ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Part One of Two
It was the first real day of spring. The sun shone bright through her window. Anigel Raez was seventeen, and fully awake. For once she did not 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. The smell of sausage came in from the kitchen down the hall, and it was Passion Sunday.
Any other Sunday, Caroline would have stuck her head in. she would have said, “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 this morning, in her sleep, 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 long black hair, content, because, though she had gone to Mass for many Sundays, and would be more than happy to go to his 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. “We mustn’t be late. We mustn’t be. You’ll want to 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 tool a sausage from the plate of sausages 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,” John said, smiling broadly, we’re Catholic. 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 oriole, 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, presiding in narrowed eyes 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 Annalise three years ago, more maternal. Anigel settled on the word rounder. She was just as thin, Ani thought, ut 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,” Caaroline 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. Her answer and her heart were like lead. But lead was a real thing, and this as the most real she had felt in some time.
Anigel said, “No.”
John came down the hall, grinning. He was not tall, shorter than Caroline, but well build 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 armada 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 perfunctorily.
“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, came together now 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 the two and three storey houses 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 coming to understand. The disaster of her mother’s marriage to her father, the oddness of a relationship which should never have been, which found itself culminating in him leaving and never coming back after so much drinking, which saw Caroline leave for college to never come back, marrying John before college was even over, which saw Anigel finally leave, even as she was afraid to leave her brother in her mother’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, the girl’s high school four blocks down from the boy’s Our Lady of Mercy where her brother went. 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 the cardigan the majority of the year, she strode as quickly as possible 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 had Mass not even once a week, but the girls had it every day. Attendance was taken on your knees, right before Communion.
All of her life was bound in religion. Everyone she knew, and most of the people she believed in, were bound in religion. The round of guilt and semi fear and sneaking around from something, the Jesus who had died for your sins to set you free to sin again. But Anigel didn’t 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 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, empty hole, and the absolute absence of answers.
It was the first real day of spring. The sun shone bright through her window. Anigel Raez was seventeen, and fully awake. For once she did not 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. The smell of sausage came in from the kitchen down the hall, and it was Passion Sunday.
Any other Sunday, Caroline would have stuck her head in. she would have said, “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 this morning, in her sleep, 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 long black hair, content, because, though she had gone to Mass for many Sundays, and would be more than happy to go to his 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. “We mustn’t be late. We mustn’t be. You’ll want to 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 tool a sausage from the plate of sausages 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,” John said, smiling broadly, we’re Catholic. 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 oriole, 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, presiding in narrowed eyes 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 Annalise three years ago, more maternal. Anigel settled on the word rounder. She was just as thin, Ani thought, ut 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,” Caaroline 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. Her answer and her heart were like lead. But lead was a real thing, and this as the most real she had felt in some time.
Anigel said, “No.”
John came down the hall, grinning. He was not tall, shorter than Caroline, but well build 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 armada 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 perfunctorily.
“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, came together now 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 the two and three storey houses 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 coming to understand. The disaster of her mother’s marriage to her father, the oddness of a relationship which should never have been, which found itself culminating in him leaving and never coming back after so much drinking, which saw Caroline leave for college to never come back, marrying John before college was even over, which saw Anigel finally leave, even as she was afraid to leave her brother in her mother’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, the girl’s high school four blocks down from the boy’s Our Lady of Mercy where her brother went. 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 the cardigan the majority of the year, she strode as quickly as possible 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 had Mass not even once a week, but the girls had it every day. Attendance was taken on your knees, right before Communion.
All of her life was bound in religion. Everyone she knew, and most of the people she believed in, were bound in religion. The round of guilt and semi fear and sneaking around from something, the Jesus who had died for your sins to set you free to sin again. But Anigel didn’t 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 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, empty hole, and the absolute absence of answers.
