The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  I try to make sense of the strange conversation I heard in the pantry, but as the days go by, I have other pressing matters to think about. Such as my bladder now being the size of a walnut. I wake up almost every hour and waddle down the long, echoey corridor to the bathroom. All fourteen stations of the cross are lined up so that I walk by each one before I finally get there—the ripe smell of incense lingering in the hall, coming up through the vents and mingling with the sweet, honeyed scent of melted candle wax. Maybe I’m just dreaming and this isn’t real. It’s just a bad dream in which I’m trapped inside my old copy of The Children’s Illustrated Bible. But it’s a long walk with a full bladder, and it’s definitely real.

  There is Jesus, carrying his cross right beside me. We are quite the pair—he and I—but everyone knows what’s in store for him at the end of that long walk, and I wouldn’t put it past Gran to have sent me here solely to scare the living daylights out of me. Even after I’m back in bed, it’s pretty hard to forget the images of the crown of thorns and the nails stuck in his hands and feet—the soldiers divvying up his clothes like vultures.

  Catholics are pretty good at keeping Jesus nailed to that cross, rather than focusing more on that happy bit where he rose from the dead and freed us from sin and evil. It’s like Gran not wanting us to feel too good about ourselves. As if that’s a concern anymore. I’m not sure there will be any rising from anything after I’m done here. Unlike Jesus ascending into heaven, I feel like I’m just headed right over a cliff.

  —

  The nuns do a lot of different things to support themselves. They make soaps and lotions and have beehives that make honey and chickens that lay eggs. Sister Josephine takes everything to the mercantile in town once a week, and I get up my nerve to ask if I can go with her. Sister Bernadette frowns, like she thinks this is a very bad idea, but I tell her I’ve done all the laundry already and what harm can it do for me to go out into the world for just one day? She eyes my belly as if she’s thinking that a person’s life can actually change pretty dramatically in just one day, but then she looks away, as if nuns shouldn’t be thinking things like that. Her face is slightly flushed when she says, “Okay, but just this once.”

  Sister Josephine is about half the age of Sister Agnes and Sister Bernadette, but that doesn’t mean she’s young. She’s also the tallest nun I’ve ever seen—at least six feet, if not more. She has a row of whiskers on her upper lip and a few stray hairs popping out of her chin, which are very distracting to look at. She drives way too fast in the old green pickup, taking the corners at a clip that sends me flying across the cab. But it’s the potholes I wish she’d slow down for. I am clutching my stomach with one hand and holding on to the dashboard for dear life with the other when she looks over and says, “Oh my goodness,” as if she forgot I was here.

  “I have a bit of a lead foot,” she says apologetically, slowing down just a smidgen. “I grew up on a farm and started driving when I was ten, so it’s kind of a thrill for me to get out on the road every week.”

  She’s so much chattier than the other nuns, and I feel out of practice holding up my end of the conversation. “Mother Superior is so good about knowing what each one of us needs and which skills we have that will best serve. She handed me the keys to this old beauty the minute I was fully professed, which was quite an honor.”

  “What does it mean to be professed?” I ask.

  “Oh, it’s the very, very, very last stage, when you take your final vows. You have to go through a test period for six months, and then you become a novitiate for two years if you seem a good fit, and then you take temporary vows for no less than three years. And then you get professed, which is your final vows. So it’s not a very spontaneous decision to commit yourself to this life.”

  I want to say it would have been nice if there were a similar process for getting pregnant, but that would come out wrong, so I don’t. And then she surprises me by saying, “I would have thought your gran would have told you all this.”

  I’m more stunned than when she was flying over the potholes.

  “You know my gran?”

  Her wimple reminds me of the white folds on a turkey’s neck as she swivels her head to look at me. “Of course; she grew up here at Our Lady, from when she was three years old. She really took me under her wing and showed me the ropes. She was such a fun, chatty teenager—not what you’d expect to find in a convent—she never told you about us?”

  I shake my head, too shocked to say anything.

  “Hmm, I wonder…,” she says. But she doesn’t say what she wonders, and I’m still so stunned by Gran being fun and chatty that I don’t notice we’ve pulled into the parking lot of a log cabin, which turns out to be the mercantile and the post office all rolled into one. Sister Josephine is already hopping out of the truck. I open my door just as a woman is getting out of a yellow Datsun next to us, and the sound of the two metal doors colliding is so loud that everyone close by looks over, including two boys about my age. They look puffy, and I notice they are wearing two coats apiece and they’re all rumpled like they’ve been sleeping in the back of that station wagon for weeks.

  The woman in the Datsun is checking the damage to her door, and Sister Josephine has come around to look at mine. “Good thing we all have rusty old cars,” the nun says cheerfully, and the Datsun woman suddenly reminds me of a colorful paint-by-number with her flowered boots and lipstick, compared to Sister Josephine in her black tunic and her habit. If the woman had thought of blaming me for denting her door, she obviously isn’t going to anymore. Who argues with a six-foot nun? She shrugs and steers the boys inside the store, but the older one looks back at me with a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Well,” says Sister Josephine, “you wanted to come to town so badly; are you going to hide in the truck now?”

  Her eyes are twinkling.

  “Will you tell me more about my gran before we get back to the convent?”

  “Help me get these soaps and lotions inside, and we’ll see,” she says.

  —

  The mercantile is one of those out-of-the-way places that has a bit of everything. Pump pots full of coffee and hot-pink Hostess Sno Balls are the “breakfast special.” There’s a whole wall of fishing lures and metal spinner racks of postcards with pictures of moose or pristine mountain lakes. The dusty cans of peas and fruit cocktail could be ten years old, it’s hard to say. There is another aisle with playing cards, panty hose, and votive candles mixed in with just about everything else that nobody needs. This is also the aisle where the nuns sell their soaps and lotions. It seems pretty well stocked to me, but Sister Josephine says to squeeze in as many more as I can. The label says PERPETUAL SORROW SOAP, and I wonder if the nuns should think about changing the name.

  “Here’s my own special milk-and-honey lotion,” she says, making a precarious pyramid with a few of the bottles.

  I glance over at the Datsun woman, who has come out of the bathroom looking a bit tidier. Her hair is freshly combed and her lips are much, much redder than when she was frowning at me for denting her door. The boys have decided on the breakfast special, and the older one is stirring his coffee with a red plastic straw and stealing looks at me. I pull my jacket tight around my belly and pretend to be busy. But I can hear everything they say.

  “How much farther to Fairbanks?” asks the younger boy, his mouth full of Sno Ball. The word Fairbanks is like a kick in the gut, which the baby decides to do just then, right on cue. “Shhh,” I tell it, rubbing my belly.

  “It’s a good week,” says the woman, pouring coffee into a foam cup.

  “Well, we’ve been driving for two weeks already,” says the older boy. “That doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “It wouldn’t take so long if they’d pave the road,” she says, “but the Alaskan side doesn’t want to spend the money and the Canadian side doesn’t want to spend the money. So nobody does it.”

  “Well, I can drive, too,” the boy says, “if you
want a break.”

  “Thanks, Oscar. We’ll see.”

  He doesn’t look like an Oscar to me. It sounds old-fashioned. He needs a haircut. I watch him push his bangs out of his eyes every few seconds. His hair is dirty and it’s obvious he hasn’t showered in a while; he moves slowly, like he’s carrying the world on his shoulders. But there is something sweet about his disheveled appearance. If he washed his hair, it might be the same color as Ray’s. I shake my head at the thought of Ray and how quick I am to think this stranger looks sweet.

  Aren’t all boys the same? I’ve only been at the convent for about a month, but it feels like years and I’ve forgotten what people my own age look and act like. Then again, maybe I’ve never known. I wouldn’t be here now if I’d been smarter.

  I watch Oscar watching his little brother, who has a rounder face than him and darker hair and skin, but they have the same sharp, pointy nose and the same dirty, tousled look. The younger one is licking his Sno Ball–covered lips, which are pink and chocolaty with bits of coconut stuck to them. Oscar hands him a napkin, but he’s also smiling in such a sweet brotherly way—there is nothing phony about it. It reminds me of when George gave me a doughnut that day at the Salvation Army and how strangers have been kinder to me than my own family. Suddenly I feel like the loneliest person in the world. Without any warning, I know I have to get out of here. I drop all my soaps in a heap and bolt out of the store, the little bell tinkling as if to alert the world that I have just been completely undone by the smallest act of kindness.

  In the truck I can’t stop crying. Sister Josephine comes out and hands me a travel packet of tissues and a lumpy brown package with my name on it. The boy called Oscar has come out to stare at us as we pull away. I slump farther down in my seat, but the tears will not stop.

  —

  Sister Josephine does not go back to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow right away. She pulls off onto a secluded dirt road and bumps along until we reach the river. She stops the engine and we sit watching the muddy water roll past. I’m sniffling and wondering how she knew this secret spot was here when, as if reading my mind, she says, “Your gran and I used to come here all the time.”

  She points through the trees and I can see the brick outline of the convent. I wonder if she means they somehow got here by crossing the river from the other side. That would be pretty adventurous, and I wonder what else I don’t know about who Gran once was.

  Sister Josephine’s wimple and habit make it seem as if she is looking through a curtained window, straight ahead so I can’t see her face. I realize she’s not staring at the river; she’s looking into the past.

  “I was nineteen. Your gran was probably sixteen. I was trying to decide if I had a calling, and she was trying desperately to get out of here. Sister Agnes warned me that she was a bad influence, but Marguerite was so funny and charismatic, it was hard not to want to be around her.”

  I would never use any of those words to describe Gran.

  “She’d lived her whole life here. Her mother died. Her father couldn’t take care of her. Or maybe he just wouldn’t. She was only three when he left her with the abbess. I don’t think your gran ever got over that feeling of being abandoned, even though the abbess took a shine to her like you wouldn’t believe.”

  I think about Gran taking in me and Lily after Dad died. I never thought about how hard that must have been for someone her age—a five-year-old and a brand-new baby.

  Sister Josephine swivels her white neck to look at me, a huge smile on her face. “Oh, the abbess loved your gran like she was her own child—always called her their precious gift from God.” She chuckles. “Sister Agnes, as I’m sure you’ve realized, has never understood their relationship. We’re just human, but people think we aren’t going to feel normal emotions once we get professed. Jealousy, anger, sorrow. When your gran left in the middle of the night without saying good-bye, even the abbess couldn’t pretend that her heart wasn’t a tiny bit broken.”

  Ironically, Gran reminds me more of Sister Agnes than the abbess.

  “But she must have kept in touch; otherwise, how did I get here?” I ask.

  “She did, oh she did. But it was mostly in times of need. I think that’s part of what bothers Sister Agnes so much. When your mother got ill—after your father died—your gran asked Mother Superior if there was a place that would take her in so she didn’t have to be put in a home. She wasn’t right in the head after that.”

  Sister Josephine looks like maybe she’s said too much; her face turns pink against the white of her wimple. “Oh, Ruth, I’m so sorry about your father.”

  “I’m starting to forget him,” I tell her. “And my mother.”

  “It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Your family seems to have some kind of snowball effect going on,” she says sadly.

  “That’s one way of saying it,” I tell her, blowing my nose into one of the tissues. “Instead of a curse, I mean; a snowball effect sounds almost nice.”

  I think about the pink Sno Ball that boy was eating back at the mercantile and the way his brother was looking at him. What is their story? I know I should care more about my own family, but our story will always be old and tired and badly written. If I had the energy, I would try to rewrite it. Perhaps Lily will be the one to do that.

  But even if I am following in the footsteps of my mother and my grandmother, there’s still a part of me that believes I deserve better. I would give anything for someone to look at me the way Oscar looked at his brother, covered in a pink Hostess Sno Ball. I almost tell Sister Josephine right there on the bank of the river why I broke down back at the mercantile, but it seems silly. How do you find words to describe that much emptiness?

  “Aren’t you going to open your package? It’s the first mail you’ve received,” says Sister Josephine.

  I look at the loopy handwriting and realize it’s from Selma. Good old Selma, writing to me when I didn’t even say good-bye to her. I slowly unwrap it and out falls a lumpy, hand-knitted hat. It’s orange, of course, and extremely large.

  Dear Ruth,

  Your gran called the other day and gave me your address; she thought you might like news from home. Wasn’t that nice? My knitting gauge is still a little off, but I made this for your baby anyway. I hope it gets there in time so he/she can take it with them to their new family. (I think orange can be good for a boy or a girl, right?) I know it won’t fit until the baby is probably grown up, but I thought it would be nice to have something so they’d have a little connection to their first family. We don’t have to be blood to be family. (I can see you rolling your eyes, don’t think I can’t!)

  I think what you’re doing is really brave. I know you’re frustrated with me, and I know you feel that always thinking the best of people isn’t that easy, but I’m just going to go ahead and keep disagreeing with you. It really is that easy. I still think the best of you and I think your baby will, too—when they’re old enough to understand. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much and that you get to come home soon.

  Love,

  Selma

  Over the past couple of weeks, fish camp has been nonstop busyness. Relatives just keep showing up, bringing their boats with wide hulls and their elders with wide, calloused hands, who have been cleaning fish for almost a hundred years. The camp is now full to the brim with wild boy cousins who roll around in the dirt and aunties with empty spaces in their mouths that make it hard to chew the dried fish, so they just suck on it all day long. For some reason there is always enough of everything, even places to sleep.

  Dumpling’s mom makes the same joke every day—“got to keep working till the sun goes down”—and everyone laughs, out of respect.

  But kids here aren’t really expected to work all the time and the adults never push or nag us—so nobody says we have to stay and help instead of going into the village. There are so many people at fish camp—there’s always someone around to stoke the fire or help Dumpling’s mom—so it’s not like we’ll
be missed. Dumpling’s father has to get some parts for the outboard again, so Dumpling, Bunny, and I come along.

  “Auntie says you can borrow the three-wheelers, at least until the gas runs out,” he tells us. Maybe he just wants us out of his hair, but that’s fine with us.

  Once we see the three-wheelers, we forget everything that is going on back at camp. We tear up and down the main street of the village with the dirty wind in our hair, no purpose whatsoever other than to make a lot of noise and go really fast.

  When I try to keep up with Dumpling, all I can see is her red ribbon waving at me like a flag. The mud from her back tires spits me with gravel pellets if I get too close; I have to slow down, and then I spray Bunny on her three-wheeler behind me and she yells as if she’s been shot with a BB gun. We drive back and forth on the main street until only the whites of our eyes pop out of our mud-splotched faces.

  “Damn village kids!” a priest yells as we spray him, too.

  “I want to go back to the skiff,” Bunny tells Dumpling when we finally nose our three-wheelers close enough to talk to each other. Dumpling has turned off the main street and taken us a ways from town, close to the slough. The wind is stiffer over here with no buildings around for shelter. The bent beach grass looks just like the hunched-over aunties in their kuspuks, waiting for us back at fish camp.

  Dumpling hops off her three-wheeler and walks slowly toward three white clapboard houses sitting off by themselves: one with blue trim; one with a big, muscular dog in front; and one with a curtain that seems to be moving by itself every couple of seconds, behind broken glass. She tramps along the edge of the slough and up the bank. I follow, hoping she’s watching out for dogs. Village dogs are always charging out from behind outhouses or woodpiles when you least expect it. There was a funeral the night we got here. Three-year-old Willard Hunter wandered out into his family’s dog yard and got his face bitten off before anybody noticed he’d even slipped outside. Dogs and drowning are the two things Dumpling and Bunny are supposed to watch out for. I tighten the straps on my life jacket. Bunny is wearing one, too, but I notice Dumpling left hers back in the skiff.