Domestic Pleasures

Abstract

HOLY WATER Where did it come from? Did it course along the lead veins connecting colored glass, through the stones in the church walls to well up in the marble font? Had it surged from an underground river, or was it someone's tears? Following Nana out of Mass, I could not resist slipping both hands into the chilly water, letting them hover at the bottom like fish. Because I hadn't been baptized, Nana hurried me, fingers dripping, past Father David Gouveia, past the Virgin Mother serenely weeping, into the sun, where I licked the drops from my thumbs and shook the rest to the concrete. Then, with the pleasure of a child who insists on living within a single, happy day, I hopscotched behind Nana to her house, decorated myself with bright rosaries and PEACE stickers from Saint Labre Indian School. If she never smiled it hardly mattered- it was ceremony I loved, milky tea and sweetbread for breakfast; at ten o' clock, a mint bonbon. Every room unchanged since her husband's early death, each doily and statuette quiet. After nap, with an oversized crochet hook, I caught yarn into clumsy chain stitches, Nana solemnly fingering each loop like a bead in her rosary. I could not have seen beyond that Sunday, to the dry-eyed years ahead, when every pleasure dulled me. Teach me, I'd whisper to her memory, the grief that will save me.