidly in recitation of the last line of the Glory Be. World without end, amen. World without end, amen. Theresa sat down on the floor repairing the statue, first gluing it, then taping around it to hold the glued piece in place.
The horn of Dutch Clark’s Buick sounded outside.
“Here, honey, I was wrong. I’m sorry. You can take Mary to bingo with you. Here. But don’t take her out of the bag, ok? She’s all bandaged up.”
Mary resembled a mummy, but Mary Fran took her. Though visibly confused, habit took over, and Mary Fran hobbled down the steps and got into Dutch Clark’s car.
Theresa sighed in relief. Seizure averted. That past, she chuckled at the absurdity of the entire scenario, which, after all these years, made her want to tell Candace about it. Candace would have loved the Go Fish story, would have cracked up about this bingo story, not to mention the story of Patty O’Mara and the school nativity play.
Patty was nine when she came over after dinner and told the Horvaths she’d been cast as Mary in the play. Theresa’s mother and sister, of course, felt personally responsible for transforming a neglected tomboy into a young Madonna. They’d already decided she’d be a nun when she grew up, just as Theresa’s mother had decided, in a way, about Theresa a long time ago. You are not the kind of girl who would satisfy a husband, she’d intone, out of the blue, when they stood side-by-side in the kitchen, Theresa drying the dishes that her mother washed and enduring all-too-frequent spot-checking. Not dry. You try harder at this. Her mother’s accent making “dry” a two-syllable word.
When Theresa got a scholarship to the Catholic women’s college about 40 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, the idea of being away from her mother was like a strong and heady potion. Almost too much. She majored in sociology and was a strong student. But she was afraid. Without her mother there, it felt as though she were poised on some peak surrounded by nothing, with sheer drops on every side. At the end of her freshman year, she attended the convent open house at the college and began her novitiate shortly thereafter.
Certainly, her mother was disappointed that she quit the order. How to explain to the parish priest? But on a practical level, she was probably also relieved. Two hip replacements. Flickering eyesight. Who would look after Mary Fran? As if on cue, Theresa arrived to solve that little conundrum.
Patty became the fresh putty, someone new to form into the creature that, deep down, their mother must have wished to be: translucent Mary, Queen of Heaven, alone of all her sex. Days were counted down until the nativity play. Mom was working on the costume. Mary Fran assisted. Straight pins with pearl heads.
Patty’s mother, Louise, managed to clean up for the big night. Mom made Theresa promise to take off early from work so they could get the best seats, a feat involving Mom’s ramming her walker up to the front with her head down like Rocky Bleier, the purple-heart Steelers running back, plowing through the Dolphins’ defense. Bizarrely, at the last minute, the nun directing the play had maneuvered things so that Patty held a real, live baby. The baby was easily about 14 months old, and wailing. Patty’s long, scrawny arms seemed even scrawnier with this massive child in them; his head was about as big as Patty’s. Theresa could sense that Patty was uncomfortable about the whole thing. But nothing seemed strange to her mother and sister, who watched in a rapture.
♦ ♦ ♦
The nuns at Patty’s grade school were the sort that Theresa despised. The meek ones. Not like her order, which, as soon as Vatican II gave the green light, started phasing out habits and pre-assigned names. John Kevin became Mary Ellen. Aurelius became (almost protestantly!) Geneva. Capellanus turned into Candace. The women in her order could wear street clothes if they wanted. They could be part of the workforce—not simply Catholic school teachers, but lawyers, physicians, even one plumber. Only the older ones clung to the old ways. But this order, the one at Patty’s school, wore full veils and seemed to have sat out Vatican II altogether. The parish priest, Father Donnelly, held them—and all the women in the parish—on a tight leash. It stretched out long enough for them to do most of the work of the church and school, but pulled up short when they raised any ideas, questions, or suggestions. They were the body. He was the head. Capo. Capellanus.
Now, not only was the nativity play odd because of the too-big newborn baby. It was also an “update” of the conventional biblical story, set, apparently, in Appalachia. Joseph’s name was Joe-Bob. Mary’s was Mary-Sue. They still named Jesus Jesus. As the nature of the adaptation began to dawn on Theresa, she seethed with rage. They’d cast their Patty as a white-trash Mary. She looked at Louise, and at her mother, whose yellow-gray hair was rolled into a stuffed cabbage. Neither seemed to be disturbed by this.
Afterward, when punch and cookies were served, they gathered around the seat where Mrs. Horvath was parked with her walker, all offering hugs and praises for Patty’s great performance. And here comes the one in charge, Sister Madeleva, who swiftly tells Patty what a great job she’s done before getting to the more important issue of correcting the child for chewing gum during the play. “You looked very pretty, dear, but your mouth was chomping on that gum the whole time.” Louise chimed in. “Oh, Patty, how could you do something so—. Where did you get the gum?” Theresa’s mother began muttering in Hungarian. Patty’s face was draining of its color and joy.
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes widening.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Louise was stepping into enforcer mode. Fine time to begin acting like her mother, Theresa thought.
“Excuse me.” Theresa, who hated to speak in public much, entered into the discussion using a voice that (she thought) would instantly convey to Sr. Madeleva that she was, at the very least, her equal. “Sister, if I’m not mistaken, you used a play in which the nativity is set in Appalachia. Am I right?”
“Well, yes. We wanted to make the birth of Christ seem more real to — ah — a contemporary audience.” Sr. Madeleva chirped this out as if she had been preparing for days to answer this question in front of a cynical press pool.
“Well, then, it seems to me that having Mary chew gum is actually quite appropriate to the setting.” Sr. Madeleva had to agree, but she never apologized to Patty. Theresa wanted to grab her by her long veil and force her to. As it was, it was enough that she could explain later to Patty that there was nothing at all wrong with her performance. Louise backed off and became vapid again. And Theresa’s mother swallowed twice to signal that she approved of Theresa’s intervention.
What Theresa would have added, for Candace’s benefit, was that she’d wanted to really shock little Sister by suggesting that, the next time they did this version of the play, they might want to have Mary chew and spit tobacco. Candace had been born and raised in West Virginia, and so would’ve just howled at the whole story of Joe-Bob, Mary-Sue, and Madeleva. When she was most relaxed, Candace—she even let her accent seep into her voice. To Theresa, she seemed exotic, like someone from the other side of the world.
The night that the Mary statue fell on the floor, Mary Fran came home with $300, having won the Round Robin. Theresa was passed out on the couch and woke to the bills waving in her face.
♦ ♦ ♦
The third quarter was underway. Patty was not playing like herself in this game. The players on the other team were tall, but so was Patty, who so dominated the boards that she’d been All-American twice when playing at Indiana University. In the Olympic games so far, Patty’d averaged 20 points per game, but in this game, she’d only scored five points—two rebounds and one free throw (the other, shockingly, missed the board entirely). In fact, in all the games Theresa’d ever watched Patty play, she’d never seen her so . . . delayed was the word for it, as though Patty were about 10 seconds behind the action around her.
When Patty was in the fifth grade, the parish elementary school, for the first time, offered a basketball team for girls. Patty was already quite tall then. One day, as Theresa was parking the car, she saw Patty out front banging a basketball against a phone pole. The NO PARKING/STREET CLEANING sign was her two-dimensional, improvised hoop. What a shame, Theresa thought, and vowed to put a real hoop up that weekend. What amazed her was the passion with which Patty drove toward the goal. She really seemed to know how to handle the ball. “Theresa, can you tell your mom I can’t come to the Rosary anymore, except maybe Thursdays? I got on the basketball team at my school, and we have practice every night at 6:30.”
“That means no blackjack, either?” Patty was a damned good player now, and they even played for cash—nickels anyway. Mary stayed on the hi-fi where she belonged.
“Well, maybe we can play sometimes over the weekend? Except that’s when I have most of my games.”
Theresa asked Patty to let her know when the games were once the season began. She really wanted to see these girls play ball. It’s about time they gave them something to do besides cheer for the boys. “No problem, honey. I’ll tell Mom. She’s gotta let go of you sooner or later, right?”
A stream of Hungarian invectives rolled out when Theresa told her mother about Patty’s new schedule. Hearing her mother spit out the gristly syllables, she knew that putting a backboard and hoop on the pole in front of the house was not a good idea. Her mother was getting less and less tolerant of anything or anyone. Just a month before, Theresa had been awakened around one in the morning by a commotion outside. Her mother had fallen down the front steps, pulled by the weight and force of the garden hose she had trained on a small group of teenagers out talking under the streetlight. Fortunately, she had merely bruised her right knee, for she’d already maxed out on hip replacements. “They were making too much noise,” she said. “When I tell them go home, they tell me go to hell.”
“Playing basketball no good for girl. It makes her tough like a man. This was a good girl. Now she will go bad.” What, in 1980, do you say to a woman who speaks like this? All Theresa could think of was, “Mom, Patty’s getting older now. Of course, she’s not going to be coming over for the Rosary forever.”
There wasn’t a convent in the world for Patty O’Mara. Sure, she had a strong religious faith, but Patty O’Mara’s gift was basketball. Nothing was plainer, and nobody was better. It was magic to watch her. Even Billy O’Mara started going to the games, because word traveled fast that this kid was amazing. He probably heard about this while sitting in a bar up on Broadway Avenue, asked what the kid’s name was, and blurted out, “Holy Christ, that’s my daughter!” Theresa attended as many games as she could. She encouraged her mother and Mary Fran to go to a game with her one Saturday afternoon, but her mother said it was too cold. The game was against St. George, a school in a really old, rough neighborhood in Mt. Oliver. This was the team to beat to make the playoffs, apparently. And when the team came out, it was clear that these girls had never picked up a Barbie doll in their lives. Compared to Patty and her teammates, the St. George Dragons seemed like sailors in their postures and their language. But the young ladies of St. Pamphilus, headed by the seventh-grade Patty O’Mara, were from a neighborhood that could go either way — up into suburban smugness or down into blue-collar brashness — and so they mirrored whoever their opponents were.
How did this girl learn to play like this? Raised in an era where gym class for girls consisted of jumping jacks and walking across the room on your buttocks, arms folded over the chest like a genie’s, Theresa’s jaw dropped to see this girl pluck rebounds out of the air. Where a lot of the girls her age—even some of the beefy eighth-graders from St. George’s—still lacked the upper-body strength to shoot from above the shoulders (one girl even did her free-throws underhand, as if heaving a sandbag onto a bank), Patty could launch jump shots from the corner, the ball touching nothing but the very tips of her fingers and, just barely, the net.
Awesome as Patty was to watch, Theresa was awed just as much by the sight of these girls playing, competing, having a stake, losing their tempers, holding back tears, shaking off pain. Another thing she wanted to share with Candace. The two of them had read and discussed Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. The book, and others like it coming out in the thick of the women’s movement, encapsulated the unnamed desperation, rage, and deep sadness inside women like Theresa and Candace. She remembered how they both dwelled on this quote from one of the books they read: “As with other marginal groups, a certain handful of women are accorded higher status that they might perform a species of cultural policing over the rest.” Candace was worried that religious women like themselves might be the tools of such cultural policing of other women. Theresa argued that they didn’t have to be, that they could fight from within their faith. Candace threw that back at her later, when she refused to spend time alone with her anymore. “It was a mistake,” she told Theresa. The “mistake” between them was what had given Theresa, for the first time, a sense that she had a heartbeat, the ability to smile spontaneously. It was what had given her a body.
“But I guess you can rationalize it by telling yourself that it’s our way of ‘fighting from within’,” Candace made critical quotation marks with her raised hands, the same ones that had cradled Theresa’s face the night of the “mistake”. Months of sleepless nights, pounds fallen off her sturdy frame — Theresa finally broke down. In the hospital, she decided that she would leave the order once she was released. Already there were rumors, Claude told her in her conspiratorial rasp when she visited; like a delegate, she came with this “information” and a card signed by all the sisters. Who picked it out, Theresa couldn’t help but wonder. It had the line from 1 Corinthians 13: “Love never fails.” If it was true that there were already rumors, what kind of love was being implied here?
♦ ♦ ♦
Because Patty was so good, St. George’s defense doubled up on her. Things get messy in the key and, intentionally or not, Patty was getting fouled a good deal. Still, not all of the fouls were called. With the St. Pamphilus Pumas leading by only three points at the beginning of the fourth quarter, one girl from St. George’s finally fouled out. By Theresa’s count, this one had actually fouled out about halfway through the second quarter, but it was only now that the referee was calling the third foul. Patty stood at the foul line for her free throws. Eager to grab the ball off the board in hopes of narrowing the Pumas’ lead, the St. George’s girls were champing at the bit, so much so that there was a good deal of physical jostling up near the backboard. Patty made her first shot, but as it passed through the net, two girls from each of the teams ignited from eager elbowing into full-blown slapping.
Instantly, it was impossible to see what the girls were doing because the players from both teams began to surround them. Shouts and cries, referee’s whistles, faces red with tears, dramatic tossings of the head. Then the parents started shouting insults. Theresa looked around as if she had arrived in a foreign country. She heard words she hadn’t ever heard before. The bedlam was abruptly pierced by silence. There, at the door, stood Father Donnelly. It was like one of those E.F. Hutton Investors commercials, where the E.F. Hutton figure commands instantaneous attention. At first, she could not tell who was more ashamed when they realized their pastor had arrived to witness them in base actions — the parents or the girls. But certainly, it was the parents. The girls were passionate about their game and still hot with the rightness of their respective causes in the mini-riot.
The priest forbade the teams from continuing to play the game. It turned out to be a forfeit by Patty’s team to St. George’s because, immediately after the event, Father Donnelly disbanded the girls’ team indefinitely. At a meeting with parents, he said that the sport made the girls too mean and aggressive. But the boys’ team coach found a way to convince the priest to let Patty O’Mara play for them. Rumor was that he told Father Donnelly, “Mark my words. This girl is going to the Olympics some day.” Alone of all her sex, Patty continued to play ball.
♦ ♦ ♦
Yes, the prophecy of the boys’ coach has come true, but now it looks as though Patty and her team are not going to win a medal. The U.S. is down 25 points by the end of the third quarter. Mary Fran is muttering the last line of the Glory Be over and over, and Theresa needs to get out of the room before she whales a pillow at her sister or the television. She goes back to the kitchen, lights a cigarette, sees herself in the window to the patio. Bright gray around the temples. The sun is almost down. The locusts’ chirring is so strong it raises goosebumps on her arms. Of course, Patty will be fine with or without a medal. Of course, Patty has a degree in accounting and three good offers to play basketball professionally in Europe. Their Patty will be fine. So why is she crying? Why does she stand over the kitchen sink, sobs shaking her torso? It’s probably hormones; she wishes the peri- business would just come to a full pause.
She clears her face of tears with her hands and sees herself again in the window, remembering another time long ago when she caught her own reflection in this room. She was arguing with her mother, repeating over and over again that, no, her going to college would not cost the family a dime; her mother simply could not believe that Theresa had been able to obtain something in the world. She’d once heard her mother say to her father, after looking at her report card, “It’s a shame that this isn’t Mikey’s grades, or Jamey or Paul’s,” referring, of course, to Theresa’s brothers, who opened a book so rarely that Theresa had taken to hiding her babysitting money in the dictionary, safe from the boys’ itchy palms. Olive green, the phone on the wall never rings at this time of night. Now that it does, Theresa expects it to be someone from the church and answers with a flat, clipped Hello.
It’s Candace. She’s watching the Olympics on TV. The network did a little feature on Patty, mentioning that she’s from Pittsburgh. It made her think of Theresa.
Theresa can barely speak. “Yeah. That’s our Patty, she lives next door to us. Where are you?” She should have said, “How are you?”
“I’m good, Terry. Terry, I left the order about three months ago. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you—“. Candace is saying other things that sound very heartfelt and worth hearing, but Theresa can’t hear them, since Mary Fran is letting out four-alarm screams that get louder as she approaches the kitchen. “A bomb! A bomb! There’s a bomb at the Olympics!” Now Mary Fran is pulling Theresa desperately, violently, toward the living room. The receiver hangs in mid-air, but Theresa can do nothing.
In the living room, Mary Fran is shrieking, practically hyperventilating. “Ohmygod, a bomb. Patty’s gonna die!” Theresa has to grab her sister from behind like a human straitjacket. “Stop, Mary, stop. Breathe. Like this. Let’s wait and see what’s going on.” Mary Fran tries to head-butt Theresa, who moves her head to the side and tightens her hold around her sister’s mid-section. She focuses on the television. Apparently, Mary Fran has moved the Mary statue from the hi-fi to the top of the TV — for luck—and the Holy Mother is flanked by rabbit ears. The reporters explain that the coliseum has been evacuated due to a bomb scare, that a new game will be held sometime in the next week, that everyone is safe. Then, they cut to the men’s freestyle swimming competition, the blue of the pool matching the robes of the statue.
There are some voices outside the front door. Theresa recognizes Billy O’Mara’s and instructs her sister to stay put while she goes out to talk to him. Billy is fairly drunk but coherent enough to tell Theresa what he’s just finished telling the neighbors — that Patty had food poisoning last night, didn’t get enough sleep, was dehydrated; that someone from the team just finished calling home to say that she was safe. She goes back inside and tells Mary Fran that everything is OK. “It’s not a real bomb, honey, just a threat. And now, Patty will get to play again when she’s not sick.” Mary Fran is still muttering her Glory Be’s. Theresa takes her by the shoulders and shouts her out of her state: “Mary Fran. It’s a miracle! Look, Mary’s on the television and now Patty is going to win a gold medal.”
“She is?”
“Yes. She is going to be OK and she and her team are going to win.”
Mary Fran begins to smile. “I want a sandwich. Let’s go make a sandwich, Theresa.”
They get into the kitchen, where the receiver still hangs from the wall phone. Theresa picks it up, fully expecting the line to be dead. Says Hello anyway.
“Is everything OK, Terry? I thought I’d better wait for you to come back.”
I thought I’d better do that, too, Terry thinks, her whole body swigging down the sound of Candace’s voice.
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her fiction has appeared in 34th Parallel, Carbon Culture, Wordrunner, Riprap, Thumbnail, Switchback, Weave, Wordgathering, Atticus Review, Extract(s), Spry, and Kestrel. One of her stories is included in The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability. Her chapbooks Scatter, Feed and Lie Low, Goaded Lamb were published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2014 and 2023 respectively, and her book of poetry, Nobody’s Jackknife, was published in 2015 by West End Press.
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