Virgin Territory (3 page)

She’s here for you
.

I should probably mention that I’m not a religious person. As a kid, I never set foot inside a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a temple, unless it was part of some outing designed by my mother to expand my frame of reference. In New York City, it’s possible to come in contact with representatives of just about every religion under the sun, sometimes all gathered together under the same roof for an ecumenical something. They were all nice enough people as far as I could tell, but none of them
ever convinced me to sign up and become a member of their church or to follow them to India.

As far as God Himself is concerned, I have nothing against the guy, but I don’t think He’s spent enough time in New York City or in Jupiter, Florida, because I’ve never once seen Him. Or maybe I
have
seen Him, and I didn’t recognize Him. In any case, God and I have adopted a policy of laissez-faire, which means that as long as I don’t bother Him, I expect Him not to mess with me.

Of course, I’ve heard Bible stories about Jesus and the Blessed Mother and even the Apostles. They’re like famous baseball players—I know their names and what team they play for, but anything more than that slips my mind because I don’t follow the sport. I have nothing against religion, you understand. It’s just not my thing. So I’m thinking, when the woman at the golf course said, “She’s here for you,” she must have meant
you
in a general sense, and not me in particular.

After dinner I’m scraping the leftover food into the garbage disposal and loading the dishwasher when Doug comes waltzing into the kitchen. He’s freshly showered and smells like a scented trash bag. He hoists himself up onto the countertop. I decide not to tell him that he’s just plopped his ass smack on a patch of apricot jam left over from my morning toast. He looks happy, and he’s ever so slightly stoned.

“So …”

He’s holding up a piece of paper in front of his face as though
it’s a mini Magna Carta, and now he’s reading aloud as if to a crowd of invisible dignitaries.

“Says here, a person can sell their real estate by burying a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary on their front lawn, upside down and facing the house. What d’ya make-a that?”

I can’t bear to look at Doug when his face is cleanly shaven and he has a buzz on. He’s just too open or something, and I see too plainly the face of the guy he once was shining through the face of the guy he’s lately become. It’s not that either of those faces is hard to take. No. It’s the distance between the two that kills me.

Don’t get me wrong. Doug has always been a decent-enough-looking guy. His hair is black and shaggy, and though it’s salting around the edges, there’s still plenty of it. His eyes are a shade of blue that match a color-enhanced snapshot of the ocean. He has that tall, dark, Irish American thing going for him; and being outdoors all day makes him look like a tennis bum with a trust fund, a look that women seem to find appealing.

“I wouldn’t have a clue what to make of it,” I say as I carefully place a two-in-one Action Pac into the dishwasher, close the door, and press
NORMAL
. Almost immediately the machine starts breathing out the toxic fumes of Citrus Breeze. Because the hum of wash and rinse is threatening to trump our conversation, I up my volume. “I’m grounded and denied access to the Internet. Remember?”

“I remember. And for a good reason, too.” He’s trying to
affect his dad voice, but because he’s high, he just sounds like he’s imitating someone on TV. “Here y’go, buddy.”

Buddy?

He hands me two sheets of paper—one has some 1-2-3 steps about how you can bury a statue on the front lawn as a way to get your house sold, and the other is a list of results from a Google search of “the Virgin Mary.”

I give him a cold stare and do my best to dim his ridiculous grin by adopting an expression that says,
And what am I supposed to do with this?

“Didn’t think I was paying attention, did ya?”

“Whatev.” I turned back to the pots and pans from last night’s dinner.

“Look. I did your homework for you. You could at least show a little appreciation.”

He hops down from his perch and makes a big show of leaving the room as though he’s the most underappreciated single parental unit in all of Jupiter, but when I don’t take the bait, he turns back to me and says, “You think everything sucks, right? You do. I know, because I was the same when I was your age. I thought the whole world sucked big-time. And it did. But y’know what really sucked? Me. I sucked. I had a bad attitude, and pretty soon everything around me just reflected back my suckiness.”

“So what’re you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that, if you want to get somewhere in this world, you have to at least make an effort.”

“Wait. So are you telling me that you’ve gotten somewhere in this world, or are you saying that you don’t suck anymore?”

“Nice.” His voice sounds flat and sulky. And then he’s gone.

I finish up the pots, sponge down the counter, and put everything away so that the kitchen looks pretty much the way my grandmother always kept it when she lived here.

From the next room Doug announces that he’s going out, and then in a concession to his own guilt for leaving me at home alone, he says I can use his computer to check my e-mail. But, he’s quick to warn me, he’ll be checking on me when he gets home to make sure I haven’t been up to any shenanigans.

Shenanigans?

I have no idea where he goes when he leaves the house in the evening, though he always makes sure to tell me that if anything happens I can call him on his cell and he’ll come right home. I always remind him that nothing has happened since we moved to Florida nine years ago.

I should mention that moving to Florida wasn’t my idea. I never would’ve come here. Doug said that Florida was going to be a great new beginning for us, which of course meant that life would suck just like before only in a new setting. To be fair, Doug kind of
had
to move here because of my grandmother, Marie. She developed the early stages of Alzheimer’s about five years ago, and she was getting worse and worse. Doug felt that it wasn’t safe for her to live alone anymore in her done-up, four-bedroom hacienda on a cheery cul-de-sac. Right after Marie
drove her car into the window of the dry cleaner, we moved in with her. Then Doug had her moved into an assisted-living situation, and here we are, still living in her house.

All my e-mail turns out to be junk. Nothing from Corey. I check out a few Blessed Virgin Mary sites and discover that her first public appearance was in 1531 when she showed up on a Mexican mountainside and startled a local shepherd named Juan. During the last century, she was very busy—Lourdes in France, Knock in Ireland, Fatima in Portugal, and Medjugorje in the former Yugoslavia. I also read up on how an Internet casino recently paid out $28,000, via eBay, so they could purchase an image of the Virgin Mary that had been toasted into a cheese sandwich. And there are hundreds of personal testimonies from people who claim that they’ve seen her on various inanimate objects such as water tanks, car bumpers, billboards, a cinnamon bun, oil slicks, subway platforms, an office building, hillsides, and moldy wallboards.

As I’m doing my research, the house begins to settle down. I can hear the hum of the central air, the creak of floorboards relaxing, and the slosh and whoosh of the dishwasher as it does its last round. I leave the computer and walk from room to room, restlessly. I pretend that I’m living in the aftermath of some major global catastrophe, and I’m one of a handful of survivors scattered around North America. This is my place, my safety zone, and it’s going to stay that way as long as I keep it sealed against contaminants and possible invasion by other survivors
who aren’t so lucky. I know they are out there, wandering around and looking for a safe zone. Unlike me, they don’t have a choice of rooms. They can’t sit in overstuffed furniture that has been upholstered to match the sand and sea-foam-colored carpets and drapes. They don’t have a state-of-the-art toaster. They don’t know the pleasures of foam mattresses designed by NASA. Of course, as soon as the other survivors find me, they’ll want in; but in order to survive, I’ll have to deny them access. I’ll have to be strong and go it alone. And even though it might be fun to invite one or two of them inside the house, offer them a cool drink, make them microwave popcorn, and watch one of the very last pre-apocalyptic DVDs together, I’ll have to resist. The survival of the whole world depends on my ability to refuse to open that door.

I pick up my guitar and practice a few Bob Dylan songs. I’m forcing myself to learn one of his classics, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I am, after all, named after the guy, and for the past few months, I’ve been trying to master the tune on my guitar. At the rate I’m going, I should have it down in time for my seventieth birthday. Still, it’s good to have a project.

The phone rings. There’s definitely someone on the other end because I can hear breathing. Not the heavy panting of a perv, just what it takes to stay alive during waking hours. This has been happening for a while. I don’t recognize the number on the caller ID, so I suspect that it’s Marie dialing the only number she remembers—her home number. But by the time
she gets me on the phone, she’s forgotten who she is and why she’s calling. That’s my theory anyway. Rather than embarrass her by asking too many questions
(Do you know who I am? Why did you call? Who’s the president of the United States?)
I pull up a kitchen stool and begin to tell her about the unexpected appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the golf course. It feels good to talk to somebody, even if it’s only my grandmother, a woman who is slowly forgetting everything.

“… and so the lady asked me if I was able to see it. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything, really. I mean, there was something there, for sure, but I wouldn’t swear that it was the Blessed Mary. Just looked like rot or a scar or something gone wrong with the tree. I couldn’t say it was a person, even. Then all of a sudden, I saw it. It was like one of those drawings of a bunch of dots, and it looks like a bunch of dots until someone says that it’s supposed to be two people kissing or whatever, and your eyes adjust, and then you see it. Y’ever see those drawings, Gram?”

Marie was always a big talker, but once she started losing her memory, she began to say less and less. Personally, I think she keeps quiet because she doesn’t want anyone to notice that she can’t keep things straight. In any case, I run out of things to tell her, so I say see ya and hang up.

I decide to review the Wedding Archives. The Wedding Archives are Doug’s life’s work, at least his work up until his life changed and we moved to Jupiter.

I call them the Wedding Archives, but they aren’t that organized; they’re just a collection of loose DVDs with the names of a bride and a groom and the date they were hitched scribbled in Doug’s almost illegible handwriting. They’re stored in a shoe box that sits way at the back of Doug’s clothes closet. If I didn’t climb a stepladder and reach into the back of the closet to liberate the box every once in a while, no one else would bother, and the DVDs would just sit there, forgotten, gathering dust. Doug doesn’t care about his past; he’s pretty much turned his back on everything he did in New York. He says that it’s better for us to move on and try to forget. I’m not so sure.

I take the DVDs out of the box, careful not to leave fingerprints on the shiny silver discs. I slip one of them into the computer, click on the appropriate icon, and instantly bring someone’s happiest day gloriously back to life. I usually fast-forward a lot because even though I’ve seen each wedding numerous times, I like to review as many of them as I can in one sitting.

Tonight I start with Cindy Choi. She’s alone at a vanity table, applying makeup and pretending that Doug isn’t standing right behind her recording her reflection in the mirror. Cut to the freshly polished limousines pulling up in front of the temple. The entire wedding party spills out onto the sidewalk. I love this part, the part when the bridesmaids nervously assemble on the church steps while the bride-to-be breaks down in tears.
Watching people cry in fast-forward is way funnier than watching them in real time or even in reverse.

The Witty-Gainsbourg wedding is also one of my all-time faves. Wait for it. The groom is about to faint and fall flat on his face.
Boom!
In real life, this kind of thing can take forever: the exchange of the vows, the public make-out session, the cutting of the cake. But when I watch them with my hand on the controls, time flies, and I can move the principal players in and out in a matter of seconds.

I love a good reception; that’s the part that really kills me. People act so crazy. Even when the bride and groom have chosen a standard wedding package at one of those cookie-cutter banquet halls for clueless newlyweds, the families and friends end up all over the place, falling down drunk, crying on camera, and driving off in the wrong direction. Fun.

The last time I screened the Moore-Greene wedding, I laughed so hard I almost threw up. Halfway through the reception some uncle in a plaid cummerbund jitterbugs with a teenage girl on a parquet dance floor; he spins her around, rocks and rolls her, and then accidentally sends her flying into the four-tiered wedding cake. Genius. Lucky that Doug was there to catch it on camera. He could’ve made money sending something like that to
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, but he claimed that he wasn’t that kind of videographer.

I usually listen with the sound turned down; it’s too distracting when you have to hear the sappy music, the by-the-number
testimonials, the lame jokes, and the heartfelt good wishes. When you know too much about the people, you get involved in ways that aren’t always fun.

I never view the Wedding Archives more than once a month. I feel that it could get weird if I made it a habit. I could turn into a freak. And I never go straight to the Viola-DellaCruz wedding because even though the Viola-DellaCruz is superspecial, I feel it’s better if I wait for it. I let the disc sit in the box gathering strength. I wait until I’m good and ready. I wait until I can’t stand it anymore. Then I go for it.