Small Axe Books

Tristan and Dingo fell in love with Christa the same day. It was in Religion class, the dreaded sophomore second semester morality sequence, five months of the same long, long lecture about the history of Catholicism’s quest for self-abuse. Tristan, a quiet nobody in K-Mart’s best attempt at the prevailing preppy fashions, spent most of that semester earnestly answering journal questions on topics ranging from pre-marital sex to abortion, all dissenting in the respectful cafeteria Catholic way from the Church’s official teachings. Dingo sat in back, trading blasphemies with Skippy the Satanist, who sat beside him and spent the classes drawing inspired caricatures of the pope, Jesus, and Sr. Mary Catherine.

Christa had early gotten on Sr. Mary Catherine’s list of lost souls. From the second week of the semester she kept Christa after class to “talk” and referred her often to the guidance office. Christa found such attention amusing; it allowed her to leave the class as much as three times a week, spending the hour making up stories about her life and watching the counselors gape and gawk at her. Along with the bi-monthly “mental reservation” days she gave herself to hang out in second lunch, these trips to the guidance office cut down her attendance to once or twice a week.

She chanced to be there one Tuesday, sitting in the front row, second desk from the door where she had been assigned. Sr. Mary Catherine spoke in earnest about whatever she was talking about, writing key words on the board to emphasize concepts. “Abortion,” the nun was saying, “has been condemned from the Church since its beginnings. Why, one of the oldest pronouncements about any moral matter was a treatise condemning abortion in 150 A.D. . . .” Christa was not paying attention. Few people were, other than to jot down the date mechanically for their list of things to memorize and then forget for the upcoming quiz. Instead, Christa’s attention fixed on a note filled with lurid reminiscences of the previous weekend, and she had long given up trying not to smile at it.

The nun realized her lecture was passing on deaf ears. Years spent in hopeless attempts to teach hormonal teenagers in sticky September classrooms the finer points of Aquinas had calloused her attentions, shrinking her periphery so that she missed the sleeping kid in the corner, the casual conversations across the aisle, and so long as the sleeper’s snoring and the whispers remained respectfully subdued, she was likely to carry on as if they weren’t there. But the sight of a student reading a note was something with which she had no tolerance; it broke through years of protective self-delusion and reopened the primordial wound, the one left by the searing discovery that the children weren’t listening to her, that they were in fact mocking her sincerest efforts toward their salvation. So much the worse when she saw a student actually enjoying reading the note, laughing at it, without even attempting to hide the treason; for then, the laughter was real, audible, not just some metaphor she had invented in desperation. To save the face that only she knew she had lost, the nun prepared her attack.

“Miss Leyden?” she asked in her best I’m-surprised-at-you voice, “Is that a note you’re reading?”

Christa raised her eyes from the paper, staring vacantly ahead.

“I think so, sister,” she said.

“Are you writing it, or reading it?”

“I believe I’m reading it sister.”

“Would you care to read it to the class?”

It was a classic line, one crossing the lips of all bad teachers at least once a quarter. You could tell a cool teacher, Christa thought, because they never had to stoop to outright humiliation to feel that they were in control. They had more confidence than that. Really cool teachers wouldn’t care if you were reading a note, or daydreaming, or drawing a picture on your notebook, because they had confidence that the lag of attention would be temporary. Less cool teachers, who were still cool in their way, would take the note from the student and throw it away. Only true assholes were interested in voyeuristically peering into a person’s private life and encouraging others to do so, and they were almost always lousy at their jobs because they knew the only way they could get kids to pay attention to them was to mock one of their own.

Christa broke her vague stare at the black board and met the nun’s eye.

“No,” she said flatly. “But I’ll summarize it for ya. Actually, it’s about this class.”

“Oh really? A discussion of Church history perhaps? Or morality?” The nun’s smile was wide and condescending.

“Both actually. You know how you were saying that the first church statement against abortion was in 150 A.D.?”

“Yes. I was just saying that.”

“And that’s, like, supposed to prove something?”

“Yes. If you were paying attention, Miss Leyden, you’d realize that it’s in keeping with the righteousness of the Church’s present position on the subject. It shows how consistent and long standing the Church’s opposition to abortion is.”

“And this was at a time when the central authority of the church wasn’t established yet. Like, not every Christian believed the pope in Rome could talk to God.”

Sr. Mary Catherine seemed a bit taken aback. Her smile faded. “Well no,” she admitted. “The Petrine theory wasn’t universally accepted for several centuries. There were variations from community to community on matters of doctrine and dogma, but–”

“So what you’re quoting there is just the opinion of one particular community. Not the `church’ as a whole.”

“Yes, but that has since become the accepted doctrine of the Church as a whole.”

“But it could have gone other ways, right? I mean, Gnostic stuff could have been the `official’ doctrine of the church now, if history had gone a different course.”

“Well, I suppose it could have, but–”

“So, basically, this particular community forced their beliefs on the others. Just like the Gnostics who used to have orgies for masses got crushed by the chastity crowd. Just like there were really twelve Gospels, but some guy in Egypt decided only four would be `official’ because he didn’t wanna deal with a gospel saying God was a woman or that Jesus was gay!”

This caused a shuffle of seats in the classroom. The class, unused to Sr. Mary Catherine’s being challenged, woke out of their sentence dictation coma and began whispering things. A blonde crewcut football player looked at Sister Mary Catherine pleadingly.

“Jesus wasn’t gay,” he said emphatically. “Was he?”

“Of course not,” said the nun.

“One of the gospels says he was,” Christa maintained. “I saw it on Channel 11.”

“Those gospels weren’t included because they were heretical,” said Sr. Mary Catherine decisively.

“They are only heretical because some guy decided they were. Some guy in Egypt, in the fifth century. And some churches agreed with him, so they killed anyone who disagreed and burned their books. All the beliefs we have today come from whoever got to write the history books. From whoever won the battles. Why are they always right, sister? Unless you think it’s Catholic to think might makes right.”

All eyes were on Christa. She stared defiantly at the nun, having cornered her perfectly. Sr. Mary Catherine looked flustered, desperately thinking how to change the subject.

“Well? Does might make right, sister?” Christa repeated.

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then why should any of us have to believe anything that not everyone back then believed?”

“There’s evidence in the Old Testament,” the nun said, recovering, “of the immorality of abortion, too. In Leviticus–”

“Sister?”

It was a voice from the back. Dingo sat up in his chair, his demeanor suddenly thoughtful.

“Yes, Mr. Mulcrone?”

“Most of the Old Testament was written thousands of years ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“By nomads in the desert, right?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“People who would slaughter goats and stuff, right?” (Skippy chuckled at this).

“Yes, Mr. Mulcrone. What is your point?!”

“I’m just saying that the beliefs of a group of people who would slaughter a cow, cut it in half, and then walk between the bloody halves to seal a covenant can’t possibly be all that relevant to our lives today.”

The class burst out laughing. Sr. Mary Catherine was completely disoriented. She started to say something when the bell rang for third lunch. As the class cleared the room, the nun regained her composure enough to tell Christa and Dingo to stay after class. Tristan lingered to overhear, stacking his books slowly on top of each other. The nun lectured them about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater and issued them detentions, both for “disrupting class” and an extra one for Christa for dress code. Although her outfit violated no official rule, Sr. Mary Catherine deemed it an “unusual outfit,” and that was enough to make it stick.

Dingo asked for Christa’s phone number and called her later that week, but they spent the whole time talking about the hypocrisy of Catholicism and the rise of the Religious Right and never did get on the subject of a date. They met at the Warsaw Ghetto the next Friday and sat with mutual friends, and repeated the ritual for the next few Fridays until it was more or less decided that they, too, were friends.

“Friends are better than lovers,” Christa said casually one Friday night, letting it drop like a nonsequitur on the Formica table among the ashes and cigarette butts. Dingo said he didn’t think there had to be a difference, necessarily, and Christa agreed, though she maintained that sometimes the two were very separate entities. The others at the table continued their conversation without heed to the tangent, and the moment was lost.

Tristan would not speak a word to Christa till months later, the next year in fact, when he decided to wear all black because he only had enough money for two pairs of pants and three shirts and he wanted everything to match.