Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  One day when Catherine is singing the Song of Solomon, Jesus comes to her and kisses her right on the mouth. Another time when he appears, she drinks the blood flowing from the wound in his side. Later she becomes his bride in a ceremony presided over by Mary herself and attended by Saints Paul and Dominic. On Catherine’s right hand Jesus places a ring set with four pearls and a large diamond. After Jesus and Mary and the others disappear, the ring remains, although only Catherine can see it. In 1375, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, Catherine receives the stigmata while staring at a crucifix. As the blood from her wounds flows hot and red, she is transported to ever higher ecstasies.

  In 1380, Catherine dies an agonizing death, which she believes to be the torment of demons. She is only thirty-three years old, the same age as Jesus, her Holy Bridegroom, when he died on the cross.

  —Shortly after Catherine’s death, Mary said, her tomb was opened and they discovered that her body had not decomposed. The same thing has happened with many other saints, including Teresa. Their long-dead bodies were found to be completely incorrupt, still fresh and fragrant as newly picked flowers. Carnations, some said when trying to describe the smell. Clover maybe, or lily of the valley, Our Lady’s Tears. Personally, I thought it was more like datura, Angel’s Trumpet, whose smell is so intoxicating they say you shouldn’t plant it below your bedroom window for fear of not waking up in the morning.

  —Their flesh was found to be still juicy and sweet, Mary continued. So they were neatly dismembered and their body parts were distributed as sacred relics. Pieces of Catherine were spread all over Europe: shoulder blades, ribs, arms, hands, teeth, feet, the finger on which she wore Jesus’ wedding ring. Pope Urban VI ordered and oversaw the ceremonial removal of Catherine’s head, which was then taken to Siena in a gilded copper reliquary. As for Teresa, one arm was sent to Lisbon, one cheek to Madrid, one breast and one foot to Rome. A slice of her heart, like a slice of liver, was removed and taken to Milan. The rest of her heart was given a small jeweled crown and is still displayed in a glass case at the convent in Ávila. If you look closely enough, you can see the wide gash where the angel plunged his spear in all the way to her entrails. If you look closely enough, you can see her face or mine or your own reflected in the glass.

  Shopping

  On Wednesday afternoon we went to the mall. It was my idea, one that I suggested over lunch with some trepidation, well aware of the possibility that inviting the Virgin Mary to the temple of Mammon might be, if not exactly a mortal sin, then at least outrageously inappropriate. But I had some errands to run and I felt it would have been rude to rush off without asking her if she wanted to come along.

  Much to my relief, she said she thought it was an excellent idea, that she had, in fact, been about to suggest a shopping trip herself. She was still using my shampoo and thought it was high time she bought some of her own. Plus she needed to pay a visit to the bank machine and there were a few other odds and ends she wanted to pick up. The word Mammon was not mentioned and she did not quote to me those familiar lines: And Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. I was fairly confident that we would find no doves for sale at the mall—budgies, parakeets, cockatiels, and parrots perhaps, but not doves.

  Right after lunch we got ready to go. As we gathered up our purses, I noticed that Mary’s was almost identical to one I had bought a few years ago but have since given away.

  Sometimes I think I’ve spent the better part of my adult life in search of the perfect purse. Frequently I think I’ve found it, feeling sure that each new purse is the perfect purse at last, and that I will quite happily carry this one with me forever and ever. But then, sometimes quickly, sometimes more gradually, it becomes evident that this purse is not the perfect purse after all. With regular usage, it proves to be too big or too small, the strap is too short or too long, there are too many compartments or not enough. Or it proves to have been shoddily made: the lining rips, the zipper breaks, the fastener won’t stay closed or else it closes so tightly that I have to wrestle it open with both hands every time.

  Once, the strap of an apparently perfect purse let loose just as I was sprinting across a busy street in the pouring rain. I ended up down on my knees in the middle of traffic, trying to gather up my wallet, my hairbrush, a pack of gum, and three tampons that were rolling around on the wet asphalt. Brakes squealed, horns blared, drivers shook their fists and cursed at me.

  Soon enough I found myself back on the trail, searching once again for the perfect purse. Upon reflection, I cannot help but conclude that in this aspect, men are a lot like purses.

  Mary and I got into the car, buckled up, and headed to the large mall in the heart of the suburbs on the western side of town. We did not talk much on the way. Mary seemed content to look out the window while I concentrated on getting us there safely. Although I have been driving for more than twenty years and have never been involved in a serious accident, still I am nervous behind the wheel. I have little faith in my own driving ability, even less in that of the strangers piloting the cars all around me.

  My car, having miraculously healed itself the week before, continued to behave well and carried us smoothly through a long stretch of urban landscape now so commonplace that this part of the city is completely indistinguishable from any other on the continent.

  Both sides of the road were lined with a relentless cacophony of signs, each vying for our attention in hopes of convincing us to come on in and open our wallets. We passed between them as if running a gauntlet of colorful, shouting, oversized words. We passed gas stations, car lots, fast-food restaurants serving burgers, tacos, chicken, pizza, and submarine sandwiches. We passed sprawling superstores selling electronics, sports equipment, home and garden supplies, toys, furniture, and books. We passed strip malls where clusters of smaller stores offered carpets, computers, bathroom accessories, kitchen cabinets, party supplies, lighting fixtures, hot tubs, menswear, beer-making equipment, air conditioners, and pets.

  We passed a funeral home that resembled an oversized ranch-style house. There was a large green sign in front that proclaimed the name of the home while also giving the exact time and temperature in a flashing red digital display across the top. Judging by the number of cars in the parking lot and the discreet presence of a black hearse at the side door, there was a funeral in progress. Mary crossed herself and closed her eyes for a minute.

  We waited at a red light beside a new video store announcing its grand opening with a banner and red and silver flags strung across the parking lot. Beneath this stood a person in a gorilla suit thumping his chest with one hand and waving at the traffic with the other. I could not see the connection, but Mary seemed to be amused. She waved back and the gorilla jumped up and down until we drove away.

  A few minutes later we turned left into the mall parking lot and found a spot near the large department store on the eastern side. This is where I always park. Even on a Saturday afternoon a week before Christmas, I can always find a space in this part of the lot. I come to this mall often enough to know that there is never any room at the other end near the supermarket.

  I come to this mall more often than I would care to admit in certain circles. Not long ago, at a literary gathering, I inadvertently made passing reference to something I had seen at the mall. One of the younger writers present immediately seized upon this offhand remark, obviously aghast at my confession.

  —Oh my God! he shrieked. I just can’t picture you at the mall!

  I suppose he meant this as a compliment, as if my being a writer meant that I must be like those early Scholastics, living the life of the mind in their ivory towers, above all such uninspired, unenlightened, quotidian activities. I suppose he also could not picture me cleaning the toilet, washing the kitchen floor, or watching silly sitcoms all evening in my pink chenille housecoat while eating popcorn or doing my nails. The trut
h was I could not picture him at the mall either, slinking around in his black beret and his distressed leather jacket, wolfing down a burger and fries at the food court while scribbling out his angst on a grease-spotted paper napkin. Had I had a chance to say as much, I would not have meant it as a compliment. But fortunately, the conversation had swirled on ahead before I could muster a reply.

  When I was in my twenties, I, too, viewed shopping malls with great disdain. I considered the mall to be the epitome of crass commercialism and conspicuous consumption, the boorish domain of the bourgeois, the soulless castle of the status quo, the ultimate monument to materialism, meaninglessness, vulgarity, vacuity, and all that is wrong with the world. Shopping malls, I felt, were an affront to my dignity, my intelligence, my individuality, and my aesthetic sensitivity. I could not even drive past one without feeling offended.

  When I was in my thirties, I still disliked shopping malls, although for different reasons. Whenever I went to the mall, especially on weekends or near Christmas, I ended up feeling demoralized and depressed. As if all that fluorescent light and recycled air weren’t enough to contend with, I also had to deal with the fact that everywhere I looked, all I could see were loving couples and happy families. There were young lovers holding hands across the tables in the food court, making eyes at each other in the lingerie department, kissing in the shoe store. I could see their tongues burrowing into each other’s mouths. There were handsome fathers and beautiful mothers milling about with their rosy-cheeked children toddling along between them, bouncing wide-eyed through the toy department, waiting in line to sit on Santa’s knee. There were babies sleeping like angels in strollers. I could see their eyelashes quivering on their cheeks. And there I was: alone. In those days, a trip to the mall only served to confirm my suspicion that I was a freak.

  But now that I am in my forties, I find a kind of comfort at the mall that I cannot quite put my finger on. It has something to do with the fact that, because one is so much like another, when I am at the mall, I could be anywhere. There I know exactly what is expected of me: I am supposed to look and admire and then, if I can afford it, I am supposed to buy something. Usually I do. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I also find comfort in the orderliness of shelf upon shelf, rack upon rack, row upon row of all those brand-new products arrayed for my perusal.

  Maybe I like being at the mall because there I can believe that the most weighty and pressing questions I will ever have to face are:

  Will I sleep better between these 200-thread-count, 100% cotton sheets?

  Will this sixty-piece collection of pop-top stackable plastic containers keep my leftovers fresher longer?

  Which is more flattering: the red shirt or the blue?

  What color nail polish should I buy: Antique Lace, Iced Mocha, Luscious, Flesh, or Buff?

  Do these shoes pinch my toes?

  Do these pants make me look fat?

  When I am at the mall, I feel as normal as the next person and I like it.

  We went into the department store. Nobody paid the least bit of attention to us. As far as anybody else was concerned, we were exactly what we appeared to be: two middle-class, middle-aged women out for an afternoon at the mall. We were close to invisible. As I have said, anonymity has its own rewards. Mary seemed as comfortable here as she would have been in one of the great cathedrals of Europe.

  Just inside the door was the housewares department on our left and, on our right, ladies’ lingerie. The aisle display in housewares consisted of a set of outrageously expensive, generously proportioned stainless steel pots and pans arranged on an antique stove the size of a small car. Directly across the aisle was the lingerie display: two mannequins (torsos only, no arms, no legs, no heads) sporting see-through underwire bras and minuscule matching bikini briefs, one in lime green, the other in hot pink. They, too, were generously proportioned and outrageously expensive.

  —Not my style, Mary said. More suited, I’d say, to that other Madonna, the really famous one.

  I snorted in agreement. I could not picture myself wearing this underwear either, especially not while standing at the stove stirring a big pot of spaghetti sauce, with or without all my appendages intact.

  We strolled through linens, televisions, and greeting cards. In the cosmetics department, we were accosted by a perky young woman in a tight red skirt who wanted to spray our faces with a pink purse-sized atomizer of Evian Water.

  —Used regularly, she said, it will moisturize, tone, nourish, and refresh your skin. It is especially recommended for expectant mothers and babies.

  I could not help but think that it might be even more useful for women of a certain age, those of us in the menopausal years who find ourselves suffering hot flashes at unpredictable (and always inconvenient) moments.

  —It will change your lives forever, the young woman said earnestly.

  —Holy water, Mary whispered.

  I was shocked by her irreverence and laughed with my hand over my mouth. The young woman did not get the joke and walked away looking hurt. Clearly, Mary’s sense of humor was not without a certain edge. In fact, she was becoming positively giddy, a result perhaps of inhaling the fumes of a hundred different fragrances all at once. Or maybe it was the dazzle of all those little bright lights reflecting off the mirrored countertops and a million glass jars of magic potions.

  In the next aisle, an elegant, long-necked woman in an ivory-colored linen suit tried to convince us to buy the latest brand of anti-aging face cream.

  —It’s a miracle, she enthused breathlessly. I’ve been using it for only six months and just look at me. I’m fifty-four years old and I don’t look a day over thirty.

  We slipped away while the woman admired her own face and neck in a small mirror she had produced with a flourish from her jacket pocket.

  —Heaven forbid that a woman should look her age, Mary said, slipping her arm through mine. Imagine what that stuff could do for me. I’m two thousand years old and don’t look a day over two hundred.

  This time I laughed out loud.

  We went into the mall proper. In the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the week, it was not overly crowded. In all the times I’ve been to this mall, I have almost never run into anybody I know. This day was proving to be no exception. Our camouflage was holding up well and still, nobody gave us so much as a second glance.

  We stopped at the bank machine. If I had expected Mary to marvel slack-jawed at the technological conveniences of modern life, I was wrong. Clearly she was as up-to-date on these advances as the next person. I should not have been surprised. After all, she was not some primitive naif who had been popped into a time machine and then dropped down unceremoniously into this day and age. She did not exist in a vacuum and she had not spent the last two thousand years in a cave. She had been here all along. Televisions, telephones, bank machines, microwave ovens, computers, and the Internet: all these things were no more startling to her than they were to me. She was as much at home in this world as in the past or the next.

  At the bank machine, she went first. I found myself inching up behind her until I was peeking over her shoulder, trying to see the name on her card. I was practically on top of her and still could not read it. She, of course, caught me.

  Laughing, she held the card up so I could have a good look: MARY THEOTOKOS, it said. This was obviously a Greek name but I had no idea what it meant.

  —God-Bearer, Mary said, smiling. It means God-Bearer or Mother of God. It’s a name first given to me at the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.

  I used the machine and took out a hundred dollars.

  Next to the bank was the pet store. We joined a small group of people that had gathered at the window where three black kittens were tumbling, boxing, and chasing their own and each other’s tails. A fourth kitten, marmalade-colored and very dainty-looking, sat in the corner and ignored the others, washing her face and yawning. The audience was charmed and so were we. All at once, the three rambunctious kittens
were tired. They collapsed in a furry heap and fell instantly asleep. The orange kitten walked over and flopped down on top of them. The crowd laughed and dispersed, except for an elderly woman in a powder blue cardigan who seemed about to go inside and make a purchase.

  At Mary’s suggestion, we wandered into the store just to look around. As I had suspected, there were no doves. There was, however, a fierce-looking, multicolored parrot perched not in its cage but on top of it, a peach-colored canary happily singing its heart out, and a fat blue budgie admiring himself in a little mirror with a bell attached. The left side of the store was lined with fish tanks: goldfish, guppies, kissing gourami, mollies, rainbows, harlequins, angelfish, algae eaters, and three small piranhas. I remembered what Mary had said about the fish being a symbol of Christianity and wondered if any of these exotic tropical varieties would qualify.

  On the right side of the store were the rodents and the reptiles. There were hamsters frantically spinning their wheels, guinea pigs nibbling with their fur sticking out all over, mice curled up into little gray balls, and large white rats blinking their red eyes and twitching their long pink tails. Four small green iguanas stood like statues in their tank. Although the sign said not to, I tapped my finger gently on the glass, and one came forward, eyeing me in a friendly way with his head cocked to one side.

  —He likes you, Mary said. Then she made a strange face and pointed at the tank directly below.

  At first glance it appeared to be empty. I leaned in for a closer look and then drew back sharply, elbowing Mary in the process. There in the far corner was a cluster of large brown insects. There were six or eight of them, each about three inches long and half as wide. The sign said: MADAGASCAR HISSING COCKROACHES, 9.99 EACH.