from GRANTA
Long before any decisions have been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the morning looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest contents of her life into three categories: things to keep, things to throw away, things to donate to Catholic Charities. Sister Melanie is doing the same.
‘What’s the rush?’ I ask, picking my way past the long row of boxes that lines the front hall, everything labelled and sealed and neatly stacked. It is August, and the heat and humidity have turned the air into an unbearable soup. I think they’re getting ahead of themselves and I tell them so. Sister Kathy, who is responsible for assessing their situation, won’t be coming from the mother house in North Carolina for weeks.
‘We’ve got to be ready,’ Sister Nena says. She does not stop working. Her state of being is one of constant action, perpetual motion. A small gold tennis racquet dangles from her neck where on another nun one would expect to find a cross. ‘I won’t pack the kitchen until the very end.’
Not that the kitchen matters. I suspect that the nuns, who are small enough to emulate the very sparrows God has His eye on, should be eating more, which is why I’ve brought them dinner. Sister Melanie is going to Mercy, the nuns’ retirement home, but she doesn’t know when. Some days she is looking forward to the move, other days she isn’t so sure. She stops and looks in the bag at the casserole I’ve brought, gives me a hug, and ambles off again.
Sister Nena is certain that she doesn’t want to go to Mercy. She regards it as the end of the line. She’s hoping to land in a smaller apartment by herself, or maybe with another sister, though finding a new room-mate at the age of seventy-eight can be a challenge. ‘It’s up to God, she says, then she goes back to her boxes.
Sister Nena was bom in Nashville, the city where we both live. She was eighteen when she entered the convent. Sixty years later the convent is gone and the Sisters of Mercy who are left in this city are largely scattered. For almost twenty years, Sister Nena and Sister Melanie have lived in a condo they once shared with Sister Helen. The condo, which is within walking distance of the mall, is in an upscale suburban neighbourhood called Green Hills. It isn’t exactly the place I would have pictured nuns living, but then everything about my friendship with Sister Nena has made me re-evaluate how life is for nuns these days.
‘It’s like that book,’ she said, summing up the best-seller, ‘First I pray, then I eat.’
‘That leaves love,’ I said.
‘That’s it. I love a lot of people. Pray, eat, love, tennis. I’m in a rut. I need to find something else I can do for others.’
I guess I always thought the rut was part of it. A religious life is not one that I associate with great adventure. But now that change is barrelling towards her, Sister Nena is restless for its arrival. Day after day she is standing up to meet it and I can see she’s had a talent for adventure all along. It seems to me that entering the convent at the age of eighteen is in fact a great act of daring.
‘I didn’t always want to be a nun,’ Sister Nena said. ‘Not when I was younger. I wanted to be a tennis player. My brothers and I knew a man who let us play on his court in return for keeping it up. It was a dirt court and my brothers would roll it out with the big roller and I would repaint the lines. We played tennis eveiy day.’ Nena, the youngest of three. Nena, the only girl, following her brothers to the courts eveiy morning of summer on her bicycle, racquet in hand.
When I asked her what her brothers thought of her joining the convent, she said they thought she was crazy, using the word crazy as if it were a medical diagnosis. ‘So did my father. He thought I was making a terrible mistake giving up getting married, having kids. I liked kids,’ she said. ‘I babysat a lot when I was young. I had a happy life back then.
I had a boyfriend. His family was in the meat-packing business. My father called him Ham Boy. It was all good but still there was something that wasn’t quite right. I didn’t feel comfortable. I never felt like I was living the life I was supposed to.'
What about her mother is what I want to know. What did her mother
say?
Sister Nena smiled the smile of a daughter who had pleased the mother she loved above all else. ‘She was proud of me.’
There will never be enough days for me to as]k Sister Nena all the things I want to know, and she is endlessly patient with me. She can see it plainly herself: it hasn’t been an ordinary life. Some of my questions are surely a result of the leftover curiosity of childhood, the quiet suspicion that nuns were not like the rest of us. But there is another way in which the questions feel like an attempt to gather vital information for my own life. Forget about the yoga practice, the meditating, the vague dreams of going to an ashram in India: Sister Nena has stayed in Tennessee and devoted her life to God. She has lived with her calling for so long that it seems less a religious vocation than a marriage, a deeply worn path of mutual acceptance. Sister Nena and God understand one another. They are in it for life.
The Sisters of Mercy was started by Catherine McAuley in Dublin. She recognized the needs of poor women and girls and used her considerable inheritance to open a home for them called Mercy House, taking her vows in 1831. Committing your life to God was one thing, but I think that choosing an order would be akin to choosing which branch of the military to sign up for. Army? Navy? Dominicans? From a distance it all looks like service but the daily life must play out in veiy different ways. ‘The Mercies taught me in school,’ Sister Nena said.
I nod my head, of course. I was also taught by the Mercies in school. I was taught by Sister Nena.
‘They never manipulated me,’ she said in their defence. ‘But I admired them, their goodness.’
I spent twelve years with the Sisters of Mercy and I am certain, in all that time, no one ever suggested that I or any of my friends should consider joining the order. Nuns have never been in the business of recruitment, which may in part account for their dwindling ranks. What we were told repeatedly was to listen. God had a vocation for all of us and if we paid close attention and were true to ourselves, we would
know His intention. Sometimes you might not like what you heard. You might think that what was being asked of you was too much, but at that point there really was no getting out of it. Once you knew what God wanted from your life, you would have to be ten different kinds of fool to look the other way. When I was a girl in Catholic school I was open to the idea of being a nun, a mother, a wife, but whenever I closed my eyes and listened (and there was plenty of time for listening — in chapel, in maths class, in basketball games — we were told the news could come at any time) the voice I heard was consistent: be a writer. It didn’t matter that writing had never been listed as one of our options. I knew that for me this was the truth, and to this end I found the nuns to be invaluable examples. I was, after all, educated by a group of women who had in essence jumped ship, ignored the strongest warnings of their fathers and brothers in order to follow their own clear direction. They were working women who had given eveiy aspect of their lives over to their beliefs, as I had every intention of giving my life over to my belief. The nun’s existence was not so far from the kind of singular life I imagined for myself, even if God wasn’t the object of my devotion.
In her years as a postulant and then a novice, Sister Nena moved around: Memphis, Cincinnati, Knoxville, finishing her education and taking her orders. When I asked her when she stopped wearing a habit, she had to think about it. T970?’ Her hair is now a thick, curling grey cut close to her head. T liked the habit. If they told us tomorrow we had to wear it again I’d be fine with that. Just not those things that went around the face. There was so much starch in them that they hurt.’ She touched her cheek at the memory. ‘It got so hot in the summer with all that stuff on, you couldn’t believe it. But if it got too hot I’d just pull my skirts up.’
It was around 1969 that Sister Nena came back to Nashville to teach at St Bernard’s Academy, about the same time I arrived from California and enrolled in first grade late that November. This is the point at which our lives first intersect: Sister Nena, age thirty-two, and Ann, very nearly six.
The convent where we met was an imposing and unadorned building of the darkest red brick imaginable. In those days it sat on the top of a hill and looked down over a long, rolling lawn dotted with statuary. It was there I learned to roller-skate and ran the three-legged race with Trudy Corbin on field day. Once a year I was part of a procession of
little girls who set a garland of roses on top of the statue of Maiy while singing, ‘Oh Maiy, we crown thee with blossoms today’, then we would file back inside and eat our lunches out of paper sacks. The cafeteria was in the basement of the convent; the classrooms were on the first floor. On the second floor there was a spectacular chapel painted in bright blue. It had an altar made from Italian marble and a marble kneeling rail and rows of polished pews where I would go in the morning to say part of the rosaiy and then chat Qod up in that personal way that became popular after Vatican II. My mother worked long shifts as a nurse and she would take me and my sister to the convent early and pick us up late. The nuns would let us come into their kitchen and sort the silverware, which in retrospect I imagine they mixed together just to give us something to do. My sister and I were well aware of the privilege we were receiving, getting to go into their kitchen, their dining room, and, on veiy rare occasions, into the sitting room on the second floor where they had a television set. Still, in all those years, I never set foot on the third or fourth floor of the building. That was where the nuns slept, where Sister Nena slept, and it was for us as far away as the moon, even as it sat right on top of us.
How did we find each other again?’ Sister Nena asked me recently while we were in the grocery store.
‘You called me,’ I said. ‘Years ago. You were looking for money.’
She stopped in the middle of the aisle and shook her head. ‘I forgot. It was for St Vincent’s School. Oh, that’s awful. It’s awful that that’s why I called you.’
I put my arm over her shoulder while she steered the cart. Sister Nena likes to steer the cart. ‘At least you called.’
Sister Nena lived in the convent at St Bernard’s until she was sixty years old. That was when the order sold the building. The parcel of land, which sat smack in the middle of a hip and crowded neighbourhood, was valuable. A large apartment complex was built in the front yard where we had played. They ripped out the giant mock orange trees first. Picking up mock oranges, which were smelly and green and had deep turning folds that were distressingly reminiscent of human brains, was a punishment all the girls sought to avoid. It surprised me how sony I was to see the trees go.
The convent had an interior window over the doorway to the chapel
that could be opened on to the third floor so that the nuns who were too infirm to come downstairs could sit in their wheelchairs and listen to mass. When I was a girl I would try to glance up at them without being noticed. From my vantage point down in the pews they were tiny in their long white dresses, which may have been the uniform of advanced age and may have just been their nightgowns. After the sale of the convent, the sisters who were retired or needed care were sent to Mercy, which was then a new facility twenty miles outside of town. The grade-school students were moved next door into the building that had once been the high school (the high school, never as successful as the grade school, was now defunct) and the convent itself was converted into office spaces. Eveiy schoolroom and nun’s bedroom found another use: a therapist’s office, a legal practice, a Pilates studio. The altar was given to a parish in Stone Mountain, Georgia. It had to be taken out through the back wall with a crane. The pews were sold. The empty chapel was now rented out for parties.
That was hard,’ Sister Nena said in the manner of one used to taking hard things in stride. ‘We had a lot of fun there, especially in the summers when everyone would come home, the sisters who taught in other towns would all come back. We’d sit up and tell stories and laugh, have a glass of wine.’
I went back to St Bernard’s once, years later, and climbed the back stairs to the fourth floor and stood in an empty bedroom/office to look out of the window. It was like looking down from the moon.
The vows for the Sisters of Mercy are poverty, celibacy and obedience, service to the poor, sick and uneducated, with perseverance until death. Obedience is another way of saying that you don’t complain when your order decides to sell the place where you live. You don’t get a vote. Sometimes this stiikes me as ridiculously unfair (‘You should have told them no,’ I find myself wanting to say, even though I have no idea who ‘them’ might have been). Other times, when I can manage to see outside the limitations of my own life, I catch a glimpse of what the move must have been for Sister Nena: another act of faith, the belief that God has a plan and is looking after you. It must be the right thing because you had turned your life over to God and even if you didn’t understand all the intricacies of the deal, He wasn’t about to make a mistake.
After the sale, the younger sisters, the ones who were still teaching, were relocated to rented apartments around town so they could have
an easier commute into work. ‘It was all right,’ Sister Nena said. ‘We’d all still get together on the weekends and have dinner.’ Sister Nena, who taught reading in grades one through three, and Sister Helen, my maths teacher for those same grades, and Sister Melanie, the lower-school principal, lived together in a rented condo, the three bedrooms making a straight line off of the upstairs hallway. They were happy there. They continued to work until the time came to work less. They semi-retired, retired, tutored children who needed tutoring, helped out at Catholic Charities. After she left St Bernard’s, Sister Nena volunteered at St Vincent de Paul’s, a school for underserved African-American children in North Nashville that remained in a state of constant financial peril until it finally went under.
Then, in 2004, Sister Helen had a stroke. After she got out of the hospital she was sent to Mercy. For a long time Sister Melanie and Sister Nena thought that she’d come home and take up her place again in the third bedroom, but Sister Helen only got worse. Day after day, Sister Nena would drive the twenty miles out to Mercy to visit her friend and try to get her to do the puzzles in the children’s maths workbooks that she had taught from for years, and sometimes Sister Helen would, but mostly she would sit and watch television. Over time she recognized Sister Nena less and less, and then finally not at all. It was because of the stroke that I started seeing more of Sister Nena. We would have lunch after she played tennis or have coffee in the afternoons. She would talk about her friend and sometimes she would cry a little. They had, after all, been together for a veiy long time. It was during one of those conversations that she mentioned Sister Helen’s last name was Kain, and I wondered how I could have never known that before.
Sister Nena and Sister Melanie stayed on in Green Hills, but by 2010 Sister Melanie was growing increasingly fragile, forgetful. It was the consensus among the other nuns, and of Sister Melanie herself, that she was ready to go out to Mercy.
The question then was what should be done with Sister Nena? She was, after all, still playing tennis like one of the Williams sisters three times a week and didn’t seem like a candidate for the retirement home. Still, while one spare bedroom could be overlooked, the rented condo was $1,400 a month and there were no extra nuns to fill up what would now be two spare bedrooms. It was decided that Sister Nena could stay out of Mercy, but she needed to find an apartment that was significantly less expensive. For the first time in her life she would be on her own.
I like to take Sister Nena to Whole Foods. It is a veritable amusement park of decadence and wonder to one who has taken a vow of poverty. Her ability to cook is rudimentary at best and she doesn’t like to shop, so I advocate prepared foods from the deli. Sister Melanie, who adored the grocery store, made her pilgrimage to Kroger eveiy Sunday. It was not a habit Sister Nena planned on picking up, claiming her Italian heritage would save her: as long as she had a box of pasta and a jar of sauce she was never going to starve. I could usually convince her to let me get a few things now that I knew what she liked. She was greatly enamoured of the olive bar. After Sister Kathy had visited and the decision about everyone’s future was settled, I took Sister Nena to the store and we got some coffee and went to sit at a small table by the window to discuss the details. She told me she’d found a place in a sprawling complex called Western Hills on the other side of town. I didn’t like the sound of it. I knew the neighbourhood, and the busy street was crowded with fast-food places, cheque-cashing centres and advertisements for bail bondsmen. She was set on getting a two-bedroom so that she could have a little office for her computer and the chair where she says her prayers in the morning. I argued for a smaller place in the neighbourhood where she lived now, but for once in her life the decision was Sister Nena’s to make and she intended to get what she wanted. ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ she said, trying to reassure me, to reassure herself. ‘Sister Jeannine lives out there. She likes the place. I’ve got it all figured out. Sister Melanie’s helping me work on a budget. They gave me a bank account, a credit card and a debit card.’
There in the cafe at Whole Foods, amid the swirl of mothers with strollers and young men with backpacks, my friend was not out of place, a slightly built Italian woman in a tracksuit. I stared at her blankly, unsure of what we were talking about.
‘I got a chequing account,’ she said again.
‘You’ve never had a chequing account?’
She shook her head. ‘Melanie handled all the finances. She paid the bills. ‘Then Sister Nena leaned in, moving her cup aside. ‘What exactly is the difference between a credit card and a debit card?’
I tried to outline the differences as clearly as possible; explaining the different ways either one of them can trip a person up. ‘When you use the debit card you have to write it down in the registry the same way you would a cheque. You need to write everything down and then sub
tract it from your balance each time so you’ll know how much you have.’
She took a sip of her coffee. ‘I can do that. I’m smart enough.’
‘You’re perfectly smart,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if you know all of this already. Once a month you get a statement from the bank. You have to balance your chequebook against the bank statement.’ I never thought much of the intellectual content of my secondary education, which was weighed down by a preponderance of religion classes and gym. But while the nuns may have been short on Shakespeare, they were long on practicality. By the time we were in high school we had learned how to make stews and sauces and cakes. We knew how to make crepes. We could remove stains and operate a washing machine. We were taught not only the fundamentals of sewing, but how to make a budget and balance a chequebook, how to fill out a simple tax form. Down at the grade school, Sister Nena had not received the benefits of any of these lessons.
She puzzled over what I was saying about bank statements for a long time. When I got to the part about how she was supposed to mark off her cancelled cheques in the tiny column in the registry, she suddenly perked up as if she had found the answer to the problem. Then she started laughing. ‘You shouldn’t tease me like that,’ she said, putting her hand on her heart. ‘You scared me to death. You shouldn’t tease a nun.’
‘I’m not teasing you,’ I said.
By the slight flash of panic that came across her face I could tell that she believed me. Still, she shook her head. ‘I don’t have to do that. I never saw Sister Melanie do that.’
All the Sisters of Mercy living in their separate apartments submit a budget to the mother house, estimating the cost of their electric and phone bills, food and rent. What they came up with for their monthly stipend was a modest number at best. The order picks that up, along with all medical expenses and insurance. When Sister Nena was hit two years ago by a car that ran a red light, her car was totalled and the order agreed that she could have a new car. I drove her to the Toyota dealership. All she had to do was sign a piece of paper and pick up the keys. ‘I hope it’s not red,’ she said on the way there. ‘I don’t like red cars.’
The car, a Corolla, was new, and it was red. Sister Nena walked a slow circle around it, studying, while the salesman watched. It wasn’t every day a car was purchased over the phone for someone who hadn’t seen it. ‘I take it back,’ she said to me finally. ‘The red is nice.’
When Sister Nena was a young nun teaching at St Bernards, around the time that I was her student, she received an allowance from the order of twenty dollars a month. All of her personal expenses were to be covered by that sum: Life Savers, shoes, clothing. Any cash gifts from the parents of students that came inside Christmas cards were to be turned over, as was any money from her own parents folded into birthday cards. It wasn’t a matter of the order leeching up the presents; it was the enactment of the vow. They were still to be poor even when a little extra cash presented itself. I couldn’t help but wonder if thei'e was ever a small temptation to take a ten-dollar bill from one’s own birthday card, but the question seemed impolite. ‘What if your mother sent you a sweater?’ I asked instead. I was not being wilfully obtuse. I was trying to figure out the system.
‘Oh, that wasn’t a problem. You got to keep the sweater.’
It is possible that the only reason any of this makes some limited sense to me is because these were the lessons I was taught as a child. The notion of a rich man’s camel not being able to make its way through the eye of the needle was a thought so terrifying (my family was not without means) it would keep me up at night. I believed then that turning away from the material world was the essence of freedom, and someplace deep inside myself; someplace that very rarely sees the light of day. I still believe it now. I imagine that no one who has spent sixty years embracing the tenets of poverty thinks to herself, I wish I’d had a $200 bottle of perfume. That said, after our coffee and the perilous conversation about chequing accounts, we went into Whole Foods to do some shopping. Sister Nena was adamant about wanting to go to Kroger, a less expensive grocery store a few blocks away, because the weekly nun dinner was going to be at her house that night and she’d promised to make pork chops. I told her no, I was buying the pork chops where we were. I believed that pork chops were not an item that should be bargain-hunted.
‘When did you get to be so bossy?’ she said to me.
T’ve been waiting my entire life to boss you around,’ I said. I filled up the cart with salads and bread and good German beer while Sister Nena despaired over how much money I spent.
In the check-out line I was still thinking about the twenty dollars a month, a figure that she told me was later raised to one hundred. ‘I worked almost fifty years and I never once saw a pay cheque,’ she said, and then she shrugged as if to say she hadn’t really missed it.
*
Sister Melanie had moved out to Mercy the week before Sister Nena moved to her new apartment, but she came back to help. Sister Nena’s eighty-year-old brother, Bud, was there along with two of his children, Andy and Pam, and Sister Nena’s friend Nora came. Together we loaded up our cars with everything Sister Nena didn’t want to leave to the two movers. It was 6:30 in the morning and ha'^1 just started to rain.
‘We can probably take all the boxes in the cars,’ she said. ‘That way the movers wouldn’t have to bother with them.’
‘They’re movers,’ I said, trying to remember if I had helped a friend move since I was in graduate school. ‘That’s what they do.’ I went to take apart Sister Nena’s computer, which was a series of enormous black metal boxes with dozens of snaking cables coming out the back. It looked like something that might have come out of NASA in the seventies. I was veiy careful putting it in my car.
Western Hills was actually set farther back from the busy street than I had realized, and the complex was so big that it had the insulated feel of a small, walled city. Once our caravan arrived and the contents of our cars were emptied out into the apartment’s small living room, the rest of the group went back to their lives and Sister Nena, Sister Melanie, Sister Jeannine and I begin to put the food in the refrigerator and the clothes in closets while the movers brought in the furniture and the boxes. The three nuns, all in their seventies, did hard work at a steady pace, and while I might have been tempted to sit down for a moment on the recently positioned sofa, they did not, and so I did not. I told the movers where to put the television.
‘I’m sony,’ the young man said to me. ‘I know you told me your name but I don’t remember.’
‘Ann,’ I said.
‘Sister Ann?’ he asked.
It was true that in a room with three nuns I could easily pass for the fourth. We were all dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. We had all forgone mascara. I shook my head. ‘Just Ann,’ I said. I thought about my mother, who, like the nuns, is in her seventies now. She was and is a woman of legendary beauty, a woman with a drawer full of silk camisoles and a closet full of high-heeled shoes, who never left the house without makeup even if she was just walking the dog. My sister and I often wondered how her particular elegance and attention to detail had passed over us, how we had managed so little dexterity where beauty was concerned.
But as I talked to the mover, a Catholic kid with a shamrock tattooed inside his wrist, I thought of how we would arrive at the convent veiy early in the morning and how we would stay sometimes until after dark. Maybe what rubbed off over the years was more than faith. Maybe the reason I felt so comfortable with Sister Nena and the rest of the nuns was that I spent the majority of the waking hours of my childhood with them.
That first time Sister Nena called me all those years ago, when she was looking for someone to help her buy school supplies for the children at the St Vincent de Paul School, she told me she had prayed about it for a long time before picking up the phone. She wasn’t happy about having to ask for money, but the children didn’t have paper or crayons or glue sticks and she knew I’d been doing well over the years. She’d read some of my books. T taught you how to read and write,’ she said.
‘You did,’ I said, and didn’t mention that she had in fact done a great deal more for me than that. Sister Nena had been the focal point of all of my feelings of persecution, the repository for my childish anger. I knew that she had thought I was lazy and slow, dull as a butter knife. I watched the hands of other girls shoot up in class while I sat in the back, struggling to understand the question. While having no evidence to the contrary at the time, I was certain that I was smarter than she gave me credit for being, and I would prove it. I grew up wanting to be a writer so that Sister Nena would realize she had underestimated me. I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life’s great motivators, and my revenge against Sister Nena would be my success. When I was a child I dreamed that one day she would need something from me and I would give it to her with full benevolence. It was tine that she had taught me how to read and write, but what she didn’t mention on the phone that day, and what she surely didn’t remember after nearly fifty years of teaching children, was what an excruciatingly long time it had taken me to leam.
My parents divorced in Los Angeles where I had started first grade at the Cathedral of the Incarnation. In late November of that year, my mother took my sister and me to Tennessee for what was going to be a three-week vacation to see a man she knew there. We never went back. I had not yet learned to read in California and when I was eventually enrolled in St Bernard’s, I landed on Sister Nena’s doorstep. I remember her well. She was child-sized herself, wearing a plain blue polyester dress that zipped up the back. She had short dark hair and the per
petual tan of a person who played tennis on any passable day. She moved through the classroom with enormous energy and purpose and I could all but see the nonsensical letters of the alphabet trailing behind her wherever she went. I was perilously lost for all the long hours of the school day, but I had yet to conclude that I was in any real trouble. It was still a time in my life that I believed we would go home again and I would catch up among the children and the nuns I knew in California. In Nashville, we stayed in the guesj; room of strangers, friends of my mother’s friend. These people, the Harrises, had daughters of their own who went to St Bernard’s and the daughters were not greatly inclined to go to school, nor were the Harrises inclined to make them. Many days we all stayed home together. It was 1969, a fine year for truancy.
I started second grade at St Bernard’s as well, having learned very few of the lessons that had been laid out in my first year. The enrolment at the school was small and we had the same teachers for grades one through three. Again, Sister Helen was there with the maths I didn’t understand. Again, Sister Nena rolled up her sleeves, but the making of letters eluded me. We left the Harrises’ house and found our own apartment, and then moved again. After Christmas we moved to Mufreesboro, a less expensive town thirty minutes away where I was enrolled in public school, but we didn’t stay. A few months into third grade we were back in Nashville and I was back with Sister Nena. I still couldn’t read whole sentences or write the alphabet with all the letters facing in the right direction. I knew a handful of words and I did my best to fake my way through. Sister Nena, seeing me turn up for a half year of school for the third time in a row, had had enough. She kept me in from recess and after school, badgering me with flashcards and wideruled paper in which I was expected to write out letters neatly over and over again. If I was firmly wedged between the cracks I’d fallen into, she had plans to pull me up, by the hair if necessary. She would see to it that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life not exactly knowing how to read or write. Cursive was waiting just ahead in fourth grade, she told me. I had better get up to speed. She might as well have said that in fourth grade-classes would be conducted in French (a confusion that came from a Babar book my sister had. Because it was both in cursive and in French I believed that cursive was French.) I was terrified of all there was to do, of how far behind I had fallen, and somehow I convinced myself that I was terrified of Sister Nena. I wouldn’t be in
tiouble if it wasn t for her because no one else in my life had noticed I couldn’t read.
The only thing interesting about my anger and blame of Sister Nena was my willingness to hold on to it without any further reflection until I was in my thirties. I had let my seven-year-old self, my eight-year-old self, make my case against her. How much happier I would have been to never leam anything at all! It wasn’t until I sent her a cheque for school supplies that I found myself wondering how often I was in her classroom those first three years and how much work she had in front of her eveiy time I wandered in. It isn’t often the past picks up the telephone and calls, affording the opportunity to reconsider personal history in a way that could save countless thousands of dollars in therapy had I been inclined to go. I found myself thinking about my childhood, my education. It is a pastime I am particularly loath to engage in, but I was struck that all I had remembered was her exasperation with my epic slowness, not her ultimate triumph over it. To overstate the case, it was a bit akin to Helen Keller holding a grudge against Annie Sullivan for yanking her around. The next time the children of St Vincent de Paul ran out of glue sticks and Sister Nena called me again, I suggested that we go shopping together and buy some.
She was standing outside her condo in Green Hills when I arrived, waiting for me. Sister Melanie and Sister Helen, still in good health, were home as well. Tennis and prayer and a habit of eating very little must agree with the human body because Sister Nena seemed to have foregone the ageing process completely. She was exactly the person I had known when I was a child and she was nothing like that person at all. She opened up her arms and held me. I was one of her students, one of who knows how many children that had passed through her classroom. That was what she remembered about me. I was one of her own.
There have been veiy few things in my life that have made me as happy as taking Sister Nena shopping. When we started it was all school supplies, though eventually she confessed her longing to buy small presents for the teachers at St Vincent’s who were every bit as poor as their students and paid a sliver of the wages a public-school teacher would have made. She picked out bottles of hand lotion and boxes of Kleenex, staplers and Life Savers, gifts too modest to embarrass anyone, but her
joy over having something to give them all but vibrated as we walked up and down the aisles of Target piling things into our cart. It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.
Despite my constant questions about what she might need for herself, it was years before Sister Nena let me buy anything for her. She wouldn’t dream of letting me take her to the olive bar back then. That came later in our friendship, after Sister Helen had her stroke, after her best friend Joanne died of cancer, which was an inconceivable loss. We inched towards each other slowly over many years. At some point I realized that the people she was closest to were dying off or being sent away. Over the course of years there was a place for me.
‘You’re at the top of my prayer list,’ she tells me. ‘And not because you buy me things.’ She has come to understand that letting me buy her things makes me ridiculously happy, and my happiness, instead of the things themselves, is the source of her joy.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘It’s because I love you,’ she said.
So ferocious is my love for Sister Nena that I can scarcely understand it myself. Hers is the brand of Catholicism I remember from my childhood, a religion of good work and very little discussion.
‘I like the Catholic Church,’ she says to me sometimes.
‘Good thing,’ I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I had ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, the part of the faith that is both selfless and responsible: bringing soup to the sick, going to visit the widower husbands of her friends who have died, sticking with the children who are slow to learn and teaching them how to read, because it wasn’t just me, it turns out there are legions of us. She babysits for two Haitian girls, Islande and Thania, and helps them with their reading and their maths. They ask their mother to bring the phone to their beds before they go to sleep so they can call Sister Nena and say goodnight, tell her they have said their prayers. I think of how Sister Nena spoke of the Mercies who taught her in school and how she had admired their goodness. I think of how it took me half my life to comprehend the thing she had discovered as a child (I have no doubt that she had been a better student than I was).
She is happy in her new apartment, though she probably could have
set up hei camp in a closet somewhere and been fine. Happiness is her mindset, her decision, and while she often reminds me that God will take care of filings, she is also determined not to trouble Him if at all possible. It’s a little bit like wanting to move all the boxes before the movers come. She will take on the work of her life quickly, do it all herself when no one is watching so that she can show God how little help she needs.
Any worries she has these days are focused on Sister Melanie, who is adjusting slowly to her new life at Mercy. Sister Melanie is shy and had long relied on Sister Nena for her social skills. 'She stays in her room all the time,’ Sister Nena said. 'Whenever I go out to see her, there she is. I tell her, no one’s going to find you in here. You have to get out.’ She is reaching down into that place where Sister Melanie has wedged herself. She is trying to pull her up.
We got together the day after the funeral of her friend Mary Ann. Mary Ann was the other Catholic in her tennis group. ‘I’m fine. I’m not sad,’ Sister Nena tells me when I call. I know better than to believe her. 'You don’t have to take me out.’
‘What if I just want to see you?’ I say.
Over lunch she tells me that the last time she saw her, Mary Ann was very peaceful. 'She looked at me and said, “Nena, I’m ready. I want to see God.’” Then Sister Nena shook her head. 'I’m wrong. That was the time before last. The last time I saw her she couldn’t say anything. When I went to her funeral and I saw the urn there and I thought, where is her soul?’ Sister Nena looks at me then, hoping that I might know ‘Is it with God? I want to believe her soul is with God. She was so certain. I’m just not sure. I shouldn’t say that.’ She puts her hand flat out on the table. ‘I am sure.’
‘Nobody’s sure,’ I say.
‘Sister Jeannine is sure.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. I’m contradicting myself. I know God made us but I’m not so sure about what happens afterwards.’
‘What do you want to happen?’ I ask her.
This she knows the answer to immediately. It is as if she has been waiting her entire lifetime for someone to ask her. ‘I want God to hold me,’ she says.
You above all others, I tell her. You first.
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