“Mr. White?” I said into the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you. This is Taylor Alta.” After Carla left for breakfast, thoughts piled up in my bedroom: She might kill herself, what if she tells, and why can’t I talk her out of it?
“Yes, Taylor. What can I do for you?” The headmaster’s voice was edges.
“A student last night talked a lot about committing suicide.” Telling Carla’s thoughts to the headmaster was telling secrets, a sin to be confessed.
“And you’re concerned for her safety and/or the safety of others?” His words were rehearsed. Maybe he was reading that pamphlet.
“Yes, she could hurt herself.”
“You’re sure. What you’re saying is very big, and we can’t take anything lightly.”
“I know.”
“Everyone is very shaken. Are you okay, Taylor?”
“Not really. But I’m more concerned about Carla.”
“Carla Spalding?”
“Yes, she’s coming back to my apartment after breakfast.” Meeting me at my place sounded dirty. How many Hail Marys would I say? How much would she say?
“I see,” he said. “We’ll have to act quickly. When she leaves your apartment again, call the school nurse who will pick her up outside the dorm, take her to Wilmington for a psychiatric evaluation.” Everything was happening fast. Carla would be pissed. A Hail Mary for wanting her neck, another for kissing her neck. A novena for saving myself.
“And after that?”
“Maybe hospitalization. Maybe not. You’re doing the right thing, Taylor. One suicide is enough,” he said.
“Too much,” I said.
“Indeed.” Mr. White hung up.
The receiver weighed forty pounds and landed in the cradle with a bang, like the little window on the confessional slamming shut.
Years ago I made my last confession. At St. Barnabas the confessional always smelled like bad breath. Opening the curtain gave enough light on dark wood and velvet to lead me to the kneeler.
After enough time for me to think of what to say, the window to Father Mortimer opened so fast and so loud I forgot. The shadows through the window showed him crossing himself. The ritual always kicked in.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” he said.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have not been to confession in eight months,” I said, even though it had been more.
It was ninth grade, and most of the kids were Episcopalians, and didn’t have to confess a thing. It was my mother who packed us into the VW van and marched us into the back pew on Saturday afternoons for confession. It was ninth grade, and most of the kids were pushing off the walls of the gym toward the dance floor during Saturday night dances and making out in the bushes outside. Many kids smoked pot, and I made up excuses why I couldn’t, like my dad would kill me, or my mom would know, or I had to go to church in the morning. None of the excuses sounded good enough for ninth grade.
Sometimes during the converted-gym dances with disco balls blinking, a few girls were left sitting. There was Mary Maguire, a field hockey player whose thick auburn hair defied the rubber bands she tried to tame it with. Mary cracked jokes in math class, winking at me when the whiskey-breath teacher tried to get us to believe in imaginary numbers.
could not possibly be real, and recognizing something about adults gave us a secret, something separate from ninth grade, something ours.
One Saturday night Mary Maguire leaned back in the folding metal chair along the gym wall and stretched her long, halfback legs in front of her. And her short skirt ran perpendicular across the line of muscle down her thigh. In me there was something shivery when I looked, something that dropped down my throat, down my stomach, farther down.
That’s what I tried to tell Father Mortimer. I knew that something was bad, that girls shouldn’t like girls, that I might turn green and grow warts. This metamorphosis I believed to be possible from merely having such thoughts. The change on the outside of me was not complex; it was x causes y. The world would be able to tell by one look that I was bad, and being good was the most important thing.
“My child,” he said, “have you shared your feelings with your mother?”
A shock wave ran from my elbows to my knees. It was the electric fear of my mother sitting across the breakfast table, her eyebrow rising behind her bug-eye glasses, and it was also the hope that filled my lungs of talking to someone like Father Mortimer. I had saved this secret for him.
“No, Father.”
“Good,” he said. “Never tell your mother. Feelings for the same sex are expressly forbidden. Further, they are mortal sins and make you immoral. Ask God for forgiveness.” His voice was bigger than the bell in the church tower. This wasn’t the same priest who came for cocktails, the priest my mother called “Father M.”
“But Father M . . .”
“There is no room for you in God’s kingdom. Say two rosaries, and do not act on your feelings. For your own sake, child. For the Lord’s,” he said. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and he slammed the window.
That’s when I knew I was bad.
Bad has a taste and a color. It’s crimson, like the velvet in the confessional. And its taste is firm, a little sweet but bitter when it slides down your throat. Like beets.
One time walking away from Sarah’s room in college, the bile that rose in my throat was beets. The beginning of our senior year, I didn’t go to sleep without walking across campus to her room for a hug good night, Orion guiding me there.
In her dorm room, where stuffed animals crowded the bed and a cross hung above the bookshelf, when we rose and met each other in the middle of the room, held each other and swayed back and forth, one night she said, “You know, I can really understand why you fall for women.”
Inside, something sweet and bitter slid down my throat.
This was Sarah, the one who walked out junior year when I confessed my feelings for women. My Sarah whose body I matched in rowing, and otherwise didn’t dare notice. Mark’s Sarah, who called him every night after our hug.
The swaying stopped.
All I said was “Yeah, right,” and backed away. A shock wave stiffened my arms. The fear that all things good could be damned by Father M, and the faint hope that my love could be returned.
“No, really,” she said. “I get it.”
With Orion holding up the night sky behind me, I ran back to my room, the night the type of cold that breaks twigs from branches. The bitter red bubbled up. I tasted it.
That’s what was in my mouth when Mr. White hung up. Beets.