44 The first misfit toy

Mary Pendleton is giddy, nervous.   She is giddy because she feels like Christmas, nervous because she feels like a school-girl sneaking out for her first kiss.  The only light in the area is from the sharp, white interior of the ambulance drop-off, which, in contrast to the Emergency Room on the opposite side of the building, is quite placid.  It is dark and drizzly, but a little chill and precipitation can’t possibly dampen Mary’s glee this evening. 

The counselor makes her way out of the halide haze of the hospital parking lot, past the perimeter of Old Presbyterian, to the dark Memorial Rose Gardens beyond.  A short wrought iron fence encompasses the gardens, more decorative than functional.  And as Mary enters the labyrinth of flora, she notices a single broken picket with a decorative Fleur-de-lis cap  lying on the ground.  She picks it up in order to give it to a groundskeeper in the morning.  This place is going to be special to her after all.

The maze is disorienting, but the smell of the flowers in almost overwhelming with promise.  Mary finds her way to the center, which is uninhabited except for one lone girl, seated in the silver- blue darkness of a gibbous moon.  Mary indulges in a pause, lets the aroma and moment wash over her; this square, hemmed in as it is and washed in beautiful silence is a cathedral on the dark side of another world.   Life may not pass this way again.

“Where the hell have you been?” the Woman barks.  Mary comes to and rushes up to her to wrap the Woman’s head in an embrace.  The kisses the Woman’s forehead and presses her face into her own chest as if she was every bit as precious as the reincarnated Buddha-child.  The Woman shrugs Mary off, “Cigarette?” she asks.  “Oh no,” Mary says, “I quit some time ago.”

“No, Mary,” the Woman fumes, “Not for you – for me.  Do you have a cigarette, for me?”

“Oh, of course, of course.”  Mary gleefully searches her big bag for a smoke.  She always keeps candy and gum for her kids, and smokes and condoms for her bigger kids.  Mary lights the Woman up and pets her dark hair.  Mary can’t help fawning over her.  “I am so happy,” she whispers to the Woman.  The Woman is not looking at Mary.  “I am not going to nag, but, I really want you to stop smoking after tonight, ok?  And you should come stay with me for a while, just until.  You know?  It will be good for you.”

The Woman holds herself tightly, her arms and legs crossed.  The cherry of her Marlboro glows hot when she inhales – the only warm color on an otherwise blue-grey night.

“What do you want with me, anyway, Mary?” the Woman asks, “I mean, what is it with you?  What do you want with any of us?”

“What do you mean?  I want to help, you know that.  It’s what I do?”

“Yeah, but why?  Do you just want my baby, is that it?  I mean, what’s your angle?”

“I just want what’s best for everybody.  I want to take care of you, and the baby.  And whoever else I can help.  You know this.  You need to get your trust issues under control, babe.  Why are you acting like this?”  Mary reaches out to the Woman, tries to console her.  The Woman pushes Mary’s hands away.  She stands up.  Mary speaks to the Woman in a calm, reassuring voice, “Just come over, you’ll see.  Everything is all fixed up.  I’ve got the baby’s room all painted.  And Paul gave me a crib that he got from his sister.  And there’s a room for you, too, sweetie.  I’ve taken care of everything.  It’s all fixed up.”  Mary stands as well.

The Woman takes one last drag and snuffs the butt out in the pea-sized gravel.  She looks at Mary for the first time this evening, “Listen, Mary, I had an abortion; I aborted the baby, ok?”

Mary blanches in disbelief, “You did what?”

“I just can’t deal with all of this right now.  This is not the right time; everything is all wrong.”

“But, you had no right.  You had no right at all.  That was my baby; I was going to take care of you and the baby.”  Tears of grief begin to stream down Mary’s face as she understood the reality or the Woman’s statement.

“No, Mary, it was my baby.  That’s where you get confused.”

“But I was going to save her, save you.”  Hints of hysteria peek through Mary’s words.

“You want to be the great Mother Mary, fix us all, save us all.  But you’re not living in the real world, you know. You’re idealism is just . . . outdated, cliché.  You need to realize that some of us just can’t be fixed; we’re the Island Of Misfit Toys, plain and simple.  So just stop it – stop trying to fix everyone; strop trying to fix me, I don’t want it.” The Woman looks Mary in the eye, “Listen, you can’t save us all.”

Mary shrieks in madness and grief.  No one hears.  “No! You had no right!  You had no right to do that!”  Mary wails, she cries, she falls apart.  And then Mary’s hand does a thing that should have surprised her: Mary’s hand plunges the rusted picket through the abdomen of the Woman, through her uterus, through her womb, the place of her offense. 

The Woman cries in pain, broadcasting her fate to none but rose petals, who tremble delicately in the cool night air.  Mary lowers her to the ground and the gravel runs black with blood, dark as crude in the spare midnight moonlight.  “You had no right,” Mary whispers.  The Woman looks at Mary first with horror, then with puzzlement, and, at last, when the inevitability of her situation becomes real to her, with relief.  She moves through all five stages of grief in the course of a minute.  This World has not treated the Woman kindly, and death, she finds, is a solace.  Mary weeps tirelessly over the Woman, kisses her forehead and holds her hand in escort to the next world.  “My soul for yours, my soul for yours.”  Mary kisses the Woman’s face again and again.

Mary, under the full spell of her madness, stands and turns her face to Heaven.  Her tears mingle with the soft rain.  Her tears are of sorrow to be sure, but they are also of rapture, of communion.  A mother’s duty is limited only by how much flesh she has to give.  But in this moment, has discovered the key to transcending her own limitations of sacrifice:  Mary has relinquished not only her flesh, but her soul.  She has drawn out that incurable poison that cruelly enslaved her little one.  She has discovered how to fix the un-fixable.  Any punishment to fall upon her now will be counted only as an Ecstasy.  She has become like her Overseer.

Mary dips two fingers into the soaked gravel and makes a diagonal mark across the Woman’s breast.  She does this once again, and then bridges the stripes with a horizontal bar, forming a large letter A, the badge of her sin:  A for abortion.

With unceasing tears, for the rest of the night, Mary goes about the tireless sacrament of adorning Kathy Leokadia’s body with every single rose petal in labyrinth’s heart.  Only thorny stripped-bare stems and a funerary of flowers welcome the morning light.

The pink dawn falls lovely upon Mary’s face as she makes her way out of the warren.   She has much work to do.  There are others in need of the Cure.