The Proper Words for Sin

Private Things

94 PRIVATE THINGS In the car on Thursday morning, Corey’s mother looked directly at him the way she always did when she was driving and said, “Wait until you see where we’re going.” Corey didn’t answer. If the car didn’t break down or crash, he would see whatever his mother had planned. Since his eleventh birthday, he’d entered what his mother called his “silent phase,” and he was happy she didn’t press him to talk unless, she reminded him, “There’s an emergency.” A year ago Corey’s mother had decided to homeschool him. “You hate going there anyway,” she said, and he’d agreed. Fifth grade was terrible. He was in the middle school now with boys up to eighth grade who said “fuck” and “cocksucker” in the halls between classes , and girls who laughed when they heard those words. His father, “who wears the religion in this family,” according to his mother, didn’t approve. “Adversity and temptation are God’s fitness training for us,” he said. “It’s how we grow strong enough to be his soldiers.” “You listen to your father,” his mother said, “but never you mind the Jesus talk when you’re with me. You’ll be the only student, but this is a public school I’m running.” PRIVATE THINGS 95 Now, as she parked the car on a street in Philadelphia, she said, “Once we’re inside, you have to answer when I talk to you. We’ll be in school then.” Corey nodded. He liked being in school fifty miles from where they lived near Allentown. And he had signed a contract to do what she asked. “Just you wait,” she said. “I’ve been reading about this place.” It didn’t take Corey long to agree with her. Right away they walked into a room with nothing but glass cases full of skulls. They gazed at old photographs of men and women with missing limbs and examined a single prosthetic leg with an inscription that declared it had only been worn once to the owner’s daughter’s wedding. “Imagine that, Corey,” his mother said. “Doesn’t that say something about love?” In another room, Corey saw a photograph of a naked girl with no legs. She was balanced on her hands for the photo, and there were little, worm-like flaps of skin where her hips should have started. He figured his legs must have looked like that a few weeks after he was conceived, right before they unfolded and grew where they were supposed to be instead of curled like a cheap noisemaker for New Year’s Eve. His mother nudged him away from the display. “Someone had the good sense to collect all these things, the good with the bad, but we’re not here to look at the monsters,” she said. “This is school, not the circus.” Corey knew there was a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead because her picture was on the free brochure at the entrance, but he didn’t complain because his mother allowed him to stop by a set of skeletons. There was a huge one of someone who’d grown to be seven foot six and was still growing when he died. The sign by the door read Bone Pathology, so it wasn’t a surprise to see a short skeleton nearby. Mary Ashberry, the inscription said, 3'6". Little, all right, but what 96 PRIVATE THINGS was astonishing was that she held the skull of her child, who, the sign said, had died at birth shortly before Mary Ashberry died from peritonitis after a cesarean section. “People are often very tall and very short,” his mother said. “These aren’t the same as those others.” Corey nodded, but the other skeletons looked deformed, the backbones impossibly curved, the shoulders tilted in a way he’d never seen. “Isn’t this the strangest place you’ve ever been?” she said a half hour later. “Maybe.” “What do you mean maybe?” She pointed at the nearest display. “What’s weirder than a jar full of needles and pins that all came from inside somebody who ate them and still lived?” Corey thought of the wig his mother had begun wearing at the beginning of the week. “I’m so tired of wasting time with my hair,” she’d said when...