Her Religion

Tragedy. Noel Missouri Tragedy. The name my momma gave me when I was born was a bit of Christmas, a bit of geography, and a bit of our reality.

She herself was not born given a name like Noel Missouri Tragedy, or even anything at all normal Tragedy, like Mary Ellen Tragedy or Susan Lowell Tragedy. Her name that her momma gave her is who knows what, because her momma was who knows who, who I don't know maybe even never got a chance to look at her, I've heard that's true, that they just take the baby away when they know it's to be adopted, just pull it out and stick a needle in the sweatin' new momma's veins and she fogs out while they wash off the baby in another room and someone signs the papers.

The ones who were waiting, the ones who paid for that great honor of having a child they couldn't make on their own, they were not named Tragedy, either, but something like Johnson or Mayberry or something. But my momma decided to change her name when she ran off, because she said she wanted a name that tied her to her real momma, the one she could close her eyes and imagine everything about except her face, but she could see her hands and her arms and the sweat on the back of her neck, and the trembling of her chin after she woke up from foggy land and knew that what she'd said she'd do she really had done, she'd given away her baby. My momma wanted to honor that woman, or that girl, and she paid 42 dollars finally when she was able to do that and after she heard about how it was done, and she dropped that name Mayberry or Johnson and became the wonderful young pregnant Miss Tragedy, like at a beauty contest, "Misssss Vermonnnnt! …Missss Tennesseeeee!…Missss Tra-gedeeeeeee!" I was loaded up in her belly and she told me hundreds of times from as long as I can remember that her name is Miss Tragedy, and my name is Miss Tragedy too, and it's on account of her own momma who was truly the original unknown and mysterious Miss Tragedy, my lost forever grandma. She would always look so serious and so sad and so moved, really, when she'd hold me and tell me that, and rock me in her arms and shake her head like it was her religion, and say, "She loves us, she does so, I know my momma the original Miss Tragedy is loving us today, honey, so full her heart will burst of it."

I wasn't born on Christmas, I was born in September, but momma said Noel was a pretty name and that Christmas was for children, so that's what she gave me. She said that she'd taken a Greyhound bus through Missouri when she'd run away, and that there were small, green rolling hills that she'd never have expected to be there all along in a place like Missouri, that it hadn't ever occurred to her that Missouri was really anything at all, and she shamed herself for writing if off like that when she saw that, actually, whatever it is, it's got some pretty green countryside and rolling hills, and that's a whole lot more than a whole lot of other places that people try to get to can say.   She said that she thought of me there when she was traveling in that bus through Missouri, and she said that she thought I was kind of the same way, that nobody would have stopped to consider that maybe there was some simple sweet baby rolling deep inside that belly of the girl in the yellow sweater, that it just wouldn't have occurred to them that a girl so much a plain Jane in some kind of mess was so matter of factly the home of this sweet baby life-glob inside, her own green rolling hills that are there whether you know it or not.

So my name became, that September, young Miss Noel Missouri Tragedy. I send my blessings to my momma's momma and to my momma for loving so hard up and down, up to her imagined hurting momma and down to her secret baby child, also half-imagined I guess. I think if I was pregnant I'd be guessing my poor child's life away more than breathing. We must all be the products of our momma's imaginations for the awful longest time. I don't know. I don't have a baby and I don't imagine it's something I'm going to aim for anytime soon enough to count, because I fancy I'll hold onto myself until the point when I can say, "Yes, sir, that there is a man who loves me and who I do not only adore but trust and respect and can imagine being the strongest kind of daddy that a girl could need when she's needing a daddy to be strong, and the man who would laugh with such a magic that even the nastiest little terrible-two year old brat would just hug and collapse into giggles with," and when that man is the sweetest, warmest, solemn friend in my arms when I don't need him to say a thing, but just when I need to hear him breathe and know that he is kind, well, then I guess I'll probably force myself on that poor man a hundred times a day until his seed is stuck on fast to one of my eggs, and I will be the proudest momma of a girl who will break the spell, a girl who will not be another Tragedy, no more little Miss Tragedy baby girls from this line, and if it's a little Mister, then, I suppose I'll forgive the little buggar for that! And no, sir, his name will be the name of his wholesome father's. This woman's belly is not putting forth a Mister Tragedy or his big or little sister.

But that is one amazing ghost of a dream, and I'm satisfied with that, I'm not unrealistic, I just have impossible standards. I'm not unrealistic, just because I know that my standards are out of this world and that it just might not be ever coming true, and I, today and since I was first ever alive on this world, have been Miss Noel Missouri Tragedy, and if on account of my holding my silly righteous head so high and insisting on the man of my dream do not ever meet a soul worth spit, well, then, I will be buried quite happily at the age of a hundred and eighty-five with no teeth and no children and no name on the grave except Miss N.M. Tragedy, instead of Mrs. Dream. That will be fine.

But if that man does come, he will know it. I'll have to leave it up to him to make sure he lets me in on it too, because if I have any doubts in myself, it is this, that I simply do not pay very close attention, and I suppose that's my cynicism in a way, in that I hold my head so high with my dream that at the same time I keep myself busy reminding myself that this is a dream that will be very, very difficult to find in this world in this space of what's left of my, what did I say, one hundred and eighty-five years, and I might just not even notice the man once (and if) he somehow one day comes.

So he'll have to be sharp, that one.

I would like someday to go to Missouri with that man on a Greyhound bus, to show him my middle name. I'd very much like to wait for him to be there with me, but I suppose if he hasn't made himself known by the time I'm, oh, a hundred and twelve, I'll go there on my own. I myself would love to see those hills that are there, and that have been there all along.

Kevin Acers, Phanat Nikom, Thailand, 1994