1.
Mother Roberta made the rules: no chewing gum, no bicycles, no tree nuts, no pets. Every morning she brewed the coffee and every night she cooked the meal. Twice a year she sewed our made-to-measure habits from yards of a black poly-wool blend. She embroidered pillows, made punch from powder, wrote the homilies for the priest.
When Father Thaddeus came to Lackawanna, he suggested she might take a break. Relax. She was eighty-one, frail as filament, and had started having bad days. Lapses in memory, slips in the shower. She sometimes peed herself. Twice in one month, we’d had to rummage through bags of trash in search of her false teeth.
Mother Roberta acquiesced—she would try to relax. She began to spend her days behind a newspaper held wide, or at the kitchen table with a cup of Red Rose tea, staring at a spread of puzzle pieces that she never seemed to touch. But while we weren’t looking, she put all thousand pieces where they were meant to be, and one afternoon the puzzle was finished. A moonscape. She left it on the table until dinner, then wrecked it and started again.
Everything we knew about living, we knew because Mother Roberta had showed us. She taught us to be busy: write our representatives, make bread of brown bananas. “There is no time for nothing,” she used to tell us, when she caught us staring out the window, or flipping through stations on the rectory radio.
Mother Roberta had three stiff hairs on her chin that we could spot only when she sat underneath the kitchen light. We used to fight each other for the chance to lean close and tug them loose. The thrill of it—we were eager, and she obliged, knowing she was too blind to get them herself. One of us would crouch and raise a pair of tweezers and, when a hair was plucked free, present it in front of Mother Roberta’s face, so she could close her eyes, make a wish, and blow.
It seemed impossible then, in the time before Little Neon and Woonsocket, to imagine chin hairs of our own. The four of us were born in different months of the same year, each of us twenty when we became novitiates, twenty-two when we made our vows. We were twenty-nine when we moved from Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo, to Woonsocket. Back then, our chins were bald, our minds sharp. Our faith was firm and founded. We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.
There were a lot of parts missing, I suppose. But for a while we didn’t realize it. For a while it seemed like enough.
When I was young, I thought womanhood would bring autonomy. Glamour. Fur coats and fat wallets. Days entirely of my design. I planned, as a girl, to become the kind of woman who kept a pen in her breast pocket; it seemed important that when I grew up I always had my own pen, that I never had to borrow anything from anyone else.
Now that I’m on my own, the thing I miss most is time spent in a parked van with my sisters, waiting for one of us to root through her bag and find whatever it was the other needed the most.
2.
Our ninth spring in Lackawanna, we painted the convent walls the color of mayonnaise.
This was in 2005, when newscasters couldn’t stop talking about the death of the pope, and we couldn’t stop talking about the mold on our bathroom wall. Remediation—that was the word we used. We wanted mold remediation. We bleached and squeegeed and scrubbed, but nothing worked. Nothing remediated. After a while we decided we might as well cover it up, which took three coats of what we agreed was the perfect white paint: not too yellow, not too blue. And then we painted the walls of the kitchen and the pantry and the foyer and the living room of our gable-front house. We kept painting until we ran out of walls.
It was the spring the babies stopped coming, so we had time on our hands. There used to be a dozen babies in our day care, some young enough that the mothers still counted their ages in months, others old enough to tell us how they felt. But a few years back a new Montessori school opened, and their budget allotted a music program, cooler toys, zoo-to-you animal visits—rabbits and turtles, mostly, maybe an iguana—and in the last few years, the mothers had started an enrollment exodus. Each year we had fewer babies. By our ninth spring, there was only one baby, and we thought four to one was an excellent teacher-to-student ratio, but the baby’s mother felt it important for him to socialize. So then there were none. Not a single baby.
We stayed busy. We pruned the hedges and shampooed the carpets. We were in possession of an old red Mercury Villager, a donation from a parishioner a few years back. The van had no air-conditioning. The seats were gray velour and the sliding doors were trouble; they jammed in their tracks. More than once we drove down the highway with the doors stuck halfway open, wind whipping through the car.
We couldn’t fix the doors, but we could change the motor oil. Or—Therese could, while the rest of us watched. Only Therese was game and limber enough.
That spring, when Frances and Mary Lucille and I were standing around, eating corn chips, and Therese was belly-up under the car, Mother Roberta came outside barefoot to tell us the Buffalo diocese was kicking us out.
Mary Lucille put a chip in her mouth.
“I didn’t catch that,” Therese called from under the car. She stopped cranking her wrench. “What’d you say?”
“They’re kicking us out,” Frances said.
“What?”
Mother Roberta stooped to yell in the direction of Therese’s head. “You’re being reassigned! The Buffalo diocese is broke!” And when Therese said nothing, she yelled again, her face beet red. “Broke! Bust! In arrears!” Then she stood straight and turned to hock a fat loogie into the grass. She did not care to repeat herself.
There was silence, then the sound of oil hitting the pan. Therese let it all drip out, and then she tightened the bolt, emerged, wiped her blackened hands on a rag, and looked up at Mother Roberta. “How come?”
Mother Roberta reminded us about the decline in church attendance. The first year Father Thaddeus came to Lackawanna, the diocese’s numbers had fallen by nearly half. This meant the offertory revenue dropped, too. The numbers fell the next year, too, and when they fell the year after that, we were sure they couldn’t fall again.
They fell again.
Frances crossed her arms. “But can’t we do something? We could sell muffins, or CDs, or—knives. I have a cousin who got rich from knives.”
“Where would we get knives?” Therese asked.
“I can call my cousin,” Frances said.
“No,” Mother Roberta said, weary. She shook her head. “We are not selling knives.”
“We could do a phone-a-thon,” Mary Lucille said. “Ask people for donations.”
“That’s a nice idea,” Mother Roberta said, “but it’s too late for that. This is bankruptcy. Do you understand? This is huge debt. Colossal.”
“But how?” Mary Lucille said. “We don’t have any expensive things.”
“Well,” Frances said, “I’ve heard stories.” A look of rapture came over her; she delighted in other people’s secrets. “Someone in Williamsville told me that Father Art has had seven cosmetic surgeries.”
“I thought so!” Therese said.
“Yeah. Neck lift, face lift, eye lift. Chin implants, too.”
Mary Lucille’s hand went instinctively to her own chin.
“And this other parish in Hamburg replaced all their bronze bells,” she said. They opted for new bells that could ring themselves. Frances had heard they’d selected the most state-of-the-art operating system, Apollo. With Apollo, you could make the bells play any of the 7,800 songs from a customized digital library. The Apollo package came with a five-year warranty, a money-back guarantee, free annual maintenance, and a remote control.
Copyright © 2021 by Claire Luchette