SIXTEEN
PASSION
SUNDAY
Toward the end of every Lent, Anigel Reyes remembered the Passion Sunday of her seventeenth year. That morning the sun shone bright through her window, and for once Anigel didn’t want to go back to sleep. She wanted to sing, and when she smelled the air it was full of flowers. Winter was over. The warmth was here and the smell of sausage came from the kitchen down the hall.
Any other Sunday Caroline would have stuck her head in her sister’s room, saying, “Come on, Ani. You don’t want to be late.”
And any other Sunday, Anigel would have kept to herself that she didn’t care if she was late, that the later they got to Saint Celestine’s the better. But, in the night, she had come to the heart of the old problem, and having solved it, though the answer may have not been what others would call a happy one, it was happy to her. A diagnosis was delivered on the long sorrow, and she brushed her teeth and washed her face and pulled a brush through her thick black hair, content because, though she had gone to Mass for many Sundays, and would be more than happy to go to this one, this would be her last. Her new life had begun.
“What’s this?” John jested as Anigel entered the kitchen and swung around her brother-in-law, kissing him on the cheek, then kissing the curly head of her baby niece who clapped her hands and laughed. And finally she turned to embrace her sister who cried, “Ani! Ani! I’m trying to cook.”
“Let me help you!” Anigel offered, opening up the refrigerator and pulling out the milk. “Hustle, hustle! Move that bustle! We gotta see the Passion Play. I could live without the palm procession, but what can you do? Oh—!”
“Ani!” Caroline slapped her sister’s hand as Anigel took a sausage from the meat plate and sat at the table, devouring the link in two bites then pouring milk for everyone.
“Jon’s been in the shower,” Anigel said, looking at her brother-in-law. “He’s all starched and shiny. I showered last night, so I’m pretty much together. I guess the only one left to get ready is you, Cara. What time we have to be there?”
“The same time we’re always there,” her sister said, bringing the pancakes and scrambled eggs to the table, “and what has come over you?”
“Actually we do have to be there fifteen minutes early,” John said, scooping eggs onto his wife’s plate, “because of the Palm procession, so…. 9:45.”
“Well, that gives me almost an hour,” Caroline decided.
“The Methodists have one service at nine and their main service at eleven,” Anigel said. “Eleven is so much more civilized.”
“Well, we’re not civilized, “we’re Catholic,’ John said. “Honey, would you ask the blessing?”
As Caroline prayed, Anigel bowed her head, but she did not close her eyes. She looked across the kitchen to where, hands extended in her vaginal aureole, the pink robed and star mantled Virgin of Guadalupe blessed them. Across from Guadalupe, behind Anigel’s back was the Black Madonna, Our Lady of Chestohova, with the lines of her mouth almost like scars, gazing on Anigel’s back in narrow eyed sobriety.
“…In the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,” Caroline concluded, “Amen.”
They crossed themselves, and as they began to fork eggs and sausage and pancakes onto their plates, it was John who said, “Caroline is right. There’s something changed about you. You in love?”
Anigel shrugged and said, unable to stop smiling, “In love with life.”
John Balusik often said that his wife Caroline and her younger sister looked like twins. Caroline was slightly older and, since she’d had a baby, maternal. Anigel settled on the word rounder. She was just as thin, Ani thought, but there were curves and gentlenesses where Anigel still felt the angles of her girlhood. She stood in the bathroom behind her sister, watching Caroline with the curler, and smelled the hot hair and oil as her older sister released one lock of black hair and went to the next one.
“When you stand behind me like that,” Caroline murmured, “I assume you either have to go to the bathroom, or you have something to tell me.”
“Well,” Anigel decided, “I don’t have to go to the bathroom.”
“Is this about the way you’re acting?”
“Yes,” Anigel said. Then, “Maybe.”
“Oh, my God,” Caroline released the curlers and looked at her sister. She whispered, eyes wide with panic, “You’re not a virgin anymore.”
“That,” Anigel said, “is not even an issue.”
“Then what?”
“It’s spring, and it’s beautiful,” Anigel said. “And it’s a beautiful world, and I looked out my window and saw the tulips. They were bright in the sunlight, and last night I could smell the lilacs.”
Caroline nodded, trying to hide her impatience, and then Anigel said, “When we pray, when we go to church, do you believe it?”
“What?”
“Do you believe it? Jesus, God, the Cross, Christmas. The Church. All of it. The Virgin Mary? Do you believe in it?”
“Of course I do, Ani.”
And then Caroline said, “Don’t you?”
“Well, that’s the thing…”
And Anigel had thought it would be easier to say this than it presently was, “I’m not sure that I do.”
There was a rhythm change in Caroline, lifting the curler to her hair, a slight change in the temperature of the room, the tension of the air. The beauty Anigel had felt was less beautiful now shared, and in this moment, Anigel pressed on.
“In fact, I don’t believe in it. Any of it.”
“And this… is why you’re in a good mood?”
“I… I think so. It feels like… waking up.”
“Oh, Ani, please don’t say that.”
“I felt terrible. I really did. I felt terrible all week, terrible for a long time with all these doubts and all these thoughts and then… it was just like…”
Anigel was going to say, it was just this voice came to me and said, be honest with yourself, you don’t really believe in this. And that voice had made her free. And she could not explain that voice to her sister.
Caroline still sounded sad.
“You don’t believe in God, Ani?”
And in her answering, Anigel did not sound free. She actually felt a little heavy hearted, but at least the feeling was real, and this was the most real she had felt in some time.
Anigel said, “No.”
John came down the hall, humming. He was not tall, shorter than Caroline, but well built and handsome, always smiling, with a clean shaven head. He was what Anigel thought she would like to have if she could be less wild. He had been a surprise back in high school, the white boy who was so in love with the glamorous Caroline and braved the crowd of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Black boys who thought they had a right to her.
He was carrying his daughter on his shoulder and he said, “Are all my beautiful girls almost ready?”
Caroline leaned out and kissed John.
“Just about,” she said, unplugging the curling iron.
“I’ll go wash the dishes real quick,” he said.
As he left, Caroline said, “Oh, Ani, please don’t tell John.”
No, Anigel agreed, telling her quiet brother-in-law, Knight of Columbus, member of the Rosary Society, would not be a good idea.
The words which would barely form in front of her sister now came together in her brain as she walked to church behind her sister and her brother-in-law. It was the first warm day, and anyone who didn’t understand the weather in Michigan would believe hot days were soon to follow. As they walked up Laramie Street, she could smell the heavy scent of lilacs. White blossoms hung from the magnolia trees. They were only three blocks from Saint Celestine’s, and she could see the steeple over brick bungalows and the two or three story aluminum clapboard houses and storefronts of Little Poland.
She was sorry she had said anything to Caroline. It tarnished the joy in her heart she could not then explain to herself, but was now coming to understand. Anigel would not be here if not for the disaster of her parents’ marriage that culminated in her father leaving, and saw Caroline escape via college, marrying John before they’d even graduated. Anigel was the next to leave, even as she feared leaving her brother in her stepfather’s house.
“You can come with me,” she had told him. “You should come with me.”
“We can’t all stay with Caroline,” Bobby said. “I can do fine by myself.”
And Anigel didn’t know if they really could all stay with Caroline. She didn’t know if it was unfair to ask John and Caroline to take them both in, but she knew she couldn’t stay in that house and so, finally, she had left one night and shown up at Caroline’s door with a duffel bag. She had never even asked to stay. Asking would mean that she could be refused, and refusal was not an option. From the day she had arrived there was nothing more to say.
Mama kept on paying tuition at Our Lady Queen of the Rosary. All the women in the family had gone to Rosary, though the neighborhood wasn’t now what it had been. Every morning, dressing in the too short skirt, the white blouse, and a cardigan the majority of the year, she strode up Laramie and then down Banner and up to Westhaven, reaching the second floor bathroom in time to finish her hair and makeup with the other girls rushing in and out doing the same, and then smoke a second cigarette by the window before heading to morning Mass. She heard that the boys at OLM didn’t even have weekly Mass, but the girls had it every day. Attendance was taken on your knees, right before Communion.
All her life was bound in religion. Everyone and everything she knew was bound up in the Church. The round of guilt and semi fear, the sneaking, the Jesus who died for your sins to set you free to sin again. But Anigel did not feel particularly sinful or particularly free. The Mary who was always sad, eyes rolled to heaven, and whose sorrow did not seem to affect a thing, was one with the belief which seemed never to affect anything. The God who would make things better in the future, when you were dead, the belief that did not make you do good, that did not make her father a sober man or her mother a better woman, the long list of doings and don’t-ings, the constant slights and heavy burdens laid stone by stone on her and every other bitch she knew, by a God who seemed either indifferent or hostile to vaginas and far too in love with penises and the stupidity attached to them, was only matched by the numbness, the empty hole, and the absolute absence of answers.
The bells rang louder, and John took the stroller from Caroline and lowered it over the curb, across the street and up the last block before the grey stone bulk of Saint Celestine’s, where Catholics were gathering with their palm branches.
Mass had already started and Father Baron was standing on the high steps of Saint Celestine’s, a few feet below the rounded arches that held the open doors.
“Jesus proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem.
As he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany
at the place called the Mount of Olives,
he sent two of his disciples.
He said, "Go into the village opposite you,
and as you enter it you will find a colt tethered
on which no one has ever sat.
Untie it and bring it here….”
It depressed her how much she didn’t belong here.
“So those who had been sent went off
and found everything just as he had told them.
And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, ‘Why are you untying this colt?’
They answered,
‘The Master has need of it.’
So they brought it to Jesus…”
Last night Anigel smelled the jasmine and the lilacs, the light scent and the heavy one filling the air, and she’d laid awake till first light and the early bird twitter, and then Anigel traveled downstairs and to the backyard. Most of the grass was just turning from brown to green, but beside the trash can there was one stem rising up from the earth, alive again after a long sleep. From it one leaf unfurled for the vary early morning, and as she beheld it, the green blade said, “What if there is nothing to fear because there is nothing to believe?”
She had said nothing to the blade and the blade seemed to reply, to her nothingness by saying: “There is nothing to fear.”
There is nothing to believe in?
The blade simply rose. The new sun shone on the drop of dew. There was a chill in the very early morning and the birdsong which had gone on since darkness.
The tiny stalk growing up from the earth said:
“Believe in me.”
When the hour came,
Jesus took his place at table with the apostles.
He said to them,
"I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,
for, I tell you, I shall not eat it again
until there is fulfillment in the kingdom of God."
Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and said,
"Take this and share it among yourselves;
for I tell you that from this time on
I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine
until the kingdom of God comes."
On the steps of Saint Celestine’s, the choir sang,
“All glory laud and honor,
to you Redeemer King,
to whom the lips of children
made sweet hosannas ring!”
Sheepishly, with the requisite Catholic embarrassment, the congregation of Saint Celestine’s half heartedly joined in. They had circled the block where Saint Celestine’s rose on stone platform over Calvert Street, passing the school and the parish house, going around the little cemetery and the few houses and, having rounded the block, palm branches swaying with resentment, they entered the church to the sound of a blasting organ. Anigel saw the same faces, Liz Meecham, Anne Demarkowski, Rabbit Griffin, she had known her whole life. They had never been friends. There was something missing her. Not belief, not exactly.
The church was dressed in red. Red was draped over the statues, and carnations adorned the altar as the choir, triumphant and sweet in the loft sang:
“Lauda! Lauda! Lauda, to the Son of David!”
The music was all around her. In this crowded church she was as solitary as Jesus at his trial. Now, here they were after so much singing, after the first readings, the procession and the psalms, at the Passion play with Bobby Johnson as Jesus. He stood before Caiaphas and Annas, and he declared:
“If I tell you, you will not believe,
and if I question, you will not respond.
But from this time on the Son of Man
will be seated at the right hand of
the power of God."
Jeremy Taylor and Mike Peterson had never been very kind to her. Back in seventh grade, Peterson had asked her, “So, in February, when it’s Black History Month, do you get to celebrate all of it, or do you stop on Valentine’s Day?”
He didn’t have to explain, but chose to, “Because you’re only half Black.”
But today they were Annas and Caiaphas, and the two priests declared:
"What further need have we for testimony?
We have heard it from his own mouth."
And the most curious sensation overtook her as Jesus was led to Pontius Pilate, and as he was tried before the people and they shouted, the choir, the boys and girls she had grown up with who were in the youth group, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” For the very first time, in her unbelief, in knowing she would never return to this church, she felt half of these people, many of them fairly cruel, had always been saying “Crucify him!”, had always been getting ready to tie up someone and haul them away, and as the Cross was lain on Bobby Johnson’s back, she whispered something to Caroline and moved past her, heading down the side pew. She could not be seen, and she could not not weep, and she could not look away, and she could not escape the feeling that, though Bobby Johnson was not really dying, she could not leave Jesus alone. She could not look away.
As the narrator declared that Jesus breathed his last, there was the gentle rumble of people falling to their knees, and in the corner of the vestibule, she went to her knees as well.
O sacred head, surrounded
by crown of piercing thorn!
O bleeding head, so wounded,
so shamed and put to scorn!
Death's pallid hue comes o'er thee,
the glow of life decays
yet angel-hosts adore thee,
and tremble as they gaze.
The mass had gone subtle. That was the mystery of Passion Sunday. After the exultation of the palm procession was the somber quality of the rest of the mass, how, even after they had risen from their knees at the death of Jesus, in spirit they did not get back up again. The reading ended with his death and with his burial and, in some way, the rest of the mass was his funeral. Something had died. Anigel went and took Communion for the same reason the priest said, in memory of me. She did not want to forget what she had not known until now or treasured till this moment as she crossed herself and took the bread and took the wine and felt the forms of all things changing. She did not sit with her family, though John looked up at her from where he was kneeling as she came back from Communion.
Outside was where she belonged. The incense and the music oppressed and she was lonely as fuck. Lonely as Jesus crucified outside the city walls. Neither of them belonged in this company. In this stone, and in these dull songs, in these people she’d known for seventeen years, never once had she met him.
Anigel exited one of the old heavy doors to sit on the porch where she could still hear Mass and the solemn measure of the organ. The sky was full of a rich bright blue, the trees were dropping white and pink blossoms and warmth late morning touched her skin and she shed her sweater. After the music died, and there was the small thunder of the congregation rising from its knees, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, opened them again and looked on in wonder at the soundless world.
ONLY TWO MORE (ADMITTEDLY LONGER) CHAPTERS TO THE END
