The Three Sisters

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

pecial thanks to my three supportive sisters. Mari Trevelyan-Simpkins who gave me the photos that brought
The Three Sisters
into existence, and who has always believed in the three sisters more than any Saint she learned about in Catholic School. Maureen Burton, who has always had faith in my academic, business and writing careers, and even though I have written this book, still believes God will welcome me into Heaven. Erica Orloff who edited the book, always provided encouragement, and helped me to convince K to get into therapy so the rest of the world would better understand her. And to my Dad, who never read the book, but would have been proud
of it.

DEDICATION

o Judas Iscariot, without whom Western Civilization would not have
been possible

To the Southern Baptists, who tried to convince me the Pope was the Antichrist, failed miserably, and thus sparked my interest
in Catholicism.

To Robert Mills, thank you for
your inspiration.

CHAPTER I

Sisters must be free to unite, to share what they see in light of their uniquely personal attempt to follow Christ in the mid-twentieth century. The new nun knows that she must be open and sharing, that she must try to help those who suffer in
any way.

-Sister Borroneo,
The
New Nuns

uns just want to have fun!

So do girls in Catholic School. But twelve years in the Catholic Gulag and six months in the cloistered halls of a Catholic convent taught me that fun was the last thing the men of the Catholic Church wanted to bestow upon their female inferiors. I still wonder how in God’s name I could have survived twelve years of oppressive obedience and intolerable boredom at Catholic School without losing my sanity.

I was born three weeks early on April
1
,
1953
, fighting to get out. My mother had wanted to name me Cogito because she thought if she gave me that name, I would be smart and thoughtful when I grew up. However, due to a clerical error, the “g” was dropped and my legal name became Coito. I don’t know why they never tried to correct it; perhaps they figured it was God’s will, but Coito I became. While I was growing up, everyone called me K, so I never really thought about my eponymous gift until I was older and realized the two most important activities in life were joined together in my intended and legal name, Cogito the Effable and Coito
the Ineffable.

My early arrival ended my father’s vacation from the automobile factory and forced him to leave the lake for the hospital. He had gotten his job after coming back from the war, but he stayed at that job his entire life. Beyond showing up for work, and getting his paycheck, he had little ambition. This is why our family was crammed into the same two-story house in a row of replicated façades in a suburb of Chicago during my entire childhood. He never considered moving us to a nicer house or to a better neighborhood because with his salary, we could barely afford to stay where we were. When everyone else on the block had a color TV, we were still stuck with a black and white TV, or nun TV, as I
called it.

Since my parents were Catholic, by some miracle of transubstantiation, I became Catholic as well, and even though the Faith of Our Fathers had been firmly implanted in every cell of my body, I still had to undergo the torturous upbringing Catholic daughters endure. Day in and day out for twelve years, my father and mother sent me to Catholic school during the week, and if this weren’t enough to keep us on the straight and narrow, we also went to Mass on Sundays, on Saints’ birthdays, on Holy Days of Obligation, on the anniversary of Fatima, and on numerous other occasions. About the only thing we didn’t give up during Lent was going to Mass.

When my mom enrolled me in Catholic School and told the sisters that my first name was Coito, they also decided to refer to me as K rather than cross themselves for protection every time my name was called in class, or have to explain to my fellow classmates why the sisters could use my name as a proper noun, but not as a verb. During my first few years in Catholic School, I really tried to do what was right, learn the liturgy, and study hard for my classes. I always got good grades. That was easy, but cooperating enough so I could participate in the school’s festivities was more difficult.

I was chosen to lead the parade for the Feast of the Queenship of Mary when I was in third grade and proudly played the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Christmas play in fourth grade. Years later, it struck me as ironic that this thespian role converted me into the oxymoronymous Virgin Coito, a contradiction of terms no one recognized at the time. I knew how to overact and get attention from an early age, and while this gave me experience in the theater, my behavior also got me in trouble more times than I
can count.

The Christmas play sticks in my mind for another reason: my father rarely showed up for my performances or for other school activities. After the Christmas play was over, my mother took me over to Liz’s spacious house to have fun. She had twice as many Barbies as me and my two sisters put together. While we were walking back to our cramped abode, I looked inside O’Malley’s Bar, and there in the third booth was my dad, laughing and having a good time. It was as if time stood still. He wasn’t working overtime as he had said, but was enjoying himself and ignoring me. The picture of him in that bar became etched in my brain, forever frozen there like a Polaroid snapshot. I never
forgot it.

I confronted him the next day, and he said he had worked late and I must have seen him when he had just arrived at the bar. If that had been the first time he had missed one of my school events, I would have believed him, but it wasn’t. From that day on, I saw my father differently. I remained the little overachiever, but it was for me, not
for him.

Until then, I had always focused on how similar my dad and I were, but from that day on, I saw our differences. While my dad was a follower, I was a leader. I had ambition; he was happy with the way things were. I wanted to learn and change the world; he was happy watching wrestling matches on TV. The more he tried to control me, the more
I rebelled.

Grandmother claimed she wasn’t surprised I was turning into a little rebel. She said I didn’t listen to my elders because I was born on Spy Wednesday with the red hair of Judas. If I didn’t change my ways, I would die a violent death just like Judas. Personally, I never understood why my birth date could be a bad omen. From my point of view, since I was born on April Fool’s Day, my mission in life was to be the joker. Being able to make people laugh was my special dispensation from God, and it was Pantagruel and not the pope who would provide me with my inspiration. It’s all in how you look
at it.

Like everyone else, K endured the Catholic Trinity of Confession, Communion, and Catechism during elementary school. I always referred to the Catechism as
Everything You Needed to Know about Catholicism without Getting Your Knuckles Rapped
. As luck would have it, as soon as we started to learn all those Latin phrases, the Vatican changed the rules and we had to relearn everything in the vernacular. It seemed as if the Vatican was just waiting until I had learned those Latin phrases so they could switch to the vernacular just to
spite me.

At confession, the two safest sins were disobeying my parents, the priests never doubted that one, and telling a lie. You could never lie about lying during confession. If I had lied during the past week, I was telling the truth, but if I hadn’t lied and I said I had lied, I had just lied and therefore was telling the truth about lying. K and her compatriots would compare our confessions each week to expand our repertoire because if we confessed to the same sins every week, the priests might think we weren’t taking confession seriously. We would also compare penances to see what each sin was worth and plan accordingly. When the priest would say, “Go and sin no more,” I would wonder whether he was serious because if we really listened to him, he would be out of a job. When I learned the priest could command self-denial as a penance, I instantly wanted to know all the things I could be denied so I could
do them.

While most of my classmates in second grade struggled to get everything correct, I ambitiously learned the Roman rituals before any of my fellow inmates. I looked upon these assignments as learning opportunities with which to impress my peers. After I memorized a prayer for penance, I would think up variations on Hail Mary, Our Father, Glory be, and the Apostle’s Creed or one of the other Catholic classics, and like an organist improvising on a tune, I would create new variations to share with my classmates to create some comic relief.

Catholic school spurred my creativity in other ways. The sisters and their contemptuous clickers drilled the Catechism into us with such persistence, I thought we would end up having marshmallows for brains. After learning the method in the Catechism’s madness, I found no reason why I shouldn’t create my own, improved version of the Catechism.

One of the missions the sisters laid down for us in Catholic School was to save as many Pagan Babies as possible. For only five dollars, which seemed like a pretty good deal to me, we could get a Pagan Baby baptized and sent to heaven. The teachers even showed us short movies of Catholic missionaries in Africa baptizing the Pagan Babies to encourage us. We could buy a saint stamp for ten cents to paste in a book, and when the book was full, we could redeem the book for a Pagan Baby, whom we could name on our Pagan Baby Adoption Certificate. When we were first told about this opportunity, I rushed home to my parents and said, “Guess what, I’m going to have a baby, and she’s black,” which would have given my dad multiple heart attacks were it not for the biological impossibility of my statement at that
tender age.

The Catholic equivalents to S&H Green Stamps prepared us for the future because they taught us how to buy on the installment plan. I asked our teacher if our book were half full, whether we could redeem it for half a Pagan Baby. She said we couldn’t, so there was always a rush to fill the book before the Pagan Baby Awards Day ceremony. There was a poster with Jesus in a pastoral scene at the front of the classroom, and every time someone adopted a Pagan Baby, we got to add a child to the poster. By the end of the school year, Jesus had become the most prolific father in history.

In a way I thought the pagans were lucky. They automatically went to Limbo when they died and didn’t risk going to Hell until the missionaries baptized them. I could just imagine African tribes fleeing the missionaries to make sure they kept their spot reserved in Limbo. When my mother told me that our dog had gone to “Doggie Heaven,” I wondered whether unbaptized pagan dogs went to
“Doggie Limbo.”

After realizing that once the Pagan Babies were baptized, they too would need a Catechism to guide them along the straight and narrow path, I wrote
K’s Catechism for Cannibals
in perfect Palmer Method penmanship, providing dozens of important questions and answers as well as prayers written just for the
pagan cannibals.

Q: Is it better to cook a Virgin Martyr or
a Heretic?

A: It is better to cook a Virgin Martyr than a Heretic because the Virgin Martyr is sweeter to the palate and the meat is softer to cook than that of a Heretic.

Q: Should a converted Cannibal woman continue to walk
around topless?

A: A converted Cannibal should continue to walk around topless because Priests are celibate and will not
be tempted.

I even provided the cannibals with a prayer to say before
each meal.

Our Martyr, who hath been cooked, blessed be thy meat. Thy flesh be done, so thy sweet taste will fill us when
we eat.

I sold my literary creation to my fellow students for a dime and then contributed all my earnings to converting the Pagan Babies in Africa. Despite my altruistic intentions, when the sisters got a copy of my addition to the canon, they imposed an excessive number of penances on me.

The nun who imposed the greatest guilt and fear in us was Sister Mary Margaret, whom we referred to as Attilla the Nun because she behaved more like a four-foot, ten-inch tall Auschwitz prison matron than a Sister of Mercy. Some students were convinced that not only did she have eyes in the back of her head, but that the Blessed Virgin Mary had endowed her with the ability to see through walls and read our minds. It was rumored that she made extra money in the summer by training Marine Drill Sergeants, and we had no doubt that she gave every penny she made to the Church. We joked that Satan would rather do battle with the Archangel Gabriel than with Sister Mary Margaret because at least Satan had a chance of defeating Gabriel. Even K watched her step around Attila
the Nun.

When Sister Mary Margaret wasn’t around, one of my favorite pastimes in Catholic School was getting up in front of the classroom when the sisters would leave us alone to read or study. There was an easel in the front of the room with pictures from different scenes in the Bible or the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the lives of suffering saints. At random, I would choose one of the pictures on the easel and commence with K’s convoluted re-creation of Catholic history. I would make up stories from the Bible and the Lives of the Saints, mixing the two together to create new plots and subplots the Mother Superior had never considered. Our teachers always wondered why we giggled when she told us the misfortunes these martyrs had suffered. Little did
they know.

We had to go to the chapel every day, and this got boring really quickly. Truth to tell, it was Mass that first turned me into an entrepreneur. While the boys spent services trading baseball cards, we girls spent our time trading prayer cards. When I noticed that the boys’ baseball cards had statistics on the back for batting averages, home runs, stolen bases (did baseball players have to confess when they stole a base?) and other statistical information, I wondered why our prayer cards lacked similar numerical measures for the saints. Usually the prayer cards just provided a bunch of boring stories of their privations, piety, and deaths.