The Cats Console Me

"Body of Christ," said the priest up at the altar and held up the Host.  

"What's that?" my sister asked, now five years old, a year younger than I.   

"A little wafer of special bread.  The priest blessed it.  Shhhh," said my mother.

"I have to go to the bathroom.  Really bad," said my other sister, who was four, barely.  

"Now?" my mom looked at her anxious face and saw real urgency.  They gathered themselves up and shuffled out of the pew and left me and my sister sitting on the hard bench.  


"Behave yourselves while I'm gone," my mom whispered and made the shush sign with her finger over her lips.  


"Peas be with you.  I thought he said peas be with you.  Get it?" I looked at my sister, and I snorted as I tried to keep from laughing out loud.  She made a face back at me and tugged at her dress, scratched her hair under her bobby-pinned circlet of lace.  I looked at the backs of all the adults in front of me, pew after pew, dark suit jackets and the edges of the women's skirts.  I thought about my snort and how funny it sounded.  I felt my laughter building up in my chest, and I snorted again.  My sister caught my giggling mood and we started to laugh inside and mess around with our feet on the padded short bench below us where we had knelt.  We were thrashing our ankles clad in anklet socks and our patent-leather Sunday shoes.  


We sisters in a pew in the back of the small church lost track of the mass being said, forgot about keeping up with the kneeling-standing-kneeling-sitting-standing-kneeling that the adults were doing around us.  We rustled, snorted, giggled, mimicked noises we heard.  Everything became hilarious so that we would not be left in boredom by the incomprehensible sermon, and so we could ignore the bloody Christ hanging from a cross beyond the altar, beyond the wan and smiling Mary who looked like she had never been a girl.  


My mother and my younger sister shuffled sideways down the pew until they reached us, my mom scowling at us.  The look said, "You are going to catch it when you get home," but I was just glad to have her with us again.  It was better that way.  I grinned at her.  


"Hi Mom!" I whispered loudly.  She concentrated on scowling some more, but I saw her suppress a smile.  


Finally, I saw the priest between some of the adult elbows in front of me, waving his hands in the cupped upright position that priests always held their hands in during Mass.  He was signaling the Sign of the Cross and the adults were moving around and gathering up their sweaters and purses and hats and beginning to genuflect and leave reverently.  We did that too, as we had been taught, but much more quickly, a token bend of the knee and a swatting motion of the hand around the four corners as we crossed ourselves.  I made my way outside with my family where I inhaled fresh air like it was the last chance to inhale deeply ever again, so grateful was I to take it.  The adults were clotting around in the yard with their voices rumbling and murmuring saying words in their tedious adult language.  I moved away from them, looked for other kids, but saw no friendly ones. 


I spotted the car and dashed for it, fiendishly happy to be moving quickly with my muscles bursting with energy.  I tagged the car, using it to slow myself down and then turned and waited for everyone to join me.  I saw my sister tugging on my mother's arm, as if she were a horse hauling a woman out of a tar pit, with all her might.  


"Come on, mom.  Can we go?  Please?"  My sister was desperate to get away from the slow adult movements and tedious conversations they never seemed to end.  "Pleeeeease?" she whined, an unparalleled nuisance and nag hanging onto the arm over her head.  


Finally, we were all in the Chevy station wagon and rolling away from the church, all of us giggling about how awful that had been.  "I thought we were going to die!" we yelled to each other, making puns and laughing hysterically about almost nothing.  


Suddenly, the car stopped.


"Roll down your window.  There's Father Juan.  He wants to say something.  See?"  my mom said, looking excited.  I rolled down the window and looked up into the Latin face of our parish priest, a Spaniard with an accent and charm that captivated my mother's attention every Sunday.  Because she liked him, I liked him, and because I liked him, I assumed he liked me.  I grinned at him winningly.


Father Juan gripped my arm in a fierce vise of strong fingers and smiled at me but said in a low angry voice, "I have no doubt you fully enjoyed the Mass today.  I am looking forward to your full attention next week."  The fingers released, and his voice wished us a happy Sunday.  My mom waved good-bye and said, "What did he say?  I didn't hear him."  


"I don't know," I said and went silent.  I still felt the pain of the grip.  I was pitched into a dark anger and felt intensely betrayed.  I had not understood his sarcasm and only felt the vicious grip, felt the shock of his anger hitting my stomach.  I hated him now, but there wasn't anything I could do.  He was the priest and we went to that church, and that was it.  


I thought about the fake little wafer Father Juan had held up earlier, pretending it was Christ, about the tepid smile on Mary's face, the way adults looked at each other and laughed together and then complained about each other later.  I didn't trust any of it.  


At home, we scattered to our rooms to play before our midday meal.  I went outside and found a sleeping pile of warm cats and buried my face in their musty fur.  I explained to them how much I hated church, hated the stupid priest and his dumb church and congratulated the cats on the wisdom of not going to church.  They purred and I was consoled by their simplicity and acceptance of my wailing sadness.  Then, healed by this, I went inside to change out of my constricting dress and stiff black shoes whose gloss was now gone.  

Innocent

It's Sunday.

My mother is handing me a small circle of lace and a couple of bobby pins.  I am meant to pin it to my hair in preparation for attending mass at our church.  She has already started a roast in the oven which is now cooking slowly, and its embedded garlic cloves are aromatic, devilishly tantalizing.

"Why do I have to wear this thing?"  I ask.  "It will just come off.  See?"  I try to pull it off, but her hand stops mine.  I think about how to get sick really fast so I can stay home from church.  Nothing comes to mind.  I am unhappy for a moment, but I smell the roast cooking.  I think that's what heaven must smell like.    

"It's a sign of reverence," says my mother as she helps me pin on the lace.  She's looking around for her rosary and makes sure I have mine.

My sisters are looking for kittens outside in the backyard even though they have their best Sunday clothes on.  I want to see those kittens, too, I think.  I'm not very sure what reverent really is.  I feel exasperated and impatient.  I am beginning to feel my stomach rumble with appetite.

"Boys don't have to.  Why do I?"  I complain.  Boys get to be altar boys; girls don't.  Boys get to ring the bells and do important work at the altar.  Girls get to do nothing at all.  I feel demoted to second class.

The answers are vague to me, unfathomable:  "Because.  I said so.  They were supposed to teach you that in catechism."

She looks at my lace circlet, pats my head, then turns around and calls my sisters in.  I hear them out in back, excited about the new litter of kittens hidden under a bush at the side of the house.  They seem like a litter, too:  Unruly, curious, not ready for going to mass. They are shooed back into the house, then out the front door and into the car.  My brother, an altar boy, is gone already on his bike to get ready for  mass at the church.  I want to ride a bike to church and wear pants.  I don't want to wear a token lace head covering and be reverent.  

We are off to mass finally.  I begin hoping that Father John will make it quick today so we'll be able to go home again and eat a big Sunday dinner and then play outside.  We have "fasted" the night before, eating fish sticks and salad.  Fish sticks!  The words themselves reek with grease and processed seafood.  I think of cat food and the kittens under the bush, hiding with their mother.  I wonder if they're also Catholic, like we are.

"Mom, are cats Catholic?  Why do we have to eat fish on Friday?  Can't we just give it to the cats?"  I was at an age where magic was just as strong as truth.  I want the kittens to go to heaven with me someday and hope they'll be reverent so they can make it.

"It's penance."

"What's penance?" Is penance a kind of magic, I wonder.  It doesn't seem so because of the way she is saying it.  It seems like punishment.  To get to heaven, I have to be reverent and get penance.  There are a lot of rules, mysteries, obstacles.

Little by little I am learning that not much makes very much sense. Getting to heaven is going to be complicated.  It seems like the rules are not really rules, the stories wild confabulations, the standards different for everyone.  The bible stories are wild and disconnected.  Pillars of salt, water turning into wine, walking on water.  God seems like a mean guy a lot of the time, but Jesus is interesting.  He has special powers and likes children.

But, I am stuck on this penance stuff.

"It means you have to give something up for your sins."  It sounds like subtraction, like a math problem.  Now the baffling idea of what my sins might be stops me again.  I don't think I have committed any sins.  I am pretty sure of it actually.  Sins are things like killing people, coveting your neighbor's wife, stealing, taking God's name in vain.

Seems like I have to add coveting to penance and reverence.   The list of big Catholic ideas that are strange and unwieldy for a girl like me is growing.

"What sins?"  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  I stole my sister's stuffed animal.  My sister didn't have a stuffed animal that I wanted.   I remembered the dark reaches of the small confessional where the priest pretending to be God needed to hear me say something, so I made up a story.   He tells me to say three Hail Marys and five Our Fathers.

I don't want to miss out on heaven.  I think about jumping around in white billowing clouds and perfection and gold everywhere.  I want the kittens to jump around up there with me and eat the fish sticks so I don't have to anymore.  I want the roast beef with garlic tucked in its sides and mashed potatoes and gravy and dessert.  

"Eat your fish sticks and then you can have dessert," my mom had said to me last Friday night, hoping bribery would quell my consternation and puzzlement.

"I have to eat fish sticks, but I can have dessert?"

"We give up meat on Fridays as a sign of penance.  It's a way of paying for the sins of the world."

The sins of the whole world?  I'm a kid!  It's an impossibility.  Perversely, it makes me want to go do something wrong, bad, mean, so I can feel my own actual guilt instead of taking on the guilt of all the other people in the world, who are mostly grown-ups anyway.

Mass is long and there is a lot of standing, sitting, standing and then kneeling.  I see my brother up there with three other boys doing the rituals at the right time.  He gets to ring the bells that signal when the host is raised up high and when the priest drinks wine and then blesses the little white communion disks.  Everyone shuffles up in a line for their turn to be given a disk on their tongue.  I get one, and it has no flavor.  I try to make it last a long time in my mouth, but it melts quickly away.  Body of Christ.  I try to think of Jesus, and he is tasteless, like Wonder Bread, and it's very disappointing.

Finally, we're free, set loose into the sunshine and I yank the floppy lace doily off my head and hand it over to my mom, who stuffs it into her purse while she's talking with the other moms and ladies of the church, out on the asphalt in the courtyard.  They're talking a lot, and it seems interminable, pointless.  

I just want food, to go home and eat the savory beef and be free to play and live outside and see little cats playing in the yard.  I want nothing to do with penance and guilt and coveting.  My spirit is filled with the sunshine and fresh blowing breeze, and it blows the feelings of demotion far away.  I am eight years old and my soul is all my own, unscathed by life's coming wounds, still years away.