Curse of the
Virgin
by Richard Sensenbrenner
She falls onto
my lap from a secondhand book. She has
a look a bit putout about the whole thing, but
wouldn’t complain. She is a
vision in red, white, and blue, standing palms
out, her halo unwilling to be upstaged. That
hooded cape is a light blue and the perfectly
pleated tunic a plain, unblemished white. What
really sticks out, perhaps literally, is the
goose-blood-red-heart. There is no
room for lungs, I think, while looking at that
huge heart with its own halo. She is
anatomically incorrect. I turn her
over and the back reads, In memory of Doris- and
then some Polish name requiring time for
dissection, followed by an invocation to God.
These holy
cards are a flat commemorative. My
mind instantly draws the correlation with
baseball cards, old women gathering together to
trade a Gladys for an Ethel. Sandwiched
in Plexiglas is the rare Francine, whose wake
took place during a blizzard.
I turn her
back over. She looks like Donna Reed,
not a bad thing at all, not very authentic. I
move to throw her in the wastepaper basket but I
can’t for some reason. The card
sticks in my opposing digits. I can’t
discard the Blessed Virgin and Doris What’s-her-name-ski. I
am a Catholic, for Christ’s sake.
It’s only
paper. What if I wrote both their
names on a piece of paper, crumpled it up and
tossed it? I get out a piece of paper,
fumble around for a pen, write their names, and
now I have two of them.
Reading my
book for pages, I ignore them both and wonder why
this stuff always happens to me. It’s
not like they take up a whole lot of space. I
can put her with my own collection of dead
relatives, maybe. Can I take a total
stranger, like Doris and include her with my
relations?
My wandering
eyes conveniently notice a library book on the
other side of the room. I’ll
institutionalize her, put her between the pages,
deposit her in the drop box, and run like hell. It’s
a government problem.
But now Donna
Reed, in her prelude to a habit, looks me in the
eye. What if the next person crumples
Doris into a ball and tosses her with the
eggshells, or coffee grounds?
I introduce
Doris to my dead relatives and she now resides
with them in the very top drawer of my dresser,
along with a tangle of rosaries and chainless
medals.
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