Chapter Three

I guess I can talk about girls. Women. Dames, broads, babes, vessels of life, flowers of creation, yeah, yeah. How about royal pains in the ass? Can we say that?

Where to start? Well, I can't go on long, because it's my night to go to the store. Anyway.

The beginning. I'll start at the beginning. Grace was my first. Grace was not just a girl, she is my idea of woman. She formed me. I know that sounds corny, but there it is. Before I knew girls, I knew Grace. She was The One Who.

Gracie and I knew each other in grade school, back at old St. Kieran's. She was the only girl I ever knew who could make the nuns as mad as the baddest guy in the school. She was smart, and when she wanted to, I guess she did all right, but sometimes it must have seemed to those Sisters of Saint Joseph nuns that Grace was their special penance, sent from a God who thought that their lives, their devotion, their chastity and their material goods were not enough. He, being Divine Trickster, wanted to fuck with their heads as well.

Gracie liked to do stuff like set off firecrackers in the toilet stalls, write graffiti on the blackboards during recess. But those were minor deviltries. She once set up a proof that Jesus could not possibly have been the Son of God, and used the Catholic Bible to do it. She got sent to Father Kelly, and then had to go home for a week. She also cut off just one of her footlong braids and came to school that way. Her specialties also included playground fighting, smuggling Uncle Eamonn's Black Watch cigars to school and teaching us to smoke behind the school boiler house, and making up the dirtiest limericks I have ever heard before or since. Grace used awful language for a girl. For anyone, for that matter. Ma said that it would bar her entry to Heaven one day. Sister Mary Colman nailed it better; she said that Grace had a mouth on her that made the saints cry and could cut through a four-hour steel door. I have seen fires that burn through four-hour doors, and I think Grace's mouth would have given them a good run. For many reasons.

Yet Grace was one of the gentlest females I have ever known, then or now. She would beat the bejesus out of you on the playground, win all the marbles and keep 'em, go nose to nose with a sandlot umpire as good as any big-leaguer I have seen, but somehow she had a knack for knowing when there was real trouble in your life. She would always mysteriously appear when you were alone and in a bad way, offering a shoulder, an ear. She never said a word, just let you cry and promised not to tell. She was there for me when my younger brother, Paul, was dying. Never said a word, just let me sob it out on her clean white blouse and gave me a piece of licorice from her pocket after. "Yer all right, Johnny Sullivan, yer fine," she'd say in that funny little hoarse voice of hers, "God just gave you a little much to handle here." She clumsily patted my back and was off down the drive on her bike before I could say anything.

I remember the day when I saw Grace as someone more than Gracie of the skinny legs and swift right cross and oddly olive green eyes, Gracie of the dirty vocabulary and soft heart and kind, capable hands, hands always engaged in throwing a ball or picking a locker's lock or shooting a ringer marble or patting one of the many stray dogs that populated our neighborhood. (Gracie loved animals. Uncle Eamonn would not have a dog, so Grace used to buy dog biscuits and keep them in her jacket pocket for the neighborhood strays. She usually had a mangy, scrawny cat or two hanging around her, too.)

Anyway, I remember when Gracie made that transition from a girl to The Girl. There was nothing too definite about it, but it was memorable. We were in high school, and there was a dance at St. Kieran's for the CYO, and I remember the band was covering a Raspberries tune, "Go All The Way," and I asked Grace to dance, and it was really weird. Suddenly she went from this scruffy, skinny girl I had known all my life to an attractive young woman. It was just something about her movements. I don't know how to describe it. The other girls were out there jumping around, shaking it pretty good, but there was something about the way Grace moved -- she looked -- I don't know -- dangerous. Like she could do a guy some damage. Not in a mean or crazy way, she just -- she didn't look like anyone I ever saw. I didn't know it, standing there in the sweat-scented gym of St. Kieran's, but she looked like no one I have ever seen again. There has never been another. And I did not know, that chilly November night, when she grabbed both my hands behind the gym, that it would never happen quite this way again.

"Kiss me, Johnny Sullivan," she said, "kiss me like you mean it."

I awkwardly put my mouth over hers and attempted a kiss. I wasn't entirely sure about where tongues should go and so forth. Grace showed me. I felt like I was immersed in liquid fire, and yet I felt like laughing. It was absurd, and it was wonderful. Grace's breath smelt of Dentyne and a faint tinge of Irish whisky, probably filched from Uncle Eamonn's supply, and under the sodium light, her eyes were emerald and liquid and....

"JOHN SULLIVAN AND GRACE ANN O'MALLEY!"

It was Father Kelly. He was in a self-righteous lather, and he had probably had a little whisky himself, and we realized that we could at least outrun him if we didn't outrank him, and we jumped the fence behind the gym into some bushes and ran down a gully and onto the Norfolk and Western tracks. We walked the tracks home, as we lived only a few streets apart.

"I'll walk you to your door," I said.

"You'll play hell," she said. "D'you want my father to break your goddamn neck? Go home, Johnny Sullivan, and try not to find any girls between here and there." And with a harsh laugh, she ran off into the dimly lit brick street.

I was a little hurt, but still bedazzled, and I wandered home half-drunk from the night air and the kiss and the insane realization that this was a girl I could never let go.....

Oh, for God's sake. Wouldn't you KNOW that that shithead Derrico is down there roaring like he's giving birth? I'll tell you the rest a little later, I promise. It's important I keep this going. You see, I saw Grace yesterday....