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  • Canto for Angels
  • Susan O’Dell Underwood (bio)

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Name one angel who isn’t strange, and a stranger. A stranger came to Mary and introduced her to her own body, announced what it was bound to do. From then on, angels wouldn’t give her a moment’s peace. There’s no getting away from that dark-alley snowflake of an angel. No two alike. Yours is, after all, all yours. It’s a surprise every time you need saving—so much saving, to offset the hubris and jockeying. So much human still underneath the wings. In high school, my sweetest, dearest friend—I’ll call her Cindy—was the first person I knew who believed in angels. Long before mass-produced Hallmark angels decorated our lives every day, all year, Cindy said she felt [End Page 64] her guardian angel watching over her all the time.

But there was not room for nearly enough angels, balancing side by side on the head of a pin. Or a nail. Or a railroad spike. Each angel would have to be a black-eyed nonconformist. Flawed and failing. Look around and know that angels are fallible, culpable. Each one envying the other’s trumpet. That maligned Angel of Death, will we know him when we see him? Perhaps he is no he after all, but your next-door neighbor, and you don’t recognize her coming to the back door with a slice of pound cake or an empty cup. No matter how good or kind or hapless or charmed we might be, some people, like Cindy, believe an angel is guarding you. A rough kind of guarding, like jostling in basketball, aggravating the air around you. Or invisible as static, the tinnitus you hear inside your head. Who might hover over our shoulders while we’re typing an email or scrolling through Facebook, looking for friends? It seems to me that Cindy and I—most of the young women we knew—were driven by a curious, rarefied agitation to know that life after girlhood would be an improvement. We wanted to hurry and be grown up, not recognizing how vulnerable we really were, weak and fraught with the need for possibility. Now years go by and eclipse and alter us. Through wormholes of memory, we marvel that we were ever safe.

Cindy worked at the mall, and she would park her tan station wagon in the shade of a tree far from the entrance, with the windows rolled down to keep the vinyl seats cool. She and I cruised her neighborhood, past the houses of boys we’d never have the nerve to speak to, and drove back roads, and went for pizza, all in that ugly, beat-up, hand-me-down family car a seventeen-year-old girl had no business loving as much as she did. This was a couple of years before she bought a cool greenbottlefly–colored VW Bug. She had to work to save up for that car, and gas, and insurance. I remember thinking I wasn’t a bad friend, but I didn’t understand her choices. I never asked why she needed a car at all, though it felt like a luxury to me, and also an awful responsibility. She was two years older than I was. My parents drove me, would drive me gladly, to keep me from needing a job. I didn’t mention our opposing liberties. She was free to go wherever she wanted, but did not have much free time for going. I had nowhere I was required to be, so much boredom, time on my hands.

Which of us was more free? I harbored this sense that I was luckier, not having to work a crappy mall job. But Cindy needed money to spend on items to put in her hope chest. None of the women in my family—who taught school and farmed—had ever led me to believe that a hope chest was an actual thing. But Cindy’s was a real wooden chest inside her closet, nearly full. She devoted herself to it the way she’d promised...

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