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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Holy Virgin In Queens
LAST YEAR, not long before I left
While living in New York, I discovered that it is not one big city, but many small cities piled on top of each other, overlapping and colliding all the time. Some of the smaller cities are defined by physical borders, but most aren’t. For instance, I lived in a queer-girl province whose borders were marked by coffee shops, clothing, music, nightclubs, and the certain way you met another girl’s eyes and held them, a small, erotic, and powerful gesture, letting her know that you knew who she was, what she was. These were the perimeters of our world. Our city overlapped with other cities, of course, and many people existed within several cities at once. We all shared the streets, neighborhoods, and buildings of New York. Nevertheless, I was certain that my world was clearly defined, its boundaries ephemeral and secret, yet reliable and firm. Maybe that’s why I loved living in New York: I felt as though unimaginable possibilities lay just beneath the surface of the city. If I learned the cues, secrets, and passwords, I could move between worlds.
A lot of girls in my circle went to hear bands play in an old Bronx warehouse known as the Firetrap. I used to see Catherine there all the time. She was friends with a couple of girls I knew, and for a while had dated one of my friends. Catherine had also kissed my girlfriend once, before I’d met either of them. They were playing spin the bottle at a party. I thought Catherine was very beautiful, and I was in awe of the fact that she worked as a stripper. I had never known anyone who did sex work, but I’d read a lot of feminist theory in college, so I knew it was supposed to be subversive.
One night, after a show at the Firetrap, Catherine and I were chatting, and she mentioned that she’d just moved to Brooklyn, where I lived. We were practically neighbors; she was the first stop on the n line after the n/r split, and I was the first stop on the r. That night, we took the train home together and said good night when we transferred at Fifty-ninth Street.
After that, I frequently saw Catherine on the train. One day, I noticed that she wore a medal of Mary around her neck, and I asked her about it.
She was embarrassed. “Well, I’m not Catholic. . . . I mean, I grew up Catholic, and my mother — my family — is very religious. But it’s just . . . It’s like a charm. It keeps me safe. That’s all, really.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“Are you Catholic, too?”
“Kind of,” I said. “I mean, I was, but I’m not now.”
She understood. And that was the end of that.
SOMETIME LATER, I read in the paper that the Virgin Mary had been appearing in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, and I knew I had to go. Apparently, a group of the faithful gathered there on feast days to wait for the Madonna to appear with messages for the world. I had never been a person of great faith, but I’d often wished I were, and I half imagined that it might just happen to me someday, in a violent and mystical way. I wanted a vision like Saint Bernadette or ecstasies like Saint Theresa. I didn’t really expect to see Mary, of course — the Virgin Mother of God wouldn’t really appear in Queens — but wouldn’t it be interesting to find out what sort of people went to the park to wait for her?
I was afraid to go alone, though, and I knew none of my friends would want to come along. I needed someone who would be respectful and interested, but not a complete nut. Then I thought of Catherine.
I called and sheepishly asked if she wanted to go with me. She hesitated, then said yes. We decided to go the following Saturday, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
As we were hanging up, Catherine said, “Wait! . . . What if she does appear?” She giggled, a little embarrassed. “I mean, if she did — what would I say?”
I decided then that I’d invited the right person.
SATURDAY WAS A WET AND MISERABLE DAY. Catherine met me at my apartment, because we didn’t want to have to wait for each other on the Fifty-ninth Street platform. We walked to the subway, sleepy but excited in the early-morning rain. It was a fall day, but it smelled like winter, and the rain made everything look glossy and fresh and clean, hardly like Brooklyn at all. We went down into the subway and didn’t come out from underground until an hour and a half later, when the Number 7 train emerged into the open air along the edge of Manhattan, heading east. I’d been tired in the dark tunnels, but as we rode over the river, surrounded by sky and rain, I felt my excitement returning. It seemed like we were almost there, even though we were still some distance away.
The fluorescent light on the train seemed cold, but warmer than the grayness outside. Catherine was wearing bright primary colors — a yellow jacket and a red baseball cap — like a little kid on a summer day. We were too tired to talk much, both preoccupied with our own thoughts. I was wondering what this trip meant to me and why the hell I was going anyway. At least, I figured I would have a funny story to tell later. I assumed Catherine was having similar thoughts.
While I was thinking, I’d been admiring Catherine. She was tall and stunning, with short brown hair, hazel eyes, and pale, freckled skin. I kind of had a crush on her, a small one. I was loyal to my girlfriend, but recently, as Catherine and I had become better acquainted from seeing each other on the train, I’d begun flirting with her. I had gotten in the habit of making small, affectionate gestures: tucking her hair behind her ear, resting a hand on her shoulder, touching her leg for emphasis as I talked — the old tricks of any flirtatious girl. As we rode to see Mary, I did these things again, this time under the guise of excitement and nervousness.
But flirting is complicated between girls. I mean, girls do help maintain each other’s appearance in small and gentle ways. It’s a natural thing, affectionate but not automatically romantic. Now, if I’d been straight and on that train with a boy, and I’d pushed myself forward slightly to whisper into his ear, maybe brushed his ear with my lips, just a little, we both would have known it wasn’t by accident. And if I’d sweetly reached up to tuck his hair behind his ear, it would have been a suggestive caress, not just a simple gesture of friendship. But between girls, it’s different. And that is where the confusion begins.
But I knew my crush on Catherine was idle and innocent, not really much of a crush at all. I think I was simply intrigued by her; I wanted so badly to learn more about her, to understand her and be her friend, that my feelings overflowed into something intense and romantic. At that time in my life, living in New York, I was full of an enormous affection, a love too big and abstract to be contained. I was just one big crush waiting to happen. Some days I had crushes on all my friends, on every cute boy who came into the coffee shop where I worked, on the lovely old ladies I saw on the train. I was able to transform pity, fascination, or casual interest into an enormous love. Maybe it was just my life then: I was twenty-one and happy and living in Brooklyn, in a fabulously cheap apartment with shining wood floors and big windows. I had a sweetheart and a kitten and a nice job with good tips. I was aware of how much I had: I had all this time; I had a whole life. I was full of hope and promise, and it got transformed into love — for everyone and everything.
WHEN CATHERINE AND I finally got off the train near Flushing Meadows Park, where Mary was supposed to appear, we adjusted ourselves in an attempt to look a little more like the sort of young women who would be coming to witness the Virgin. It wasn’t easy: We were dressed in our regular baggy pants, belted low on our hips. I was wearing sneakers, and Catherine wore clunky oxfords. Neither of us had on makeup. My hair was so short it hardly needed the clip I’d stuck in for a feminine touch. Her hair barely stayed behind her ears when she pushed it there. We zipped up our jackets against the weather. Catherine stuck her baseball cap in her pocket, and her soft brown hair got darker and heavier in the rain. When she leaned forward, her bangs fell into her eyes and curled wetly on her forehead. I shoved my hands into my pockets and forced them to stay there.
Catherine’s arms swung casually at her sides. She was graceful and sexy, and at the same time ungainly and sweetly awkward, like a boy I might have had a crush on in the seventh grade. I wanted to grab her hand and lace my fingers into hers, but we were on our way to see the Virgin, who almost certainly would not approve — at least, not this Virgin, the one in this park, visiting this particular group of Catholics. The article I’d read in the paper said they were hard-core conservatives, probably convinced the world had been going to hell ever since the Bible was translated out of Latin.
But even if we hadn’t been on our way to see Mary, even if I hadn’t been self-conscious that day about being queer, I still wouldn’t have reached for Catherine’s hand. Because I was already in love with another girl. Sometimes I thought about how easy it would be to ruin it all. I knew that people ruined their lives all the time, that I could do it myself at any moment. But I wanted to keep my life happy, simple, and perfect, the way it was. I was in love with a gorgeous, matter-of-fact girl with warm hands and dark eyes and a soft body. I was in love with a girl who washed my hair for me and sang me songs while we did the dishes together. Right then, my girl was still in Brooklyn, asleep in the bed we shared. She didn’t want to stand in a park in the rain, waiting for Mary to appear in the clouds. For one thing, she was Jewish. But even if she hadn’t been, she had absolutely no desire, she’d said, to be in such close proximity to a bunch of fucked-up fundamentalists.
By the time Catherine and I reached the park, we were soaking wet. We weren’t sure where to go. The park seemed enormous, and we didn’t see any praying people or miraculous rays of sun. All we could see were a few trees and, farther away, the highway and Shea Stadium. The sky was dark, and it was pouring rain. We stood there for a minute, undecided.
“Should we just look up?” Catherine said.
I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we could do that.”
We looked up. I didn’t see anything. Catherine scanned the sky carefully, and I began to think that she was much more optimistic than I was. Now that we were at the park, my fantasies of ecstasy and conversion seemed medieval and childish. I was damp and cold, and I felt stupid for having gotten up early on my day off and taken a two-hour subway ride only to stand in a park in the rain. I’d had a small glimmer of hope to begin with, but it was dwindling fast. What sort of people, I wondered, spent their free time faithfully praying and waiting for miracles?
“We should find the others,” Catherine said.
I nodded, wondering if she might, in some hidden part of her, be like those people. No, I told myself. She wasn’t one of them; she was like me.
WE SET OUT ACROSS THE PARK, tromping through the mud. Before long, my socks and the cuffs of my pants were soaking wet. I began to shiver. Finally, we heard voices, lots of them, speaking in rhythm. We came over a little hill and saw about a hundred people walking in two concentric circles and reciting the rosary. The men, dressed all in gray, were walking clockwise, and the women, dressed in blue, walked counterclockwise. It looked as though they were about to choose partners and start to waltz.
They were a nondescript group, mostly white, of a variety of ages — not much to look at, really. Still, I was a little spooked to see them all chanting like that and dressed alike. I knew the prayers from when I was little and would go to church with my grandmother, but the words sounded different outdoors, chanted by so many people in an intense, cheerless monotone, flattened by the sound of the rain. Or perhaps the Hail Mary always sounded like this, and I simply remembered it differently. When I was a little girl, I had loved going to church with my grandmother, dressing up and sitting on the pew next to her, giving the responses and singing the hymns. That was familiar, but this was foreign, although the words were unchanged.
We stood on the edge of the hill through four Hail Marys and an Our Father. Then Catherine whispered, “Are we staying?” She looked uncomfortable. I felt like a spy, an emissary of Satan secretly checking out God’s chosen people. I tried to feel detached, like an anthropologist studying the natives of another land. In spite of myself, I wished I had worn a dress.
“We’re dressed wrong,” I whispered.
“It shouldn’t matter,” Catherine said, but we both knew it did. I had thought that morning about what to wear and, in a fit of self-righteous defiance, had decided to dress just as I always did. Now I almost regretted that decision. We were far from our home territory. Here, we didn’t look tough or sexy; we looked aberrant and pathetic. If the chanting people had known who we really were, they would have made us leave, or prayed for us, or both.
Catherine and I hovered there on the hill, keeping our distance. The rain began falling even harder, and lightning flashed apocalyptically in the sky. After a few more Hail Marys, there was a slight commotion below us. All at once, the blue and gray circles parted to reveal a woman standing alone in the center, dressed in blue, like the others. The crowd fell silent and formed a reverent semicircle to our right. The woman stood at our left, facing them. Her white hair streamed down her back, and her hands were raised to the sky.
“Is that her?” Catherine whispered.
I had been wondering the same thing. Of course, it wasn’t. We giggled nervously.
Suddenly, the crowd began to murmur, and the air was filled with flashing lights. It wasn’t lightning. I was startled, and for an instant I felt deeply reverent — until I realized that people were taking flash photographs of the sky.
“Did you bring your camera?” I whispered.
Catherine shook her head.
The woman standing apart from the others began to speak. We moved halfway down the hill, to hear her better.
She was old, perhaps in her nineties, and soaking wet like everyone else; her dress, no doubt blue when dry, had darkened to navy and clung to her body. But while everyone else looked wet and uncomfortable, she looked dramatic and holy, like a priestess or a sorceress — except for the rosaries in each hand and the large cross around her neck.
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