Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Life is Long
Nick Assencio hated and feared his abuela, but he could never tell her this because it would break her heart. He didn’t understand her, didn’t understand how they could even be related. Even though she had raised him, even though he had never met the woman whom she refused to call his mother.
“Dana,” she would say, on the rare occasion that his abuela would spit that name like a curse.
Not that she ever cursed.
Every day in the Assencio house was new and, for Nick, that meant trying to understand how to escape punishment for a multitude of crimes that he did not know were crimes. They were unserious, and their punishments were meted out vehemently but without malice.
“Cross yourself on the way into St. Benedict’s!”
“Sit up straight!”
“You should be outside playing, not in here reading those books!”
“You need to come inside and do your homework, not hang out with those bad friends of yours!”
Most of the time, all Abuela Assencio did was tell him not to do what he was doing, and that was it. Once in a while, it might necessitate a certain number of extra prayers, an extra visit to confession, or both. Twice, she used her green, plastic hairbrush – once, because she caught him using a friend’s bicycle. Another time was because he had lied to her about eating a cookie.
The worst, by far and away, however, was not a physical punishment. When he was in junior high, Abuela Assencio found a stack of JCPenney catalogues under his bed. They were folded open to the underwear section. Nick had discovered women. She made it obvious that this was a bridge too far.
“You don’t even understand!” she screamed, her voice catching and cracking at the shrillest notes. “You are too, too, too young! Don’t you even worry about Hell? How can you not? I’m old! I will die first! Do you know what it will do to me if I see you rejecting the Grace of God and willingly going off to Hell!? You are stabbing me! Oh! I cannot fix this! You need to see Father Antonio, but how will you even look him in the eye, with what you’ve done!?”
Nick found that in hiding the catalogues, he knew that he was doing something wrong, but he could not say what it was or why it was wrong. Abuela Assencio’s loud entreaties to Jesus, Mary, and a multitude of saints, her eyes that somehow pleaded with and judged him, her refusal to acknowledge his vows and disavowals ground him into dust where he stood. She pitied him. She had tried to save him. She begged the invisible power in the room to spare Nick, as if he might be carted off to hell by a rabble of demons at any minute. And, she cried. …and cried. …and cried.
Even after she stopped crying, there was something in her words that felt broken to Nick. Something that he felt he could never mend. It was a pantomime that he never forgot because Abuela Assencio never let him forget it. To be sure, she never once mentioned it again. She didn’t even make him go to Mass anymore. But the worst punishment he ever received was to be given up.
He went to Mass anyway. He watched her for scolding, disapproving looks. Nick tried to do what he was supposed to do, and he tried to understand it without her guidance. He didn’t. He never could.
But life is long.
It is especially long when you are a teenage boy, and you are growing up. And so, there was eventually a truce. Nick learned, in absent cries that were louder than the real cries had ever been, that he had learned. He watched Abuela Assencio’s eyes for judgement. He learned to read her, through trial and error, approval and disapproval. The messages were vague and often contradictory, but they were there. When she grew older, he took care of her. He made her meals. He took her to St. Benedict’s.
In the months before she died, he graduated from high school. Something that his mother had never done. Something that she had reminded him of regularly, all his life.
Sex was a thing that destroyed people. It was to be feared. It was the reason that he was where he was and his mother was wherever she was. Nick had learned from his neighborhood friends – and later school – that he had to have had a father. His curiosity with regard to the identity of this man was akin to wondering what it would be like to be decapitated. Even if there might be a way to find out, the knowledge simply wasn’t worth it.
The day of his graduation, Nick’s abuela gave him a hug. She whispered in his ear something that he had been waiting to hear his whole life:
“You are a good boy. I am hard on you so that you will stay that way. You do not want to destroy women. We are the weaker sex. But you, you men, you take everything we have and you leave us. At some point you leave us. Nick, I will not always be here, but you must promise me, before God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, that you will not leave a woman. You will never leave a woman.”
Nick cried. He cried because he was a good boy. He cried because at eighteen, he finally understood so much. He cried because he felt relief that the hardest battle he had ever fought was over, and he knew: he would never leave a woman.
Abuela Assencio died three months afterwards. Nick sold the house with everything in it and went to college.
Life is long. And, the human brain doesn’t understand itself.
Nick met a lot of girls in college. Because of his upbringing, he treated them with the sort of care that might be afforded to breathtakingly beautiful, fatally venomous snakes. In spite of this, his guileless charm won him a date or two with girls who felt unthreatened by him but disinclined to see him more than once. He couldn’t have left them if he had wanted to.
He studied science and found elegance and relative simplicity in the theoretical world. There was some abstract and universal indifference in making a life that dealt with the minutiae of quarks and electrons. There was consistency when dealing with something as immutable as the speed of light. Once Nick began to study the sciences, he realized that he didn’t believe in his grandmother’s Hell. There was no need for a creator to create. He became an agnostic in college but was more obsessed with the scientific infinite regressions of “why” than the philosophical. He didn’t care to know whether or not there was intent to the universe so much as he wanted to understand it, to know what drove it. His promise to his grandmother would have felt, had he bothered to consider it anymore, strange, as if it had been made by a family member but not him.
But, life is long, and it is strange.
Nick eventually met Sarah Humphries. She came to the coffee shop where he worked an easy but busy schedule to help pay for his very modest room in a house with several equally bashful and socially anxious science majors. Nick saw the poetry of the stars in Sarah’s eyes and smile. He would nearly push the other baristas out of the way in order to wait on her. Her smiles made him foggy even after his shifts. Nick found himself unable to concentrate.
And then, miracle of miracles, when she had approached him, his promise to his grandmother seemed all the more absurd; nothing on Earth could make him leave her.
But life is strange. Life is very, very strange. And, in order to make any real sense of it, one must not only understand one’s own brain but must know the very nature of the universe itself, a feat that is the very essence of impossibility. The human brain is as blindingly sophisticated as it is bafflingly primitive. It is simultaneously responsible for all of our prejudices and anxieties, our triumphs and charity, our intents and our outcomes.
It would be impossible to say whether life is strange because of the universe we inhabit or the archaic organ that processes all of our information about it. But sufficed to say, life is long, and it is strange. Nick and Sarah met during his junior year of college. Six years later, they would find out just how strange life could be.
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