The Assumption
We were known as The Guineveres to the other girls at the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration because our parents all named us Guinevere at birth, a coincidence that bound us together from the moment we met. We arrived over the course of two years, one by one, delivered unto the cool foyer of the convent and into the care of Sister Fran. Each of us had our own story. Usually, our parents whispered that they loved us; they told us to behave. Our mothers gave us lipstick kisses on our cheeks, or our fathers said they hoped someday we’d understand. Then they drove away for good, up the one-lane drive and into a world that was easier without children. They all had their reasons.
But The Guineveres had our reasons for wanting to run away, which is how we found ourselves stowed inside the cramped quarters of a parade float, wheels whirring beneath us, gravel bumping us like unpredictable hiccups so that we had to brace ourselves against the chicken-wire frame that cut into our skin. Inside the float, the air was suffocating, a thick blanket thrown over us. Through tiny gaps in the tissue paper, we could see Sister Monica, the handle of our float thrown over her shoulder as though she were heaving a giant cross up that graveled hill. Half-circle sweat marks appeared at her armpits; she grunted as she struggled with the weight of us.
Soon we heard Sister Fran’s voice snap from behind, “Keep with the pace. This is a parade, not a pilgrimage.” She appeared in our line of vision, her whistle swinging around her neck in place of the cross pendant that the other sisters wore. Sister Fran looked almost translucent in the sunlight, her arms and legs exposed and her veins appearing like little road maps beneath her pale skin.
“It’s quite heavy,” Sister Monica said between short breaths.
“Sin is heavy,” Sister Fran said. She trilled the whistle three quick times into a wincing Sister Monica’s ear, then marched ahead toward the front of the parade.
Our float was the largest entry in the parade, and for good reason. We’d designed it to hide us. Eight feet at its tallest point, it was shaped like a hand of benediction—two perpendicular fingers set closer than a victory sign, resembling a double-barreled, gun-shaped hand pointed toward the air. Win and I stood crouched in the upright fingers, Ginny had curled her tiny body into the thumb, and Gwen pancaked herself inside the narrow hollow of the plywood base. Outside we could hear the cheering of onlookers, some squealing and hooting. The band boomed in the distance, not the slow, haunting organ music we normally heard in the chapel during mass, but something infinitely more upbeat, with horns and guitars.
The parade itself capped off the Sisters’ annual August festival celebrating the Assumption of Mary, her earthly departure. At the end of her life, Mary was carried up to heaven on the wings of angels, her body too sacred to remain on earth, succumbing to dust like the rest of us. To be certain, The Guineveres didn’t believe we were perfect, not like Mary. How could we, with Sister Fran’s constant reminders of our waywardness or the sins of our bodies that shamed us for the simple fact that they were bodies and thus subject to the laws of biology? “The Flesh, girls, the Flesh,” Sister Fran warned, her habit swaddled tightly against her face so she appeared to have no ears, though she always seemed to hear us, to overhear us, and so we often found ourselves whispering, even when we were alone. For The Guineveres, the festival marked not Mary’s departure but our departure, our freedom. We refused to wait until we were eighteen; we were leaving the convent for good.
Of course, this was nearly two decades ago, and some of the details I’ve since forgotten. Call it willful amnesia or an act of forgiveness. I’m not sure which. I gave up writing in my notebook a long time ago—life got in the way, and I grew out of the habit. Besides, after everything that happened that year, there were some things I didn’t wish to remember, some questions I couldn’t bring myself ask. Back then, I hadn’t yet realized that time had a way of providing the answers. Back then, I believed The Guineveres were all I had.
I was the first Guinevere to arrive at the convent, the only Guinevere that summer when my mother left me there. Almost thirteen then, I shared my name with Saint Guinevere, who, at my very age, was martyred for her faith. Beheaded by a vengeful suitor after resisting his advances, she miraculously rose from the dead. She lived on as a nun for many years after, her head apparently functioning just fine. I could understand how she must have suffered—to have her head severed from her body, but then be forced to go on living. That’s how I felt when my mother left me. But I wasn’t as wise as Saint Guinevere, and I wasn’t a saint. They called me Vere. I was a sensitive young girl, a girl who still had faith. I prayed often, as I’d been taught to do. I prayed for someone to come rescue me.
And eight months later, during Morning Roll, my prayers were answered. Sister Fran stood at the head of the Bunk Room, yelling out names like insults, and when she hollered “Guinevere,” her voice rising as she spoke that last syllable, another voice joined mine in response. “Here,” we both said in harmonious unison, like the opening chord of a song. Our eyes locked. There stood Ginny, arms akimbo, her skirt twisted on her skinny waist, pleats askew.
Ginny resembled a bird only in that she was a delicate creature, as prone to unpredictability as the spring that ushered her in. “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds tidy,” Sister Fran would say, motioning for Ginny to tuck in her shirt or tame the wild red hair that framed her face like a lion’s mane. After learning about stigmata wounds during Morning Instruction, she’d sit mesmerized by her palms, tracing her thin fingers along invisible sores. Ginny liked to think of herself as an artist—not so much a person who created art as a person who was misunderstood. When she felt things, she felt them deeply.
Winnie—we called her Win—arrived another eight months later, near Christmastime, when the hallways were strung with pine rope and holly. When Sister Fran called out roll and hollered “Guinevere,” sternly this time, as though we were in trouble, three clear voices answered back. “Here,” we said, a triumvirate chorus. We scanned the room and located the owner of the smoky alto that had joined us. We found olive-skinned Win, her arms folded in front of her, her skirt low on her hips, her bold, broad smile revealing a slight gap between her front teeth. At breakfast, we motioned her toward our table, and she skeptically slurped her Cream of Wheat as we explained the extraordinary coincidence of our trinity.
To pass the hours during Rec Time that winter, Win practiced braiding our hair, which we grew down past our shoulders. We were allowed to wash our hair only once a week, so braiding helped it appear less greasy. Despite her dexterity, Win had knotty knuckles, big hands that when balled into fists made an impression on the other girls who, if they were afraid of us, were afraid of her the most. Sometimes the younger girls pressed their backs against the wall as we passed them in the hallway, so The Guineveres could walk side by side.
Gwen was the last of us to arrive, late one fall, after the Sisters brought out our sweaters that smelled of must and mothballs. The night before, we had witnessed the new girl changing into her nightgown without even pretending to turn her back to the Bunk Room. Her eyes were glassy, a startling blue, and as she undressed, neatly folding her uniform, we noticed a heart-shaped birthmark right above the bone of her hip. In the morning, she leaned despondently against her bunk, her long blond hair appearing smooth, even after a night of sleep. Sister Fran rattled off the roll, pausing as she neared our name, her beady eyes scrutinizing her clipboard. “Guinevere,” she finally said. We rose to our tiptoes as though lifted by the spirit. “Here,” we sang in our most gleeful voices, and when we recognized Gwen had joined our song, we tried to contain our excitement but could not. “Here,” we answered as dozens of other girls swiveled in their skirts, looking on in disbelief. “Here! Here!”
“An abundance of Guineveres,” Sister Fran said, clicking her tongue, which we took as acknowledgment that Gwen’s arrival was no coincidence but a miracle indeed. That morning at breakfast, over stewed prunes and dry toast, we sat together, the four of us, now with Gwen, complete.
Of The Guineveres, Gwen was the prettiest, and she understood this as fact, not opinion. Someday she hoped to become an actress. She clipped out photos of beautiful people from the only magazines she could find in the library, and she tacked them to her bunk, staring at the images while she sat up in bed brushing her hair—exactly one hundred strokes every night before Lights Out.
It was Gwen, herself longing to wear lipstick, who taught us to stain our lips with the beets we were served for dinner or the berries we picked out of the fruit salad. It was Gwen who instructed us to stuff our bras with tissues, not by wadding but by folding so as not to create lumps. It was Gwen who demonstrated how to do toe touches to slenderize our middles or how to perform the pencil test that we all passed, except Win, or how to roll up the tops of our gray uniform skirts so we didn’t look old-fashioned. It was Gwen who showed us how to steal butter from the dinner table—“It’s borrowing,” she explained, as she tucked a pat into the cuff of her sleeve—so that we could later massage it into our hair and skin made brittle by the dry air of the convent. She dedicated herself devoutly to grooming.
And it was Gwen who, after living at the convent for less than a year, devised our hollow-floated plan to leave it.
“We’re running away,” she had said. She was reclining on one of the plaid couches in the Rec Room, propped up on pillows like Cleopatra awaiting hand-fed grapes. “And I know just how to do it.” She smiled with one corner of her mouth, for dramatic effect, the way she sometimes did. The rest of us sat on the hard ground beside her and leaned in to listen.
She had gotten the idea from a movie she’d once seen back home, in her Unholy Life. In it, a giant cake was wheeled into a party at a mansion—an executive’s house—and a chorus girl popped out of it, her arms raised in a V. Gwen soon demonstrated the scene for us, jumping up from behind one of the couches and putting her arms toward the ceiling as Father James sometimes did during mass. In the movie, everyone gazed upon the beautiful woman as she burst through the cardboard cake, including the man who would eventually fall in love with her. This was Gwen’s favorite part, the marveled, amorous expression on the man’s face.
We worked on our float for weeks, every evening in the courtyard, right after dinner until Lights Out. Win, whose grandfather had taught her to use tools, built the frame for us, a wooden base supporting chicken wire that we all helped bend into shape: a giant hand offering the victory sign. It was a universal symbol, The Guineveres agreed, and only one finger away from the other universal symbol we wished to offer the convent upon our departure. We painstakingly covered the frame with yellow tissue paper, twisting each piece around the wire and flaying it out at the ends until the frame was completely covered and our fingers numbed. The end product looked primitive, at best; the oversized fingers were set too vertically together to look much like a victory sign.
“Victory?” Sister Fran had questioned when she came to assess our creation. “A rather secular theme, don’t you think?”
“The victory of our souls,” one of us said. After all, she reminded us daily about the battle between good and evil that raged inside our young bodies.
“This won’t do.” As parade master, Sister Fran made it her earnest duty to ensure every float met a particular standard. The prior year, some girls weren’t allowed to enter their Holy Chalice because she said it looked too similar to a martini glass. “Quality, like cleanliness, is a sign of godliness, girls,” Sister Fran muttered as she circled our float. Her nose was an equilateral triangle, and she tapped the tip of it while thinking. A few tedious moments of contemplation passed, and then she spoke again. “Ah, a hand of benediction. Yes, yes. A hand of benediction.”
“Whose hand?” Ginny had said. Win elbowed her.
“Yes, Sister,” Gwen said. “A hand of benediction.”
“It’s settled,” Sister Fran said. She turned toward Ginny. “It’s a hand of blessing. That’s what this”—and here she paused to wave in the general direction of our float—“will be announced as in the parade.” She made some markings on a clipboard. “You’ll need to add the papal ring,” she’d said without looking up. “You can’t very well have a hand of benediction without the papal ring.”
To complete our Hand of Benediction, we cut out an oval from poster board and painted it. We didn’t have any gold paint, so we mixed brown and white together to form a color closer to beige, but it looked okay. Finally, we glued the oblong ring to the float, somewhere near where the knuckle would be. It wasn’t perfect, but Sister Fran agreed to let it march in the parade. She did like to reward hard work, she had said.
Of course, The Guineveres would not pop out of our Hand of Benediction. No party awaited; no dazzled lover’s eyes would gaze upon us. We knew that once the floats were paraded up the long driveway of the convent and, farther, into the courtyard of the church, they’d be left there until Sunday mass to help commemorate the Assumption. They’d be left alone. Overnight. Unguarded.
In the empty quiet of the church courtyard, once the sun had sunk and the sky turned to shadow, we planned to unfurl ourselves from our hiding spots. We’d stand on firm ground again and stretch our limbs, free to set about our lives that didn’t involve the Sisters or their rules. Lives that didn’t involve rising early every morning to Sister Fran’s whistle and dressing in our monochrome uniforms—gray skirt, white blouse, white knee socks, black loafers. Lives that didn’t involve single-filing to the kitchen, where we were served oatmeal and a piece of peaked fruit for breakfast. “We must be modest in our wants,” Sister Fran would say when we asked for something more substantive, like eggs or waffles or a cream cheese Danish, the things we’d been accustomed to at home. We had little awe for the routine of convent life. After breakfast, we endured an hour of silent prayer, three hours of Morning Instruction, a break for lunch, chapel, more Instruction, and then Rec Time after dinner.
We simply wanted to be ordinary girls.
During the two blissfully unstructured festival days, under a canopy of tents, we could at least pretend we were ordinary girls, like before our parents left us here. When we weren’t working the booths or cleaning the trash from the courtyard, where the garbage cans overflowed with grilled corn husks and sticky paper cups, we ate sugary foods, played tear-offs with names like Bars and Bells, and watched as the local parishioners aimed for the target on the dunking booth where Father James sat beneath a handmade sign that read DUNK-A-PRIEST. We placed bets at Turtle Downs, a booth run by Sister Tabitha, Sister Fran’s second in command. She gripped a microphone and held it close to her reedy lips as the creatures ambled across the track in a leisurely race to the finish. Sister Tabitha had a stutter that she bore proudly, perhaps to demonstrate how God loves us despite our flaws.
“Sc-c-c-scales of Justice takes the lead,” she called out, rattling off the names of the creatures as she called the race. “The Holy Sn-n-n-snail is close on his tail. Though Sh-sh-sh-sh-Shell Fire is making a si-si-significant comeback from behind.”
For these two short days, the Sisters possessed a sense of, if not lightness, then at least not their usual costume of pressed lips and tight faces. They dressed in pink skirts and white cotton shirts, a drastic departure from their usual black habits, but they still covered their heads with veils. Without their tunics, they looked gaunt; their thin frames resembled a prairie animal we’d seen in a National Geographic in the library. It was our favorite magazine, and we turned those pages especially slowly when they featured photos of naked men and women.
“It’s like they’re not embarrassed or anything,” Ginny said.
“It’s like Eden before the Fall,” I noted.
“I’d hate to live in a world without makeup,” Gwen added.
Win said nothing, just sat there and stared at the picture as if it were the most perplexing thing she’d ever seen.
We used to joke that we lived at the Sisters of the Supreme Constipation School for Girls. Behind the Sisters’ backs, we’d contort our mouths in imitation, in what Win dubbed our Holy Constipation Faces. During Morning Instruction, while we sat in varnished desks reading about the lives of the saints, Ginny doodled pictures of the Sisters, their cheeks sunken and their expressions strained, cradling their torsos and sitting on a toilet as a heavenly light shined down upon them. This too shall pass, the caption read. We laughed, but not Gwen. She told us we were too old for such antics, and in some ways she was right. Had we lived “outside,” we’d be in high school, learning to drive cars, getting part-time jobs at Woolworth’s, and smoking cigarettes on our breaks in order to appear older and occupied and, thus, more attractive to boys. But the convent stalled the progression of time, stunted our growth. We lived cloistered lives, and in that way we were like all those saints.
“And look at how they turned out,” Win reminded us. We had spread ourselves out on the lawn near the bandstand, watching the trumpet player’s face redden and the saxophone player’s cheeks blow in and out like a fish’s.
“Yes. They died! It was horrible! I don’t want to die,” Ginny said, clasping her forehead, then pulling back her palm to examine it for stigmata wounds.
“And most of them never even got laid,” Gwen said.
“There are more important things than that,” I added.
“Like what?” Gwen asked, but it came out like a yawn. She constantly preened herself, and at that moment she picked dirt from beneath her nails, grimacing as she flicked each speck to the grass.
“Like faith.” I was the only true believer among us.
At the far end of the lawn, we saw Lottie Barzetti, the sun reflecting off her glasses. She was handing out tufts of cotton candy to her friends like manna, bending at the waist to administer each piece. Her curly hair had frizzed out in the heat, and she had her socks pulled up to her knees, even though the Sisters said we could go without socks for the day. Lottie was never one to break the rules. Her devoutness bordered on ascetic. The Guineveres once found her in the Bunk Room hitting herself over the head with her Bible. “Stupid girl, stupid girl,” she kept repeating with each thwack.
From behind her we could hear the crowd cheer, and we watched as Father James emerged from the dunking booth. His now transparent undershirt revealed his wide chest, patched with dark hairs. His shorts clung to his body in a way that showed a lump of manhood. We looked on in horror, not like we did with those National Geographics; something seemed irreverent about it.
During the festival, even the old folks from the convalescence wing seemed livelier. During the day, they’d usually sit stone-faced at the tables in their lobby. Some would stare out the window toward the parking lot as though waiting for someone, but they seldom received visitors. These decrepit old men and women were left behind, forgotten, like us, and so we felt sorry for them. But still, we didn’t ever want to be put on Sick Ward duty. We called it the Sick Ward, even though most of them weren’t visibly sick—like Mr. Macker or Miss Oatley—just old and dying slowly of age.
The Sick Ward comprised the entire east wing of the convent, a different world altogether. Old men and women would moan from their beds, call out the names of people they’d once known in voices that sounded ghostly, like the slow hand-spinning of a record. It frightened us. The Guineveres agreed that this must be a kind of purgatory, where souls of old people went when nobody else would claim them. And purgatory, we repugnantly observed, smelled like rubbing alcohol, bleach, and urine. From a distance, the old folks looked like a militia’s front line. Their wheelchairs pointed toward the church, and the balloons tied to their armrests shifted in the breeze like colorful flags. Mr. Macker had fallen asleep in his chair, his head leaned back at a forty-five-degree angle, his mouth parted as if he were waiting to take communion. His crooked toes poked out of his slippers like an atrophied hand.
For more than a month The Guineveres had planned our escape; we’d held meetings in the Bunk Room while the other girls played Ping-Pong; we’d even followed every rule, down to ensuring our uniform skirts hit the proper length, draping the floor when kneeling, as we did every morning before prayer under threat of a JUG. A JUG was similar to a detention, only worse. It stood for Justice Under God, and it usually involved extra Bible study and some undesirable chore detail, like scrubbing the old folks’ lobby or changing one of the convalescents’ bedclothes or washing down the blackboard in the Instruction room, then clapping out the erasers that coated the insides of our noses with a fine layer of chalk.
Each of us had our role in the grand escape plot. Gwen was charged with securing extra blankets that she’d pilfered on the most recent Wash Day when Sister Claire wasn’t looking, then tucked beneath her mattress. Win, who had recently been assigned to kitchen duty, was tasked with appropriating food, no easy feat since our uniforms had no pockets. She managed to stow away a few bags of dry oatmeal, some raisins, and a jar of peanut butter, placing them in the sanitary closet, where nobody would think to look. Every girl felt shame when she opened the sanitary closet each month, as though her body had betrayed her, and so our food supply remained in there for two weeks, untouched. For my part, I gathered grooming sundries, items Gwen said were essential: toothpaste, tissues, a bar of soap, a hairbrush. Poor Ginny wasn’t given a task at all. We found her unreliable but well-intentioned—a weakened constitution, she claimed, from her asthma—so we asked her to carry the burden of worry for the rest of us. She did that with ease.
We planned to find our way to the city. The Guineveres had pulled together what we knew of the surrounding terrain from our memories of being brought to the convent. Ginny had the most specialized knowledge, having been taken to the hospital last year for yet another bout of asthma that the rest of us knew was really just hyperventilating brought on by excessive concern. “We’re practically in the middle of a desolate forest,” Ginny had reported. And when we pressed her further she conceded that she did remember passing houses along the way to the hospital, and a general store, and a bank, now that she thought of it. “It had a clock so bright that from a distance I thought it was the moon,” she said.
The Guineveres would hike through the woods to town; it couldn’t be more than fifteen miles, we figured. We’d avoid the main roads. We’d stop to rest if we had to. “But we won’t get dirty,” Gwen had said, reminding us of our need to keep our dignity. Then we’d take a bus to the city, where we’d get jobs as secretaries at first, and we’d rent an apartment, the four of us. Ginny wanted to go to art school, eventually. Gwen wanted to work as a sales clerk at Tiffany’s while auditioning for theater productions.
“Of course,” Gwen had said, “later we’ll all get married. To executives.”
“Yes, to executives,” we all repeated.
Win thought she would become a hairdresser at first, maybe eventually earn a beautician’s license. Braiding our hair felt like a logic puzzle to her, she said, and she had great spatial awareness. Plus, she preferred manual labor to paperwork. Win was big-boned and strong, a fact that led the Sisters to recruit her help carrying the large sacks of flour and potatoes that were delivered to the convent each month. As for myself, I hadn’t developed many specialized interests or skills, except a keen memory for church history. At night, while the other girls slept, I’d write in my notebook all the saints I could remember. My mother and I used to do that, memorize parts of the Bible together: Adam begat Seth who begat Enos who begat sons and daughters and so on. I’d jot down as many of their names as I could, pretend I was listing the branches of my own family tree. Because that’s what I wanted to do when I got out—to belong somewhere, to someone, to a big family. When I told The Guineveres this, they scoffed, said I needed grander dreams than that. I never mentioned it again, and if prodded, I explained to them that I wanted to become a schoolteacher. This answer pleased The Guineveres just fine.
When it was time, we walked through the festival, now buzzing with people, with women in sundresses and strappy sandals, with small kids who held balloons that floated like the Holy Ghost above their heads. At the high striker, Regina, one of the newest girls, swung the rubber mallet. She went by Reggie, and despite her thick frame and legs set a shoulder’s width apart, the puck didn’t rise even halfway to the bell. After each attempt, she’d tuck the mallet between her legs, and she’d wipe her sausage hands on her uniform skirt. Next to Reggie, cheering with strained facial expressions, stood her sidekick, Noreen, mute as always. She had a green apron tied around her waist, and she was supposed to be selling raffle tickets, but considering The Guineveres had never heard her speak, we didn’t know how this would be possible. Some of the older girls—the ones who were almost eighteen—had spread out in front of the bandstand, kicking off their shoes and leaning back on their elbows. A few of them had only a matter of weeks before their birthdays, and then they’d be sent away, off into the world, forever free. We envied them their ages.
“Any cute boys?” Gwen asked as she scanned the crowd. Her lips were still stained pink from the cotton candy we’d eaten earlier when we worked the concessions booth. She had pressed strands of fluff to her mouth and let it melt there.
“None that I see,” Win said.
“Maybe they’re turning them away at the gate,” Ginny said.
“Lead us not into temptation,” I added.
Oblivious to all but our own purpose, The Guineveres walked through the crowd transfixed, like Moses must have felt when he parted the Red Sea, leading his people to the Promised Land.
The convent itself towered behind the festival tents. Its gray stone had grown lightly mossed, and to see to the topmost cross affixed to the highest spire, we had to crane our necks back, giving us the feeling of staring straight up into the heavens. And as we stood there, doing just that, our necks exposed, the backs of our heads resting on our shoulders, we felt the weight of the convent, the sheer enormity of it. Its windows were eyes staring down on us, unblinking. Unsympathetic, too.
We climbed the steps to the main archway, and from there we saw that the Sisters were beginning to corral the old folks toward the parade’s staging area. We made our way inside, down the long corridor that, though it had plenty of windows, was shrouded in shade. Regardless of the time of year, the hallway felt chilled, the way dirt does if you dig down far enough. The size of the convent taught us how space related to time. It took us several long minutes to cross through to the Sick Ward. Nobody was in the main room, except Mrs. Martin, who sat at one of the front tables, a deck of cards stacked in front of her, two hands neatly dealt. She didn’t look up as we walked past.
We arrived at the back door to the courtyard just in time to catch a glimpse of Sister Fran holding her clipboard. She walked on the tips of her toes, bouncing as she exited through the open gate in the direction of the festival crowd. We could hear the squeal of her whistle, short staccato beats, and though she was yelling something, it sounded to us like the garbled warble of a bird. Gwen shoved my back, and I stumbled forward a bit.
“Go,” she said. “Move.”
I sensed the urgency, and I can say that up until that point, I hadn’t been scared. But now, faced with the reality of the situation, my limbs felt mired in quicksand. It’d been three long years since I’d stepped foot off the convent’s grounds. What did I know about the world?
“Vere,” Win said. “Go!” Her voice was not unkind, and so I stumbled forward, and, despite my fear, my legs carried me the rest of the way.
A tall stone wall stretched the perimeter of the courtyard, enclosing it. We could see above the wall to the striped tops of the festival tents that billowed in and out in the breeze like they were breathing. Because the Sisters believed that functionality preceded beauty in all areas of their lives, and because they did not tolerate waste of any sort, they had filled their old black shoes with soil and lined them along the base of the wall in tiers, using them as planters. From these rows of leather lace-ups sprang purple geraniums that were pretty enough, except for how creepy it looked. The toes were scuffed, angled out from one another in pairs. Moss had grown in the shoes’ worn crevices or along their busted seams, and every so often the head of a geranium popped through a weak spot in the leather, eaten by decay. These shoes gave us the distinct impression that the previous owners, whoever they were, wherever they were—alive or dead—were guarding the courtyard like invisible sentinels. Even out of doors, these shoes reminded us, we could not escape the omnipresence of the Sisters in our lives.
We tried to put this out of our minds as we made our way to the concrete patio in the center of the courtyard where the floats were parked, lined in rows. Our Hand of Benediction wasn’t so shoddy compared to some of the others: an enormous fish with streamers for a tail; some lumpy nondescript saints; a dove with an elongated neck; a lamb that looked more like a dog; a tree of life that resembled pom-pom fronds; and a float that simply spelled out L-O-V-E, each letter in a different color. We hurried in silence toward our Hand of Benediction. Sister Fran had made a sign that read A BLESSING FOR YOU and affixed it to the front of the float; the smell of fresh glue stung our noses.
Getting into the float was like getting into a canoe—it wasn’t easy. Though the float didn’t tip and turn, the angle was tight as we climbed through the hollow plywood base and into our hiding spots. We hadn’t accounted for the space taken up by our stash of blankets and supplies, so I scraped my back as I slid up into position, and I grabbed hold of the chicken wire to get my balance.
“I can see your fingers poking out, idiot,” Gwen snipped, so I loosened my grip a bit and allowed the frame to hold my weight. Waiting for everyone to take their places, I felt like a caged animal ready for transport.
“Okay, ready,” Win said.
“Hurry,” I heard Ginny say.
Gwen grunted somewhere beneath me. The float rocked and knocked as she slid inside the platform below.
“Okay,” Gwen said.
“All aboard,” Win said.
“God save us,” Ginny said.
“Amen,” I said.
We didn’t have to wait very long. Only a few minutes later the short punctuation of Sister Fran’s whistle grew louder. Through small gaps we could make out the outline of some Sisters approaching. We closed our eyes, hoping if we couldn’t see them, we’d be invisible. Our hearts were beating quickly; we swallowed pitifully. We could hear our stomachs grumbling from too much funnel cake we’d eaten earlier in the day. We didn’t know when we’d be able to eat again. Soon we could hear footsteps surrounding us, and then Sister Fran began coaching the others.
“Parade route is same as last year. Be sure to keep moving at all times—and stay a good ten feet back from one another. No accidents this time, please, Lucrecia.” Sister Fran then began calling out the assignments. Sister Margaret would march with the L-O-V-E float; Sister Magda would be pulling the lamb; Sister Claire would walk with the Saint Theobald.
“Which one is Theobald?” we heard Sister Claire ask.
A pause. Claire was not known for her brains. “The monk,” replied Sister Fran with a tone of disappointment. She sighed audibly, then continued her list of assignments.
Sister Fran answered our prayers and assigned Sister Monica to pull our float. She was the largest sister in the order, so presumably the strongest. Her hips were wide, her back end was huge, and she sort of hunched and waddled when she walked, swinging her legs out and around her body, earning her the nickname Sister Hippomonica.
Now Sister Monica’s enormous derriere faced us. It looked like two oblong melons beneath her skirt, and I thought I heard Win restraining a laugh. Sister Monica picked up the long handle attached to our float and jerked it lightly to test its weight. “Jesus help me,” she muttered, then turned to face front.
We heard Sister Fran’s whistle again—a long, low sound followed by an up-pitched zip. Soon we were moving—not quickly, but moving. Inside the float, our muscles already began to ache from the odd angles at which we held our bodies. We couldn’t think of where we’d sleep or how the woods at night would be crawling with spiders and snakes. We couldn’t project our thoughts very far into our futures. We could only recall our pasts in silence. We considered our present, too, and we marveled at what had become natural in our lives: the stone structure itself, now looming behind us; the Sisters who normally resembled black-cloaked matryoshka dolls; the alabaster statues of saints that lined the corridors of the convent, staring down at us like disapproving parents. But not our parents. Our parents were far away. What would they think of us now, we wondered, as Sister Monica unknowingly pulled us up the hill, our bodies twisted and contorted inside our Hand of Benediction. Together we took a deep breath of stale air and exhaled. All these years later, and I can attest: This may have been my only out-of-body experience. I felt like I was watching the scene from a distance, from the crowd of onlookers in the parade. In fact, I’m certain I can see it in my memory, that jalopy of a float, our Hand of Benediction, slowly wobbling its way up the hill, the four of us hidden inside.
Once we got to pavement, the ride felt smoother; the wheels purred beneath us. The crowd now clapped in rhythm with the band. Sister Fran clapped along with them, her broad smile revealing her teeth that were small and pointy like a cat’s.
The float in front of us had no wheels, and so it was carried by handlebars at both ends. From behind, it looked like a giant misshapen mushroom, but it was supposed to be a saint. The float kept tilting from side to side, swaying so it seemed as though Saint Whoever was dancing, but once Sister Fran marched up beside the Sisters carrying it, the dancing stopped and the float straightened.
Tucked inside our Hand of Benediction, we felt dizzy with excitement. The world looked overmagnified somehow. Though we’d often fantasized about leaving the convent, conjuring up great scenes of escape—with tied bedsheets thrown out the Bunk Room window and Sister Fran in hot pursuit, her whistle bouncing up and down on her chest as she ran after us—in the end, we simply believed our parents would come back for us. That they’d show up one day, wet-faced, frantic with apology. We even figured we’d forgive them. They were our parents, after all, and though they let us down, we wanted to love them. That’s how love works. It conquers all. Back then, the solution seemed pretty simple.
Sister Monica’s breath grew labored as she strained to pull us up the incline of the long drive. Her face glistened. She kept stopping to wipe her palms on her skirt and to get a better grip. Just as we began to crest the top of the drive, Sister Fran walked toward us again with a look of stern indignation on her face. Holy Constipation.
“Here,” Sister Fran said, grabbing the handle; then her voice changed. “Dear heavens,” she said. “It’s like hauling the Rock of Gibraltar.”
We all froze, our muscles stiffening. Anxiety overcame our cramped hiding space in the form of warmth, as though blood simultaneously rushed to our faces, which kicked on like little space heaters.
But the float kept moving forward, upward, toward the top of the hill, to where, just a little beyond, sat the church and our salvation. Our Mount Sinai. Our Promised Land. Sister Fran and Sister Monica each gripped the float’s handle with one hand, waving to the crowd with the other. Sweat soaked the backs of their thin white blouses. Their smiles looked more like winces.
Onlookers lined the parade route, their gazes aimed toward the top of the hill, where Sister Tabitha now stood announcing the floats in the same scratchy voice that had called out the names of the turtles at Turtle Downs. She held the megaphone to her lips and lifted her head to the sky, so she resembled a bugle player in a marching band made of one.
“The S-s-sacred Heart,” she said, “by Lottie Barzetti, Sh-Sh-Shirley Mitchell, and Nan Waggler.” We could hear the crowd clapping slowly, either tired or unenthused. We couldn’t blame them. Who, after all, really enjoys parades after the first ten minutes, The Guineveres had wondered while building our float in the courtyard, twisting paper around wire. Certainly not us. We found it all so embarrassing somehow.
“S-s-s-saint Philomena, patron s-s-saint of youth,” Sister Tabitha said through her megaphone another minute later, as the brown hump of a float in front of us cleared the top of the hill. The crowd’s clapping grew louder, and we knew we were almost there. Our breathing became shallow; our heads buzzed; our fingers were wet with sweat and anticipation. We’d never felt closer to freedom.
“A Hand of Benediction: A Blessing to You,” Sister Tabitha hollered, and she read our names off, one by one. We winced when we heard them, spoken so publicly. We could tell by the volume of the clapping and the angle of the float that we’d reached the top of the drive. If we could have seen behind us, we’d have waved good-bye to the old gray building shrinking in the distance. We’d have waved good-bye to years of loneliness, of guilt because we never felt we could live up to the expectations of perfection demanded of us by the Sisters. They say good-byes are always hard, but not for us. Not on that day.
We eased up as we rolled farther away from the convent and toward the churchyard. Sister Fran surrendered the handle to Sister Monica, and we were gliding along the smooth pavement, which bumped every once in a while when we hit a crack or a rock. The hypnotic sound of the wheels on concrete nearly lulled us to sleep.
Soon the sounds from the crowd quieted, and we could feel the coolness of the shadows in the courtyard. Some Sisters giggled in hushed tones; wheels scraped and grated. We knew we’d almost made it, and tension rose up from our bodies like souls from the departed.
“Right over there,” we heard Father James say. He’d changed out of his indecent swim trunks and wore his usual black outfit, slacks and a shirt. The Hand of Benediction turned one hundred and eighty degrees before coming to a quick stop. And just like that, we arrived.
We began to feel edgy with excitement, but we knew we couldn’t risk moving. We’d wait until we heard no more voices, until long after we heard no more voices. We weren’t allowed watches—we lived on God’s Time at the convent—so we’d decided to say the rosary three times in our heads, since praying it three times, from start to finish, all fifty-nine beads, lasted about an hour.
We waited. We recited the Our Father. We’d learned patience while sitting through long sermons or tedious lectures given to us by Sister Fran during Morning Instruction. We waited. We recited the Hail Mary. We’d learned to be still while kneeling in rows during prayer time, our knees growing numb from the wood. We waited. We recited the Glory Be. We’d learned to be silent while single-filing through the convent, treading as gently as possible through the stone foyers that felt chilly even in the summer.
We heard some murmuring and muttering, idle chatter among the Sisters. We heard Sister Lucrecia’s laugh, five high notes descending the scales. Sister Fran asked Sister Tabitha for the bullhorn back; Sister Tabitha hesitated to relinquish it. She sang into it—“La, la, laaaaaaaa!”—until she lost her breath and gasped for air. This aural display was followed by subdued snickers, a sound that unsettled us, for we’d never known the Sisters to be jovial. The Guineveres wondered what else we didn’t know about them.
The band’s happy cadence faded. We heard a running faucet in the distance. We heard some birds chirping somewhere beyond. Then we felt the lightest sprinkling of water—was it raining? It hadn’t looked threatening. We hadn’t noticed any clouds. The cool droplets would have been a welcome respite from the heat, if not for our next realization: Tissue paper dissolves in water.
It was like coming to from a dream, or maybe like Jonah when he first emerged from the belly of the whale. We were disoriented; we couldn’t see clearly at first. The spray of water revealed the blue sky above us, bit by bit. Then the water came on heavier, the full force of it stinging our skin till we were crying out in pain. “Stop!” we screamed in unison, breaking our vow of silence. We couldn’t open our eyes, only stand and wait for it to end.
And when it did, we opened our eyes slowly, one at a time. There stood Sister Fran, holding a hose like the staff of Joseph. “Where are the others?” she asked, then hunched down to peer inside the base of the float. She stood again, slowly, brushing her skirt with one hand to smooth out wrinkles. She was quiet for a moment, and the quiet was excruciating, so we just stood there, blinking slowly and waiting for the end.
“Get. Out,” she said in two sentences.
Win looked like a wet, rabid rodent. Her hair clung to her forehead and cheeks, and her dark eyes were glossy, stunned. Beneath me I could hear Gwen and Ginny untangling their bodies from their hiding spots.
Sister Fran squeezed the nozzle again, and water pelted our skin. Then she dropped the hose, and it became a serpent in the grass. Water dripped down our faces. Or were they tears? I can’t remember. The Guineveres stood paralyzed with fear, with disappointment.
“Out,” she said again. This time she said it softly, but not without anger.
One by one—much more slowly than we had gotten in—we climbed out.
Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Domet
