Evergreen (16 page)

“That’s why she picked you,” Mary Margaret said.

The other two tugged hard on Mary Margaret’s arm. “
Shh
. You’ll get in trouble.”

Just before they pulled her away from Naamah and the lockers, Mary Margaret looked at her as if she were sorry. She said, “Don’t let her make you ugly.”

Naamah had never thought about the way she looked unless it was to straighten her skirt or smooth a wrinkle from her blouse or unless it was to pull her dark hair back from her face like all the girls were made to do each morning before they went down to breakfast. There were no mirrors in the dormitory or in the bathrooms—anywhere Naamah knew of. The only time she ever saw her reflection was when she was washing the windows and sunlight came through the glass in just the right way, and even then she didn’t recognize the girl she saw. She didn’t even know what color her eyes were.

Sister Cordelia had once said beautiful girls were born with ugly souls, and Naamah had felt sorry for orphans like Ethelina because even then, though she was just a little girl, Naamah sensed what Ethelina’s beauty would cost her. During her nightly prayers, Naamah used to wish for vast brown moles to appear on her own skin overnight to protect her. She’d wish for wiry black hairs. The more revolting the better. And though her wish never came true, and her skin remained pure as milk, no one, not even Sister Cordelia, had ever accused her of being beautiful. Stupid, but not beautiful. Naamah touched her cheek, wondering if what Mary Margaret had said was true and what it meant if it was.

Sister Cordelia spent the first part of the week spreading lard onto pieces of bread and watching Naamah eat them in an effort to fatten her up, so the townspeople wouldn’t know she’d been starved. Naamah was tall and thin by nature; the week of lying in her cot and eating mostly cornmeal had made her gaunt.

“People are fat as hams out there,” Sister Cordelia said. “They stuff themselves to bursting. They don’t care what God says about excess. They eat whatever they please. Whenever they want. They don’t understand the virtue of skin and bones.”

To Sister Cordelia’s dismay, each of the lard sandwiches Naamah ate wouldn’t stay put in her stomach. The same thing happened when Sister Cordelia dipped pieces of bread in oil and when she forewent the bread altogether and placed a pat of butter on Naamah’s tongue while she read from the Bible, hoping the Word of God would make it welcome.

What Sister Cordelia didn’t know was that Naamah was making those sandwiches, those pieces of bread dipped in oil, those pats of butter, come up.
Fight for me, Naamah. Fight for you
. Every time she swallowed, Naamah thought of her mother and that stage, freedom, and she’d go running to the bathroom with a hand over her mouth. She thought that if people were really as fat as hams on the other side of the Hopewell wall, when they saw how thin she was they’d rescue her from Sister Cordelia and help her find her mother. Naamah had to keep reminding herself to curb her smile, her first little victory, on the way back.

As well as the long mealtime hours spent trying to get Naamah’s stomach to cooperate, Sister Cordelia had spent two afternoons in a row trying to organize the girls into a choir and get them to sing, which they wouldn’t do because they thought it was a trick—normally at Hopewell, singing was forbidden—and because other than Sister Lydie no one had ever sung to them, and they didn’t know how. Each of the girls kneeled, awaiting her punishment. Sister Cordelia raised her voice, but she didn’t raise her ruler this time.

“After the festival you’ll all get what’s coming to you,” Sister Cordelia said.

Naamah wondered if people out there didn’t like to see lash marks on girls’ hands.

On the third afternoon, Sister Cordelia came marching into her office, her habit flying behind her like a black tongue. Naamah was still sitting in front of a stack of sandwiches, willing herself to look green when she felt as bright and yellow as the sun.

“You’re going to make yourself useful,” she said, herding Naamah from the table into the dining room, where the girls were lined up against the wall according to age. They were standing at attention like Naamah imagined soldiers did, except that two of the girls were only five years old, with such small voices and hands and feet.

When the girls saw Naamah, they looked relieved as if now that she was there they wouldn’t be scrutinized as closely. Some let their shoulders inch forward. Some let their knees bend slightly. One of them scratched the back of her neck and a brown spider fell to the floor, and though regular girls might have screamed or jumped or let out their ponytails to check for spiders in their own hair, the Hopewell girls stood still.

Sister Cordelia placed a dusty book of hymns in Naamah’s hand. On the front cover was a photograph of a man and a woman standing together before a microphone. Their mouths were half open as if they were in the middle of singing a song. Each of them was holding one side of a Bible. The woman wore a dress with flowers all over it. The man wore a wedding ring. They looked like they loved each other as much as they loved God.

“Your job is to pick a song and teach it to them,” Sister Cordelia said. “They won’t sing for me, but I have a feeling they’ll sing for you.”

Sister Cordelia opened the songbook for her. The pages were stiff and yellow and smelled like mold. One of the corners disintegrated in her hand.

“Careful,” Sister Cordelia said.

Naamah read through the first song. While she understood the words, she didn’t understand the melody, only that there was one hidden somewhere in there. The little round notes in the top corner looked like a pair of eyeglasses. She wished Sister Lydie were here, even if she could only stay the afternoon. Sister Lydie’s voice was like the cottony clouds rolling past the windows in the dining room; always her voice had left behind blue.

“That’s middle C,” Sister Cordelia said, pointing to a dark note. “These are accidentals. This means sharp. This means flat.”

“Accidents?” Naamah said.

“Just teach them the words,” Sister Cordelia said to Naamah. “I’ll be back soon.” To the rest of the girls, she said, “I suggest you listen to Naamah. You’ve seen what it’s like to lie in the broom closet. You may ask her if you’ve forgotten.”

After Sister Cordelia was gone and they were alone in the dining room, Naamah stood as still as the row of girls in front of her.
Listen to you?
they seemed to be thinking, looking Naamah up and down. Why would any of them do that? And why would Sister Cordelia want them to? Naamah didn’t know anything about music other than the happiness she remembered feeling when Sister Lydie sang to her all those years ago and when her mother sang to her in her dream. She didn’t know about notes or accidentals, sharps or flats, and she didn’t know why a person who thought music and singing were for heathens would know about them either.
Listen to me?
Naamah thought. But the girls did listen. Out of curiosity. Hope. Fear. She didn’t know why. Even the girls who’d told on
her when she had her monthly blood listened, even the girls whose hands were still sticky from figs. The littlest girls came to her first.

“Can we help pick a song?” they said, and in their eager expressions, their still-trusting brown eyes, Naamah saw who the girls could have been if they were brought up somewhere else. In the older ones she saw what they would become if they stayed at Hopewell.

Naamah put the book on the floor, and the girls gathered around it with her. They took turns reading the titles of the songs out loud as Naamah flipped the pages.

“Do you really think she’d put us in the broom closet?” Mary Helen said.

“I don’t want my back to bleed,” said Mary Rose.

Naamah stopped turning the pages when she got to a song called “Angel Band.” Instead of the northern Minnesota sky, which was the only entity that could ever match Sister Cordelia’s moods exactly, Naamah imagined a sky full of yellow-haired angels. She imagined a pretty golden harp and even prettier golden notes floating up to them on a breeze.

“I like the name of that one,” Mary Margaret said, from the outer edge of the circle. She was kneeling with her hands pressed together as if she were at a real mass led by a priest in a church, instead of the one led daily by Sister Cordelia in the classroom during which they stood. They’d heard of churches with stained-glass windows and even of men who preached right out in the open, but Sister Cordelia said only Holy Rollers needed props. She said the cross was enough for a true Christian. Only a sinner went down to the river to pray.

“Will you read it to us?” Mary Margaret said.

“Are these even Catholic songs?” another girl asked. “They sound sacrilegious.”

“Why would Sister Cordelia give them to us if they weren’t?” said another.

“You mean if they were?”

“Maybe it’s a test.”

“Let her read,” Mary Margaret said.

And so Naamah did, and the words, which conveyed a kind of religious love none of them had ever known, stilled the girls’ fidgeting with the hems of their skirts and the buttons on their blouses, as well as the ones staring off into space because for a moment they could.

My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run

My strongest trials now are past, my triumph has begun

Oh, come Angel Band come and around me stand

Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home

Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home

“That one, that one!” the littlest girls said. “Because it has a bear in it.”

“It’s not that kind of bear,” another girl said.

“Grrr,”
said another.

“It means
Please take me away from here
,” Naamah said, and the girls looked at her and at one another with a kind of knowing no one outside of Hopewell would ever be able to offer them, and that was all it took for them to agree. “Angel Band” was their song.

Naamah read the first line again.

The next, and the next.

All the girls, including Naamah, were very good at memorizing what Sister Cordelia told them to memorize, at recalling
exactly the definitions of words and reciting them days, weeks, months, even years later. They were good at remembering what got them in trouble and what didn’t. But memorization wasn’t the same as thinking, as feeling; it was the difference between reciting the meaning of the word
orphan
according to the dictionary and having to live as one. In Sister Cordelia’s world, there was never any room for interpretation, and there certainly wasn’t room for angels or their snow-white wings.

The littlest girls leaned against Naamah, and the other girls leaned against them, and there they sat huddled together on the floor in the dining room in silence as if what they had found was so delicate a shift of a foot or a cough or a sneeze could make it disappear again. If this was happiness, Naamah thought, if this sudden warmth she felt was love, then it really was worth fighting for.

Sister Cordelia came back to the dining room with a gramophone, which was one of the most beautiful things Naamah and the girls had ever seen, even though they didn’t yet know quite what it was or how it worked. The base of it was square and made of sleek dark wood, out of which sprouted a shiny brass piece shaped like a great trumpet flower.

“It makes music,” Sister Cordelia said, and showed Naamah how it would work if a record was placed on the turntable. “I don’t want you to play it until I leave.”

“Yes, Sister,” Naamah said.

She and the girls might have been more curious about why Sister Cordelia didn’t want to be in the same room with the gramophone or about where it came from, but the answers, whatever they were, couldn’t have been as compelling as the gramophone itself and the idea that it could somehow,
would
somehow, make music out of the thin Hopewell air.

“You have an hour to teach them a song,” Sister Cordelia said. “All of you will perform Saturday afternoon at three o’clock. You won’t have the gramophone. It’ll be just your voices in a crowd of people. Once it’s over we’re coming directly home.” She fingered her cross. “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t go at all.”

“Yes, Sister,” Mary Margaret said quickly, as if to rush her out.

Sister Cordelia looked at Mary Margaret and the rest of the girls circled around Naamah and the songbook. “Don’t be fooled, Naamah. They don’t care about you. You’re worth only as much as a fig to them. Or a piece of cheese.”

How much am I worth to you?
Naamah thought.

When Sister Cordelia was gone and they were alone again, Naamah turned the metal crank and placed the record on the turntable as she’d been shown. Maybe Sister Cordelia was right about the girls’ attention, but having them circle around her made her feel special even if they did it only because Sister Cordelia had told them to. Being chosen was what each of them had dreamed of after being unchosen by their parents and after being passed over by new parents because they weren’t darling enough or they were freckled or they were too old. Once when Naamah was six years old, a woman came very close to adopting her. During her visits, she told Naamah about the room she would have and the toys she would play with. But then one day the woman’s husband came with her to Hopewell, looked hard at Naamah, and told his wife they couldn’t adopt her. She never knew why.

Naamah set the needle on the record, and after a startling crackle and spit, a song came on, and each of their faces lit up. Naamah sat with the songbook on her lap, wondering how a page filled with heavy black notes could sound so light and alive. The girls listened to song after song until they got to
theirs, which was even more beautiful than the others, more delicate, and their practice time was nearly up.

“We’re going to be in big trouble,” one of the little girls said.

“Huge,” said the other.

“No, we aren’t,” Mary Margaret said, still on her knees. “One of us can sing, and the rest of us can hum like they do on the record. It’ll be pretty that way.”