“You marry Jesus,” she said, shocked at my stupidity. “You wear a wedding dress and everything.”
“But you don’t get to kiss anybody,” I said.
“You get to be Jesus’s bride,” she said. Her voice had turned cold. “That’s better than kissing anything.”
“Okay,” I said, suddenly bored and sleepy.
“Boys smell bad. Like dirty socks,” she said. “Jesus is clean and pure.”
When I didn’t answer her she rolled away from me. But what could I say? I wanted to skip the nun part and go straight to saint; that was a fact. Along the way I might want to kiss a boy, a real boy, smelly or not.
“You’d be a good nun,” I said finally.
She didn’t answer but somehow I knew she wasn’t asleep.
“Really,” I said. “You would be a great nun.”
She rolled over again, toward me so that we were face-to-face. When she talked, I could smell the pepperoni from the pizza we’d had for dinner on her breath.
“I might be an airline stewardess instead,” she whispered. “Then I would marry a pilot and live in Chicago.”
I mumbled something. My toes ached in a way that I liked.
“You know Joseph Copertino?” Antoinetta said. Clearly, she had not been dancing ballet all day or she would just be quiet and go to sleep.
“Is he from church?” I asked her.
Antoinetta laughed. “No, silly. He’s the patron saint of air travel. Ever since he was a kid, he had these ecstasies. Yelling, beating, pinching, burning, piercing with needles—none of this would bring him out of them. But he would return to the world when he heard the voice of his boss.” She yawned. “He would often levitate and float, so he became the patron saint of air travel.” She rolled over. “Mmmmm,” she said. “Hmhmhmhm.”
I guessed those were falling asleep noises. But now I was wide awake. Floating! Levitating! I lay there, concentrating really hard on getting my body to lift up from the bed. But I just stayed there, earthbound, until I finally gave up and went to sleep.
The next day, Cody was going to Henrietta Plotz’s birthday pool party at her house. She had a pizza shaped like a dinosaur and a karaoke machine. That was all fine for Cody, but why I had to go was beyond me. I didn’t even care that they had an indoor pool.
“Bianca got to ask one person her age and she picked you,” my mother explained, talking like this was a good thing for me.
Henrietta’s sister Bianca was so dull and so unliked that the fact that she had picked me made me certain that the L on my forehead was getting bigger every day.
“Besides,” my mother said, “saints are into sacrifice, aren’t they? You should feel grateful for the opportunity to give up an afternoon this way.”
“Ha-ha,” I said. But she had a point.
That’s how I ended up at a six-year-old’s party, sitting on the side of the pool with Bianca Plotz looking at the younger kids splashing around. I could see my mother, sitting with the other mothers, in her pants with the drawstring waist and her toenails painted baby blue and only the top of her black bathing suit. She was telling them how my father did not want her to take us away so far for so long.
“He’s being a jerk,” she said.
Cody floated on his back. It was all he could do. Everyone else graduated in swimming class, from Pike to Eel to Minnow, and Cody remained behind, unable to put his face in the water, to blow bubbles, or to kick his feet and move his arms together in a way that would move him forward. He stayed in Pike. He floated.
Cody always wanted to get me on his side about the divorce, which meant that he wanted me to blame Dad for everything. Just that morning he said, “Would you feel really horrible if Ava Pomme died?” Cody always said Ava Pomme like they were two parts of one word: powder puff, coffee cake, Ava Pomme.
“Of course I’d feel bad!” I said. “And so would you.”
“But if she died,” he said, “then Dad would come home.”
As dumb as that was, even I considered the possibility.
“I don’t like her,” Cody whispered, all sad and guilty.
He made a list of all the things he didn’t like about her and decided to recite it to me right then, for about the millionth time. This was a trick he’d picked up from our mother, who had picked it up from her therapist.
“Her tarts,” he told me.
“Her tarts,” I reminded him, “are famous.”
“I only like Pop-Tarts,” Cody said. Then he imitated Ava Pomme’s horrified voice: “Surely your mother doesn’t give you those?”
“Pop-Tarts,” I said, jumping to Ava’s defense, “are totally revolting.”
“Her clothes,” Cody continued. “They’re black. All of them.”
I sighed. “Of course they’re black. That’s sophisticated.” Our mother’s wardrobe of various types of khaki trousers—capri, flat front, side zipper, loose fit—floated through my mind.
“The noisy elevator that goes to her apartment,” he said.