Cross Dressing (13 page)

“Three-seventy and jail?”

“More like four hundred and prison,” Karen said. “I don’t work for free.”

Dan hung his head, shaking it slowly.

“You know, there is one alternative,” Karen said.

Dan perked up. “What? I’m open. Talk to me.”

“Your brother’s wardrobe and the statute of limitations may be your, uh, salvation.”

Dan sucked on his lemon drop and squinted at his lawyer. “I don’t get it.” Actually he was starting to get it—he just didn’t like what he was getting.

“How does seven years of celibacy strike you?” Karen winked at Dan.

“Celibacy?” Dan stared at every single one of Karen’s soft parts as she crossed the room to a bookshelf.
No, not that
, he thought.
Anything but that.

“Think of Michael as your altar ego,” Karen said. “Get it? A-l-t-
a
-r ego.” She chuckled as she pulled a Bible from the shelf. “You want my advice?” She tossed the Bible to Dan. “I suggest you bone up on your new employee handbook.”

S
ister Peg was busy as the devil in a high wind. She was making lunch for the residents while simultaneously working the phone. Among her other calls, she was calling Father Michael’s apartment every hour or so, hoping to find him and get him back.

As usual, Ruben was helping. Sister Peg had thanked the Lord for Ruben more than once. He was the hardest-working, least-complaining person she’d ever met. He’d been raised on the fringe of gang culture, and when the time came he had joined a neighborhood clique of the San Fers, hence the Gothic-lettering tattoos on his neck, arms, and back. As with most gang bangers, it was the “family” aspect of the gang that appealed to him. His own family had disintegrated by the time he was twelve, so the San Fers provided an important sense of belonging. A few years later, when his younger brother was
killed in a drive-by, Ruben quit the San Fers and moved into the Care Center where he found a new family. He held a grudge about his brother’s death, but he wasn’t vengeful. Ruben showed great respect for life, at least for those who deserved it. He honored the elderly residents and was protective of the kids who came through, and he never shrank from any duty, no matter how unpleasant.

Ruben had been a tagger with the gang, a regular Jackson Pollock with a can of spray paint. Since his education consisted of three years at a school for the deaf and two years in special-ed classes in the L.A. public school system, he had no formal art training, but he was gifted, there was no question about that. Ruben sensed that he could somehow make a living with his skills, but without a mentor to guide him, he had no real hopes in that regard. His hopes were in the lottery, twice weekly.

There was still no answer at Father Michael’s apartment. Sister Peg considered going over there but knew she didn’t have the time. She hung up and looked at her list to see which funding application she needed to follow up on next. She dialed, reached her party’s extension, and was put on hold. She watched Ruben as he grated a giant wedge of cheese. When he was finished, Sister Peg squeezed the phone between her ear and shoulder, then plunged her hands into the mound of shredded cheddar. A second later someone came back on the line. “Yes,” Sister Peg said, “we’re registered with the Department of Health Services as an in-home congregate care facility.” She dumped the cheese into a steaming vat of macaroni and stirred. “I submitted the funding request two months ago. Could you please look again?”

They looked again, then came back on the line. “I can’t find it, Sister,” the voice said. “It’s lost if it was ever here to begin with. You’ll have to start over, sorry.” Click. Sister Peg listened to the dial tone for a moment and wanted to explode.
She clenched her teeth and whispered something coarse into the phone. She hung up, made a note to resubmit, then dialed Father Michael again. Still no answer.

When it came time to serve lunch, Sister Peg and Ruben formed a short buffet service. The phone cord stretched tight to the wall as Peg moved from serving the mac and cheese to the pot full of string beans, all the while wheeling and dealing with a plumber. “Trust me, it’s a tax write-off,” she improvised. “Donation of services.” Ruben passed her a plate with a piece of Wonder bread on it. “Of course I’ll pad the invoice, I need your help.” She thought about the backed-up toilet as she slapped some string beans onto a plate. “Say, do you like cheese?” Sister Peg hammered on the guy until he finally relented. He said he’d come by that afternoon.

Sister Peg was set to dial again when something caught her eye. It was an empty plate rising slowly from the other side of the counter. Sister Peg could see some little fingers holding the plate, but she couldn’t see who belonged to the fingers. When she peeked around the edge of the plate she saw Alissa looking up at her. “Hello there,” Peg said.

Alissa didn’t say a word. Her expression never changed.

Sister Peg smiled. “Would you like the beef Wellington or the crab bisque?”

Alissa had no idea what the nun was talking about. She just nodded and hoped for the best as she held her plate up a little higher.

Sister Peg served her lunch. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.” She watched Alissa walk to a table in the corner. She was still limping. It brought back bad memories. Sister Peg had lived in Los Angeles all her life and had seen some awful things. And lately, things seemed to be getting worse.

Over the previous five years, in Los Angeles County, the number of abused children had increased by 63 percent,
dwarfing the national average increase of 16 percent. More than 100,000 of the people who called the county’s abuse hot line hung up before speaking to anyone because they were on hold for so long. Sister Peg didn’t know which statistic was more disturbing—that so many people hung up or that there were so many calls to deal with in the first place.

Sister Peg knew the frustration of dealing with this bureaucracy. A couple of years earlier she had called to report that a five-year-old child she knew was being abused. She was put on hold. Thirty-two minutes later an overworked social worker came on the line. Sister Peg told the woman about a little girl named Sonia. The girl’s mother, who was supposed to be under the supervision of Child Protective Services, had a long history of abusing her eight children. She disciplined them with burning cigarettes or by locking them in a closet for days without food. The social worker apologized and said there was nothing her department could do.

“Why not?” Sister Peg asked.

“We don’t have the funding or the manpower,” the social worker said. “And trust me, we have a lot of cases worse than this.” The social worker wasn’t unsympathetic, she was just numb from her workload. She took Sister Peg’s information and said—without a trace of cynicism—“If nothing else, Sonia will be an important statistic.”

Sister Peg was so infuriated that she set out to fix the problem. She wrote to her elected officials and she badgered someone at the L.A.
Daily Times
into investigating the matter. The paper eventually ran a two-part story criticizing the department for failing to investigate as many as 25 percent of the calls reporting abuse.

Local officials were suddenly facing a serious problem. Since none of them could get reelected with the press tossing around statistics like that, the only prudent thing to do was to raise the legal threshold of what constituted child abuse. So
the City Council and the Board of Supervisors quickly passed the necessary measure, and just like that, the Department of Social Services was investigating all but 2 percent of calls reporting abuse.

Several months later, the paper published a follow-up article about Sonia. She was found dead, having been tortured with a butane lighter before her mother dropped her onto the freeway from an overpass. In the article someone from Social Services lamented the child’s fate, laying blame at the feet of whoever had cut the department’s funding. Someone from a twelve-step program was quoted as saying that crack cocaine had killed the girl, not the mother. And finally, in a fine example of one of the unusual ways in which the word
lucky
was used in Los Angeles, the newspaper writer said that, all things considered, Sonia was lucky to be dead.

Most people would have surrendered in the face of such madness and acknowledged that they were wasting their time trying to change things. But Sister Peg couldn’t surrender. She felt responsible for Sonia’s death. She could have done something. Sonia was one of the reasons Sister Peg wouldn’t give up on the Care Center. She didn’t know how, but the next time—and there would certainly be a next time—Sister Peg was going to do whatever it took to ensure there were no more Sonias in her world. The night she read about Sonia’s death, all Sister Peg could do was pray. So she prayed for Sonia’s soul. Then she asked that God forgive her for agreeing that Sonia was, somehow, lucky.

A
fter reflecting on the scenario laid out by his attorney, Dan opted for what he felt was the lesser of two evils.
I guess I’ll change my name
, he thought. So he went to the bathroom, pulled out his electric clippers, and lost the beard. He rooted through the medicine cabinet and bathroom drawers, until he
found his old contacts hidden behind some expired ointments and old throat lozenges. He dropped his Armani frames into the trash and inserted the hard lenses. He blinked and squinted and teared up before regaining focus.

Finally Dan put on Michael’s clericals and stood before the full-length mirror. As he adjusted the collar, something came over him. It was an odd, not altogether unpleasant, sensation. It was seductive and had something to do with the outfit. Dan got the feeling that the clothes came with certain expectations and demands. They also commanded some degree of respect, both by the person wearing them and by those who encountered him. It was an interesting dynamic, he thought, and a familiar one as well. This was the reason advertisers used “authority figures” in commercials. The right outfit implied endorsement by the corresponding ruling organization. If a man wearing a white coat and a stethoscope smiled and held up a box of laxatives, the little pile-driving pills suddenly had an unauthorized nod from the AMA. Disclaimers like “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV” didn’t matter; the picture was far more powerful than the copy. Or, as one advertiser smugly put it, “Image is everything.”

Another aspect of the psychology of clothes that Dan thought about was the hierarchy of garments. Why did high-ranking military and religious people wear more conspicuous clothes than those of lower rank? Did they do it simply to identify their rank? No, that could be accomplished in far simpler ways. Ornate outfits were simply a bald show of power intended to intimidate, convey superiority, and demand obedience.

But why did people assume that anyone they saw in a uniform was really what the uniform said they were? Simple. Because they usually were, which was why wearing a uniform was so effective in pulling a con, whether it be advertising or convincing people that you had a direct link with the supreme
deity. The appearance of authority was usually as good as actually having it—as long as you didn’t get caught.

Dan turned and looked at himself sideways in the mirror. It struck him that the clericals not only carried responsibility, they were also rife with potential. The potential to do good, to help, to save, to offer redemption and forgiveness and hope. Dan recognized the sensation as the one that had urged him to theological study in the first place. He hoped it would pass quickly.

Dan glanced over to the dresser and saw the Bible that his attorney had given him. He picked it up and read out loud the first thing he saw. “I am the Lord thy God,” he said. Dan liked the way he sounded. His voice resonated as he continued, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!” Dan raised his chin and looked down his nose at his reflection in the mirror. He tried to look as if he had God’s direct line. Suddenly the earth began to shake. Dan dropped the Bible and prepared to fall to his knees when he realized it was just a small temblor, probably an aftershock to the Northridge quake. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Dan picked up the book, looked up, and apologized. As he was about to put the Bible back on the dresser, he noticed a dog-eared page. He opened it to Matthew,
chapter eight
, verse twenty-two. “But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.” Dan slowly closed the book, thinking of Michael.
Oh, yeah
, he thought.
That reminds me. I need to call the funeral home.

S
ister Peg was still thinking about Sonia when a loud noise brought her back to the kitchen. Ruben was banging a big metal spoon against the vat of macaroni. He was trying to get Sister Peg’s attention so he could hand her a plate. Ruben sometimes worried about her. She worked so hard and had so many frustrations. He knew how that sort of thing took its toll,
little by little chipping away at whatever hope you may have had. She got so busy that she sometimes forgot to eat. Ruben did what he could to make sure it didn’t happen often. He handed her a plate.

She spooned some soggy string beans next to the macaroni and cheese, then scooted up on the counter to eat while making another call. She took a bite of bread, dialed, then waited.

“Hello?” The voice was distant and slightly echoed, the speaker-phone effect.

Sister Peg hated that. “Monsignor, it’s Sister Peg. I’m trying to find Father Michael. I figured you knew where he—”

Monsignor Matthews grabbed the phone. “Sister!” he said. His tone was nervous and agitated. “I wouldn’t have any idea where he is and I’m sure you know he’s not to be called ‘Father’ any longer.” He paused. “Not after Africa.”

Sister Peg smirked into the phone. “Let me guess,” she said. “Someone’s in the office with you.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

“Well, that should teach you not to use that damn speaker phone. It’s rude.”

“It’s merely a convenience,” he answered. “Can you hold a moment?” Monsignor Matthews put his hand over the mouthpiece and asked to be left alone, then he returned to Sister Peg. “Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “I gave him your name and number and washed my hands of it. Don’t get me any more involved if you want me in a position to help in the future.”