Selected by K-Ming Chang
Hope Chest
For her eighth birthday the girl asked for a Hope Chest. She knew to start early would give her the advantage.
A jewelry box? her mother asked in reply.
No, a Hope Chest, a dowry; a large and ornately decorated box she could fill with household items and linens to prepare for her role as Wife.
But a wife no longer comes with a dowry, said her mother. You will marry based on love; you will bring your dazzling personality…
The girl was upset; she knew those things wouldn’t be enough. The man to whom she hoped to offer her dowry, who would open her chest, wasn’t any man, wasn’t bony and blond like the girl’s father. His hair flowed, he was nearly impossible to obtain as he lived in a kingdom in the sky.
Jesus, in other words, was who the girl hoped to marry. The girl understood him: she felt that she too had been persecuted. This Hope Chest situation, for example, and how at nearly eight-years-old she was forced to explain the significance of a dowry to her adult mother.
The biggest relief of the girl’s life came when she was relieved of choice: flipping through a photo album, she stopped at three people, standing on church steps in stiff dresses and kitten heels and lace veils. The photograph was black and white which made the three women look like Liesl from The Sound of Music, which at the time was the girl’s favorite film.
Who are they, the girl had asked, sweating, running the photograph across the living room to her mother. She was thrilled by the fact that someone in her family photo album might be Austrian and sixteen. They weren’t; the three women in the photo were Irish—her mother’s great aunts—who emigrated to America and joined a convent when it was clear they wouldn’t marry.
Then how could they wear such wonderfully dazzling dresses? the girl asked.
Because, on that day, the women had wedded the Lord. The girl thought she might vomit. So far her life had consisted of a near-constant struggle. She wanted two things, equally: to wear a beautiful gown like, for example, the Baroness in The Sound of Music; and like Mother Superior, she wanted to be Godly and Holy and good. The girl’s mother regularly reminded her that no one had asked her to make this distinction. But that wasn’t how things worked, the girl knew. And now she’d found precedent in her own family for a solution: the dress, the attention of a wedding; a life with no earthly, gaseous husband, devoted to God.
After the girl first watched The Sound of Music and became Catholic, her mother had tried suggesting that maybe what the girl loved wasn’t Catholicism, but the operatic voice and conviction of Mother Superior, the anti-fascist sentiment, sisterhood. The girl felt that her mother desperately wanted her to become a lesbian.
As the girl began to center her life around a commitment to Christ, and showed no signs of wavering, her mother brought her to meet with a Unitarian Universalist minister. The Unitarian minister wore a pixie haircut and no habit so the girl could not take her seriously. But she was British, which the girl liked. Without meaning to, the girl began to soften in her seat as she listened to the British lady minister talk about her love of God and her wife; about how maybe heaven was only a state of being, a manifestation of peace in the world where we already live. She discussed plurality. The girl remembered that Joan of Arc wore her hair short, that through strength Joan had displayed her Godly submission. Then the kind woman minister gave the girl a blank sheet of paper. She asked the girl to draw heaven as she saw it; she showed examples from other children in the Unitarian youth group: they’d drawn the beach, a baseball diamond, their two moms and three dogs at Disney. Using marker the girl sliced her sheet horizontally. On the top half she drew Christ on the cross, amongst angels rejoicing. On the bottom was hell: brimstone and Satan and sinners burst into flames.
So a Hope Chest for her birthday: preferably gold-plated. The girl read that she was intended to fill the box with china and linens.
Where did you find your wedding-night linens? the girl asked her mother who was steeping her tea and looked up from the steam and said, What?
The sacred sheets, the girl said, on which, under the blessèd and watchful eyes of the lord, you sacrificed your girlhood to Ted?
Her mother spat out her tea.
So what dimensions are we talking? the girl’s father asked, who she referred to as Ted, because there was only one Father and He was God.
About the dimensions of a small child, the girl said.
With named dimensions, the chest began to take shape in her head: a chest adorned with veiled women and prostrate saints. She began to see all the things that could fit: three kittens, five hairbrushes. She could fit seven lizards and an ant farm and ballet slippers and books. Without familial linens or china to put in her chest, her options were limitless. She sat on her bedroom floor with the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes; the girl began to experience the overwhelmed-feeling, where thoughts stormed her head from all angles and sides, as if she were being pelted with rocks by monkeys from the trees and she had no umbrella.
And that is something you’re afraid of, monkeys? The psychologist the girl had once seen asked after she described the sensation, early in the session, marking the moment that the girl knew not to trust her.
Although the girl had not named it to herself, she had turned to Catholicism as a way of relieving this pelted-sensation. She had read that—in this modern era in which she was forced to live—some people chose to refer to a Hope Chest instead as a Chest of Curiosities. The girl did not want to be curious. Curiosity led to her pelted head.
Every Thursday at school, the girl took a Map Quiz and was reminded of her constant risk of failure and that she had little to no understanding of where she existed in the world. It was enough for the girl to keep up with what was in front of her, to follow God’s rules with grace. She wanted to be a Virgin saint; she had no interest in becoming Magellan. She didn’t want to stand with her fists on her sides staring out at vast and uncharted landscapes; she wanted to walk with her eyes humbly lowered, to lift her gaze only once God had called.
She didn’t like it when her notions were disrupted. For example, seven months before, the girl learned that her mother would soon undergo surgery to have her breasts removed: the girl was forced to reckon with the idea that her kind yet Christ-negligent mother might be a saint.
The girl had a book of Virgin Martyr Saints that she’d been banned from reading. She’d read of Saint Agatha, who sliced off her breasts with a sword as testament to her faith, who the book pictured holding those breasts in front of her on a platter.
After her mother’s surgery the girl asked her mother to bake together. This made the girl’s mother happy—the girl had developed an interest that was not Catholicism nor desecration of the self—she was happy in general as she still was taking pain pills from the procedure. Maybe that is why she didn’t question the girl’s demand that the baking project remain a surprise, even from the mother: the girl would read her the recipe’s steps, announce the ingredients, only when they were relevant and without revealing the result.
Step by step, the girl guided her mother into making cakes of Saint Agatha’s breasts: half-moon shaped, reminiscent of a young girl’s bosom, as the book described it. The celestial desert consisted of ricotta and marzipan and sugar-powder: representative of feminine grace; voluptuous and intense, and its subtle seduction which is difficult to resist. Together the girl and her mother coated the breast-like molds in a frothy cream. Her foggy mother didn’t make the connection until they’d applied candied cherries to the tip—the nipple—of every cake.
To be enjoyed in pairs: two breasts means two sweets per person, the girl read to her mother, her mother who had just lost her breasts, who now looked down at a tray of them—perky and round and globbed off—coated in a cloudy-white paste with erect cherry nipples.
She’s a traditional figure of both the feminine divine and modernity, the girl wailed when her mother confiscated her Virgin Martyr book.
The girl’s birthday came: at the kitchen table, Ted presented her with the chest. She’d refused all other presents and cake; she was not interested in earthly glory. Her mother was reluctant; she felt the Hope Chest crossed the metaphorical line that the family psychologist they’d once seen had drawn, between unconditional love and enablement. But the Hope Chest was the only gift that the girl would accept, and when Ted presented it, in her excitement the girl slipped and for the first time in a year called him Daddy instead of Ted.
The chest wasn’t gold plated but the girl didn’t mind; her family was middle class, which she’d come to like, as she’d read the Bible and what it had to say about camels and rich men. The chest was the correct size—large enough to hold a small child—and Ted had made dainty engravings across: roses and geese and halos. On top he’d engraved a long-necked swan. Ted was good at things like that. The girl felt her mother watching as she looked at the swan engravement; her mother knew that swans terrified her, but Ted must have forgotten. Still the girl didn’t say anything. She hugged Ted; she was working on being grateful.
The girl carried the Hope Chest to her room and felt hopeful. For a moment she forgot her commitment to Christ; she imagined opening the chest to find it filled with drawers that held worlds: winding rivers and fuzzy hills, fairies straddling the bent necks of the geese and swan. She saw neon geckos splayed on the wood sunning, a sea monster resurrecting its head from a mist-heavy lake. Then she closed the lid on that, metaphorically speaking. She now knew to train her imagination away. She’d instead focus on the facts of Christianity. She opened the chest’s lid. She smelled sawdust, saw little wooden flecks of the inner surface that Ted left unfinished. She had nothing of worth to put in it.
Then she thought of Saint Agatha, and her mother’s mastected breasts. Unlike Saint Agatha and her mother, the girl didn’t have breasts to remove. She didn’t like the idea of breasts except as a fleshly apparatus to remove to demonstrate her devotion. Otherwise, she wanted to remain fast and flat—like Joan of Arc—un-bogged and encumbered by excessive mortal skin.
If only the girl had breasts to remove she could place them in her Hope Chest—small, risen cakes—reserved for her husband Christ our Lord to eat. Then she remembered.
The girl waited until her parents were asleep before going to the basement. She left the lights off—the girl hated the basement—and held her breath down the stairs, repeating rapid Hail Marys in her head. She crept to the backup freezer—Ted had stocked it with stews and breads during a phase in which he was terrified of nuclear holocaust—that no one ever looked in or used. Seven months ago, she’d saved and stuffed a Saint Agatha breast cake toward the back. She’d only been able to sneak one, not a pair, but as her husband she figured that Christ wouldn’t mind.
The girl carried the frozen breast on flat palms up the stairs from the cellar and then up to her room. She knelt by her chest. Lowering the pale cake onto the dark wood the girl saw that she’d been correct. Her eyelids turned heavy as she sat there and prayed, staring at the cake—the sacrificed, freezer-burned breast—where it thawed on the wood. It began to look like a pillow. It occurred to the girl that her body would fit inside (she was small for her age.) She made herself into a ball on the floor of the chest. She left the lid open as she lowered her head to the part-softened cake and fell asleep.
The next morning the girl began drinking coffee: she needed to remain short if until eighteen she would fit in her chest. She snuck it from her parent’s pot; when her carpool stopped at Dunkin Donuts she began ordering drip coffee, black, instead of Vanilla Bean Coolatta. Every night she slept in her chest. In the morning she picked marzipan and ricotta from her hair before her parents could notice. At first she came down to breakfast smelling sweet; quickly the scent soured. She picked roses to lay through her box to help with the odor. Accidentally, she discovered a second benefit to the flowers: in her sleep she stirred and a thorn pricked her. From her pointer finger’s pad she watched the blood bubble. Her mother had allowed her to take a cloth napkin—plain, white—and she wiped the blood on it. Like Saint Veronica, wiping the face of a cross-bearing Christ. The girl lay the blood-streaked cloth over her eyes. She pretended to be the Lord.
The girl became so focused on her chest that she began to neglect the rest of her Catholic rituals. She barely prayed. Every day she drank coffee in order to continue to fit, but she removed suffering from the act; she began adding nine packets of Ted’s Splenda to every cup. Her teeth started to feel furry. She spent her days collecting stones and scraps of paper off the street, saving bits of torn advertisements that seemed like His message. For example: a crumpled corner of a newspaper ad that pictured the upper-right portion of a man in a suit, where the only legible word left was Suffer. Another day, a scrap from her mother’s coupon clippings told her Save. The inside of her chest was starting to feel mucky and wet, like a trash bin, and a few ants had come to gnaw slowly on the now-moldy breast. She wouldn’t kill the ants because they too were God’s creatures. She slept even worse, feeling ants crawl through the slots in her fingers.
The girl woke with a fuzzy mouth. Not in the usual, morning way; the small, square teeth that the girl hadn’t yet lost began rotting with the coffee’s acid, sanded down with the Splenda she’d started to add. She ran her tongue over them. One wiggled. She pressed. The tooth bent back all the way. She pictured the tooth as herself—exorcised—back-bending, belly exposed to the sky. She wiggled harder with her tongue and the tooth bent but wouldn’t fall until it did. She felt it plop in her mouth; she kept it shut, the tooth swam there in the blood it came with, surrounded by moist, sloping gums.
She spat the tooth onto her palm and placed it in her chest. There the tooth looked correct; more correct than it had, the girl thought, rooted in her mouth. A tooth, blood-splat in its crooks and spiralled down in its cavities, in a wooden box like a relic. Like the image of Saint Lucy, the eyes she’d gouged displayed on a plate. The girl began to pray that her teeth would fall out.
She continued to drink her nine-Splenda coffee. The girl had a newly defined vision: herself laid in the chest, surrounded by teeth. Teeth freed from her mouth, gums left clean and empty and soft like an infant’s. But the trouble was that more teeth wouldn’t fall. Like a branch, the girl waited to be rid of her weight. The girl tried to be patient which she knew was a virtue. She also understood that to be in her chest, her body haloed in an outline of teeth, was the way to transcend. Wedded to Christ, in a white gown of enamel, shed of earthly sensation and sin.
So the girl took some string from her mother’s desk. She tied one end to a sore tooth that wouldn’t wiggle. She tied the other end to the knob of the door to her bedroom then she slammed. The tooth tore from its roots; blood spurted, splattering floral wallpaper. She felt copper and rust fill her mouth; she screamed but instead of sound summoned liquid, closer to milk than water. The girl drooled bloody drool; she cried not because of the blood in her mouth, or the throbbing hole where her tooth used to be. She cried because she knew wouldn’t have the strength to rip out another. And if the girl couldn’t rip out her small, silly teeth, she could no longer believe that she would slice off her breasts. That she’d roast at the stake. That she’d pluck her own eyes from her face like Saint Lucy so as not to look upon evil. All the girl could do was lay there and cry. All she could do was bring her single, measly tooth with her and climb into her chest. She clutched the tooth in her fist and closed the lid down from above her. She waited for her wet eyes to adjust to the dark.
But they didn’t, they wouldn’t. She felt them roll and swim in her head, desperate for something on which they could latch. They found nothing—her breath caught—she clutched her tooth but could not see to find the other.
She thought again of Saint Lucy, who had lived in the dark. Sankta Loosia, the Swedish song called her, or did they sing it in Finland, or Norway, the Swiss Alps? The girl hadn’t paid attention; she knew no geography, and now she groped blind, unable in her mind to conjure any sort of map. All she could conjure was the image of the ceremony of the holy girl, blonde braids swinging beneath the candle-lit wreath balanced on her head. All she’d ever considered was that Saint Lucy looked holy. That, like the Sound of Music, she may have been Austrian. She hadn’t thought of how Saint Lucy must have been scared, how she’d only been a girl, that as she felt the suction of her eye from its socket in her skull maybe what she wanted wasn’t eternal grace but her mother.
The air was starting to thin; the girl tried to use less of it. She thought of the virgin martyr Cecilia who survived suffocation only to later lose her head. Saint Cecilia who sang to God in her heart for the duration of her forced wedding. The girl sang the Santa Lucia song. Blood sloshed as her mouth stretched to find words; Sankta Loosia, she sang, and she heard it in her mother’s voice.
The girl stared up in the black at what she now couldn’t be sure was the roof of her chest; she’d lost all orientation. She lay still among crumbs, curled petals, news clippings and teeth. She saw the air swirl. At first the air took its usual shapes: red crosses and blue halos circled in stars; wings and veiled women—what the girl always saw when she pushed her fists into her eyes.
Then her vision shifted. Right there, in the dark air of the chest, the girl saw the photograph: her three great, virgin aunts, posed in a line in white dresses on the cathedral steps. The girl saw them begin to move. She saw one virgin aunt turn to look at her sister and lift off her bridal veil. The other kicked loose her sling-back. She watched as the three aunts shed their dresses like skin, till they wore only slips. Somehow they seemed fuller. She watched their faces sprout, ecstatic. Barefoot, they ran down the stairs. They weren’t afraid to laugh or to touch or delight in each other. She watched their toes sink in squelching slopes of grass; there wasn’t anyone there to hang above them and bleed. The girl watched; the three people lived. She mirrored their movements, circling her wrists, her feet. She found the sky and she pushed it up and it opened.
Mom, the girl called, as she emerged from her chest.
Maeve Barry has won the annual fiction prizes from the Iowa Review, the Sewanee Review and Ninth Letter. Her stories also appear in Post Road Magazine, FENCE, the Brooklyn Review and Rose Books Reader, among other places. She was recently a resident of the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation, where she worked on her first novel.
Selected by K-Ming Chang, a Lambda Literary Award winner, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a Kundiman Fellow, and an O. Henry Prize Winner. She is the author of the novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Faulkner Award and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Otherwise Award.
