As a girl she used to skate in the shadow of that school and convent, the steel wheels of her roller skates striking sparking twilight, bewildering the lightning bugs. Her mother had sewed dolls for sale in the department stores, and her father had taught piano lessons to purchase them for her.
And she was happy in the small odd neighborhood that was part blue collar part businessman part bohemian, but her older brother was never happy, and when the years had passed and World War II came he enlisted as soon as he could, and announced proudly to his father (he was always ashamed of his father) that he was leaving forever, and when he left she felt lonely and stuck, and the girl whose steel wheels struck sparks in the shadow of the convent in the innocence of youth felt her first yearn of doubt and wonder, and now the family was not so well off she had been supporting them (and all her younger brothers and sisters) by working and cleaning up at the convent, and sometimes when she was cleaning in the building's upper rooms at night she would look out and wonder where he was and what he was doing, and nothing within sight of that boxy building, be it the downtown or her own house, seemed enough and everything looked too small for her, like her own worn-out clothes pushed several seasons too far. And she thought of asking the Mother Superior about her feeling and then thought not. And when she had finished her work and was descending the stairs she would be thinking partially about her own thoughts but also about a certain round and red-faced Irish priest who drank too much and visited the nuns for dinner, a man whose laugh and look she did not like, but whom she could avoid by pausing to listen at the landings and then choosing a certain passage or a hall like a quiet clever mouse, in a building she now knew ten times better than anyone, including the Mother Superior herself.
And when she reached the first floor she would spring out into night air and dash the first several yards from the convent until she was well past the gate and outside the light of the streetlights, away from the convent but away from her home as well, out toward an empty field of grass. And the cooled night air would gust her hair and she would think of herself as a child of four, with life and fury striking fireflies from the pavement with her vigor and her steel skates, and she would thank God for her life and for her ability to feel it grow, to feel the need and want for something so much larger than herself she could not name it, but she thanked God for that, and wondered about her brother and prayed that he was safe, and that when he came home he would be full of gusto and story upon story. And the cooled night air would gust her hair and her dress and toss the fireflies around her.
Paul A Hawkins
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