“Well, I want to go to New York City and spend the summer with Daddy. He said he’ll take me to the ballet. He said he’ll take me to Queens where there’s a painting of a saint that weeps. Real tears,” I added because I could read my mother’s mind and knew she was thinking it was a hoax.
Then, to be good and rude, I opened up the book The Song of Bernadette about how a peasant girl in France saw the Virgin Mary and got all of these orders from her, like to build a church in a particular place and have sick people come and bathe in water from the spring. Bernadette became a saint. I was keeping a list of what I had in common with other saints, and number one on my list was that I was a peasant, too. It looked like rich people never got to be saints, so that eliminated Sophie.
“Besides,” I said to my mother, “I thought we didn’t have any money. I thought we were peasants. How can a bunch of peasants afford to go to Italy?” We had read about peasants in school, too. Peasants tilled the land, we learned. They were poor, but they were good, hardworking people.
“Peasants!” my mother shrieked.
“Peasants helped people,” I told her. “In World War Two. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“What has gotten into you?” she mumbled under her breath.
I knew what she was thinking. She talked about it with Mrs. Harrison all the time.
They were embarrassing, those talks. And she and Mrs. Harrison had them right in front of me, as if I were invisible. “It’s those teen years I read about when she was tiny,” my mother said. “They seemed so far away, so unlikely then.” Just yesterday, when Mrs. Harrison came to pick me up for school and I refused to wear the silly, bright yellow slicker and matching boots my mother had bought me as if I were a baby duckling instead of a twelve-year-old—a miracle worker, a soon-to-be saint—she shouted from the porch to Mrs. Harrison, “She still wears flowered underpants but these are too babyish.” So now the whole world knows about my underpants. Mrs. Harrison gave my mother a big sympathetic look. Then when I got in her ridiculously humongous SUV she said, “Madeline, why can’t you try to help your mother?”
I watched over the top of The Song of Bernadette while my mother sat staring at all her stupid books and maps. My father never uses guidebooks. He just goes places. He explores. He has adventures. Even in the days when they were married and supposedly happy, they would argue over traveling techniques, my mother reading from a guidebook and my father ignoring her.
“Trust me on this, Madeline,” she said suddenly, brightly, in a way that made me immediately suspicious. “You are going to love this trip. We’ll go to Italy and you can go to churches where there are saints’ actual bodies right there.”
“Like who?” I said.
“Saint Agatha,” my mother said.
“Saint Agatha?”
“Only thirteen years old and the emperor made her stand naked in public because she rejected some guy’s advances. So she’s standing there naked and miraculously her hair starts to grow. And it grows and grows until it covers her nakedness completely.”
I considered this.
“Well,” I said, turning back to my book. “That might be interesting.”
What else might be interesting came to me then, too. If I went to Rome, then I could go talk to the Pope. I didn’t want to sound too excited so I said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, yes,” my mother said, oh so smug, “there are so many saints in Italy. Catherine of Siena, Saint Claire, Saint Francis, Saint—”
“I get it, okay?” I said. But I was, I admit, tingling with excitement.
Of course, divorce changes a lot of things. For example, all of the stuff I was worried about while I prayed in church the day of the avalanche wound up happening anyway. My dad was okay, but no more ginger scones on the way to school. No more slow dancing in the kitchen. In Humanities class we learned about point of view. This is the way a writer tells a story. A point of view is very specific, and changes the way the character sees the world. Well, from my point of view my mother kept getting worse and worse. It wasn’t just the way she cried all the time, or made stupid decisions, or lost things, or even the way she stopped looking pretty. But she started to seem foolish. Her job seemed foolish. Her hair seemed foolish. The things she said seemed foolish. From my point of view, my mother was foolish.
Once, a few months after my father moved out, I found a list she had made. She was seeing a therapist with the unbelievable name of Doctor Sane. Doctor Sane always had her do things like draw animals to represent her emotions and make memory boxes and other completely idiotic tasks. This one, written in my mother’s excellent penmanship instead of on the computer, said at the top:
The good things in my life: