Among Angelic Orders

By Susan Thomas

The characters in Among Angelic Orders are harassed by the distant and not-s0-distant past, by the future, by this world and the next. They live their lives in a state of ambivalence, yearning for something they have lost, or are about to lose, while desperately clinging to what they have. These are stories of mischief, longing, confusion, and loss, tempered by the random nature of mercy that rescues us from the certainty of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020

Susan Thomas

Susan Thomas is faculty at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Bombay. Her research has been in financial econometrics, specifically on models of the volatility of financial prices, and aspects of market microstructure in Indian financial markets. She has also worked on models for the Indian zero coupon yield curve, govt. bond index construction and probability of default for Indian firms. Her work can be accessed on the web at http://www.igidr.ac.in/~susant.

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Among Angelic Orders

Among Angelic Orders

Stories

Susan Thomas

Fomite

Contents

The Willing Club

Breakfast with Marilyn

Washington Heights, 1952

Formerly Fat

1. Occasional Grace

2. Ties That Bind

3. A Small Thing in a Long Life

4. Our Family Jewels

5. Sleeping For Peace

6. Island Wedding

7. Among Angelic Orders

8. Knock and Enter

About the Author

In memory of my grandparents,

Fannie & Victor Tomshinsky

who still hold my hand after all these years

I don’t know what I want, but I want it now.

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-Raymond Carver

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Forgive me for telling you this. Quietly read it through to me.

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-Osip Mandelstam

The Willing Club

I wanted to marry Amy Epstein. We both liked boys but found them too wild for domestic comfort. Amy and I were interested in all the same things: imaginary games, amphibious creatures, dolls with missing body parts. Salamanders, frogs, and turtles were the attendants at our wedding, an outdoor affair on the baseball field of our bungalow colony. We invited the other kids in our group as our guests and that’s where we made our mistake. We should have known; anything can happen if you invite boys.

Amy and I picked blueberries in the woods for the refreshments and we bought a bag of marshmallows at the store, to serve on sharpened sticks. We knew the boys would have matches to light them even though we weren’t permitted to play with fire. Boys always had matches in their pockets, along with peeled golf balls, which were reputedly poisonous in the center and blew up if you lit them.

The bigger kids were playing dodgeball then, at the other end of the baseball field, and paid us no attention until the marshmallows got going. Amy’s cousin Paul, a showoff, had six of them on a stick. This caught the eye of Bernadette Kleinfeld.

Bernadette was thirteen and the meanest girl I ever met. She was long and skinny, with almost lidless eyes, a tiny pointed nose, thin lips set in a perpetual sneer and a luxurious page-boy fluff that she set each night in rollers. She painted her stubby fingernails black, her sarcastic mouth white and occasionally smoked Pall Malls in a long, sequined cigarette holder. She mostly wore black turtlenecks or halters made of two scarves with black toreador pants, high-top sneakers and a trench coat.

Two girls can’t get married, Bernadette said to us. And anyway, they couldn’t both be brides. One would have to be the groom, you nitwits.

Drop dead, Heartburnadette, Amy said.

Paul, in a sudden act of chivalry, waved his marshmallows at Bernadette for warning, but one flew off the stick and landed, blazing, in her gorgeous pageboy.

The marshmallow burned for a second and then went out. But enough of her coiffure had been destroyed to make Bernadette wretched for the rest of the summer. And she exacted, in retaliation, a penalty that ended my childhood and changed my perception of how people behave.

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In the days that followed, Bernadette devised a system of assignments for each of the nine- and ten-year-olds responsible for her ruined hairdo. She called it The Willing Club. It was named, I suppose, to describe our willingness to perform, with an enthusiasm born of terror, the menial tasks our leader assigned to us. Each of us knew that Bernadette, now sporting a fetching pixie hairdo, could be counted on to take individual revenge where she couldn’t find satisfaction in controlling the entire group. We all agreed on two things: Bernadette knew everything about everybody and there was safety in numbers. We chose group servitude.

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The Willing Club was formed with Bernadette as its president, a small group of eleven- and twelve-year-olds as its board of directors, and all the nine- and ten-year-olds as drones. We signed our names in our own blood, extracted with glee and precision by Bernadette, and mixed with India ink, to a contract she drew up and mailed to our parents. It stated the chores that each of us would perform as members of The Willing Club. There was table-clearing, dish-washing and drying, sweeping of the kitchen, and putting away of dishes after breakfast and supper. On Saturdays, we were to hang out the laundry, and do heavy chores, like raking around the bungalows, mowing and clearing brush at the edge of the woods.

None of the parents were unduly worried about our abrupt transformation from lively seekers of mischief into do-gooder automatons. It was, perhaps, some stage we were passing through briefly, not to be depended on forever, but to be enjoyed as long as it lasted. This summer we had changed from ferocious color-war wagers to devoted thespians, to obsessive artisans of copper-enameled ashtrays and plastic lanyards. And it was only the end of July. None of the parents knew the crime we had committed, and none of us suspected Bernadette’s motives in putting us to work. These now became clear to us.

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Bernadette was making phone calls every night after supper from the pay phone on the porch of the general store. One night a week each of us would be called on to assist her. The general store sat right in the center of our community, in a clearing of the woods. It was the hub of our daily social life, but at night became the deserted assignation of clandestine activity.

Like the bungalows, it was brown-stained wood and had a long porch with three steps that served as bleachers. There were two doors to the store, one for entering and down at the other end, a door for exiting. The phone was at the far end, next to the out door. We sat on the steps, hiding Bernadette from the view of passers-by.

Bernadette ensconced herself in the booth with cigarettes, Nehi orange soda, and a pack of gum. Her long legs traveled out the telephone booth and onto the porch railing.

Good evening, she chirped when someone picked up at the other end of a randomly dialed telephone number. This is an informal survey being conducted by the producers of the Ed Sullivan show. We were wondering if you found the show’s format stimulating.

Yes? Would you be willing to participate in a questionnaire about future acts that we might book for the show?

Bernadette smiled. Her teeth were small and sharp.

Good, we appreciate your cooperation, and we want you to know that every participant will be rewarded with a free surprise gift, delivered to your home.

Bernadette took a little puff of the cigarette she had lit and balanced on the porch rail.

Now let me make sure I have your name and address correct. Would you please spell your name into the telephone—slowly and distinctly, followed by your address. It would be acceptable to abbreviate the state.

Stifled guffaws from Bernadette, hand covering phone’s mouthpiece.

First, what is your opinion of Señor Wences? Would you like to see him on the show less often or more frequently?

Oh really? Bernadette snickered.

Next question. Would you like to see more musical groups on the show or more variety acts?

Yes? So you would like to see more variety, musical acts of an unusual nature, such as Johnny Puleo and his Harmonicats?

Here Bernadette took a deep breath. Her tiny breasts were pointed under the black turtleneck.

Well then, I’m sure next Sunday night you will be in for a pleasant surprise. We will be presenting five hundred and fifty Mau Mau faggots, farting for you in full color for the first time on national TV.

At this point, Bernadette slammed down the phone and dissolved into a writhing tangle of bones on the steps of the store, shrieking and snorting until she found the composure to make another call.

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Bernadette also enlisted us as look-outs when she hid under people’s porches to listen. On the Saturday clean-up campaigns, working under the raised bungalows or in the sassafras-wooded fringes of each family’s yard, we were supposed to keep our eyes and ears open for family arguments, personal eccentricities and scandalous behavior. We were to summon Bernadette immediately. As a reward, we were allowed to sit with her as the drama unfolded. Bernadette could sit still for hours. She seemed to breathe through her skin, her eyes, her parted, smiling lips, as she took in the details of our parents’ lives. There were elaborate plans for escape in the event of discovery, but they all involved us being caught instead of Bernadette.

Later at the store, she would hiss into the phone, Listen closely. You are being observed by a group of accountants trained in sophisticated espionage techniques by the FBI. They have determined that your activities in the bathroom every morning are obscenely subversive.

Then she would go into detail about these bathroom activities. Sometimes they were just made-up disgusting stories, but sometimes these were details of the person’s real life, observed with agonizing precision by the inventive and diabolical Bernadette Kleinfeld.

Why were we so afraid of Bernadette? She couldn’t really harm us. All we’d have to do is tell on her and she’d be finished. It was something none of us could even think about. Maybe this was loyalty—our fear of being left out. And there was something else, too, that nobody talked about. Bernadette made everything more exciting, more dangerous than color war, more thrilling than putting on a play, more challenging than ring-a-levio. Being bad was fun.

But eventually Amy and I got tired of Bernadette. We had lost the satisfying tranquillity of our pre-connubial bliss. We never had time for each other anymore. No imaginary games like Super Girl Meets Wonder Woman, or The Slaughter of the Amazons and the Revenge of the Amazon Queen, with various doll parts playing the slaughtered Amazons.

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One afternoon we went up the hill to Bernadette’s bungalow. It was the second-to-last on the road, at the edge of the dense oak woods that surrounded the lake for miles. Bernadette was in her tiny front bedroom with her parakeet Caesar, whom she had trained to say over one hundred words, most of them obscene. The room was lined with pictures of Yul Brynner, her favorite actor, and with posters of black-and-white detective movies. Bernadette was wearing green lipstick. She was teaching Caesar to French-kiss her.

That’s disgusting, Heartburnadette, Amy said. His whole head is in your mouth.