Lock-In

William Boyle

 

Betsy hadn’t intended to be one of only five kids from her grade stupid enough to spend the night in a basement full of nuns, but that’s the way things have shaken out. No one told her this lock-in was optional. She’d been led to believe it was mandatory by both Sister Erin and Sister Margaret. So here she is.

The only other kids present are Loner Lily, twin goodie-goodies Sally and Mo, and Melissa Verdirame. No boys. Just the nice girls. The ones who bring the sisters apples and get gold star stickers. They’re all wearing their plaid school uniforms and heavy tights, which is weird. Betsy’s in her favorite red sweater with torn sleeves because she pulls them so far down over her palms and dungarees she got for her birthday from her cool cousin Elly. She’s in the wrong company.

The nuns have brewed a big pot of coffee. There are cookies from the dollar store. Board games, decks of cards, religion workbooks. Sister Mary Thomas is the most interesting person here. She’s pretty and young, and Betsy sometimes imagines her lying alone in bed, clutching a rosary and praying, and she wonders what kinds of things go through the mind of a pretty young nun when she’s alone in bed. She probably dreams about making muffins for Jesus. The other nuns are all old, with witch-whiskers and bony shoulders.

The school is St. Mary Mother of Jesus on the border of Bensonhurst and Gravesend in Brooklyn. It’s next door to the church, where they are now, in this musty basement that still smells of the perfumed neighborhood women who are always playing bingo and running raffles down here.

Betsy’s thirteen, in the eighth grade. She’s tired of how small her world is, tired of the same streets, the same blocks, the same garbage, the same leering eyes, tired of the dirty old men on the corners, tired of her teachers, of her dumbass mom and even dumberass stepdad, of trying to make friends with kids who will never be her friends.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. If Betsy was at her house, five short blocks away, she’d be sleeping. She likes to get up as early as possible, even on weekends, and watch whatever shows she taped the night before. Saturday Night Live just ended an hour ago and she programmed her VCR to record it. That’s what she’d be watching on Sunday morning over Frosted Flakes and her crossword puzzle.

She’s not even sure how long this thing will last. Will they let her go when it’s light or will they make them all go to Mass upstairs at eight before setting them loose? What’s the point?

Sundays are Betsy’s favorite day. Her mom works at the bakery, and her stepdad goes to Jersey to work concessions at Giants Stadium. Her mom has become so nasty since getting remarried, and her stepdad thinks she’s nothing if she’s not his blood. He wants her to forget about her old man, who split when she was seven. She’s so glad to have this one day a week where they’re out of her hair. Sundays mean her grandma makes spedini while her grandpa watches Abbott and Costello. Her grandparents aren’t dumbasses; she likes them just fine. Now she fears her Sunday will be shot because she’ll be so tired.

“What time do we get done here?” Betsy asks Loner Lily.

Loner Lily is eating a butter crunch cookie. She shrugs.

Monsignor Villani walks in. He’s wearing a bulky robe like someone’s father at a slumber party. He’s got pizza in a big Ziploc freezer bag. He throws it down on the folding table near the stage and says, “Some leftovers from Spumoni Gardens.”

Sister Mary Thomas comes over and sits next to Betsy. She’s wearing a plain white blouse and mom jeans and her brown hair is held up with bobby pins. She says, “You look bored.”

“I am bored,” says Betsy.

“And tired, I bet.”

“I’m so bored I’m not even that tired.”

Sister Mary Thomas smiles. “I’m bored, too.”

“You are?” Betsy says, feeling scandalized. She doesn’t think of nuns as having the capacity to be bored. She assumes they just fill that time up with loving God or whatever.

“I need a drink.”

“You what?”

“A beer. I’d really kill for a beer.”

“You drink beer?”

“Sure.”

“What else do you do?”

“I watch movies.”

“Really?”

“We have a VCR in the rectory. I love Top Gun. Have you seen it?”

“Of course I’ve seen Top Gun.”

“You know what else I like?”

“What?”

“Witness.”

“That one’s R.”

“Have you seen it?”

Betsy turns and looks hard at Sister Mary Thomas. “Is this a setup?”

Sister Mary Thomas laughs. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you making me think you’re one thing to try to get me to open up about myself and my problems at home?”

“You have problems at home?” Sister Mary Thomas asks.

“Forget it.”

“This is the real me, Betsy. I’m not setting you up.” Sister Mary Thomas plucks a few bobby pins from behind her ears and lets her hair down.

“Did you just let your hair down?” Betsy asks. “Like, literally?”

Sister Mary Thomas laughs again. It’s a soothing laugh, not horsey at all like the other nun laughs she’s heard. “You want to see something?”

“What?”

“Come with me.”

Sister Mary Thomas gets up and walks toward the stage at the far end of the basement. The other nuns are all caught up playing rummy. Sally is brushing Mo’s hair, while Melissa digs around in the beading kit she brought along. Loner Lily is biting her nails and spitting the pieces onto the checkerboard floor. No one’s paying any attention to them.

They go up on the stage. Sister Mary Thomas holds the heavy red curtain open for Betsy and leads her into darkness.

“Where are we going?” Betsy asks.

“There’s a door back here somewhere,” Sister Mary Thomas replies.

Behind the curtain smells like the lobby of the Loew’s Oriental theater where Betsy goes to see her movies, sad and sticky and forgotten. Betsy scans the darkness and makes out a stack of folding tables.

Sister Mary Thomas feels along the wall and finds a door, turning the knob and pushing it in, snapping on a light. A small storage room is illuminated. Piles of boxes. A metal shelving rack full of paper plates, Styrofoam cups, and a big electric coffee percolator the bingo ladies must use.

Nestled in the corner of the room is a statue of the Virgin Mary, wrapped in a green cord of Christmas lights. Sister Mary Thomas goes over, finds the plug, and the statue comes alive with dots of red and white light, her blue robe thorny with shadows, her cracked plaster face spotlighted. “I call her Disco Madonna,” Sister Mary Thomas says.

“You do?” Betsy says.

Sister Mary Thomas finds that response funny and laughs yet again and then she starts singing “Lady Madonna” by the Beatles but she changes it to “Disco Madonna.”

Betsy studies the face of the statue. Nose chipped off, thin black cracks like veins, a smudge of something green on one cheek. “Why’s she in here?”

“Who knows? I’m glad she is, though.” Sister Mary Thomas finds a couple of step stools leaning against the base of the rack. She opens them and sets them up in front of the statue. “Sit.”

Betsy does, putting her elbows up on her knees, pushing her hair behind her ears.

“You’re gonna like this,” Sister Mary Thomas says.

“Like what?”

Sister Mary Thomas kneels close to the statue and feels around behind it, coming out with a Sony Walkman and lightweight headphones with orange cushions and a duct-taped headband. She puts the headphones on Betsy, opens the Walkman, flipping the tape that’s in there, and finally pressing play.

Madonna’s “Holiday” comes on. Betsy recognizes the intro immediately. She has a Walkman at home and a shoebox full of cassettes. Her mom hardly ever buys her tapes at Sam Goody when she asks for them, but she has a bunch of blanks and spends a lot of time dubbing songs off the radio. Lots of them, she misses the very beginning or the dee-jay’s talking ruins it. Betsy smiles and says, “You like Madonna?”

Sister Mary Thomas puts a finger over her lips and shushes her.

Betsy strains her neck and puts her hand up in apology, not realizing she was speaking so loudly, the music blasting in her ears. She listens to the song until the end.

Sister Mary Thomas stops the tape. “You know what she’s talking about in that song?”

Betsy pushes the headphones down around her neck. “Like... wanting to take a holiday?”

“Sure. Exactly. We all deserve a break. All of us. Things don’t have to be so hard.”

“Is this your break? This little room and statue and the music?”

“This is an important place to me. I wanted to share it with you.”

“Why me?”

“You’re not like the other kids. God can forgive me for saying that. I see something else in you.” She pauses. “I want you to come here sometimes. I’m leaving for good in a few days.”

“Where are you going?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

Betsy has never—not once in her life, that she remembers—been asked to keep a secret. She doesn’t have friends like that. She hopes one day she will. Not in high school; she’s anticipating that’ll suck. Maybe in college. She nods now, promising to keep her mouth shut, miming zipping her lips and throwing away the key.

“I’m in love,” Sister Mary Thomas says.

“But you’re a nun.”

“Nuns can fall in love.”

“I thought just with Jesus.”

“Well, I do love Jesus, but I also fell in love with a man I’ve known for a couple of years. He’s my best friend.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I don’t know. I sensed you’re the kind of person I could tell. You feel trapped, I can see it in your eyes. Not just here at this lock-in, but at school and church and with your family. And that’s how I feel, too. And being with this man makes me feel different.”

“Who is he?”

“Father Dave.”

“Father Dave? Are you kidding? He’s so little. He’s like five-one. He must be six inches shorter than you.”

Sister Mary Thomas laughs again. “What’s height? Plus, I like that he’s short.”

Betsy shakes her head. “Where are you going?”

“He bought a car in secret. We’re just going to run away together. He wants to go to Florida. Maybe Miami.”

“Does he need to sit on a telephone book when he drives?”

Sister Mary Thomas swats at her leg like they’re girlfriends. “You’re terrible.” A moment passes. Tears rim her eyes. “He’s very good to me. He’s very nice. I’ve never had much of a life. I joined the convent at eighteen. I went to an all-girls Catholic boarding school on Long Island before that. I was faithful and disciplined and I never broke any rules. I think you have to break rules now and again to truly live. I don’t think that means you don’t love God. That’s what that song’s about in a way, right?”

Betsy nods because what else can she do. She’s struck by how surreal the moment is: sitting with pretty young Sister Mary Thomas in front of Disco Madonna, The Immaculate Collection tape in a secret Walkman, a secret love being whispered about.

Father Dave! Betsy once saw him eating spaghetti out of a Styrofoam cup on the front stoop of the school with a plastic fork. She asked why he didn’t just use a bowl and he said, “This is my special cup.” When he says Mass, all the old ladies complain because he talks low and gives these scholarly homilies. She remembers him talking about this one book, The Woman Who Was Poor, and she went to the library the next day to see if they had it and they didn’t because it was old and French. She wonders if Sister Mary Thomas and Father Dave have kissed, or if they’re saving that for when they run away. She pictures them on a beach, her in her habit, him in his clerical clothes, rolling around.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Sister Mary Thomas asks.

Betsy shakes her head. There is not one single boy in her class that she likes, that she has a crush on. There are no girls either. When she gets a crush, it’s on an actor or actress in some movie she’s seen, and she lives with it for a few days and dreams of a life where it’s her and him, or her and her. Christian Slater and Winona Ryder and River Phoenix are probably the biggest crushes she’s had.

“What kind of problems do you have at home? Is it your stepdad?”

Betsy doesn’t answer.

“If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

“But you won’t be for long.”

Sister Mary Thomas puts the Walkman in Betsy’s lap and stands up. “I’m going back out before Sister Erin comes looking for me,” she says. “You stay. Listen to the tape. ‘Lucky Star’ is next. I love that one.”

“Thanks, Sister,” Betsy says.

“Thank you for keeping my secret.”

And then, just like that, Sister Mary Thomas is gone from the room and Betsy is left wondering if the last however long has even been real, but she knows it has been because here she is with the Walkman and Disco Madonna, and the stool where Sister Mary Thomas was sitting is still warm from her bottom.

Betsy can’t imagine what Sister Mary Thomas just told her, how she opened up. Isn’t she afraid, even in the slightest, of what Betsy might do with that information? Girls gossip. Betsy doesn’t, but Sister Mary Thomas can’t know that for sure.

Betsy presses play and listens to “Lucky Star” and “Borderline.”

She moves her head so Disco Madonna is sort of swaying in front of her. She wishes she had a watermelon lollipop. She starts thinking of the world outside the lock-in, how dark the streets must be, how there probably aren’t any people walking around, how quiet it must be with the trains coming less frequently. Her neighborhood is dead. She imagines that the city, across the bridge, is still alive and lit up. She knows it is. There are shows, bars, crowds of people, all-night movies.

She’s been to Manhattan only for the Christmas tree and a couple of museums. She wishes she was there. She wishes she was sitting in a movie theater with a bucket of popcorn.

A lock-in isn’t anything. No one can keep you locked in, she decides. Sister Mary Thomas is proof of that.

She stops the tape and leaves the storage room.

She has twenty bucks in her pocket from her grandma. She thinks that’ll be enough to get away, even if just for a little while. Train fare and a movie and popcorn and a soda. Maybe a couple of lollipops.

She searches around the dark stage for a way out. There’s another door. This one opens on a staircase that smells like incense. She follows the smell, stumbling up the stairs in the dark, and comes out in a narrow hallway across from the sacristy. She’s afraid that Monsignor Villani will jump out at her.

There’s a dull glow coming from beyond the pews in the church, an electric candle that’s still on. She’s never thought of those candles as things that get shut off. People kneel there before or after Mass and put money in the offertory box and push a silver button to light a candle and they say their prayer. She always figured once a prayer was made, the light just stayed on, even in the dark of night. But now she sees how that’s stupid. Of course the candles get reset daily. All those lost prayers.

She hopes now the doors aren’t locked and that she can get out.

At the end of the hallway, there’s a heavy door that leads to the back parking lot on Eighty-Fourth Street. She tries the handle and it’s locked, but there’s a latch below that and she turns it and tries again and cold air whooshes in from outside and suddenly she feels as free as she’s ever felt.

She runs out into the lot, letting the door pound shut behind her, and cuts a quick right onto Eighty-Fourth Street. The streetlamps and telephone poles looks sadder in the middle of the night. A hush she’s never heard hums through the neighborhood. The sound of darkness and sleep. It’s colder than she remembered it being when she entered the lock-in and yet she feels fine in her sweater.

Her breath is in front of her.

She slows down at the corner, turns left onto Twenty-Third Avenue, passing the bank where she remembers going with her father to their safe deposit box before he moved away to California, and then she makes a right on Eighty-Sixth Street, staring up at the quiet El and all the closed shops with their graffiti-covered riot gates pulled down.

It’s a pretty short walk to the Bay Parkway station, where she’ll catch the B train into the city. She’s not sure how often they come at night. She pictures herself sitting on the platform, her legs crossed, looking out over the neighborhood, listening to the hush, waiting.

She expects to see men lurch out from shadowy market stalls. Cars pass in the street, going fast. One slows a bit, the driver seeming to consider her, but she doesn’t look over.

Just as she starts to climb the stairs up to the El platform, she hears a voice from behind her. It’s Sister Mary Thomas, halfway down the block, jogging, calling out her name.

Betsy stops and sits on the first step and waits for Sister Mary Thomas.

When she arrives, out of breath, Sister Mary Thomas says, “Jeez, Betsy.”

“How’d you know I left?” Betsy asks.

“Sister Erin heard something and asked me to check it out. I came up and saw you leaving and followed. Aren’t you cold?”

“This sweater’s warm.”

“Where on earth are you going?”

“I want to go to the city to see a movie or something. They play movies all night.”

“You can’t just leave. You have to tell someone.”

“It’s not prison, right?”

“It’s not prison, no, but you’re thirteen. What would your folks say?”

“I don’t have folks. I have a mom and a stepdad. What does that word even mean, stepdad? Where’s it come from?”

“I don’t know. I know you can’t just leave.”

“You’re leaving.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Sister Mary Thomas sits next to her on the step. “I don’t know exactly, but it is. I’m a grown-up, for one. Let’s go back to the church, sweetie. The middle of the night is nothing but trouble.”

“I want to go to the city to see a movie. Come with me.”

“We’ll wait an hour or two for a train. We’ll freeze.”

Betsy shrugs.

“We should go back,” Sister Mary Thomas tells her again.

“Why did you tell me what you told me about running away?” Betsy asks, turning to look at Sister Mary Thomas, studying her pale skin, her brown hair, her lips, the silvery breath painting the air in front of her face.

Sister Mary Thomas thinks about it. “I told you because I thought you could handle it,” she says. “I thought it would give you hope for the future.”

“I’m tired of people thinking I can handle things,” Betsy says.

A train rumbles into the station. Betsy’s so thankful. She needs one and here it is. She runs up the stairs, leaving Sister Mary Thomas behind, hops a turnstile to the bored chagrin of the man in the booth, and races up another short flight of steps to the platform, where the B train has arrived and its doors are gaping, the orange glow of the center car welcoming her. Her breath trails behind her as she launches herself into the car just before the doors ding and smack shut. She settles into a bucket seat and watches through the scratched windows, waiting for Sister Mary Thomas to come chugging up the stairs after her, to bang on the glass and demand that she come back to the lock-in.

But it doesn’t happen that way. The train pulls out. Betsy watches the darkness of the neighborhood, studies it. The dark tops of buildings. Traffic lights changing up and down the avenues.

No one else is in this train car with her, thank God. Just her and the scratched windows and a half-full plastic bottle of 7-UP skittering around on the floor.

She wonders if Sister Mary Thomas will tell the other nuns or call her mother or maybe even call the cops. She’s thinking that maybe she won’t because Betsy has the scoop on her and Sister Mary Thomas wouldn’t want anything to get out before taking off with Father Dave.

She feels bad for Sister Mary Thomas, innocently telling Betsy her plans in trust, not knowing the immediate impact it would have on her. She mostly feels bad because Sister Mary Thomas—even though she’s young and pretty and in love and listens to Madonna—is still dumb the way grown-ups get dumb.

Betsy wonders how people wind up ruined like that and when it will happen to her. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe she’s at the beginning of the process or she’s in the middle of it, and she doesn’t even know. Maybe you stay up all night, just once, at a lock-in or a slumber party, and the next day you’re never the same. You pass through darkness into the forever darkness of being whatever it is that people become.

The train’s quiet except for the soda bottle.

Betsy thinks of her mom getting a call from Sister Mary Thomas or Sister Erin, that yellow wall-mounted rotary phone ringing in their kitchen, vibrating the wood panels, her mom trudging out to it in her sweats, her stepdad grunting and pulling a pillow up over his head.

Her stepdad’s name is Bob Girgenti. He wants Betsy to take his last name, like her mom has. She’ll never do that. She likes that her last name is the same as her old man’s, Murray, even though he lives in California now and it’s an Irish name and everyone she knows, including her mom and her grandparents, is Italian. She likes that it makes her different.

Her dad is from Ireland, actually born there. His first name is Daniel. He came to Brooklyn with his parents when he was six and they settled in Bay Ridge. He met Betsy’s mom at a bar called the Pied Piper when he was twenty and she was seventeen. He got her pregnant within six months and then they got married at St. Mary’s and her dad moved in with her mom and her grandparents. Betsy was born and they tried to be a family for about seven years. Then her dad was gone one day and her mom spent all her time crying and her grandma tried to comfort her mom by saying things like, “Oh Karen, it just wasn’t meant to be.” And her grandpa kept repeating a line that Betsy wishes she had never heard him say: “Never trust no Mick bum.”

Her dad fell in love with a woman who wanted to be an actress. Her name is Lucy. Daniel and Lucy. They moved to Los Angeles together. Betsy can’t say their names in front of her mom. Her dad hardly writes, never calls. She has his phone number in California memorized. She writes it in the margins of her school notebooks so she’ll never forget it. She’s always wishing she had the guts to call him.

Part of what she hates so much about Bob is that he’s not evil. He’s boring and stupid and sometimes mean, that’s all. But he’s never smacked her or locked her in the basement or even refused to let her eat dinner as punishment for something. So, really, what does she have to complain about? She’s not so young that she hasn’t heard horror stories. Bob’s a lot of things, but he’s not a horror story. She feels guilty because sometimes she secretly wishes he was a horror story. Maybe then she’d know why she felt so lost, so out of place. What if the guilt over not encountering evil is there until one day she actually encounters evil and dealing with that becomes her life from then on?

The train makes its stops, the doors opening and closing, the silence filling with the sound of cold air rushing in. At Sixty-Second Street, a man gets on, and he’s wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit and carrying what looks like a few foil-wrapped sandwiches in a plastic bag. He sits pretty far away from her. She should worry about him, she knows that.

She looks at the floor.

She can feel his eyes on her.

“You okay?” he says. His voice is deep, tired, as if the words are fighting back against a yawn.

“I’m fine,” she says, still not looking over at him.

“You hungry? I got some egg, bacon, and cheese sandwiches in here.” He shakes the bag. “I’m bringing them to work. I always get two for Teddy. He don’t need two.”

“I’m good, thanks,” she says.

“Okay. You just let me know.”

The train dips into a tunnel. The lights flash off and then back on.

“My name’s Frank,” the man says, scooching a few seats closer to her. He’s still a good distance away, but he’s closer and closer’s no good. “What are you doing out on your own in the middle of the night?”

She doesn’t answer, studying the floor between her feet, the remnants of a piece of gum strung like thread from under the seat to the stanchion in front of her.

“The night holds perils for a girl,” Frank continues.

Again, she stays quiet.

“I have a daughter. I wouldn’t want her out here on her own. You’re how old, twelve, thirteen? Where are your parents? What’s your name?”

“My name’s Emily,” she lies, still looking down.

The derelict 7-UP bottle is still shooting around the car. It passes in front of Frank and he stops it with his foot and then reaches down, unscrews the cap, and takes a swig. He stays quiet after that. He gets off at Thirty-Sixth Street. She’s relieved.

When the train crosses over the Manhattan Bridge, she can’t even see the East River below. She sees dots of light from apartment buildings on the Manhattan side. She goes over and considers the map. She makes a decision to get off at the Broadway-Lafayette stop, thinking she’ll find a movie theater there. How can she not? Her belief is that it’ll be right there when she comes up from the subway: golden, glowing, open.

She wonders what time it is now. It must be past three, maybe even almost four. The train ride was at least forty-five minutes, lots of stopping and starting.

She gets off at Broadway-Lafayette, hustling past a man covered in a ratty black blanket, asleep on a bench. A worker polishes the floor with some kind of humming machine. She runs up a couple of flights of stairs to the street.

There are lights and cars, taxis mostly, but there’s plenty of darkness too. Most of the shops are closed. She doesn’t see a movie theater. She goes over to a newspaper rack and grabs a copy of The Village Voice, which she’s heard of. She flips through, looking for movie times. She’s cold now. She’s on a corner she’s never been on.

She sees an open deli across the street, bright and warm-looking. She walks over. It’s cluttered. Long aisles. Refrigerators full of beer and soda. A freezer with ice pops. She orders a coffee because that seems like the right thing to do. Forget lollipops.

The guy behind the counter doesn’t think twice about her or what she’s doing out at this time. He rubs his hands together and blows into them and pours her a coffee in a blue paper cup. She pays with her twenty and gets a ten, a five, some singles, and quarters and pennies back. She puts the money in her pocket. She flips open the plastic lid on the cup and blows into the steam. She doesn’t put in milk or sugar. She drinks it black and burns her upper lip.

She has The Village Voice under her arm. She spreads it out on the counter and finally gets to the movie pages. She can’t find anything starting at this time.

She’s not sure what to do. She thinks about the change in her pocket. There are at least two quarters. “You have a payphone?” she asks the guy behind the counter.

He nods. “Outside. Right around the corner.”

She leaves the paper there and goes out to the payphone, setting the coffee down on the sidewalk between her feet. She looks all around, hoping not to be noticed by taxi drivers and cops and other assorted creeps that prowl the streets at night.

It’s three hours earlier in California. She says her dad’s number out loud and then realizes that a couple of quarters won’t cover a long distance call. She can go in and get more change or she can just call collect. Collect makes more sense. She needs to save her money.

The operator puts the call through, and her dad accepts the charges. “Betsy, is everything okay?” he asks, his voice weary. “What is it? What happened, honey?”

She hasn’t heard his voice in so long. He sounds like someone she’s never known. She puts her hand over the mouthpiece to hide the sounds from passing cars and talks in a whisper: “Dad, I’m trapped,” she says. “Please help. They’ve got me locked in a basement. Please. I don’t know what to do. Please.” And then she hangs up, trying to duplicate what it’d be like if her line has been cut off.

She’s not sure what her purpose is. It’s more than a prank. She wants her dad to worry. She wants him to panic. She guesses he’ll call her mom and her mom will call the nuns and there will be all sorts of chaos. But here she is now in the dead of night in the city with only her coffee and her trusty red sweater and a little money to burn. There’s got to be a movie playing somewhere.