Mary Biddinger
EVERYONE BRIMMED WITH ENTHUSIASM FOR THE MOON
First day of first grade, Sister Camille had written on the blackboard that we were taking a trip to the moon. Most of the other kids could not read this, of course, but I immediately attempted to exit. Sister Camille wore her hair short like Princess Diana’s, handwriting in perfect swoops. In a far corner of the classroom, a 3-D celestial model caught my eye beneath a poster that read “SPACE.” A cavern inside my chest went cold. I had no problem with the night sky, loved the moon when it washed my overgrown backyard in silver. But I did not want to visit the moon or imagine that journey. Sleepless, I walked around the apartment at night, my godmother dozing in front of reruns of Little House on the Prairie. I thought about living in a sod dugout, the complete opposite of a trip to the moon. All those hidden creatures close in their own burrows, earth pressing against us like a blanket. Second week of first grade, Sister Camille produced a bottle of rubber cement and a canister of old lentils. As soon as I saw the stack of paper plates, I knew what would happen next. My knees trembled in the metal desk, uniform jumper ravaging my legs like steel wool. Other kids slathered plates with rubber cement and applied lentils to the moon’s surface with plastic spoons. Except for Wiktoria, who asked whether we might try tasting the lentils first, and Geoff, who hovered over the rubber cement and drank the fumes. The cavern in my chest roared back open. Sister Camille switched off the overhead lights, clicked on her antique lamp, and slipped a record called Space Sounds onto the turntable. The noise resembled my godmother’s overzealous steam iron when she left it unattended for a smoke. Some of the kids barely noticed, kept shaking lentils in the blanketing dim. That night I traced the moon’s crescent in Chapstick on my bedroom window, hid its sticky sideways grin behind the blinds.
EVERYONE WAS READY TO WELCOME SUMMER WITH A SLEEPLESS NIGHT
First day of summer break and us neighborhood girls insisted on a sleepover. Nobody wanted to stay at Wiktoria’s house because it was too cold, even in early June. Mildred’s dad worked third shift so her place wasn’t an option, especially with the dance marathon we had planned. I gathered my records and arranged fuzzy letter stickers on a piece of construction paper: Dance Til You Drop. My godmother darted through the living room holding a glass of iced tea in each hand. I asked if we might host the sleepover but she didn’t hear me, trilling out lyrics of a folk song about a wayward piglet that tumbled into a stream. She joined our neighborhood corner granny on the back porch and they began to pray the rosary, occasionally pausing mid-verse to grab a pastel party mint from a shallow dish. I slunk to the porch and stretched. Sure am tired, I said, covering a fake yawn with my hand, could use some sleep. Corner granny asked if I was running a fever, if I had recently stepped outside with wet hair. My godmother kept on praying but wove my name into the rosary. She was praying in Polish, which she claimed was more swiftly received by the Lord. I heard the O’Connor twins out on the sidewalk practicing their acapella performance of “Material Girl.” Then I mustered the courage to ask if the gang might stay over that night. My godmother didn’t answer one way or the other but started recalling her days in the convent school again. How she and her classmates once discovered a derelict meadow, cleared the fallen branches and trash, and gathered there on summer evenings. It seemed the sun would never fully set, my godmother said, and to think the thicket was once an industrial dumping ground, turned into a serene oasis with a little care. I decided to bargain. If we girls said a novena together with my godmother and corner granny, perhaps even in the back corner of the yard where the cabbage roses were fading like sad Victorian wallpaper, could we occupy the front room for the night? My godmother thought about it for a very long while, then nodded and popped another mint into her mouth.
EVERYONE LEARNED THE NEW POPE WAS FROM CHICAGO AND THEN THOUGHT OF OUR CORNER GRANNY
Nobody loved Halloween more than our neighborhood corner granny, who dragged decorations down from her attic every first of October. The arched-back wire cat, a billowing nylon ghost that my superstitious godmother refused to touch, and happy light-up pumpkin faces for the small kids who might otherwise be afraid. But in 1979, every decoration stayed in its box. The candy bowl remained in its ordinary state. There was no aroma of popcorn balls on the breeze. Corner granny strolled door to door, opening the conversation with a quip about the weather. Then, abruptly, she shifted focus to Pope John Paul II, who would be visiting Chicago in mere days. Even though he would be holding Mass in Grant Park, which was nowhere nearby, there was always a chance he would request to visit a real Polish neighborhood. And how could we greet him with a cardboard Dracula or plastic ghoul hanging in the front room window? Neighbors begrudgingly complied, affixed their witch cutouts to windows that couldn’t be seen from the street. Corner granny braided my hair extra tight, demanded I pull my knee socks up to my knees rather than rolling them into the weird ankle tubes that I preferred. The block smelled so intensely of her baking that the neighborhood patrol investigated for an unlicensed boulangerie (easily paid off in piping hot rolls). Rumors claimed corner granny strolled past the archbishop’s residence a dozen times with fresh bread in a basket, a few jars of pickles. My godmother told us kids that the Pope’s dedicated plane was called The Shepherd, which felt like a mixed metaphor. We offered no critique, since that would be sacrilegious, and banished any thought of dressing up like Spider-Man that year.
Mary Biddinger’s latest book is the novella-in-flash The Girl with the Black Lipstick. She teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program.
Banner Art:
Cat on a flowering summer meadow, Bruno Liljefors , 1919, Wikimedia Commons
