Mass
We whip our car into the roundabout too fast, cut off a bus, wave sorry-sorry-sorry out the back window to the honking bus, and accelerate down the last exit curve. In the front seats, we argue. Bursts of words volley from the driver’s side to the passenger side and back again about which urgent care clinic is actually the closest and which one will actually be open at this time of the morning on Christmas Eve. Scrunched up on the rear bench seat, we have a fever, our head hurts, we need a peppermint shake, and we are not happy at all about being so far away from the pile of presents under the big tree.
The cousin magic melding us together is fizzling out. Each Christmas — well, at least for a few hours during Christmas — the once-a-year, nostalgia-fueled novelty of seeing each other in real life would effectively fuse us into a single person. The wide gaps and jagged fissures between our generations, personalities, and home addresses nearly vanished. We became such a singular entity that we knew what we were thinking and feeling — and what we would be thinking and feeling, so much so that we would conduct entire conversations purely through body language, or, if things got a little heated, by shooting pointed looks at ourselves.
Right now, though, we are cracking apart. On our passenger side, we simmer in frustration at our driver’s side’s lead foot, our insistence on favoring our flawed memory over the precise map on our phone, or when that fails, swerving across busy traffic to ask for tips from complete strangers in strip mall parking lots. On our driver’s side, we chafe at our passenger side frequent and lengthy plunges into glowering judgment, a complete inability to just for once loosen up and —
— right then we nearly run the little man over.
We brake hard, but even before the car stops and rocks backwards inches from the little man’s wide chest , we feel a different shock. The little man is wearing a boxy, oversized, earth-toned plaid suit straight out of the 1970s; a 1970s that we in the front of the car keep in scattered patches of childhood memory. His carefully knotted tie with burgundy and gold stripes contrasts with his mint green dress shirt. His mustache is Burt Reynolds thick, and he is sporting a narrow-brimmed straw hat — a hat just like the one we remembered stealing off the head of our grandfather before church on Christmas Eve mornings. We would run away, and our grandfather would try to chase us across the red tile patio in his big suit, the clickety-click sound of our tiny dress shoes punctuating our laughter.
In the front, looking at the little man, we feel a strange weight, as though a long empty space within us is suddenly and unexpectedly filled.
In the back, we feel even hotter, and why did we have to stop so hard, and now our head really hurts, and did this little man have any presents and our peppermint shake?
The little man appears by our driver’s‑side window.
“Please children,” he says, “I will be late for Mass. Take me.”
From the passenger side, we shift the heaviness for a moment. We know we can’t be seeing this, can we? How could we be here, the smell of burning rubber from our tire skid marks wafting in through the vents, stopped in the middle of a random street after nearly running over a very specific, highly detailed, and Nixon-era family phantom who is asking us for a ride to church? Ridiculous. Improbable at best. Actually impossible. We can see that it is clearly a stranger, some oddball with coincidentally accurate body proportions, taste in vintage clothing, and, fine, maybe the voice was dead on, but we need to get moving because our fever in the back seat is not going to break on its own, we need to get antibiotics, and, come on, it’s Christmas Eve and ghosts do not exist.
“Get in,” we say from the driver’s side.
The little man shuffles to the rear door, fumbles with the handle, and gingerly stoops to get in behind the driver’s seat. He pulls the door shut and exhales contentedly. “Bless you, children.”
In the passenger seat, we feel stretched between dumbstruck and apoplectic. How, we wondered, did any part of us in the driver’s seat think this was a good idea? Our face flushes with heat, our eyes grow wide, and our head turns to unveil our most lethal glare towards the stunningly idiotic part of ourselves in the driver’s seat. Yet, in the moment we turn to unleash unrelenting eyebeams of condemnation, we feel the strange weight inside of ourselves settling, finding its way into old contours and crevices, and radiating a familiar warmth. Stop it, we think, this is not our grandfather, and a memory can’t just magically come alive, pop into real life, slide into the back of our car, and make that ache go away, and —
— in the driver’s seat, we feel the rays of exasperated rage blast through us and we are unable to look away from the incandescent eyes from the passenger seat locked onto our own. However, a calm shields us from the worst of the radiation. The strange weight has transformed quickly into comfort on our side of the car, filling the emptiness inside ourselves before the little man had even asked for a ride. A smart part of ourselves knows that what we are seeing is a fluke and not a phantom, but that part of ourselves shuts up as we think that maybe, just maybe, this is a chance, if only for a moment, to feel like a happy kid running across a patio again, and, hey, the least we can do is give a friendly ghost a ride to church because —
“It’s Christmas,” we say from the driver’s seat.
This inarguable and infuriatingly smug fact hangs in the air between us.
In the driver’s seat, we shrug.
In the passenger seat, we turn to the little man. “We need to take her to a doctor now. She has a fever and —”
“My child,” says the little man. “I will show you the way.”
When the little man had gotten in the car, we had scooted across the rear bench seat as fast as we could and scrunched up tighter in the corner. He wasn’t carrying any presents, or our peppermint shake. We looked at ourselves in the front seats and frowned hard when we said, “it’s Christmas.” We wanted to say this is dumb really loud and maybe cry really, really hard, but we didn’t because up front we looked kind of sad and happy at the same time.
“Please, child, drive,” says the little man. “Mass begins soon.”
We accelerate down the street. The little man leans forward, anxiously looking out the front window.
“You are a Christmas kindness, my children. A kindness that has left my life,” says the little man. “I awoke today as I do every morning. I dressed, prepared my humble meal, and sat by myself at the kitchen table. While the sun rose, I wondered how I would get to church.”
As the little man speaks, we notice that his cologne is our grandfather’s brand.
“Where I sit at Mass there are still scratches in the pew from when my own children were young and careless. I run my fingers through those grooves.”
The little man leans forward further, gripping the tops of each front seat. “My children are grown now and far away. Perhaps they have scratches in their pews from their own children.”
On the passenger side, we unclench our teeth. The back of our neck tingles, and we try to stifle a hitch in our breath. We imagine the little man sitting alone in the muted light of the nave, gently tracing those weathered lines in the pew, and we have to bite our lip to keep it together, because no way we were going to give the driver’s side one bit of satisfaction in this moment. Fine, we rationalize, we’re doing a good thing by giving the Ghost of Coincidence Present a ride, and maybe his rotten children will feel a wave of unexpected shame roll over them wherever they were lying on a beach. Honestly, how shitty are this guy’s kids? we think on the driver’s side. The indignation we feel on the little man’s behalf is a relief, because otherwise, there was no way the passenger side would let us live this episode down. We think about the little man in church, shaking hands and saying peace be with you to the families around him, and we have to bite our lip to keep it together. We sneak a look at the passenger side. Over there, we aren’t frowning, so maybe we have warmed up to our surprise experiment in Christmas goodwill. In the back, however, our cheeks are bright red, and we are looking quizzical and a little bit pissed off.
“LEFT,” says the little man. “It is very close.”
“You said the doctor is on the way?” we ask from the passenger side.
“RIGHT. Yes, my child, we are very close.”
We zig-zag through the downtown, passing long blocks of storefronts that appear less and less prosperous the farther we drive. On the driver’s and passenger side, the grunginess of the consignment stores and payday loan offices make us even more subdued and pensive. This little man is not our grandfather, but we are doing a good thing today. We will get him to where he needs to be. Where he will be embraced and where he will be loved.
“STOP,” says the little man.
We hit the brakes. With alarming speed, the little man opens the rear passenger door, hops out, scampers across the street, and skips over the curb, making a straight line to a large faux-Medieval looking door with flaky paint. A red neon sign clicks alive and blinks OPEN from the door’s tiny arched window.
We lower the passenger side window and stare. Next to the door, two scruffy older men stand laughing as the little man yanks on the handle and bolts inside.
“Right on time,” says one.
“Save us a spot in the pew,” says the other, calling after the little man.
The two men shuffle inside.
We look up. Above the door and a chipped plaster gargoyle bolted into the grimy stucco wall, a large, faded sign says “St. Chester’s Abbey” in hand-painted gothic letters. “Divine Spirits. Heavenly Company. Services Daily, 7AM to 2AM,” the sign says. A cartoon saint, little bubbles rising through his halo, rests his elbow on the “Y” in “Abbey,” cradling a jumbo chalice of foamy beer, and laughs.
In the back, we are frustrated. We pull our legs up to our chest. We want to not be so hot, our head to not hurt so much, to get presents, and get our peppermint shake right now, but when we look at ourselves in the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, we feel different, kind of like we are heavier all of a sudden. We have not seen expressions like that on our faces before. Our mouths are open, and we aren’t sure if we are really confused, or embarrassed, or super mad, or that we are about to say something, or laugh crazy hard, or that we are going to cry.We don’t understand what has just happened, and that makes us a little sad, too.
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