Kennedy's Goodbye, page 8
April 1977
So I did what I knew to do—my best. I memorized and memorized and memorized, reciting every answer to Baby Crissy, for whom I made a red construction paper miter, blasphemy, even though I knew it was a sin I’d have to confess somehow. I was prepared to be perfect. Maybe the bishop would hit me softly, and maybe Dad would be proud.
I prayed a gazillion Hail Marys even though She wasn’t a part of the God triangle, the Trinity, Jesus-hoping that She would help me anyway.
“Gina will be your sponsor. She’s your only sister, and her feelings will be hurt if you don’t ask her. So ask her,” Lemonsucker said.
A sponsor was the person you chose to guide you on earth for the rest of your life, but not in a real way—just in the religious, spiritual way. I wasn’t sure that Gina was a good choice on account of her sin baby and all. But I did as I was told, hell already lurking as it was.
“And I suppose I’ll pick her name as my confirmation name?” I said.
I took Mom’s God-silence as a yes.
And so it was: Mary Kennedy Regina.
A Blessed Mother sandwich.
I wore a pretty peach-colored dress with long angel sleeves beneath my white robe, and a red beanie held on by two bobby pins distributed by the frosted teacher.
“It would be an ‘abomination’ if your headwear fell,” she said, attempting air quotes while dispensing the pins.
“Your sleeves are never going to fit under your robe, and your dress should be white like mine,” Clarissa said, “for your re-Baptism in Christ.”
“They’re angel sleeves,” I said, “like our cheer team, the Angels. Are you nervous?”
“Huh? About what?”
Where is Clarissa’s soul? Isn’t she nervous about the bishop and the questions? Isn’t she worried about getting the answers wrong in front of God and Father and Miss Kinstler and Mom and Dad and Gina and Wayne and Sin Baby and Bea and Dooley, a superhero? Isn’t she afraid of eternal damnation like I am? Hell in a hand basket?
“You’re so gauche, Kennedy,” Clarissa said.
Turn the other cheek…
I practically held my breath throughout the entire confirmation ceremony, but the bishop did not even ask any questions like Father and Miss Kinstler threatened, but rather he spoke to us in a soft, gentle voice about being soldiers in Christ’s war. I wasn’t sure where the war was, but the bishop talked all about accepting God into our lives and showing Him that we are His warriors by being destroyers of Satan with our greatest weapon, our gift from God—love.
Love?
I was shocked that this young, red-headed man spoke so kindly to us. He didn’t smack anyone across the face, but rather, placed his open palm along our cheeks in a protective way, which I found both comforting and creepy all at the same time. But it was much better than being hit or going to hell.
I was pretty mad at everyone for lying to us about what the bishop was going to do, but it seemed to me that that was the way that adults told their truths—by lying.
I had a party and a cake trimmed in red for the Holy Spirit, with a large white dove drawn on it made out of gazillions of mini frosting rosettes.
Dad and Lemonsucker gave me a birthstone ring, representing my new birth, or re-Baptism in Christ, and Gina gave me a cross pendant. Dooley, Bea, and Roger chipped in together and gave me a card with twenty-five dollars cash in it, which was enough money to buy at least four, maybe five, record albums.
I prayed for the feeling of being filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit, but mostly, I became filled exponentially with the weird feeling I got from looking at Marcus’s muscles. So I stuck with praying the rosary a gazillion times.
May 1977
Despite my decades of prayer, the fiery feeling was everywhere—in my Andy Gibb poster, in Joe Perry’s album covers, in The Fonz and his motorcycle, even as I stood outside of Clarissa’s boy huddle.
It was lust.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
It was boy-huddle envy.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, and maybe even their boy-huddle goods.
I’d be filled with fire, alright, the eternal flame of Mom-God hell somewhere below my navel. Forever.
When May brought lilacs, I stood before the frosted teacher with a bunch.
“What am I supposed to do with those?” she asked.
“Put them in a vase with water and give thanks and praise to the Blessed Mother even though She’s not the fiery Holy Spirit,” I said, but she had no appreciation for my explanation, and threatened me with detention if I continued to act with such insubordination.
The frosted teacher had taught me the art of “shun-ing.”
I dodged detention by gaining possession of a vase from the principal’s office.
For our birthday, Dad and I had our standard lasagna and lemon cake, and Dad and I shared an entire bottle of beer.
“Cheers to the teen years!” Dad said.
I was thirteen and Dad was fifty-one and it sure seemed as if Dad wanted to be my friend too.
I saved a little bit of beer and drank it in my room after Lemonsucker and Dad went to bed.
“Cheers!” I said to Baby Crissy.
She was two, and besides Rog, she was the best friend anyone could ever ask for, even Clarissa, and thus far, even Dad.
“Cheers!” I said to the Blessed Mother.
I thanked Her for Dad and our forming friendship, and I asked Her for help finding the love weapon of which the bishop spoke so softly.
I prayed that hope, even Jesus-hope, wasn’t Jesus-dead after all.
CHAPTER 11
Seasons in the Sun
August 1977
“I told you it was going to do that,” Lemonsucker said to Dad, when our luxury screened-in porch collapsed from a minor wind. Dad responded with Lemonsucker’s two-Mississippi silence; he answered her like God.
The collapsed tent and Mom’s sour attitude couldn’t stop me and Dad and our forging friendship.
I filled in the muddy holes where the stakes once held the tent in place and watched Dad drag the dirty walls to the garbage can.
“We still have books, Dad,” I said, “we can always read inside.”
We continued to go to the library and watched TV together all summer, even Lemonsucker. We watched Happy Days and The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, 60 Minutes, and All in the Family, and it felt like family. A trinity.
On Fridays, Dad pushed Lemonsucker through the grocery store to get us home in time for The ABC Friday Night Movie. He’d give me a list of things to get while she shopped, “to expedite the misery, Schnapps,” he said, so that we were home in time for the movie.
Dad discovered mill shopping that summer, and on Saturdays, we traveled to Troy to shop. The mills were huge abandoned warehouses where they sold brand-new stuff with imperfections for a cheaper price. Dad loved going to the mills because finding bargains and imperfections were hobbies for him.
Just like when he found imperfections on my report cards.
Dad was like God—he expected perfection across the board.
“Only one-hundreds are one-hundreds, Schnapps. Grades in the nineties are grades in the nineties,” he’d say.
He had me there. Numbers were numbers. Math was math.
Math is abounding! God is abounding!
Old Lemonsucker just stood in the mills with her arms crossed, waiting for Dad to be done.
Not me. I looked at all of the bargains just like Dad, forgiving their imperfections. I wandered off, admiring the huge open warehouse space and thought about what it might be like to live in such a space, with windows from the floor to the part that should have been a ceiling, but it wasn’t. Steel continued into an A frame, beams criss-crossed like tic-tac-toe boards.
I thought about what it would be like to have my own apartment like Bob and Emily Hartley from The Bob Newhart Show, Baby Crissy perched in a rocking chair that I painted just for her.
I looked at the bedding and thought about what it would feel like to have a person next to me in my bed, like Gina and Dooley had. Someone to kiss like Rog and Valerie had.
What if I cooked my own supper, called up friends, and invited them to my vaulted-warehouse-Bob-and-Emily-Hartley apartment? I would drink Aunt Aileen’s wine from pretty glasses with long stems, and maybe even smoke cigarettes if I felt like it.
I would invite all the people who sang their feelings like Karen Carpenter and Gilbert O’Sullivan, and maybe even Roger could fly home and bring Valerie. I’d invite Aunt Aileen, and even Clarissa, if it all wasn’t too gauche for her.
What if Baby Crissy and I live happily ever after? The end?
And then a new show launched on TV, The Love Boat. My friend Dad was particularly excited as he had read the book, The Love Boats.
It was the greatest show. All of these strangers went on a cruise ship and ended up falling in love.
Love?
Dad commented on all of the pretty girls, and I stared at all of their kisses, especially the kiss between Kristy McNichol and Scott Baio, wondering what it was like to be in love. To be kissed.
Lemonsucker said that The Love Boat was unrealistic and kitschy.
Clarissa thought that it was gauche and had better things to do on a Saturday night.
But me and Dad? We didn’t care what anyone thought.
That season—of books and TV and mills and a boat just for love—was like living inside somewhere or someone else, even if for just a little while.
It felt too good to be true.
What do I always tell you, Schnapps?
October 1977
Eighth grade was not much of a grade at all, but more like an island TV show hosted by a Hawaiian nun—specifically, the swaying sister, Sister Mary Evangeline.
We had no structure, no subjects, no time slots. Instead, Sister Mary Evangeline spoke before us, all the while her hips moving in a hula, encouraging us to join alongside her in Hawaiian dance.
“Join me! Join me! Love God through your body, let Him flow through you like a trade wind,” Sister said, as her hips swayed in a most unnatural way for a nun in a habit.
She spoke about Pearl Harbor and how it affected her people. The Law of the Splintered Paddle was about leadership, hierarchy, and human rights, Sister said.
We learned about the whaling industry and endangered species, and the threat to the Hawaiian monk seal. Sister told us about cultivating crops and exporting goods like coffee, cocoa, pineapple, sugarcane, and honey.
We learned about archipelagos and volcanoes and mountains, and the different kinds of flowers indigenous to Hawaii, and which island they represented.
Mornings, after the Pledge of Allegiance from the loudspeaker, we recited the motto of Hawaii instead of prayers.
“The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” And then we said, “Aloha.”
Aloha means hello, welcome, best wishes, goodbye, or even love.
Love?
“Aloha is the greatest prayer of all, and when said with love, could mean everything to someone someday,” Sister said. “All the religion you need is within your aloha, my little flowers. Besides, Jesus has only two commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sister fluttered her hands around her heart, like the wings of a bird.
Blasphemy.
These two Jesus commandments seemed pretty easy in comparison to the rest of Catholicism, but I was pretty new to this whole love thing.
Sister Mary Evangeline told us about her life growing up in Hawaii—her brothers and sisters and mother and father, and how much she missed them. She described her long black hair, and how she still remembered the day that they cut it off when she became a nun.
Whenever Sister spoke about her life or family back in her homeland, she cried.
I hated seeing the swaying sister cry, and tried to talk to Clarissa about it, but she didn’t have quite the same interpretation as I.
“Sister Mary Evangeline is nuts,” Clarissa said.
So I did as Sister encouraged. I stood next to her. Everyone stared as she taught me to hula.
One, two, how do you do? The Angels!
Sister moved her feet as if they were on satin pillows, what was left of her long jet black hair peeking through the tight white band that surrounded her face like a picture frame. Her fingers fluttered like butterflies and her eyes closed, as if she had been taken away to another place. Her hips swayed, making her black below-the-knee habit ripple. This was how she told me to move, as if I’d been lifted away by a Hawaiian breeze, or taken on the wings of God Himself in the form of a white dove. In other words, the Holy Spirit.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
I wondered why Sister was allowed to move in such a way—eyes closed and hips swaying.
“Gently move your feet as if you are tiptoeing and sinking into warm Hawaiian sand,” she said.
Sister Mary Evangeline showed me how to move my feet, my hands, my hips.
“Sway! Sway!”
“Yes, Sister Mary Evangeline. Thank you.”
Practice makes perfect, people!
I practiced and practiced and practiced, Baby Crissy an affirming audience.
Three, four, guess who’s gonna score! The Angels!
Eventually, some of the fake Marcia Bradys joined in, but I was the only one who danced Sister’s special hula—“I Am Hawaii”—thus earning Sister’s nickname for me: Hawaii.
Clarissa had the partridge in the pear tree; I had the state of Hawaii.
Maybe being a state would make Dad proud.
December 1977
In December, Sister brought in a fake palm tree and strung Christmas lights around the trunk.
Throughout Advent, the season awaiting the arrival of Jesus at Christmas, as Sister spoke, we made paper birds called origami cranes. Her goal was to make one-thousand cranes for our lighted palm tree, because she believed that if one-thousand cranes were folded and a wish was made, then that wish would come true.
Sister’s wish? To travel back to the homeland to see her family.
Every time someone finished folding a crane, Sister strung it and hung it on the tree. Each time she hung, we recited, “O flock of heavenly cranes, cover my child with your wings.”
Sister seemed to be practicing some kind of voodoo, but I liked it. “Anything that goes to or leaves Hawaii does so on wind, waves, or wings,” Sister said, and cried.
Over Christmas break, I shuffled back and forth between WPTR and WTRY, listening to each radio station’s year-end countdowns and trying to win albums. Finally, I won an album by Debby Boone. Turned out she was all lit up and filled with a whole bunch of Jesus-hope.
I played Debby Boone’s Bea-screech song over and over like a prayer, Jesus-hoping that God would light up Sister’s life and send her home to Hawaii.
Hail Mary, full of grace, by wind, waves, or wings. Amen.
January 1978
When we returned from Christmas break, there was no swaying sister.
“Where’s Sister?” I asked no one in particular.
“Hawaii,” I heard someone say.
My heart smiled. It was a Christmas miracle. Sister’s wish had come true. By wind, waves, or wings, she had traveled home. Sister’s cranes worked. Maybe my Debby Boone prayers and rosaries helped.
It can’t hurt, Boss…
Whatever it was, I was so happy for Sister that her wish had come true.
O flock of heavenly cranes, cover my child with your wings. Thank you, Blessed Mother.
“Sister’s crane wish worked!” I said to Clarissa.
Clarissa rolled her eyes.
“What the hell are you talking about now, Kennedy? Sister’s mother died, that’s why she’s in Hawaii. Don’t you know anything?”
No. Over and over again, no.
I’d never had my heart soar like wings and sink like waves so suddenly. It had been too good to be true.
What do I always tell you, Schnapps?
How could God have been so mean as to have allowed Sister’s crane wish to come true and then kill her mother? Or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter. It made no sense.
I stared at Baby Crissy, willing her alive.
“Be careful what you wish for,” I whispered.
“Shut up, Debby Boone!” I yelled.
I am Hawaii and I can’t fix Sister.
Do you need an ambulance, Boss?
When Sister returned from Hawaii, I had no idea what to do for her. I wanted to say or do something to make her feel better. I was at a loss for words, so I did what I thought that Sister might like.
I stood before her.
“Aloha,” I offered.
Sister cried and hugged me.
No one had ever hugged me before. Ever.
“Hawaii! You’ve heard me! Aloha!”
Sister cried some more.
She hugged me.
“Alcatraz! Stop making Sister cry!” Clarissa said.
“They’re happy tears, I think. Right, Sister?”
But all Sister did was cry. Exponentially.
Alcatraz?
Sister and I danced her pain away; at least that’s what she called it.
Boys smiled at me. The better I got at the hula, the more Sister said to let the songs flow through me. The more those songs flowed through me, the more the boys smiled.
“Why Alcatraz?” I asked Clarissa.
“Because you’re Hawaii, dummy, a stupid island all by yourself having to do Sister’s stupid hula dance,” said Clarissa.
Stand back, Boss, the creases are sharp…
I let the flow flow.
April 1978
Finally, I Jesus-hoped, I made Dad proud.
“Look, Dad, all one-hundreds!” I said of my third report card of the year.
Dad scanned.
“See?” Dad said. “I told you that you could be perfect.”
I hadn’t really earned the grades the old-fashioned way, but I could have. It wasn’t my fault that Sister wrote in a whole bunch of one-hundreds in her grade book for me every time I practiced being Hawaii! But I guess when you’re Hawaii, you’re as close to perfect as you can get. Plus, if it made Dad proud, it was alright with me.
