The Guineveres (6 page)

“Our country has a great need for nurses,” Sister Magda told us. Her face grew serious, and when it did, her wrinkles relaxed. She lowered her voice reverently, her eyes, too. “Especially now.” We watched as she demonstrated on the half-dead Mr. Worlizter how to properly adjust a bedpan beneath a patient. “I was a war nurse once, you know,” she added. “It's a noble profession and not a bad choice for girls like yourselves.” Forget the fact that The Guineveres felt odd about placing our fingers against the clammy skin of an old person's neck. Forget the fact that the warmth of a full bedpan made our stomachs lurch. Forget the fact that we had no desire to be nurses, believing secretary to be a much preferable occupation since secretaries had access to executives.

Next, we took a seat, flattened our skirts on our laps, crossed our ankles, sat up straight, and read the selected biblical passage for the day, bookmarked as such by the Sisters. Sometimes the stories inspired hope in us, like how a prostitute on the brink of death was spared from stoning, or how Lazarus awoke from the dead, or how a puny little David killed Goliath. Stories of triumph were well and good, but we enjoyed the stories of hardship the best, of punishment, of anguish. Sure, our lives were tough, but the people in the Bible had it worse, The Guineveres concluded, and it lightened our moods to read about others who suffered more than we did. Commiseration was comfort. Sick Ward duty was nothing compared to being banished from paradise, or to a great flood that wipes out most of humanity except one lucky guy, his family, and their pets.

“That means we're all related,” Ginny explained as we walked back to the cafeteria, the anesthetic smell of the Sick Ward still penetrating our noses. We slowed our pace and let Ebbie walk ahead of us, watched her long, smooth gait, and even that seemed admirable. “We're practically sisters.”

“Noah was a creep,” Win said.

“He's the father of mankind,” I protested.

“I thought that was Adam,” Gwen said. She was quick, good with her facts, receiving high marks on our church history tests.

“We have two fathers of mankind,” I said. I was good with my facts, too.

“Noah had to have sex with some of his relatives, right?” Ginny said. She swung her body out to face us and walked backward down the hallway. When we passed the door to Sister Fran's office, we lowered our voices. “How could all humans descend from him otherwise?” Ginny questioned.

“He had three sons,” Win explained. “And their sons had wives.”

“I bet the old guy knocked up his son's wives,” Gwen said. She stopped walking, placed her hands on her hips, and began gyrating her torso.

“Like father, like son,” Win said. “It's practically the same genes.”

“Those poor women. Can you imagine having to repopulate the world?” Gwen shook her head. “Sounds exhausting. And they probably never regained their figures.”

“Basically we're all inbred,” Ginny said.

“That's not it,” I said.

“Then explain it,” said Gwen as she began walking again. One of us swung open the door to the cafeteria, and the smell of cooked milk hit us, so we knew we were having porridge for supper.

“Not everything can be easily explained,” I said. Everyone agreed with that. We found our table, and we waited for Sister Fran to call us to the serving buffet

Luckily, the old folks in the Sick Ward rarely asked questions, and if they did, we rarely replied. We simply read. The sounds of four girls reading at once, along with the whirring and beeping of the various machines, filled the room with a noise so textured it had a musical quality. Our patients rested listlessly in their beds, their eyes closed to the sound, or asleep altogether. Their mouths hung open, even when they swallowed, and they smelled the way old people sometimes do, like a noxious mix of baby powder and natural gas. We never felt much for these sick and dying, except guilt for our discomfort, guilt for the way we pulled our heads back when they took toothless sips of water, guilt for the way we held our breath when we took their pulse.

We told the priests about it at our monthly confession. During Wednesday chapel service, Father James brought with him a small group of other priests from nearby parishes to accommodate all the girls at the convent. Since there was only the one confessional, the other priests would station themselves around the perimeter of the chapel, their backs to the stained-glass windows so their heads glowed with a halo of light. The Sisters—due to either graciousness or to church canon, I'm still not sure—allowed us to select the priest to whom we would confess, and we cherished this, one of our few freedoms.

Choosing a priest required some strategy. You had to size up the length of the line, the speed of the priest, and the temperament of the person immediately in front of you. Some girls, like Irene and Judy and the rest of The Sads, waited until toward the end of the service, when the lines were only two or three girls deep. That way, they wouldn't have to wait as long, and if they were the last in line, nobody could hear what they had confessed, which was depressing, no doubt. Others like Reggie and Noreen and the girls who were almost eighteen raced toward a priest once Sister Lucrecia hit the first somber note of the organ. They wanted to be first—get in and get out—so they could sit back in the pew, close their eyes, and pretend to pray. The Guineveres had our own strategy. We'd often select priests stationed side by side, so we could shoot each other glances, make cross-eyed faces at one another to ensure we weren't taking it too seriously.

“The Sick Ward makes
me
feel sick,” Ginny had confessed to her priest, an old man with a half crown of hair. She stood with one leg crossed over the other; her knees were white from dryness. Ginny was always cold.

“Mrs. Martin must have been pretty once, but now she's plain ugly,” Gwen confessed. “Is ugliness a sin?” she asked, licking her lips, then flicked her hair from one shoulder to the other.

“I don't think God is calling me to help the sick,” Win had told her priest. She refused to look at him; she said doing so would only lead him to think she cared about what he thought. “He'd rather me do extra kitchen duty.”

My priest had soft, wrinkled skin that looked like crumpled paper smoothed out again. “My worst fear is being like them,” I had confessed. By which I meant alone.

We were each told to say twenty-five Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys and abstain from dessert, an easy task since we rarely had dessert anyway, which showed just how little these priests knew about our lives at the convent.

Certainly, some of the convalescents were livelier than others. Mr. Macker, for example, could do magic tricks with an old coin he kept tucked in the pocket of his bed shirt. He pulled the coin out of one of our ears and presented it to us, his hand shaking, a gummy smile flashing across his face.

“Why, you don't say,” he said, and he examined the coin quizzically. “Could probably barely hear with that thing in there.”

Mr. Macker kept a photo by his bed of a woman holding a poodle, and we could only presume this to be Mrs. Macker. The photo looked aged, yellowed a bit and faded, but you could still see the woman well enough. Whoever she was, she was pretty, curled brown hair clipped back in barrettes and a yellow ribbon tied around her waist. She half knelt in the photo, and her arms wrapped themselves around the dog. The Guineveres suspected Mr. Macker missed Mrs. Macker deeply, but he didn't always remember that he did, not even with the photo right in front of him. “My doctor said to take two of you and
not
call him in the morning,” he said to us at least once a week.

“Oh, Mr. Macker,” we replied. We no longer blushed when he said this.

“Which two?” asked Gwen.

“Any two,” Mr. Macker said, and he patted the tufts of hair on his otherwise bald head.

“Both at once?” Gwen said, winking toward the old man. Later, in the Bunk Room, she explained to us in hushed tones what a threesome was. “Think about it,” Gwen said. The other Guineveres sat in silence for a few moments, our eyes tick-tocking back and forth, our faces scrunched in puzzlement.

“How does that even work?” I asked after a few minutes, and Ginny and Win burst out laughing. “What?” I said, but they only doubled over, joined by Gwen this time, until they were all breathless.

Even though we liked Mr. Macker well enough, we didn't want to take care of him. We felt awkward when we had to change his gown; we didn't think this proper. We'd pull the sheets back to reveal his thin, bony legs, so white they were startling. His stomach poofed out, and his back arched forward so dramatically that his shoulder blades popped out like little wings, as if he were a disheveled old angel. He kept his fist shut, holding his prized coin in his hand.

“I won't do it,” said Gwen, quiet so Mr. Macker couldn't hear her. “I have dignity.”

“But Sister Connie said,” I reminded her.

“I'll tell her I did it, then,” said Gwen. “A dirty shirt won't kill him, you know. And if it did…”

“Thou shalt not lie,” I said. I believed in the Ten Commandments, and besides, The Guineveres made a pact to always tell the truth. At least to each other.

“Thou shalt not tattle,” she replied, pinching her cheeks for rouge.

Win sighed. “Poor old man.”

“I'm glad I'm not him,” Ginny said.

“At least we're not old,” Gwen said. “At least we've got our youth.” She stood back, played with her ponytail, twirling it around her finger. She clenched her jaw and pouted her lips. She called this her starlet look. Gwen believed one day she'd be discovered by a talent agent and whisked off to a movie studio to begin immediate filming. That's when her new life would really begin.

“I'll do it,” I said. And I did. I crept into the Back Room, tiptoeing past Ebbie, who looked sophisticated even when gathering soiled bedsheets, past Sister Madga, who was sorting pills, and past the old men and women whose breathing made gurgling noises, as though they were underwater. I opened the storage room where they kept the bed shirts, right next to the door Sister Connie expressly forbade us from opening, the one we tried to open once, but it was locked. The Guineveres suspected the door led to a dungeon where they flogged the misbehaving old folks or locked up girls like us, girls who'd tried to run away or who'd done something worse than running away, though we couldn't think of what that might be. When I returned to the Front Room, poor Mr. Macker kept his eyes to the ceiling.

“I'm sorry,” he said. I helped him into his new shirt, but I didn't say anything in return, just worked as quickly as I could without looking. I didn't want him to feel embarrassed, not like The Guineveres did when we undressed in the Bunk Room, turning our backs to hide our bodies.

*   *   *

The next day was Mail Distribution Day, the low point of our weekly routine. Mail Distribution took place every Tuesday, after Morning Instruction in the classroom. The classroom itself was stuffy and rectangular, containing few decorations, aside from some framed photos of Jesus and Mary and some saints, and a sign that hung above the blackboard that read
HUMBLY IN TRUTH.
Our desks were nailed to the floor so that the rows would remain meticulously even, and our books and Bibles were stored neatly on the metal racks beneath our seats. Sister Fran's large desk stood at the head of the classroom, though she rarely sat down at it. Instead, she stood leaning against the blackboard, and when she'd turn around to write out assignments or notes, we'd notice a chalk line across her back. We called this Sister Fran's Other Ruler because it seemed to measure about the same length as the one she often held in her hand as she lectured.

Usually when the bell rang, indicating the end of Morning Instruction, girls bounded out of their seats and lined up for lunch. On Mail Distribution Day, however, we remained seated. Sister Fran walked ceremoniously up and down the rows, silently setting mail on the desks of the girls who received something. The Specials almost always greedily fingered fat envelopes stuffed with letters. Sometimes they even dug into small packages of gifts, or hard candies that Sister Fran made them share at lunch. “What one receives, we all receive,” Sister Fran said, though we knew this wasn't true. Even The Sads got mail from time to time, short missives from guilty relatives who wished the girls' lives had turned out differently. Not surprisingly, whenever a Sad received a letter, her face became a mess of hands and hair as she quietly sobbed.

“There, there,” Sister Fran would console her, offering a handkerchief. “God favors a grateful heart. Be thankful you've received tidings at all. Not everyone is so lucky.”

We knew she was referring to us. The Guineveres never received letters from home, not a word from a single relative who claimed to have missed us. Maybe they misplaced our address or moved or the letters got lost or stolen or consumed in a fire at a post office. We stopped trying to rationalize the reasons. It did us no good. Win and Gwen claimed they didn't care. What would they want to learn from home anyway, they said. They weren't going back. Not ever. But Ginny and I, we always held out hope.

“Anything today?” Ginny asked as Sister Fran walked down her row, passing her desk without stopping. What she wouldn't give for a letter from her dad, even a short note with one of his funny cartoon drawings. She received one once, when she first arrived, but that was years ago. In the drawing, a man held a bouquet of balloons in each hand, and as he lifted off the ground, dust clouds kicked around his dangling feet. Ginny thought maybe her father had been trying to tell her something, a subliminal message passed through his pencil strokes.
“Hang on tight. XO,”
his note read. She taped it above her bunk, and she looked at it every night before Lights Out.

Sister Fran backpedaled to Ginny's desk. “I'm sorry, dear. Not today,” she said. She squeezed Ginny's shoulder.