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THE BEGINNING OF CALAMITIES

by Tom House

All winter he’s dreaded March–the longer, milder days, the vanishing of the last, cherished patches of ice and dirty snow on the walks, the announcement, so final today, that students would be allowed outside for recess. In the swirl of cheers, Danny smiled faintly, as if he hadn’t prayed that morning that it wouldn’t be so, hadn’t knelt on the bench at seven o’clock Mass, the only child present, One more day, God, please one more day. But now it seems he may as well have been praying for straight brown hair because those petitions, too, had had little effect. Tight, brassy curls continue to crowd across his head. “Curly girly,” the other boys continue to jeer, the same ones throwing Superballs now around the vast, empty parking lot: Brian Kessler, Joey Flynn, Kevin Lukas. What noise they make–calling out, choosing teams, racing all around! How defiant they are! Everyone knows Keep Away’s not allowed, is the most not-allowed of games, but still the yard mothers look the other way. Danny doesn’t know what to do and so continues to skirt the lot, trying to stay far enough away from the boys and the ball and yet seem part of it. Twice, when all the players have their backs to him, he raises his hand and murmurs, “Here,” this mostly for the benefit of the girls, some of whom, glancing over occasionally from their chattering circles on the walks, are still nice to him, and don’t know yet how bad at sports he is, how spazzy. But in truth, he fears the ball will actually be thrown in his direction, that it will hit him–or worse, he’ll put his hands up to catch it and miss. Yet even if he could catch it and throw it to someone else with any kind of skill, he wouldn’t want to risk the anger of Sister Regina Mary Murphy, the principal. Sister Regina often nods at him and calls him bright, devout, an example to other students. And though the boys will make fun of Danny even more afterward and say, “Who wants to be like Curly?” how terrible still if he were among those sent to the office, and she were to scowl at him and say, You?

           Just ahead, Paolo Moreno, the dark-skinned boy, is skirting the lot as well, though he’s much better, Danny fears, at pretending to be in the game: calling out loudly, sprinting all about, and sometimes, in the middle of a dash, he’ll leap way up, eyes wide, showing their whites. Paolo’s hair isn’t straight, either, but bent and frizzy in places, the ends rolling under strangely at his ears and neck. And now here, by a far corner of the stockade fence, Danny tries to speak to him, boyishly. “W-Whatchadoin’?”

           “Noth’n.”

           “K-Keep Away?”

           “Mm.”

           “Me, too.”

           But Paolo looks at him warily, sidelong. Clearly, he doesn’t want to talk to him and it’s because, Danny realizes, he’s just Curly, and not one of the boys across the way, in the thick of the rushing, whooping swarms. Yesterday, the boys called Paolo spic. “I’m not a spic, I’m Italian!?” he yelled back. “Siciliano!” But they didn’t believe him, and then he started to cry, which is the worst thing you can do.

           “Are not,” he accuses Danny now.

           “Y-Y-Yes, I am.”

           “You don’t want them to throw it.”

           “Y-Y-Yes, I do.” He raises his hand again to demonstrate his willingness–briefly, so no one sees.

           “How come you’re all the way over here, then?”

           “How come you are?”

           “I had the ball before.”

           “No, you didn’t.”

           “Yes, I did.” His eyes stretch wider. “I did.”

           “When?”

           But the boy’s turning and running off again, leaving Danny in the open by himself, and so he runs, too, but the other way, back to the island and the racks of bikes between the trees, and he squats down behind them, opening and closing the combination lock on his Stingray and looking through the bars and spokes to the game, the girls. At last he sits on the curb, dispatching Our Father’s and snippets of Psalms, all the while wincing beneath God’s stern, tremendous face. I know I have not been good, I know I should not ask. And soon he turns to Jesus, softer-eyed: Please make the bell ring, I beg you. I will do anything. I love you so much. Next to the Blessed Mother, the “interceder”: Won’t you please ask Them to make it ring? And on to Saint John, Saint Peter, Saint Francis . . . but unfortunately, it’s Stephen Hinch, the fattest boy, who lumbers by.

           “Hi, Danny,” he says, breathlessly and right out loud, and Danny blushes and squints up, marveling at the length and the strange, yellowy color of his face. Stephen’s the least-liked boy of all, much less than himself or Paolo. The other children will say things if they’re seen talking together; Stacy Ryan will say, Ew, you were talking to Stephen Hinch at lunch!

           “Hi, Stephen,” Danny says. He doesn’t know what else to do, with him standing right there.

           “Why aren’t you playing Keep Away?” the fat boy asks.

           “I was before.”

           “Oh.” Stephen doesn’t like Keep Away, he explains. He can’t run for very long and gets awfully tired–he says awfully.

           “Mm.”

           He says that when he runs the boys call him thunder thighs and pigbutt.

           “Really?” Danny says, glancing nervously through the bars. “That’s mean.”

           “What?”

           “That’s mean.”

           The boy looks down at his shoes–long shiny black shoes with buckles that no one would ever wear. “How come you’re nice to me?” he asks. Danny blushes again because he doesn’t feel nice. And in a moment, when the bell finally does ring and he rushes ahead to the line, knowing the boy won’t be able to keep up with him–that doesn’t feel very nice, either. Yet once the boy’s far enough behind, he forgets all about him and returns to his former worries. This kind of thing will happen every afternoon now: the ball-playing, the looking for a place to hide. Eventually the boys will see him and know he’s afraid. Hey, Burke, what are you sitting over by the bikes for, huh? Fag! Everyone will laugh, then, even Frances Fitzer, Ginger Holley, Patty Dupree, girls who are themselves fags, Ah ha ha!

           How he hates to imagine that, and yet he does, over and over throughout the afternoon. And he imagines it again later, pedaling the six blocks to his house, Ah ha ha! and all during dinner, and at various points throughout the evening and night, and in between his bedtime prayers. By the next day, Saturday, the chuckles have become cackles and hoots, the hoots growing in volume and duration, AHH HAA HAA! Steadily before him, an array of bared teeth and metal braces; glad, crinkling eyes behind big plastic glasses. No! he tells them, Don’t! and, soon after, is struck with the idea for the play.

           It comes to him in his small, slanted-ceilinged room upstairs, as if borne by a tardy angel. All at once, while reviewing his vocabulary unit and making practice tests, he looks up from his desk, remembering second grade: how, when they put on It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the players were allowed to stay in at recess to practice. And he wonders now if Miss Kaigh would allow their class to do the same thing, should he write a better and longer play and not just one about the Peanuts gang. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown wasn’t even a play, really, just a skit he wrote from his comic books. Peanuts are for little children, he knows that, and has long since stopped bringing those books to school. Still, he can clearly picture the afternoon Mrs. O’Brien took them up to the seventh and eighth grades to put the play on there at the front of the classrooms. How high the older children’s desks were! They towered over him as he crouched at the foot of the aisle, awaiting his cue. He hears again the howls and cheers when he ambled to the front on all fours, his black earmuffs on, playing Snoopy. “I can’t stand it!” one of the girls cried, “He’s so cute!” And one of the boys, “Go, doggie, go!” swatting him on the felt tail Mrs. O’Brien had pinned to his trousers. Then Danny, emboldened, had said, “Woo-woof!” and the laughter had doubled. How good he felt! How he wishes that could happen again, boys and girls cheering and smiling, So cute!

           But those seventh- and eighth-graders have graduated now, he realizes, and the children who were in the fourth and fifth grades are in the seventh and eighth, and there are different ones, younger than Danny, in the second, who weren’t in school at all then. He’s already three years older than they are! He wishes he could still be younger, in Mrs. O’Brien’s class, ambling up the aisle. Would it be better to still be younger? Maybe. Though he remembers, too, that his sister, Sharon, was in the seventh grade when they put the play on, and she cursed at him and yanked him by the hair as they were walking home that afternoon. “You come into my class with earmuffs? You woof like a freakin’ retard?” And so it might be better he’s not, and that she’s towns away at Holy Family, where his brothers had once gone. High school. He can’t imagine what it’s like, how enormous. Everyone so tall and learning algebra! He never wants to go there, yet it seems he’ll have to, in just three and a half years . . .

           Then possibly because his mind is on big things, he thinks of his field trip in the third grade, when they took the long bus ride to see the Christmas Spectacular at the place called Radio City Music Hall, the surprise when they emerged from the tunnel amid all the gray, gleaming towers, so many stories you couldn’t see the roofs! He felt so tiny and shadowed-over beneath them, as if rolling past the toes of dinosaurs. And later, on the wide sidewalk, they were buffeted by taxi horns and the shouts of the mothers and the children, and the bray of a man on the corner, selling big, doughy pretzels. Danny tucked his nose beneath his jacket, so not to breathe in the exhaust from the wall of idling buses. And he remembers the way Sister Theresa, when she saw the black groups arriving–whole classes of them, with black monitors–frowned and gathered them closer together. Spectacular, what a special word that is, how strong. And there was a kind of play called a pageant in it about the nativity, a nativity pageant with real animals and a great glow that arose from the manger; they all oohed and clapped. And now what if he, what if, with Easter a few weeks away, he were to write a play about Jesus’ sufferings and the crucifixion? A crucifixion pageant! “Cool!” he bursts out, and imagines Miss Kaigh, nodding and awe-stricken, Oh Daniel, what a super idea! “The Pageant of Christ,” he’ll call it, or, no, “The Passion of Christ.” Yeah! Can he? Because that seems such an amazing title, and Passion itself an even more amazing word, with its serious, whispery sound. He’s always admired it, the many times he’s come across it, capitalized that way. It means great suffering, and he associates it with Jesus’ taut, pain-ridden face lifted beseechingly toward heaven, with the drips of blood flowing from the tangled crown of thorns. But that would be hard, wouldn’t it, to write such a play? He himself could never do it, a boy. Though the story’s right in the Gospels, all the different parts of it, and what if he were just to read the passages and write down the quotes? Would that be cheating?

           He doesn’t know, yet shoots up from his desk anyway and runs to the hall, over to the small case where the holy books are kept, just above the numbered spines of The Book of Knowledge encyclopedia. Oh, but the Bible’s so big, he’s forgotten just how. And heavy! So many chapters! How will he ever find just the one part about the crucifixion in it? But then just beside it are the smaller, companion volumes–also beige, with the same gold marbling on the covers–books he’s never thought to look at before, and, remarkably, one’s called The Life of Christ. There are quotes inside: fishers of men, hell of unquenchable fire; Jesus’ words all in red, and won’t that make the play even easier to write, always knowing when He’s speaking that way? Sure. And now he stops, magically it seems, at the part called “The Beginning of Holy Week.” Before the chapter “Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem” is an illustration of Jesus in a white robe, riding a white donkey. Thick crowds are holding palm branches and laying down carpets, their mouths open with cheer, welcome. “Wow,” he says, imagining himself in such a robe, seated on such an animal, emerging onto a huge stage like Radio City. And just then in the hall, he raises his arm in a slow, magisterial way, as if addressing multitudes: Fear not, O daughter of Zion! Your king approaches you on a donkey’s colt.

           Of course, in his own play, it wouldn’t be possible to have a real donkey. For a second, he considers Duke, their springer spaniel, but he’s much too small to sit on and never does anything you ask him to. Danny can’t imagine bringing Duke to school–what a terror he’d be, tearing down the halls! He’s not even allowed in their house because after they got him he wouldn’t stop peeing on the carpets and chewing the furniture. “There’s something wrong with that animal,” his father explained. Poor boy, he’s in the garage this minute, lying in his wooden box with his matty-eared head between his paws, the way Danny finds him whenever he goes down to the den and opens the heavy, scratch-marked door. He should go down there and play with him right now; he should play with him a lot more than he does. When was the last time he did? Days ago, probably.

           There are more illustrations, one of Jesus at The Last Supper. He looks much cuter here, with the soft glow shining down on His golden-brown hair, glow on His neat, golden-brown beard. And oh–oh right, all twelve apostles are at the supper. That would be nearly half the class! He may have to begin the play after that, then, in the Garden. Isn’t that where the suffering really starts anyway? He believes so and, paging ahead, finds proof of it–vivid pictures of Jesus’ scourging, of Jesus falling on the Road to Calvary. And, “Oh no!” he says, coming upon the plate of Him hanging on the erected crucifix, not so much at the gory depiction of His torture, which is familiar enough, as at the fact that, in the three-quarter close-up of His face and upper torso, you can clearly see His left tittie, and it occurs to him that whoever plays Jesus will have to go bare at the end, down to the special, knotted cloth. His cheeks warm to imagine himself so exposed, his arms stretched wide, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do; everyone staring at his chest, his bellybutton, his feet. He could never stand before them that way, ever; and, putting the book back in the case, he shakes the thought from his head–maybe there can be a way around the bare-titties part–then races down to the kitchen, where his mother’s standing beside the stove, chopping onions for meatloaf. Mom? he’s about to ask.

~

Surrounded in avocado–avocado linoleum, avocado wallpaper, place mats, toaster cover, appliances (even a dishwasher finally)–Carol Burke is on the verge of tears. Not real ones, of course, but still she combs her memory for the big boo-hoos, trying to match her mood to the welling in her eyes: her miscarriages, her hysterectomy, her boys moving out. Despite her best efforts, however, the welling remains just that, nothing falls, and so she sniffles and tries to straighten up a little, feeling like a phony. Were it not for this tendency to hunch, were she not this mother-of-four-pushing-forty, her big-boned Irish-Italian frame would look taller than average: five-ten. Or maybe just five-nine-and-change now, with the accumulating crush of gravity. Today her teased brown hair, which usually flips up at the ends like Dear Abby’s, is gathered in the back with an extra-long barrette. So, too, the tail of her cream blouse hangs, in a casual, weekend way, down the ample seat of her knock-around blue polyesters. She’d say ample seat; her husband, Gerry, would not be so kind. Fat fanny, he’s fond of blaring; and in the summer, when she wears her one-piece, unavoidably baring the cellulite ripples on the backs of her thighs, he calls her Michelin Man–right in front of the other husbands sometimes, he calls her that. But all the wives have those, Carol’s quick to justify, which is why they’re always running back and forth to Weight Watchers and drinking Tab; and, also like many of them, she works in the business office at the public school up the street (a convenient, walkable distance, as Gerry’s always been against her learning to drive), and sometimes thinks of herself as psychic, particularly in regard to the kids. Now, for instance, she intuits by the speed of Danny’s approach that he’s about to make some impetuous demand, probably wants to use the kitchen table for another school project. Oh, that crazy planet thing last week, with the clay and the box and all that construction paper! She was picking up little black scraps for days.

           “Mom?”

           “No,” she says.

           “But I haven’t asked you yet.”

           “We’re going to be eating soon.”

           “Can I take one of the Bibles in my room?”

           “The Bibles?” she says in an overly shocked tone, even to her own ears, as if he’s just asked for a cigarette, maybe, or a condom. Still, her shock is understandable enough. When’s the last time someone asked her about the Bibles? Has anyone ever asked about them, all the years they’ve had them? Which has to be eighteen, nineteen, by now; they bought them around one of the boys’ christenings. She remembers the awkward moment when Father McGann asked if they had a good Catholic Bible at home, and she and Gerry exchanged glances. “I’m sorry, Father,” Gerry said, “we haven’t gotten one for the new house yet.” “No Bible?” Father said, and right away arranged to have someone come to the door with the proper ones. Had to have a special seal on them, or signature, some archbishop’s. Carol herself would never have chosen such a deluxe set, but Gerry’s a sucker for that kind of prissy religious stuff. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing you buy,” he’d said, and the salesman was quick to pick up on that, “Treasure all your life.” Even so, a hundred and twenty-five dollars; they had to buy it on time. It seems even more of an extravagance now: Gerry’s forgotten they exist. Ha! Once in a lifetime he ever sat down with them, maybe. And the only thing she’s ever done with them is dust the covers.

           “The family Bibles?” she says again, her tone softening, for she doesn’t see how she can forbid him to use the books. “What do you want them for?”

           He glances away to the Formica counter. “I have an idea.”

           “You don’t need the big one, I hope.”

           “No. Just The Life of Christ.”

           “Is that what those little jobs are?”

           “One of them.”

           She pauses. “Is this for religion?”

           “I want to write a play.”

           “A play?” She squints at him, vaguely recalling some Charlie Brown thing he put on in the basement a few years back with a couple of the old neighborhood kids. Cast himself as the dog! Didn’t say a single word the entire time. Which was smart in a way, she remembers thinking, a relief to her. “About what?”

           “The crucifixion.”

           “The crucifixion? Of Christ? Where’d you get an idea like that?”

           “I don’t know. I just thought of it.”

           She returns to her chopping. Well, his subject matter’s certainly getting more serious. But she’s not sure she likes this one; it seems gruesome to her, always has, the Good Friday stuff: all that whipping and those big nails. Every year they have to remind you of it, and right at the beginning of spring, just when things are getting nice. Contemplation of the suffering. What a concept! You’d think there’d be another way to get your blessings. Why do they always have to strangle the life from everything, cover it all in black? Oh now, what kind of thought is that? She glances quickly at Danny, as if he may have heard it, but he’s just biting his lip, eyebrows high, waiting for an answer. She may as well say it now. Go ahead, be careful. However, just as she’s about to, the uninvited image of her own sliced finger invades her mind: the disembodied tip of it, like the heel of a raw hotdog, rolling across the cutting board and settling, with a little bloody wobble, right next to the pile of diced onion. Oh! She winces and says distractedly, “Wouldn’t you like to write about something more cheerful?”

           “No, mom, it’s for Easter.”

           “Oh, I see. You want to write a play about the crucifixion for Easter. ‘Contemplation of the suffering,’ right? That’s very nice, I guess. All right, go ahead. Just be careful with it and make sure you put it back when you’re–”

            But he’s already fled the room, began to at very nice. She can hear the swift patters of his feet on the stairs, the swiping of the book from the bookcase, then a dull rumbling. Something falling? “Danny?”

           A muffled response: “Getting something from my closet.”

           Dredging something up, from beneath one of the many piles: the old black Royal, which, last seen, was transferred to his room after his brothers moved out. What his mother hears are flying Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars, old reports scuttling downslope, followed by parts of a never-used microscope kit. Damn. Well, he’ll fix all that later, and, slamming the closet door shut, he lugs the heavy machine over to his desk, wondering again what dorm means, which is where his oldest brother, Gerry, lives now. Robby’s place he can picture better because it’s supposed to be a kind of house, but in another town; he lives there with his friends and his girlfriend, Missy, a good-for-nothing slut, though Danny’s not supposed to know that. He overheard his father using those words once; his mother, floozy. There was hollering just before Robby left, shoving, fists thrown in the playroom, because of something he’d done again, stolen–gas, maybe, or car parts from the junkyard. Danny didn’t see the fighting, only heard it, his brother crying as he raced down the stairs, “I can’t believe my own father punched me! I’m never coming back here again!”

           He threads a sheet of looseleaf through the roller, and now his stomach flutters as he pushes down the caplock, hunts through the strangely jumbled keys, and picks out, THE PASSION OF CHRIST. Then beneath it, SCENE ONE: THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN, followed by what he believes will be the first lines of the play, spoken by the NARRATOR: Leaving Jerusalem, Jesus and the disciples soon reached the Garden of . . . G-E-T-H-S-E-M-A-N-E. Geth-so-many? This grove of olive trees had been a favorite retreat of Jesus in happier days, but tonight it had no charm for Him, for His soul was troubled with His coming Passion.

           See, there it is already! Capital P! Oh, but then–he was afraid of this–the very first character to speak is JESUS, to PETER, JOHN and JAMES: My soul is sad, even unto death. Sit here and watch with Me. Pray that you may not enter into temptation. In fact, it’s only Jesus who speaks in the entire agony scene–the disciples keep falling asleep. Three times He gets up to yell at them, then goes back to pray. All that moving around, all by himself! A solo. Is that what it’s called? What a relief when JUDAS finally enters (followed by THE GUARDS): Hail Master!

           Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a–?

           Oh yes, he forgot about this part and blushes now to think of it: a boy kissing a boy! But on the cheek, which is different. He used to kiss his father on the cheek; there was nothing wrong with that once. His mother would even tell him to, “Go kiss your father goodnight,” and then he’d slowly shuffle into the den, approach the silent man stretched along the couch, one hand cradling the undershirt-hill of his belly. “Goodnight, Dad,” peck, and the mumble behind him as he swept back out of the room–a grunty, throat-clearing sound that meant goodnight, also, and maybe his name. But of course, Danny doesn’t do it any more, hasn’t for a long time. Imagine doing it now in front of everyone? They’d all laugh again; say, So-and-So kissed you in the play! Who? Who would kiss him? No one. Brian Kessler. He pictures the blond boy’s lips brushing over his face, a soft, tender pressure, no hard look or funny smirk; betraying him but also not. And well, what if he just says, Do you betray the Son of Man? and leaves off a few words? That’s an idea. But once he’s backspaced to with, and his finger is hovering over the X key, he stops and spaces ahead again, arguing, with a wilder bout of flutters, that it’s not right, especially with the red Jesus-words, to do any kind of changing, and so types kiss after all. Maybe there can be a way around that, too.

           Sure, but in a moment he has a different kind of worry, mechanical: the print grows dim, then very dim, leaving just ghosty-gray impressions. When he takes off the typebar cover, he sees the ribbon isn’t moving and remembers this was a problem before, and why the typewriter was put in the closet in the first place. He also discovers a trick–pressing the release button and now and again advancing the ribbon by hand, which means typing without replacing the cover and thinking the exposed typebars look like a kind of skeleton, a half-moon of thin, metal ribs. And this method works, though not perfectly–the print keeps going from darker to lighter, and when the ribbon is too loose the tops of the tall letters get chopped off–until, just between PETER’s second and third denials, he comes to the end of the spool and is forced to take it out and flip it over, and in the process drops it on the floor, the long ribbon uncoiling. He snatches it up and rewinds it by hand, bemoaning its sorry condition–see-through all down the middle, and dotted with little holes, like runs in his mother’s stockings.

           Then it’s not until he looks down at the book again to type I tell you I do not know the man! that he notices the dark smudges he’s left on the margins of The Life of Christ, a whole trail of them, like someone very tiny and dirty-shoed has just traipsed across the pages. He looks at his fingers, each one stained with an oval of ink. Of course they are, wasn’t he just touching the ribbon? And he should wash his hands this minute, remove the smudges from the pages somehow with his pink wheel-eraser. Yet he goes on typing the line, and even pages over–lightly, he tries not to really touch the pages–and finds the high priest’s line, If you are the Messiah, tell us, which he likes very much and sets to typing at once, along with the rest of the trial scene. But before he has it completed, the ribbon tightens up suddenly and stays that way no matter how many times he presses the release button or swipes at the reverse lever. “Oh, come on,” he says to it, “Ooooh!” Then his whole fist comes down on the keys, sending a dozen ribs shooting up at the roller and catching in a hard, inky, frozen-up clump. Somewhat stunned, he raises his fist and examines the fleshy side of it. A couple of red impressions, a whitish scrape, but no cuts or blood, surprisingly little pain. “Ha!” He brings his fist down again, and so more of them now, stuck in the clump. The growing mass of blackened typebar heads infuriates him. “You!” he says, pecking at the remaining raised keys, “And you! Stupid! Stupid thing!”

           And now his mother hears him again–not words exactly, but foot stomping, unintelligible grunting. “Hey, what’s all that banging about?” she yells from the kitchen, then makes her heavy-footed way down the hall to the stairs. Still Danny’s unable to squelch another “ooooh!” or keep himself from giving the typewriter a little shove. “Hey, I said,” at which point she starts ascending. At the sound of her rushing steps, he quickly pulls the keys off each other, freeing the last ones as she enters the room.

           “I-I-I-I can’t get the ribbon to go right,” he explains immediately and, as she looms up behind him, moves the reverse lever back and forth, simultaneously typing fffffff to demonstrate its stuckness, the ghostiness of the print. “Look.”

           “All right,” she says, not as angry. “Don’t ruin your script. You’ll have to white all that out now.”

           But his stomach’s in knots; there’s a little fury caught in his mouth. “I don’t care,” he snaps, and types more pale f’s. “Look,” he says again and brings his fist down on his desk, not as hard as he’d like to. “Ooooh.”

           “Stop that.” She smacks his shoulder with the backs of her fingers. “Have more patience.”

           “Do you know what’s wrong?”

           “The ribbon’s not moving.”

           He clicks his tongue. “Do you know how to make it move?”

           “No, I don’t know how that old thing works. Maybe your father can help you when he comes in.”

           “Dad?” he says, picturing the man’s broad, hunched back in the plaid CPO coat, the way it would look if he were to glance out his window just now and see him squatting somewhere in the garden. He imagines his hands–big hands, rough, dirt in the knuckle grooves–fumbling with the ribbon. “He doesn’t know, either.”

           “He might.”

           “I need it fixed now.”

           “Uh!” Oh sure, the whole world has to stop because he can’t get his little ribbon moving. Kids kill her sometimes, their selfishness. The whole bunch of them, spoiled rotten. Maybe there’s a few things she’d like right now. Of course, that would never occur to them. “What do you want from me, Danny, miracles? I’m not a typewriter technician. Can’t you write the play longhand?”

           “But I wanted to type it.”

           “Well, you can’t if the typewriter’s not working, can you? You’ll just have to–Jesus Christ,” she says, gaping down at the open book. “The fingerprints you’re getting all over!” She smacks his shoulder again. “Will they come off? Let me see your hands.”

           “W-W-What?” he says, covering the smudges, his face flushing again.

           “Is the rest of it like that?”

           “No,” he says quickly. “I’ll use my eraser. Don’t worry.”

           “But it’s the Bible.”

           “It’s not the Bible, it’s The Life of Christ.”

           “It’s holy. All these books were blessed by Father McGann.”

           “Sorry,” he manages, and hopes now she won’t demand to see other pages.

           But in fact, Carol’s mind is far from this, trying to recall her own schooling at Immaculate Conception in Queens, catechism lessons with dour Sister Clare Bailey and her rubber-tipped pointing stick. “Is it a sin to get fingerprints on a holy book?”

           “I don’t know. I’ll get them off.”

           “You’d better.” But as she retreats, she can’t help thinking, Such a temper. Where does he get it from? Not her side of the family. Then in the doorway, she stops again. “Do you have a name for this play, Danny?”

           And he tells her without turning around.

           “‘The Passion of Christ?’” She nods gravely. How does he know a word like that? Then suddenly its other meaning occurs to her, and she envisions couples embracing on the covers of paperback romances, chesty girls in little newspaper ads for the X-rated theater in Islip. But he wouldn’t know about that side of it yet, would he? Little Danny? And the next second, as if to save herself from the answer, she comes up with a kind of joke, “Who gets to be the star?” But when he doesn’t look up from his typing right away, her smile drops. “Danny?”

           At last he glances over his shoulder, cringing slightly.

           “I asked who you thought would be playing Christ.”

           Then opens and closes his mouth, not knowing quite how to tell her.

           “Not you,” she says, shaking her head. She can hardly believe he’d consider it–him, Jesus Christ! What happened to his sense? His humility? His days of playing the dog in the basement? Doesn’t he know he’ll stutter and blush and make a fool of himself? She can feel her own face grow warm just thinking about it. “Oh no, Danny, you’d be much better off behind the scenes, directing.”

           “What?”

           “I mean–” And here her face grows warmer, to have said this aloud. “You’re the writer, the director; you can’t be the star, too.”

           “Why?”

           “Why? Because–because you have to be the one organizing everything, telling everyone what to do. That’s the most important job of all.”

           “No, it’s not.”

           “Yes, it is. Without the director, everything falls apart. He’s like the glue, he’s like, I don’t know, the quiet father.”

           “The quiet father?”

           “Yeah. And who could do that as good as you, who’ll know everything about everything, right?”

           He shrugs, grudgingly.

           “Right. And so,” she adds, not as softly as she hopes, “so you get one of the bigger boys to play Christ, someone outgoing, with spunk.” Then her heart sinks as she watches his gaze drop to the floor, but better to get the idea out of his head right away. “Maybe you can do one of the bit parts. What do they call those? Cameo. Like Alfred Hitchcock. You know what I’m saying?”

           He does–“Pontius Pilate?”–and at once regrets his example. He, sentence the Son of God to death?

           “Exactly,” Carol says. But those names are all one and the same to her. “What does Pilate do again?”

           “He gives Jesus over to be crucified.”

           “Oh, that’s right. And he washes his hands. He doesn’t want to give Him away.”

           “Yeah.”

           “But the Jews cry, ‘Cuh-roo-cify Him! Cuh-roo-cify Him!’” she says in a nasally twang.

           And when Danny looks up again, she’s staring wide-eyed at a patch of paneled wall above his head and wagging her fist in the air, the flabby pocket of her triceps jiggling vigorously.

           “‘Cuh-roo-cify Him! Cuh-roo-cify Him!’” Carol cries louder. She likes the feel of acting out the line. What fun, to be in a play; she almost wishes she had her own to practice for. Almost, but now she thinks, for the first time in years, of the Oklahoma! fiasco at Astoria High. She auditioned and everything: O, what a beautiful mornin’ . . . Never shook so much in her life, or sang so awfully! She had old Mrs. Beatty, the choir mistress at Immaculate Conception, to thank for that, that she even tried at all. Mrs. Beatty and her fuddy friends (of course, Carol didn’t know they were fuddies at the time): “I just love when you sing at Mass! You have the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard on a girl!” Had her thinking she was the next Patti Page. Yeah, and then you get to high school and find out just what a little fish you are. She squints angrily and, seeing this now as a cautionary tale, drops her fist and looks back down at her son. She’s right to discourage him. “So you can be that, then, Pilate.”

           “Okay,” he says to quiet her, and she is quieted by it, thinks he sees her wisdom. Still, she watches a moment more from the landing as he hunches over the book again, feels the task absorb him in stages, draw his concentration to a point. A strict, almost fearful concentration, as if so much suddenly depends on the writing of this little play!

Reprinted from The Beginning of Calamities with permission of Bridge Works Publishing Co., Bridgehampton, New York. This excerpt was first published in a slightly different form in New England Review.