LEAP OF FAITH

THE JOURNAL OF MARIA SMYTH
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I can already tell it’s going to be really hard to write in this notebook while this stupid bus is bouncing all over the highway, but I am going to have to deal with it because I have already been riding this thing for a couple of days, and I have got to find something to do with my hands, not to mention my mind, while these endless miles and endless hours keep rolling by relentlessly. Plus, I am off to start a whole new life in a whole new place, so I figured it would be the perfect time to start writing a journal. So, the last time when we stopped at that Stuckey’s and the driver was having a cigarette, I ran in and bought this notebook and this pen and this is going to be the place where I can write down all the thoughts and dreams that run through my head every day.

So, since this is the first page of my new journal, I guess I should write down all the basic facts about me which you might not know. I am 22 years old. My name is Maria Smyth, although up until a day or two ago it was Maria Smith. But, I figured that since I was starting this new life, I might as well have a new, well, sort of new, name to go with it. In reality, though, no one knows what my real name is, because I was a foundling and I was raised in a Catholic orphanage in my home town of St. Kwiatoslaw, South Dakota. Somebody left me in a basket at the police station when I was just a day or two old, so they gave me the last name of “Smith” and they called me “Maria” after Sheriff Banaszek’s wife. He was the guy who found me in the basket. So, when I climbed on this bus a few days ago, I decided to jazz up my name a little by spelling it with a “y” even though I’m still going to pronounce it “Smith”.

For the past three years or so I have worked as a medical transcriptionist and sometimes office assistant at the office of Dr. Leonard Pigeon, who is a kind of scary and disagreeable man, but who is a prominent Ear, Nose & Throat specialist in St. Kwiatoslaw. My favorite thing in the world is movies. I didn’t really have a family when I was growing up; the other kids in the orphanage came and went too quickly, really, to get to know. And the nuns were all basically on their own trip, being Brides of Christ and caring for the Poor, to really care too much about me. So, I spent a lot of time watching movies on the TV set in the pathetic “rec room” of the orphanage. At first, it was just the old black and white movies that the nuns had lying around, but then in the 90s when everything was switching over to DVD, the Blockbuster Video in town donated all their VHS tapes to the orphanage. I have never been on a real date, but I have seen every movie ever made from a Nicholas Sparks book, so I feel like I’ve been in love dozens of times!

My favorite movie of all time is “The Sound of Music”, because Julie Andrews’ name was “Maria” in that movie and she was like, trapped in a convent full of nuns until she could bust out and run to the top of an Alp where she could twirl and twirl and sing and let her face get burnt by the sun. That is how I felt sometimes when I was a little girl so I always loved that movie. And when the nuns were singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I always imagined that was how the Sisters were talking about me when I wasn’t around; that although I seemed shy and plain and boring to everyone around me, in reality I was something special and ethereal like a moonbeam.

Anyway, when I finally turned 18 I was able to move out of the orphanage. The sisters set me up with a job at a temp agency, and had found a little efficiency apartment for me down on Babetski street overtop of a dry cleaners. After a couple of months, I got this temp job at Dr. Pigeon’s, but the lady I was replacing, who was only supposed to be on vacation, called one morning and, according to Becky the receptionist, told Dr. Pigeon to “shove it up his ass.” So, they asked me to stay on and I have been working there ever since. Well, until a couple of days ago anyway.

The town I live in, St. Kwiatoslaw, is a really small town in the northwest corner of South Dakota. There is a local joke which goes something like “I’d rather be in northwest South Dakota than southeast North Dakota!” but I don’t really think that it’s very funny, so I don’t use it very often. Anyway, St. Kwiatoslaw is something like 98% Polish. That’s OK with me, I don’t have anything against Polish people, except maybe their last names, which are all really long and full of too many z’s and k’s and y’s and things. Like if I was Polish, my name Smyth would be spelled Sczmythczkie or something. Sometimes when Becky goes on lunch I have to answer the phone for her and that’s when it can be a real problem. Someone will call up and ask to make an appointment for someone whose name sounds like “Mr. Mxyzptlk” and then they get all huffy when I’d ask them to spell it for me. Or sometimes when they would come in to the office I would look down to see their names written in the appointment ledger, I would have to look up and pretend that I had grown up in the house next door to them and say, “Good Morning, Mrs. J! Why Don’t you take a seat?” It usually wasn’t a problem, except for this one old bi*h who had a hyphenated last name, so I just called her by her first name. “Good morning, Kunegunda!” I said, but I must have pronounced it wrong or something because she complained to the doctor about my “attitude”. Oh well, can’t please everyone.

Anyway, everything changed a couple of days ago on Wednesday. It was the feast day of St. Kwiatoslaw, which is like the biggest deal of the year in our town. All the Polish people in town gather at the church for a special Mass, and after that they all go home, eat a big meal of root vegetables, get drunk and fall asleep in front of the TV. I could have gone if I wanted, but honestly, after 18 years in the orphanage with the Little Sisters of St. Cecilia, the last place I want to go is a church.

The office was almost empty that day. Most places were closed, but Dr. Pigeon is not Polish and he doesn’t even live in St. Kwiatoslaw anyway. So, the only people there were the doctor, me, and Matt, the physician’s assistant, who is the only other non-Polish person in the office. Matt is a really nice guy but he’s been really jumpy lately because his wife is pregnant and she’s as big as a house and she’s like two weeks overdue. We weren’t very busy, in fact, the only patient was a lady whose husband had called that morning asking if we could fit her in with some sort of “emergency”. Her name was Mrs. Niedzielski and she was a short, squat, caricature of a woman with an enormous nose, and a head of bright, brassy red hair despite the fact that she was well into her seventies. Her hair stood straight up from her head and when she walked into the office all I could think of was the “Heat Miser” from that Christmas special they show every year.

Anyway, Mrs. Niedzielski had been in the exam room for a while and I was indexing some patient files when all of a sudden, Matt came running out and grabbed his jacket. He still had the rubber gloves on his hands and all I could hear as he ran out the door was something about his wife’s water breaking.

I should tell you that when it comes to things like babies, and where they come from, I am kind of naïve, so to speak. The Little Sisters of St. Cecilia weren’t much in the way of Sex Ed. So, I’m not a hundred percent sure what her “water breaking” means, but I’m fairly certain it had something to do with the baby finally being on its way.

A few seconds later, I heard the booming voice of Dr. Pigeon from the exam room. “Smith!” he yelled, “Get in here! Now!”

This has always been something I’ve sort of dreaded because Dr. Pigeon is a really mean man and I really don’t like to be yelled at. So, I said, “Umm, yes, Doctor,” in a voice so low that he probably couldn’t even hear me, put my files down neatly and walked over to the exam room. I knocked softly on the door before I entered, even though it was already open. “Umm, yes..?” I said.

I looked over and saw Mrs. Heat Miser out cold on the exam table, an IV drip suspended next to her. I noticed there was a big wad of gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

“Goddam it, Smith, get over here! I need you to clamp this woman’s uvula!” he boomed at me, waving some kind of medical instrument at me as he yelled. I hesitated for a moment, but then I found my courage and took the instrument from the doctor’s hand. I looked down at Mrs. Niedzielsky. She lay there, her horrible red hair now in matted clumps, her mouth agape. She did not have a single tooth in her mouth; her dentures were sitting in a cup on the other side of the room. The doctor had pulled the exam light in close, illuminating her ghastly, toothless grin, and that’s when I saw it. Her uvula, that is. The little piece of suspended flesh at the back of Mrs. Niedzielski’s mouth had grown angry and swollen, and when I saw it, it looked big and red and nasty like a radish with pulsing veins, and if I didn’t know better I would have sworn it had a face like the boil on that guy’s neck in “How to Get Ahead in Advertising”. So, I screamed. I screamed like a little girl, like Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween”. I screamed so loud, apparently, that my scream cut through whatever anesthetic haze the doctor had put Mrs. Niedzielski under and she sat straight up, hitting her head with a crack on the exam light. At that point, she fell back down onto the exam table, unconscious, a slight trickle of blood beginning to flow from the huge cut in her forehead. Dr. Pigeon turned to me with rage in his eyes.

“Get out!” he yelled at me, little balls of spit forming in the corners of his mouth. “Get the f**k out of my office! You’re a worthless, helpless little girl. Now get out! You’re fired!”

I was trembling and I could feel the tears getting ready to come out, but before they did, I turned around so he couldn’t see me. I walked out of the exam room slowly, grabbed my purse and my sweater, and left the doctor’s office for the last time.

I knew it was going to be a long night so I stopped at Jurczyk’s Variety on my way home. I got a pint of Haagen Dazs and they have a Red Box so I rented a copy of “Bridget Jones’ Diary”.
When I got back to my apartment, all I wanted to do was sleep, so I slept. When I woke up, it was already dark. I felt really sad and tired. So, I skipped making supper that night and decided to go straight for the ice cream and Bridget Jones. When I popped the DVD into the player, though, the movie which played was not “Bridget Jones Diary”. I don’t know what the movie was, actually, because the only word in the title was “อฐณญฃฦ“

The movie started with the sound of a sitar, and a woman singing in a language I couldn’t understand. Before I knew it, there were dozens of beautiful brown people singing and dancing on the screen, their costumes bright and glittering in the sun, bright white smiles and sparkling brown eyes which shifted back and forth with the rhythm of the music.

I had heard of Bollywood musicals before, but the was the first one I had ever seen.

I sat back to watch it, but it was hard to follow the story sometimes because it was in Hindi and there were no subtitles. In between spectacular musical numbers, I was able to figure out that it was about a great, feared warrior named Genghis Khan. It told the story of a man who united his tribes, championed the rights of women and religious tolerance, and was one hell of a singer and dancer to boot. But then the movie fast-forwarded through time, and showed how Genghis Khan had come to be remembered as a ruthless killer and bloodthirsty conqueror. The lesson seemed to be that the filter of history is not always an honest one. In the end, those who prevail, the victors, the survivors, get to write the history books. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how the movie ended because I fell asleep before it was over.

I was having a familiar dream. It’s a dream I have a lot when things aren’t going well: I’m like Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music”, spinning and frolicking in that beautiful mountaintop meadow. Suddenly, though, I noticed something that wasn’t usually there. It was a man on a horse, and when I stopped spinning I could see that both the horse and the man were armored, as if heading off to war. As I got closer, I could see the man’s face. He was an older man, his face wise and stern but not entirely unkind. He had a thin gray beard and a thin gray mustache, and lively, almond-shaped eyes.

“Hello, Maria,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. K,” I answered. It was a dream.

“Many called me worthless, you know.”

“Umm, pardon me?”
“When I was young, many who believed themselves to be wise called me worthless. One old man even called me a “worthless, helpless little girl”. You have great worth, Maria. You must take a leap of faith and find your destiny”

“I do?” was all I could come up with.

The rest of the dream was just sort of normal dream stuff, a blur of “Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Tron” and “Altered States” like usual. But the part with Genghis Khan really stayed with me. I thought about it all morning long, and when I went to Jurczyk’s to return the DVD to the Red Box, I decided to buy a map of the United States while I was there.

I got home and spread the map out on the floor. I dug a penny from my purse, and closed my eyes. It seemed like I should perform some kind of ritual, so I spun around counter-clockwise three times. “Leap,” I said on the first spin. “Of,” on the second. “Faith!” and I tossed the penny into the air.

It landed on Georgia. A tiny little town called Tobacco Smudge in the lower left corner of the state.

That’s where I am headed on this bus.

I packed all the clothes I like into two suitcases. Everything else I left behind. A lot of it came with the apartment anyway, none of it was really mine. The bus picks people up at the Sunoco station here in town, and luckily Jeremy who works there is really nice and really smart and he was able to use the computer and get me a ticket from St. Kwiatoslaw all the way to Tobacco Smudge. While I was waiting for the bus, all I could think about was Julie Andrews singing “I’ve Got Confidence” in “The Sound of Music”, as she head off to her new life with a suitcase in one hand and a guitar in the other. I kept singing it over and over to myself, hoping that if I sang it enough times, it might really be true,

So, I’ve been riding this this bus for a few days and it hasn’t really been that bad. I’ve never seen Georgia before; all I know about it is what I can remember from “Gone With the Wind” and “Driving Miss Daisy”. In my mind it is a place where there are magnolia and peach trees in bloom everywhere, where everyone is genteel and gracious and calls you “darlin’” while they make sweet tea. I know that that’s probably not really how it is, but that is the picture I have in my mind. I don’t know what is waiting for me in Tobacco Smudge but I am ready to find out.

Yesterday, when we were either in Missouri or Kentucky, a lady got on the bus and sat down in the seat next to me, even though there were plenty of other empty spots. I didn’t really mind. She was pretty and she smelled really nice, and at least she wasn’t talking to herself or anything like some of the weirdos who come on. She told me her name was Angela.

Before long, the miles were flying by as Angela and I talked. We talked about all kinds of things: ordinary stuff like movies we like and our favorite food, and not-so-ordinary stuff like the dreams we have and the way we want people to remember us when we’re gone. It was nice talking to Angela, and I even told her about being an orphan and growing up with the Little Sisters, which is something I never talk about with anyone. I even told her that I have never had a boyfriend; never even kissed a boy, and she looked both amused and sad when I told her that. I think she may be my first friend.

At one point, I asked Angela where she was going. “I am going to Atlanta to visit the Coca-Cola Museum,” she answered. “It’s on my bucket list.”

“What is a bucket list?” I asked her.

“Oh, dear, you don’t know?” she said with a laugh. “A Bucket List is a list of things you must do before you kick the bucket. You simply must have one!”

She pointed at my notebook, this notebook, and said, “Right now- I want you to take a page from that notebook. Write BUCKET LIST at the top of the page. Now, as your life unfolds from day to day, you will learn of these things. Things you must see, things you must feel, things you must taste. Write them down on this paper, and then one by one, you must do them, and cross them off your list”

I did as she said, but for now the only thing written on the page was the words “bucket list”, underlined.

A few hours ago we reached Atlanta, and it was time for Angela to get off. The bus was going to sit there for a while, so there was no real hurry to say goodbye. A couple of people were getting on the bus before Angela had even gotten her bags down. One of them was an older Asian man with a thin gray mustache and a thin gray beard. He looked vaguely familiar to me but I couldn’t quite place him. Anyway, as he walked past me he looked right at me, smiled brightly, and I could have sworn he winked at me. Then he sort of tipped his head sideways, as if he were motioning towards the person getting on the bus behind him.

Just as he did that, I noticed this boy, well, man really, walking up the aisle towards me. I’m not sure why, but as soon as I saw him I felt this funny sensation in my stomach, like butterflies. He was tall, taller than me, anyway, and he was kind of struggling a little as he made his way up the aisle with a suitcase in one hand and a guitar in the other. He wore a straw hat and a kind of raggedy white T-shirt, and he looked strong and he looked kind; and when he saw me, for some reason he smiled a big happy smile as if he had been looking for me the whole time.

Angela looked at me for a moment, and then looked at the boy getting on the bus. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll be right back”

She grabbed her suitcase and walked off the bus, leaving her bag on the curb as she ran into the station. A few minutes later she reappeared with something in her hand, climbed on the bus, and came over to my seat.

“Farewell, Maria,” she said to me. “I know you are going to be fine in your new life.” She hugged me and said, “Now, before I go, hand me that notebook of yours.”

She took the notebook from my hand and turned to the page where I had started my Bucket List. She wrote something down. Then she stopped, nervously chewing the end of the pen while she pondered something for a moment. Then, she quickly wrote something else into my notebook and snapped it shut.

“Here. I bought this for you,” she said, handing me the copy of Cosmopolitan magazine which she had just bought in the bus station. “Read it. And start working on that Bucket List of yours.”

She looked over in the direction of the boy with the straw hat and the guitar and I could have sworn she winked at him. Then, she walked off the bus, picked up her bag from the curb, and disappeared into the hustle and bustle of the bus station.

So now it is only a few hours until I arrive in Tobacco Smudge. I really, really want a hot shower and to sleep in a real bed for a change. There’s something about that boy with the straw hat, I keep wanting to turn around and take another look at him, a really good look. I’m thinking I’m going to do it, too, because you know, sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.

Before I do, I grab my notebook and turn to the page where my Bucket List is. Angela has written something there, actually two things. I’m not a hundred percent sure what both of them mean, but they sound really good to me, and I am ready to start crossing things off my Bucket List as soon as possible.

Here’s what she wrote:
1) listen to a boy playing guitar
2) fall in love

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