First Communion

She wears the communion dress – layers of white tulle

with a satin bow at the waist, and stiff ruffles at the neck –

a puffed-up white bird with sticks for legs. Reflected behind her image

in the full length mirror of the dimly lit bedroom,

the tall blue drapes that even this morning remain shut.

Her mother is a blur rushing back and forth

around the room, opening and rifling through drawers.

Then her mother appears in the mirror above her shoulder,

glamorous in her dark suit and wide hat, a creature of a

different order – a black swan to her white cockatoo.

Under her flowery perfume, a rancid rusty odor emanates

from her body, her mother’s smell when she is “indisposed”.

Her mother drapes the veil over the girl’s head and face.

The white veil is long, dropping below the girl’s knees.

Her mother stretches a wide headband to fit

over the veil, pulls it down to her ears; then she lifts the veil up

away from her face and folds it back.

“Marvelous,” says her mother, then leaves the room.

In the mirror, the child bride looks crushed.

Through the thin cloth of the veil, a red blood stain

is clearly visible on the elastic band, not an ordinary headband

at all, but a big old sanitary belt,

the kind with front and back garter clasps to hook up a Kotex pad. 

One of the clasps pokes up near her right ear.

Hopelessly, she tugs at the tight band to turn it somehow,

but her mother is calling her, the taxi is honking outside.

Her mother is charming the taxi driver with her crystalline voice,

her voluptuous figure.  Oddly, her face registers embarrassment,

a virginal shyness. She averts her eyes to avoid

the man’s looks in the rearview mirror, as though she,

and not her daughter, was the innocent communicant.

They fly down the street the girl usually walks,

past Sinclair’s, the grocery store,

past the house where the girl with polio lives.

But soon they’re speeding down the steep streets

of the slums she never enters. A shortcut, says the driver.

Drab clapboard houses are stacked together all the way down the hill

to the smoky factory by the river. Doors hang crooked

from their frames, others gape open like mouths. 

Elvis is on the radio singing “Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true...” 

Halfway down the hill, the car turns into an alley

of shoddy wooden sheds with clotheslines sagging.

Long johns, underwear, corsets, nightgowns, house dresses,

work shirts and trousers, all whipped into a wild jig

from the gust from the speeding car. The girl turns away from the laundry.

Her mother looks straight ahead, spurning the offending display.

Mother and daughter climb up the empty steps of the Cathedral. 

Inside, the choir is singing the Kyrie: “Kyrie Eleison”.

The church is full of families trussed in their Sunday best

who intone: “Christi Eleison”.  The girl tugs at her mother’s hand

to pull her toward an empty pew at the back.

Her mother looks confused. “Don’t you want to be with the other girls?”

she whispers.  The girl bows her head down in a pose of deep penance,

hands together in prayer. With her gloved hand on her shoulder,

her mother guides her down the aisle.

Heads turn to stare at the latecomers,

the alluring mother with her embarrassed child.

Like a silent movie star, the mother mimes

Defiance toward the staring faces, and Indignation

for her late-making daughter. Once or twice, as if to

accentuate her daughter’s guilt, she rushes

her forward with both her hands on her little shoulders.

The first communicants are assembled on the chancel near the altar

where the girl scoots to the back row, kneels,

and keeps her head down in prayer.

A spritely nun is standing nearby scrutinizing her flock.

No one dares turn to gawk at the late girl.

Finally, near the end of the ceremony, one by one, the girls

approach the Bishop.  When it’s the girl’s turn, she comes forward,

still in her penitent pose. The teen-aged altar boy whispers in her ear

to look up at the Bishop. She obeys. The altar boy slips the gold paten

under her chin; his ceremonial poise gives way

to barely suppressed shock and mortification.

The girl’s breathing becomes labored;

a bead of sweat runs down her cheek.

“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi,” intones the Bishop

as he traces the sign of the cross with the Host,

“Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi.”

With a little sigh, she closes her eyes firmly

to receive, on her pink tongue,

the Blood and the Body of Christ.