Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

“What do you want? A medal?” Bernadette says.

“I’m just saying.” My mother gets up from the table and heads for the kitchen.

“Can I have one of those nasty things?” Lanie holds out her hand to Bernadette for a cigarillo.

“Me too,” says Lizzie, in an effort to befriend Lanie.

“Clearly, the massage isn’t working.” Carl throws up his hands and returns to his seat beside Kevin. He rests his forehead dramatically on Kevin’s shoulder. “I’m a failure.”

“No, you’re not,” Lanie says. “I just need some chemical backup.”

“More mimosas?” my mother calls from the kitchen.

Everyone groans.

“You have no choice when it comes to this banana bread.” My father waltzes in with a steaming plate held high above his head.

“He cooks, he cleans, he’s superman!” Bernadette puts her most recent cigarillo out with a hiss in the swallow of liquid at the bottom of her champagne glass.

But we’re all watching Lanie. She holds the cigarillo in one hand and procures the perfect bite of banana bread with the other. We are, all of us, rapt — Carl, Kevin, my mother, my father, George, who used to pine for her until it was explained to him at thirteen that it wasn’t appropriate to French-kiss your first cousin. Even Lizzie puts aside her confusion and jealousy, because Lanie has that kind of power over people. She is a magnetic force, especially in her grief over Jack. The way she inhales smoke with her eyes closed gives us all intense pleasure, and the way she licks the crumbs from her fingers sends us all reaching for a piece of the banana bread, though eating it will never taste as good as watching Lanie. She steals an ice cube from George’s water glass and runs it along her collarbone, heated up from inside her long body. She rubs the dripping water into her skin as if it were lotion.

Even as a girl, she gave off an electric glow — eating ice cream in the morning, though my parents told her not to, would somehow end up being funny. The same is true of all of her marriages. She says each of them has been like school — her first one like high school — basic and tragic; Carl was like college — almost grown-up and life-altering; her third like graduate school — overly analytic; and now there’s Jack. Jack, she told us, is like being sent back to junior high, being forced to wear braces and have acne all over again.

Bernadette breaks the spell. “Harriet,” she says. She’s determined to put her pain somewhere else. She’s had a bad year of younger men who broke her heart, first with their yearning for her and then with that sudden, fickle indifference specific to men of a certain age who haven’t yet realized their power and then suddenly, brutally do. “Harriet, have you met any strapping, cornfed, midwestern men?”

Lizzie rises from her slump next to George, eager to earn Kevin’s forgiveness for the other night. “Why do you assume it’s a man?” She looks to Kevin, but he is focused intensely on his banana bread.

George goes red and takes his plate into the kitchen, which has become the designated safe zone. He runs water, pretends to wash dishes.

“No cornfed strappers — man, woman, or beast,” I say.

Lanie comes to my rescue. She takes my hand, pulling me up from my seat as if she were asking me to dance. “Enough of this silliness,” she announces. “These sisters are going upstairs.”

Restraint of Speech

There are times when silence is better, even, than good words. Saint Benedict discovered this when he renounced his world in the sixth century — the Roman empire disintegrating all around him, emperors being deposed in the midst of constant war. He went to live in a cave thirty miles east of Rome, in search of structure, security, and stability.

“Silence works to counteract our culture of anxiety,” Elliot told me. The snow that first winter in Illinois seemed to fall constantly, rendering the world, our world inside his office, doubly silent.

It happened the first time as if by accident, but looking back I see there was nothing accidental about it, that in fact it grew organically out of studying people whose lives were efforts at controlled meditation. Halfway into it, I took a step in his direction, on the brink, moving toward him not because I wanted to but because I thought that was the right thing to do; the instinct to share that blast of pleasure seemed appropriate after the slow, teasing seduction of watching each other remove our own clothes, watching each other’s hands as they moved down to begin their steady, rhythmic work.

But Elliot stopped me. “Stay there,” he said softly from where he stood on the other side of his desk, naked, his hand moving in swift measured strokes.

Soon the routine became clear — when I arrived, the day would be circled on the hanging calendar made by the Benedictine brotherhood of Saint John’s, each month a spare pencil drawing depicting scenes with titles like The Good Zeal of Monks, Brothers on a Short Journey, or The Times for the Brothers’ Meals . The day circled was never fixed, but once a week, there it would be. The first day, the scene depicted was The Sleeping Arrangements of the Monks . I’ve learned to look without looking as if I’m looking — a quick, imperceptible turn of my head as I walk through Elliot’s office door. Will we retreat to the cave today? Yes, I take my place, my body already a dull purr, readying itself for the steady hum. No, we hit the books, turning away from our desires, plunging instead into the comprehension of these strange men who sometimes sleep in their clothes so they can be ready to serve God immediately upon rising.

Most people assume monks are celibate, that they’ve rung out the last vestiges of sexual want drop by drop. But it is possible for monks to integrate a new, refigured sexuality into a constant dialogue with common love and monastic celibacy. There is instead an intensification, a heightening, a focus. One learns to draw the lines, to avoid foolish chatter lest one slip and slide in a flood of words.

We do not touch. We do not speak. We never speak. We make no noise, no sounds, no moans or squeals. We do not say each other’s names. In this way I’ve convinced myself that there is room for something else, some altered consciousness between us standing as we do, leaning against opposite walls for support. There are moments when I feel an invisible presence in the room with us, a wind in the sealed office blowing through me, the moment rising up out of our combined efforts, to skim my soul. We limit our movements. We move our hands just enough. We wait for each other, slowing down to let the other catch up, always monitoring the pace, and when the time comes, we turn away. Though we have never articulated any of the terms of our arrangement, there is an unspoken agreement that we will not look, that the final moment is each of ours to have privately.

Just once, I caught Elliot looking at me as he came into the trashcan lined with a plastic bag. “I am truly a worm, not a man,” he said when he saw that I’d seen him looking. And for days afterward, I turned his words over in my mind — did he mean to begin a conversation? was it a conversation I wanted to be a part of? hadn’t I achieved a celibacy of my own? would I sacrifice that? I spent long nights, tiny in my bed, staring out my window at the vast sky wondering what Elliot might offer me in the way of comfort, allowing myself to imagine the unwashed, sleepy skin-smell of it, the sound of my name in his mouth surrounded by tenderness, the salty ocean taste of him. The words began to seem, after twisting and turning them, strangely familiar. A week later, I came across the line— I am truly a worm, not a man —in The Rule of Saint Benedict, a recommendation, a mantra for life.