The Next Queen of Heaven

  At measure forty-two Irene remembered to modulate but Jeremy didn’t.

  21

  TABITHA WAS IN the back room rinsing out the combs in blue sterilizing fluid. She always felt she was on some Saturday morning science show with organs in bottles, or little fetuses in formaldehyde, especially when she remembered to wear the white coat. A standard sucky early December day; the spitting wet might have been snow, but wasn’t. Still, at least the place was quiet. What old witch was going to pay to have her hair done only to have it get rained on or blown out as she hobbled back to her car where her dead husband sat turning the pages of the free classifieds, waiting for her?

  When Linda Pearl Wasserman came into the back room and slapped the door closed, a moldy clamminess seemed to follow in her wake. She looked at Tabitha with alarm verging on glee. “Oh God, what do I do now.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Tabitha.

  “She’s out there. The one. Your enemy. Caleb’s fiancée.”

  “Linda Pearl. I know I’m a basket case but I’m actually trying to get over this and you’re not making it any easier.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’ve got the girl in the front chair. She just wants a quick wash and set today, and is asking for advice on a hairdo for early January. For her wedding.”

  Tabitha began to get interested despite herself. “What, you’re going to sabotage her? Make her look like a concentration camp survivor?”

  “Do I have to spell everything in capital letters? She’s there in the chair, she’s trapped like a—like a gerbil—what do you want to know? Girl, I’m here for you.” She grabbed Tabitha’s hands. “I live to help those in agony. Put me to work. I could wheedle state secrets out of, um, any big shot who came in here for a blow-dry.” She tried again. “Mrs. Hilarious Clinton, for one. Now that she says she’s going to run for senator from New York, if she campaigns around here and comes in for a photo-op I’ll find out the truth about what she really puts in Bill’s home-baked cookies.”

  “Well.” Tabitha drew her hands back and made a show of drying them on the towel. She didn’t like Linda Pearl to touch her. It was like shaking hands with a blob of defrosting pizza dough. “I guess you could find out how Caleb and her got engaged?”

  “I’m all over it.” She paused. “Tabitha. Do I have to do everything? I have a career in hair management, and I have to be an advice columnist too? You cretin. Listen: I’ll find out where your Caleb is and I’ll keep this Polly dolly in the chair and you can go get him. Thought you’d put up more of a fight. Frankly.”

  “I’ve had the fight knocked out of me by my mother.” But was Linda Pearl on to something? Pastor Huyck had told Tabitha to face her demons down, to find Caleb and release him to his future, and liberate herself to her own. Or something like that. So maybe Linda Pearl, twitching with zeal at espionage of the heart, was being a messenger of God. The Angel of the House of Beauty.

  Tabitha sighed. “Well, leave the door open and I’ll come out behind the screen and listen. But Linda Pearl, don’t slit her throat or do a buzz cut or anything. Not yet. If we want to do that it’d be better when she comes in the day before the wedding. Right?”

  “The soul of normalness,” said Linda Pearl in a testifying way. She locked eyes with Tabitha, sisters together on the Bitch Brigade, and she coursed out of the back room, fluting, “Coffee? Tea? Diet Shasta Cola?”

  It didn’t seem right to Tabitha that she should feel older than Linda Pearl when she was twelve years younger. But since she now felt older than her mother, maybe this was turning into a permanent condition. She hoped not. Lately her mother had taken to lying on top of her bed every night in her coat and boots, clutching the only pocketbook she had that would accommodate the Bible. She slept with all the lights on and woke herself every three hours, crying. Tabitha was reduced to dozing on the sofa so that she could leap to her mother’s doorway and say coldly, “It’s just a dream, Ma, wake up and go to sleep,” which seemed to help.

  But Tabitha wasn’t getting a whole lot of rest, which made the world go streaky from time to time, as if it had been Windexed and not dried properly.

  Bleary or no, it was still the world, and it harbored Caleb out there—that oak-necked traitor, that turncoat. The second Catholic wannabe of the season. It was funny how the world seemed smaller and less deliberately set on its pilings these days. How quickly things could change. One moment, Mom could be her old salt-of-the-earth self, Leontina Scales, running up potholders on her faithful Singer sewing machine with the treadle and the wheel to raise money for the Pentecostal missionaries in Ecuador or Peru or some other part of Africa. The next moment she was no better than a crazy Catholic lady escaped from the loony bin. How the world could shiver when it wanted. All the earthquakes weren’t on the West Coast. Linda Pearl put her faith in hair fashions but Tabitha was finding this wasn’t quite enough. Nothing was quite enough.

  But she opened the door to the back room a few inches and stood behind it, listening. From the angled mirror in the corner she could see a white vinyl raincoat dripping from a hook, and back of that Polly’s dust-colored douche-bag of a hairdo.

  Linda Pearl was in her element. She went tripping lightly around the chair with a comb and the number seven scissors, gassing up a storm. “It all depends on the fall of the veil, brides never take that into consideration. They don’t. They think it all has to do with how the veil is mounted. But different materials fall differently, fold differently. I’ve seen bouffants upwards a two hundred dollars flattened into classic Cherokee Cher before the minister even gets to say, ‘If there’s anyone here who knows anything juicy, speak now or forever hold your peace.’ Is that something you worry about, by the way?”

  “It’s a very light veil, light as mosquito netting,” said Polly Osterhaus.

  “I mean anyone speaking up to protest your sacred union with your loved one.”

  “Oh, Catholics don’t do that. They print the wedding plans in the parish bulletin for three weeks ahead of time in order to allow folks time to object, as if anyone would. It’s called publishing the banns. Which is very old-fashioned, I think, but Father Mike says we still have to do it.”

  “Hardly seems like a wedding without that touch of drama.” Linda Pearl grew sulky. She let the frond of hair drop as if offended. “Not that anyone would object in your case. What’s the name of your sweetie?”

  “Caleb.” Polly shook out her hair as if to draw Linda Pearl back to the matter at hand. She ran one hand down from the central part to about four inches below the ear and said, “I was thinking maybe about this long in back, and layered forward to take a reverse curl?”

  “He’s not coming in here, is he?” Linda Pearl crossed to the window and looked over toward the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Of course not,” said Polly shortly. “Why ever would he?”

  “It’s bad luck, from a hairdresser’s point of view, for the husband-to-be to look in on the fiancée settling her hair concerns. Is he in the neighborhood?”

  “He’s getting the tires rotated over at Scarcese’s. Is that far enough away for you?”

  “Don’t mess with custom, or custom messes with you,” said Linda Pearl darkly. She flashed Tabitha a look in the mirror and gestured with her comb: Go on, go on. Tabitha hated to leave this scene; she could hardly imagine what Linda Pearl would say next. But Tabitha backed up and grabbed her anorak from the hook in the back room and nipped out the back door. In the strong wind the door slammed, and she wished she could hear what fib Linda Pearl would come up with to explain the noise. But there was no telling how long Caleb would be loitering around Scarcese’s Budget Gas, and Tabitha had to take the opportunity while it presented itself.

  She had left Kirk to babysit Mom that morning. He was doing some kind of school project, making a brightly colored tunic, and he had popped a cassette of some sickly high-sugar-content religious pop music into the boombox to keep Mom happy. It kept her quiet, anyway; happiness was harder to quantify these days. T
abitha had had to be content with that. She hadn’t seen Hogan, however, before leaving the house. Since it was Saturday, Hogan might actually be in the middle of a shift; she couldn’t remember. As she drove over to Scarcese’s, she wondered if she would rather Hog be there or not. If she had a big square-off with Caleb, would Hog be a liability? Well, stupid question: Hog was always a liability. She sighed.

  She pulled into the station and ran over some little girl’s bicycle. How was she supposed to know it was there? She could see the girl inside buying ice cream, a dumb thing to buy at a gas station. The ice cream was probably polluted with gasoline fumes. And in December? What was wrong with everyone in Thebes anyway? Tabitha jumped out of the car and popped into the store section and said loudly, “I almost killed myself, I almost crashed into the pump swerving to avoid that bicycle, I almost blew this place up to kingdom come, who left their bicycle out there and almost caused a major death?”

  The girl looked terrified and ran out, and wheeled her bike away, wailing to beat the band. Hogan looked in from the repair bay. “What’re you doing here, Mom go and set herself on fire or something?”

  “No, that’s your job. Where’s Caleb Briggs?”

  “Mr. Can’t-Tell-His-Cock-From-His-Carburetor?”

  “You know who Caleb is.” Tabitha wasn’t exactly sure how much Hogan knew about her and Caleb. For just a moment, the whole idea of her-and-Caleb came sweeping in again, gathering her up; how could the idea have such force if it didn’t have some possibility of being true?

  “We needed some head gaskets and we ran out and I couldn’t fix his car today except we get some. So he offered to go over to Bijou Motor Supply and pick some up. He just left. What you want with him?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Did you run over that girl’s bike on purpose?” said Hogan. She looked at him and didn’t answer. “Cool,” he said.

  Bijou Motor Supply was a few blocks away on Union. It used to be Thebes’s only movie theater, back in the dark ages, and the marquee that looked like the prow of a ship still came jutting out over the sidewalk. The marquee read AUTO AND APPLIANCE PARTS POWER MOWER SKIDOO SNOWBLOW TRACTOR in plastic letters of different sizes. Tabitha didn’t go in Bijou Motor Supply often. Last time was when her mom, rustling up those potholders-for-peasants, had needed a new belt for the sewing machine. But Tabitha liked this place in the way that she suspected some people liked church. The rows of seats had all been taken out but the graduated levels, arranged in soft terraced curves facing the stage area, were lined with long reaches of metal shelving. Above the stage the screen still hung, from whose bottom edge dangled a fringe of several dozen ancient yellow curling fly-strips. The stage—because the Bijou had been some sort of opera or vaudeville house even before the movies came in—housed the office area, and Tabitha could see Stephanie Getchen stuffing some papers in a file cabinet as if she were playing the role of a boring secretary in some boring play.

  Caleb was here somewhere, for sure, wandering up and down one tiered row or another. Tabitha had a momentary panic, and resented Stephanie’s public preening and twisting as she talked on the phone, so the phone cord wrapped around her bosom and down along her waistline in a telling spiral. But she couldn’t let old anxieties about Stephanie flare up now. This might be Tabitha’s only chance to get Caleb back. Hey, wait, was that what she was doing? She didn’t have time to remember.

  For a while she wandered up and down the rows as if in a maze. She came across a couple of customers in gray fedoras and moth-bally coats who looked as if they might have been hunting for a certain kind of grommet for the better part of the century. Then she realized that if she went up to the balcony she’d be able to spot Caleb at once if he was still here. So she hopped over the velvet cord that still sported a CLOSED FOR THIS SHOW sign, and picked her way up the steps, on which boxes of outdated gidgets and widgets were carefully set, awaiting the second coming of their usefulness.

  She stumbled over a dark something at the top of the stairs. Stephanie Getchen heard her swear, and put her hand above her eyes and peered as if looking out through stage lights, a supremely phony gesture since the stage was as dimly lit as the rest of the place. But that didn’t matter; Tabitha had spied Caleb, pawing through some drawers in a display down in Row D, just off the center aisle on the left. Tabitha power-walked toward her future, not caring if Stephanie heard her. This was no time for delicacy.

  Caleb turned as Tabitha approached. He was husked in a lumberjack’s overshirt, big red-and-black squares, and his hands paused. One palm held a series of washers of various sizes and with the other hand he fingered a rusty four-inch bolt. “Hey, look who’s playing at the Bijou,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Caleb.” She hadn’t planned much beyond this.

  “What’re you looking for? Can I help?”

  “Wonder if you can.” Tabitha was inclined to swirl her head around and make her hair roll; it was an undeniably terrific effect. But somehow, though she didn’t trust words, she also didn’t want to get in their way right now; she wanted to be able to hear them clearly, and to be heard. So she stood her ground with ordinary legs, instead of slinking her weight onto one leg and exaggerating the curve of her hip. She did not roll her hair as if it were a performing pet. She said, “You mentioned you got news for me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He went back to matching the bolt to the washers. “You’ll never guess. You want to go somewhere, I can tell you?”

  “We’re already somewhere, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s kind of—” He gestured to the stage, where Stephanie Getchen was making a big show of paying no attention, a scant thirty feet away.

  “News is news.”

  “I guess I’m sorry to tell you like this.” He seemed to give up on the washers and he pocketed the bolt. “I guess I should’ve come over or called you up or something. I heard about your ma.”

  “Was that what kept you from calling me?”

  “Well, you sounded like you had your hands full.”

  “A little help might’ve helped.” But she caught that this was sounding too over. “A little help could still be a big help.”

  He squirmed. Not an attractive thing to watch. Not very Caleb, either. Was he hexed? “I guess if I am such a useless shithead, you’re better off without me.”

  “You’re not talking about that fight we had just before Halloween? Caleb, come on. Couples fight. What’s the big deal. Besides, it was kind of great.” She lowered her voice. She didn’t have much capacity for shame, but Stephanie Getchen was right there onstage behind her. For all Tabitha knew Stephanie was holding the phone receiver at arm’s length to pick this up and broadcast it live.

  “I’m not good enough for you.”

  “Well, that’s okay, I’ll make an exception.”

  “Don’t kid, sweetie. This is serious. You know it is. That was not a good scene. I scared myself. I scared you.”

  “I can take care of myself—”

  “I know you can, that’s what I’m counting on. Look, you’re going to make me say this out loud, aren’t you? So I’ll say it. I’m engaged to someone else. Tabs. It just happened.”

  Tabitha realized that she had never quite believed the rumors, not even when she’d seen Caleb and Polly together in church. Without saying so to herself, she’d lived in the snare of an impossible hope. There could’ve been any number of reasons he hadn’t called her. He’d have to have been embarrassed with that scene in his trailer; he’d never mentioned sex toys before, and coupled with his anger, and her wearing that rubber Nixon mask—well, no wonder he’d been keeping his distance. And, for all anyone knew, Polly could have been his cousin or something. Thebes was small enough that there was a certain amount of inbreeding around that nobody much mentioned. Tabitha had thought that this disaster would just jigsaw itself solved. That it wasn’t about to—did this mean she was, at last, grown up? Grown up in a way that sex and the dog leash and a little bit of Ecstasy had never meant?


  “Glory be,” she said.

  “It’s that girl you saw me with at the Catholic church. Polly Osterhaus’s her name. Polly.”

  “You said you loved me,” she said, shortly, quietly.

  “I did,” he said. “I do,” he said. “What’re ya gonna do?” he added.

  “It isn’t even Christmas yet. It’s only five, six weeks since Halloween. We have one wild night, you’re too embarrassed to apologize, and so you get engaged to get married after New Year’s? To somebody else? You who were afraid of commitment, you?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Well, I’m smarter than I used to be, tell me.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Tabitha looked up. She saw the little windows in the projection booth that had been jerry-rigged up in the middle of the balcony. They were suddenly filled with light. Maybe someone had gone to lock some cash in the safe up there. The light came streaming out, a mocking soft echo of the once strong beam of the projectors. “So am I,” she said.

  22

  SINCE ONLY OLD-SCHOOL Catholics paid attention to the concept of a Holy Day of Obligation, the church was almost empty on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. And most of the worshippers were frail women, looking to Jeremy like character actresses trying out for the part of Elizabeth the cousin of Mary, in whose desiccated womb John the Baptist would flourish.

  Old Lady Scarcese knelt, surrounded by her bodyguards, the Officers of the Sodality, all of them telling their beads with a frenzied hissle of lips, in competition with Father Mike Sheehy’s sermon on (what was it now?) Mary and her courage. “You good faithful people know the Immaculate Conception doesn’t describe Mary’s conception of Jesus. How could that be—with Christmas only seventeen days away! She’d have had the fastest gestation in history, blowing up like special effects in a nature film.” But Jeremy’s mind wandered then toward the Annunciation, Mary’s apprehension of her pregnancy. Gabriel the Archangel was probably gay. Unmarried virgins destined to give birth to God didn’t have the leeway in public opinion to spend time cloistered with angelic male youths unless they were gay. Gay, and clad only in suggestive cotton percale bedsheets with a count of 400 tpi minimum.