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To protect my sister Mona and me from the pains—or, as they pronounced it, the “pens“—of life, my parents did their fighting in Shanghai dialect, which we didn’t understand; and when my father one day pitched a brass vase through the kitchen window, my mother told us he had done it by accident.

“By accident?” said Mona.

My mother chopped the foot off a mushroom.

“By accident?” said Mona. “By accident?”

Later, I tried to explain to her that she shouldn’t have persisted like that, but it was hopeless.

“What’s the matter with throwing things?” She shrugged. “He was mad.”

That was the difference between Mona and me: fighting was just fighting to her. If she worried about anything, it was only that she might turn out too short to become a ballerina, in which case she was going to be a piano player.

I, on the other hand, was going to be a martyr. I was in fifth grade then, and the hyperimaginative sort—the kind of girl who grows morbid in Catholic school, who longs to be chopped or frozen to death but then has nightmares about it from which she wakes up screaming and clutching a stuffed bear. It was not a bear that I clutched, though, but a string of three malachite beads that I had found in the marsh by the old aqueduct one day. Apparently once part of a necklace, they were each wonderfully striated and swirled, and slightly humped toward the center, like a jellyfish; so that if I squeezed one, it would slip smoothly away, with a grace that altogether enthralled and—on those dream-harrowed nights —soothed me, soothed me as nothing had before or has since. Not that I’ve lacked occasion for soothing: though it’s been four months since my mother died, there are still nights when sleep stands away from me, stiff as a well-paid sentry. But that is another story. Back then I had my malachite beads, and if I worried them long and patiently enough, I was sure to start feeling better, more awake, even a little special—imagining, as I liked to, that my nightmares were communications from the Almighty Himself, preparation for my painful destiny. Discussing them with Patty Creamer, who had also promised her life to God, I called them “almost visions”; and Patty, her mouth wadded with the three or four sticks of Doublemint she always seemed to have going at once, said, “I bet you’ll be doin’ miracleth by seventh grade.”

Miracles. Today Patty laughs to think she ever spent good time stewing on such matters, her attention having long turned to rugs, and artwork, and antique Japanese bureaus—things she believes in.

“A good bureau’s more than just a bureau,” she explained last time we had lunch. “It’s a hedge against life. I tell you, if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that cheap stuff’s just money out the
window. Nice stuff, on the other hand—now that you can always cash out, if life gets rough. That you can count on.”

In fifth grade, though, she counted on different things.

“You’ll be doing miracles too,” I told her, but she shook her shaggy head and looked doleful.

“Na’ me,” she chomped. “Buzzit’s okay. The kin’ things I like, prayers work okay on.”

“Like?”

“Like you ‘member that dreth I liked?”

She meant the yellow one, with the crisscross straps.

“Well gueth what.”

“Your mom got it for you.”

She smiled. “And I only jutht prayed for it for a week,” she said.

As for myself, though, I definitely wanted to be able to perform a wonder or two. Miracle-working! It was the carrot of carrots. It kept me doing my homework, taking the sacraments: it kept me mournfully on key in music hour, while my classmates hiccuped and squealed their carefree hearts away. Yet I couldn’t have said what I wanted such powers for, exactly. That is, I thought of them the way one might think of, say, an ornamental sword—as a kind of collectible, which also happened to be a means of defense.

But then Patty’s father walked out on her mother, and for the first time, there was a miracle I wanted to do. I wanted it so much I could see it: Mr. Creamer made into a spitball. Mr. Creamer shot through a straw into the sky. Mr. Creamer unrolled and replumped, plop back on Patty’s doorstep. I would’ve cleaned out his mind and given him a shave en route. I would’ve given him a box of peanut fudge, tied up with a ribbon, to present to Patty with a kiss.

But instead all I could do was try to tell her he’d comeback.

“He will not, he will not!” she sobbed. “He went on a boat to Rio Deniro. To Rio Deniro!”

I tried to offer her a stick of gum, but she wouldn’t take it.

“He said he would rather look at water than at my mom’s fat face. He said he would rather look at water than at me.” Now she was really wailing, and holding her ribs so tightly that she almost seemed to be hurting herself—so tightly that just looking at her arms wound around her like snakes made my heart feel squeezed.

I patted her on the arm. A one-winged pigeon waddled by.

“He said I wasn’t even his kid, he said I came from Uncle Johnny. He said I was garbage, just like my mom and Uncle Johnny. He said I wasn’t even his kid, he said I wasn’t his Patty, he said I came from Uncle Johnny!”

“From your Uncle Johnny?” I said stupidly.

“From Uncle Johnny,” she cried. “From Uncle Johnny!”

“He said that?” I said. Then, wanting to go on, to say something, I said. “Oh Patty, don’t cry.”

She kept crying.

I tried again. “Oh Patty, don’t cry,” I said. Then I said, “Your dad was a jerk anyway.”

The pigeon produced a large runny dropping.

It was a good twenty minutes before Patty was calm enough for me just to run to the girls’ room to get her some toilet paper; and by the time I came back she was sobbing again, saying “to Rio Deniro, to Rio Deniro” over and over again, as though the words had stuck in her and couldn’t be gotten out. As we had missed the regular bus home and the late bus, too, I had to leave her a second time to go call my mother, who was mad only until she heard what had happened. Then she came and picked us up, and bought us each a Fudgsicle.

*  *  *  *  *

Some days later, Patty and I started a program to work on getting her father home. It was a serious business. We said extra prayers, and lit votive candles. I tied my malachite beads to my uniform belt, fondling them as though they were a rosary, and I a nun. We even took to walking about the school halls with our hands folded—a sight so ludicrous that our wheeze of a principal personally took us aside one day.

“I must tell you,” she said, using her nose as a speaking tube, “that there is really no need for such peee-ity.”

But we persisted, promising to marry God and praying to every saint we could think of. We gave up gum, then gum and Slim Jims both, then gum and Slim Jims and ice cream—and when even that didn’t work, we started on more innovative things. The first was looking at flowers. We held our hands beside our eyes like blinders as we hurried by the violets by the flagpole, the window box full of tulips outside the nurse’s office. Next it was looking at boys: Patty gave up angel-eyed Jamie Halloran and I, gymnastic Anthony Rossi. It was hard, but in the end our efforts paid off. Mr. Creamer came back a month later, and though he brought with him nothing but dysentery, he was at least too sick to have all that much to say.

Then, in the course of a fight with my father, my mother somehow fell out of their bedroom window.

*  *  *  *  *

Recently—thinking a mountain vacation might cheer me—I sublet my apartment to a handsome but somber newlywed couple, who turned out to be every bit as responsible as I’d hoped. They cleaned out even the eggshell chips I’d sprinkled around the base of my plants as fertilizer, leaving behind only a shiny silverplate cake server and a list of their hopes and goals for the summer. The list, tacked precariously to the back of the kitchen door, began with a fervent appeal to God to help them get their wedding thank-yous written in three weeks or less. (You could see they had originally written “two weeks” but scratched it out—no miracles being demanded here.) It went on:

Please help us, Almighty Father in Heaven Above, to get Ann a teaching job within a half-hour drive of here in a nice neighborhood.

Please help us, Almighty Father in Heaven Above, to get John a job doing anything where he won’t strain his back and that is within a half-hour drive of here.

Plese help us, Almighty Father in Heaven Above, to get us a car.

Please help us, A.F. in H.A., to learn French.

Please help us, A.F. in H.A., to find seven dinner recipes that cost less than 60 cents a serving and can be made in a half-hour. And that don’t have tomatoes, since You in Your Heavenly Wisdom made John allergic.

Please help us, A.F. in H.A., to avoid books in this apartment such as You in Your Heavenly Wisdom allowed John, for Your Heavenly Reasons, to find three nights ago (June 2nd).

Et cetera. In the left-hand margin they kept score of how they had fared with their requests, and it was heartening to see that nearly all of them were marked “Yes! Praise the Lord” (sometimes shortened to “PTL”), with the sole exception of learning French, which was mysteriously marked “No! PTL to the Highest.”

That note touched me. Strange and familiar both, it seemed like it had been written by some cousin of mine—some cousin who had stayed home to grow up, say, while I went abroad and learned what I had to, though the learning was painful. This, of course, is just a manner of speaking. In fact, I did my growing up at home, like anybody else.

But the learning was painful. I never knew exactly how it happened that my mother went hurtling through the air that night years ago, only that the wind had been chopping at the house, and that the argument had started about the state of the roof. Someone had been up to fix it the year before, but it wasn’t a roofer, it was some man my father had insisted could do just as good a job for a quarter of the price. And maybe he could have, had he not somehow managed to step through a knot in the wood under the shingles and break his uninsured ankle. Now the shingles were coming loose again, and the attic insulation was mildewing besides, and my father was wanting to sell the house altogether, which he said my mother had wanted to buy so she could send pictures of it home to her family in China.

“The Americans have a saying,” he said. “They saying, ‘You have to keep up with Jones family.’ I’m saying if Jones family in Shanghai, you can send any picture you want, an-y picture. Go take picture of those rich guys’ house. You want to act like rich guys, right? Go take picture of those rich guys’ house.”

At that point my mother sent Mona and me to wash up, and started speaking Shanghaiese. They argued for some time in the kitchen while we listened from the top of the stairs, our faces wedged between the bumpy Spanish scrolls of the wrought iron railing. First my mother ranted, then my father, then they both ranted at once until finally there was a thump, followed by a long quiet.

“Do you think they’re kissing now?” said Mona. “I bet they’re kissing, like this.” She pursed her lips like a fish and was about to put them to the railing when we heard my mother locking the back door. We hightailed it into bed; my parents creaked up the stairs. Everything at that point seemed fine. Once in their bedroom, though, they started up again, first softly, then louder and louder, until my mother turned on a radio to try to disguise the noise. A door slammed; they began shouting at one another; another door slammed; a shoe or something banged the wall behind Mona’s bed.

“How’re we supposed to sleep?” said Mona, sitting up.

There was another thud, more yelling in Shanghaiese, and then my mother’s voice pierced the wall, in English. “So what you want I should do? Go to work like Theresa Lee?”

My father rumbled something back.

“You think you’re big shot because you have job, right? You’re big shot, but you never get promotion, you never get raise. All I do is spend money, right? So what do you do you tell me. So what do you do!”

Something hit the floor so hard that our room shook.

“So kill me,” screamed my mother. “You know what you are? You are failure. Failurel You are failure!”

Then there was a sudden, terrific, bursting crash—and after it, as if on a bungled cue, the serene blare of an acappella soprano picking her way down a scale.

By the time Mona and I knew to look out the window, a neighbor’s pet beagle was already on the scene, sniffing and barking at my mother’s body, his tail crazy with excitement. Then he was barking at my stunned and trembling father, at the shrieking ambulance, the police, at crying Mona in her bunny-footed pajamas, and at me, barefoot in the cold grass, squeezing her shoulder with one hand and clutching my malachite beads with the other.

My mother wasn’t dead, only unconscious—the paramedics figured that out right away—but there was blood everywhere, and though they were reassuring about her head wounds as they strapped her to the stretcher, commenting also on how small she was, how delicate, how light, my father kept saying, “I killed her, I killed her” as the ambulance screeched and screeched headlong, forever, to the hospital. I was afraid to touch her and glad of the metal rail between us, even though its sturdiness made her seem even frailer than she was. I wished she was bigger, somehow, and noticed, with a pang, that the new red slippers we had given her for Mother’s Day had been lost somewhere along the way. How much she seemed to be leaving behind as we careened along—still not there—Mona and Dad and the medic and I taking up the whole ambulance, all the room, so there was no room for anything else; no room even for my mother’s real self, the one who should have been pinching the color back to my father’s grey face, the one who should have been calming Mona’s cowlick—the one who should have been bending over us, to help us to be strong, to help us get through, even as we bent over her.

Then suddenly we were there, the glowing square of the emergency room entrance opening like the gates of heaven; and immediately the talk of miracles began. Alive, a miracle. No bones broken, a miracle. A miracle that the hemlocks cushioned her fall, a miracle that they hadn’t been trimmed in a year and a half. It was a miracle that all that blood, the blood that had seemed that night to be everywhere, was from one shard of glass, a single shard, can you imagine, and as for the gash in her head, the scar would be covered by hair. The next day, my mother cheerfully described just how she would part it so that nothing would show at all.

“You’re a lucky duck-duck,” agreed Mona, helping herself, with a little pirouette, to the cherry atop my mother’s chocolate pudding.

That wasn’t enough for me, though. I was relieved, yes, but what I wanted by then was a real miracle, not for her simply to have survived, but for the whole thing never to have happened—for my mother’s head never to have had to be shaved and bandaged like that, for her high, proud forehead never to have been swollen down over her eyes, for her face and neck and hands never to have been painted so many shades of blue-black, and violet, and chartreuse. I still want those things—for my parents not to have had to live with this affair like a prickle bush between them, for my father to have been able to look my mother in her swollen eyes and curse the madman, the monster that could have dared do this to the woman he loved. I wanted to be able to touch my mother without shuddering, to be able to console my father, to be able to get that crash out of my head, the sound of that soprano—so many things that I didn’t know how to pray for them, that I wouldn’t have known where to start even if I had the power to work miracles, right there, right then.

*  *  *  *  *

A week later, when my mother was home, and her head beginning to bristle with new hairs, I lost my malachite deads. I had been carrying them in a white cloth pouch that Patty had given me, and was swinging the pouch on my pinky on my way home from school, when I swung just a bit too hard, and it went sailing in a long arc through the air, whooshing like a perfectly thrown basketball through one of the holes of a nearby sewer. There was no chance of fishing it out. I looked and looked, crouching on the sticky pavement until the asphalt had crazed the skin of my hands and knees, but all I could discern was an evil-smelling murk, glassy and smug and impenetrable.

My loss didn’t quite hit me until I was home, but then it produced an agony all out of proportion to my string of pretty beads. I hadn’t cried at all during my mother’s accident, but now I was crying all afternoon, all through dinner, and then after dinner too, crying past the point where I knew what I was crying for, wishing dimly that I had my beads to hold, wishing dimly that I could pray, but refusing, refusing. I didn’t know why, until I finally fell into an exhausted sleep on the couch where my parents left me for the night—glad, no doubt, that one of the more tedious of my childhood crises seemed to be finally winding off the reel of life, onto the reel of memory. They covered me, and somehow grew a pillow under my head, and, with uncharacteristic disregard for the living room rug, left some milk and pecan sandies on the coffee table, in case I woke up hungry. Their thoughtfulness was prescient. I did wake up in the early part of the night; and it was then, amid the unfamiliar sounds and shadows of the living room, that I had what I was sure was a true vision.

Even now what I saw retains an odd clarity: the requisite strange light flooding the room, first orange, and then a bright yellow-green, then a crackling bright burst like a Roman candle
going off near the piano. There was a distinct smell of coffee,
and a long silence. The room seemed to be getting colder. Nothing. A creak; the light starting to wane, then waxing again, brilliant pink now. Still nothing. Then, as the pink started to go a little purple, a perfectly normal middle-aged man’s voice, speaking something very like pig Latin, told me quietly not to despair, not to despair, my beads would be returned to me.

That was all. I sat a moment in the dark, then turned on the light, gobbled down the cookies—and in a happy flash understood that I was so good, really, so near to being a saint that my malachite beads would come back through the town water system. All I had to do was turn on all the faucets in the house, which I did, one by one, stealing quietly into the bathroom and kitchen and basement. The old spigot by the washing machine was too gunked up to be coaxed very far open, but that didn’t matter. The water didn’t have to be full blast. I understood that. Then I gathered together my pillow and blanket and trundled up to my bed to sleep.

By the time I woke up in the morning, I knew that my beads hadn’t shown up; but when I knew it for certain, I was still disappointed; and as if that weren’t enough, I had to face my parents and sister, who were all abuzz with the mystery of the faucets. Not knowing what else to do, I, like a puddlebrain, told them the truth. The results were predictably painful.

“Callie had a vision,” Mona told everyone at the bus stop. “A vision with lights, and sinks in it!”

Sinks, visions. I got it all day, from my parents, from my classmates, even some sixth and seventh graders. Someone drew a cartoon of me with a halo over my head in one of the girls’ room stalls; Anthony Rossi made gurgling noises as he walked on his hands at recess. Only Patty tried not to laugh, though even she was something less than unalloyed understanding.

“I don’ think miracles are thupposed to happen in “thewers,” she said.

Such was the end of my saintly ambitions. It wasn’t the end of all holiness; the ideas of purity and goodness still tippled my brain, and over the years I came slowly to grasp of what grit true faith was made. Last night, though, when my father called to say that he couldn’t go on living in our old house, that he was going to move to a smaller place, another place, maybe a condo—he didn’t know how, or where—I found myself still wistful for the time religion seemed all I wanted it to be. Back then the world was a place that could be set right. One had only to direct the hand of the Almighty and say, just here, Lord, we hurt here—and here, and here, and here.