The Guineveres (2 page)

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 Geographic
s; 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.