by Edna O'Brien
“Jesus, ‘tis hell,” she said. “I won’t stick it for a week.”
“Nor me. Are you hungry?”
“I’d eat a young child,” she said. I was just getting my nail file out of my toilet bag, to cut a hunk of cake with, when the key was turned in the door at the end of the room. I covered the cake quickly with a towel and we stood there perfectly still, as Sister Margaret came toward us, holding her flashlight.
“What is the meaning of this?” she asked. She knew our names already and addressed us by our full names, not just Bridget (Baba’s real name) and Caithleen, but Bridget Brennan and Caithleen Brady.
“We were lonely, Sister,” I said.
“You are not alone in your loneliness. Loneliness is no excuse for disobedience.” She was speaking in a penetrating whisper. The whole dormitory could hear her.
“Go back to your bed, Bridget Brennan,” she said. Baba tripped off quietly. Sister Margaret shone the flashlight to and fro, until the beam caught the little tea service on the bed.
“What is this?” she asked, picking up one of the cups.
“A tea service, Sister. I brought it because my mother died.” It was a stupid thing to say and I regretted it at once. I’m always saying stupid things, because I don’t think before I say them.
“Sentimental childish conduct,” she said. She lifted the outside layer of her black habit and shaped it into a basket. Then she put the tea service in there and carried it off.
I got in between the icy sheets and ate a piece of seed cake. The whole dormitory was crying. You could hear the sobbing and choking under the covers. Smothered crying.
The head of my bed backed onto the head of another girls bed, and in the dark a hand came through the rungs and put a bun on my pillow. It was an iced bun and there was something on top of the icing. Possibly a cherry. I gave her a piece of cake and we shook hands. I wondered what she looked like, as I hadn’t noticed her when the lights were on. She was a nice girl, whoever she was. The bun was nice, too. Two or three beds away I heard some girl munch an apple under the covers. Everyone seemed to be eating and crying for their mothers.
My bed faced a window and I could see a sprinkling of stars in one small corner of the sky. It was nice to lie there watching the stars, waiting for them to fade or to go out, or to flare up into one brilliant firework. Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence.
9
We were wakened at six next morning. The Angelus bell was ringing from the convent tower when Sister Margaret came in chanting the morning offering. She put on the lights and I was up and staggering on my feet before I even knew where I was.
She told us to wash and dress quickly. Mass was in fifteen minutes.
Drawing a comb, limply, through my tangled hair, I saw that Baba was still in bed. Poor Baba, she could never waken in the mornings. I went down and dragged her out. She yawned and rubbed her eyes and asked, “Where are we and what time is it?” I told her. She said, “Jesus wept!” It was her new phrase, instead of just plain “Jesus.” Her face was pale and sad and she couldn’t open the knots in her shoelaces.
We were the last to leave the dormitory. The prefect had put the lights out. It was rather dark and we had to grope to find our way up the passage and down the steep wooden stairs that led to the recreation hall. There were birds singing in the convent trees as we crossed the tarmac driveway to the chapel. The birds reminded us both of the same thing. Home wasn’t such a bad place, after all.
Mass had started when we got in, so we knelt on the kneeler nearest the door, but there was no bench for us to sit on.
“We’ll get housemaid’s knee from this,” Baba whispered.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disease. All nuns have it from kneeling.” A senior girl turned around and gave us an eye that told us to shut up. My mind wandered all through Mass. The dandruff on girls’ gym frocks, the sun coming through the stained-glass window, the shadows where nuns knelt. Nuns with heads bowed humbly, nuns kneeling upright, older nuns kneeling slackly, resting a little on their haunches. I wondered if I would ever get to know them from their backs. A nun served Mass, too. It was funny to hear her thin voice answering the priest in Latin.
Her name was Sister Mary and the priest’s name was Father Thomas, Cynthia told me on the way out.
“You’re new. Do you like it?” she asked, as she overtook us going down the steps. She ignored Baba.
“It’s awful,” I said.
“You’ll get used to it. It’s not so bad.”
“I’m lonesome.”
“For whom? Your mammy?”
“No. She’s dead.”
“Oh, poor you,” she said, putting her arm around my waist. She promised to take care of me. The big girls always took care of the new ones, and Cynthia was going to take care of me. I liked her. She was a tall girl with yellow hair and small alert brown eyes. She had a bust, too, a thing no other girl in the convent dared have. But Cynthia was different, because she was half Swedish and her mother was a convert.
First we had drill in the open yard that looked out on the street. There were school walls on three sides of it, and there were railings at the fourth side dividing us from the street. Near the railings was an open shed where the day girls kept their bicycles. The day girls were those whose parents lived in the town, and they came in and out of school every day. Cynthia told me that they were all very obliging. She meant that they would post letters on the sly for me, or bring sweets from the shops.
“Arms forward. Arms to toes. Don’t bend knees,” Sister Margaret said. You could hear knees crack and breaths gasping. Seventy bottoms were humped up in the air and I could see the white thighs of girls in front of me. That space where their black stocking tops ended which the legs of their knickers did not cover.
“Jesus, it’s worse than the army,” Baba said to me. Her voice came from upside down, because our heads were near the ground.
“Winter and summer,” a girl next to us said.
“Silence, please,” said Sister Margaret. She was standing on her toes, counting ten. And while we waited, a boy with milk cans went by whistling. His whistle was sweeter than the notes of a flute. Sweeter, because he didn’t know how happy he had made us. All of us. He reminded us of our lives at home. We went in to breakfast.
We had tea and buttered bread, and there was a spoon of marmalade on each girl’s plate. We began to talk furiously.
“Thanks for the cake,” said a girl across the table. She had black hair, a fringe, and pale, freckled skin.
“Oh, it’s you?” I said. She was nice. Not pretty or flashy or anything, but nice. Sisterly.
“Where are you from?” she asked, and I told her.
“I have a scholarship,” I said. It was better to tell it myself than have Baba tell it.
“God, you must be a genius,” she said, frowning.
“Not at all,” I said. But I liked the praise. It warmed me inside.
“I’m having visitors Sunday week. I’ll get more cakes and things,” she said. I was just going to say something very friendly to her, because after all she was next to me in the dormitory and she was likely to get lots of cakes, but Sister Margaret came in, clapping her hands.
“Silence,” she said. Her words seemed to remain in the room, hanging over our heads. She began to read from her spiritual book. She read a story about St. Teresa and how Teresa worked in a laundry and let the soap spatter into her eyes as an act of mortification.
“Don’t let the soap get in your eyes,” Baba hummed quietly to herself, and I was terrified lest she should be heard.
“I’ll drink Lysol or any damn thing to get out of here,” she said to me on the way out. A man at home had poisoned himself that way. Sister Margaret walked past us and gave us a bitter and suspicious eye. But she hardly overheard us, or we would have been expelled.
“I’d rather be a Protestant,” Baba said.
“They have convents, too,” I said,
sighing.
“Not like this jail,” she replied. She was almost crying. We went up to the dormitory, and Cynthia was waiting for me on the first landing.
“That’s for you,” she said, handing me a holy picture for my prayer book. She ran off quickly. In purple ink was written: To my new lovely friend, from her loving Cynthia.
“That sort of mush gives me acidosis,” Baba said, sneering. She went in ahead of me with her shoes on.
A lay nun came along to examine our hair, after we had made our beds.
“I have dandruff. I have dandruff,” I said excitedly, in case she’d mistake it for anything else.
She gave me a tap on the cheek with the comb and told me to be quiet. She looked through my hair. “I don’t know what this great weight of hair is for. Our Lady would hardly approve it,” she said as she passed on to the next girl. My honor was saved. The girl next to me, with the squint and the expensive dressing gown, had nits. “Disgraceful,” the nun said as she looked through the thin, mousy hair. I was afraid that bugs might crawl from her pillow to mine at nighttime.
Just before nine we went to our classrooms. Baba sat in the desk with me. We sat in the back row. Baba said it was safer back there, and while we were waiting for the nun to come, Baba wrote out a little rhyme in her copybook. It was:
The boys sit on the back bench
The girls in front quite still.
The hoys are not supposed to pinch
But there are hoys who will.
A girl is asked to tell
If a boy pinches from behind.
Some girls yell
But some girls don’t mind.
The first nun who came to the classroom was young and very pretty. Her skin was pink-white and almost moist. Like rose petals in the early morning. She taught Latin and began by teaching us the Latin for table and its various cases. Nominative, vocative, and so on. The lesson lasted forty minutes, and then another nun came, who taught us English. There were two new sticks of chalk and a clean suede eraser on the table beside her hands. Her hands were very white and she wore a narrow silver ring on one finger. She was twisting the ring around her finger all the time. She was delicate-looking and she read us an essay by G. K. Chesterton.
Then a third nun came to teach us algebra. She began to write on the blackboard, and she talked through her nose.
“Nawh, gals,” she said. I wasn’t listening. The autumn sun came through the big window and I was looking to see if there were any cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings, as there had been at the National School, when she threw down the chalk and called for every girl’s attention. I trembled a little and looked at the x’s and y’s she had written on the blackboard. The morning dragged on until lunchtime. Lunch was terrible.
First there was soup. Thin gray-green soup. And sections of dry gray bread on our side plates.
“It’s cabbage water,” Baba said to me. She had changed places with the girl next to me and I was glad of her company. She wasn’t supposed to change, and we hoped that it would go unnoticed. After the soup came the plates of dinner. On each plate there was a boiled, peeled potato, some stringy meat, and a mound of roughly chopped cabbage.
“Didn’t I tell you it was cabbage water?” Baba said, nudging me. I wasn’t interested. My meat was brutal-looking and it had a faint smell as if gone off. I sniffed it again and knew that I couldn’t eat it.
“This meat is bad,” I said to Baba.
“We’ll dump it,” she said sensibly.
“How?” I asked.
“Bring it out and toss it into that damn lake when we’re out walking.” She rooted in her pocket and found an old envelope.
I had the meat on my fork and was just going to put it in the envelope when another girl said, “Don’t. She’ll ask you where it’s gone to so quickly,” so I put just one slice in the envelope and Baba put a slice of hers.
“Sister Margaret searches pockets,” the girl said to us.
“Talk of an angel,” said Baba under her breath, because Sister Margaret had just come into the refectory and was standing at the head of the table surveying the plates. I was cutting my cabbage, and seeing something black in it, I lifted some out onto my bread plate.
“Caithleen Brady, why don’t you eat your cabbage?” she asked.
“There’s a fly in it, Sister,” I said. It was a slug really, but I didn’t like to hurt her feelings.
“Eat your cabbage, please.” She stood there while I put forkfuls into my mouth and swallowed it whole. I thought I might be sick. Afterward she went away and I put the remainder of my meat into Baba’s envelope, which she put inside her jumper.
“Do I look sexy?” she asked, because she bulged terribly at one side.
When our plates were empty we passed them up along to the head of the table.
The lay nun carried in a metal tray, which she rested on the corner of the table. She handed round dessert dishes of tapioca.
“Jesus, it’s like snot,” Baba said in my ear.
“Oh, Baba, don’t,” I begged. I felt terrible after that cabbage.
“Did I ever tell you the rhyme Declan knows?”
“No.”
“ ‘Which would you rather: run a mile, suck a boil, or eat a bowl of snot?’ Well, which would you?” she asked impatiently. She was vexed because I hadn’t laughed.
“I’d rather die, that’s all,” I said. I drank two glasses of water and we came out.
Classes continued until four o’clock. Then we all crowded into the cloakroom, got our coats, and prepared for our walk. It was nice to go out on the street. But we bypassed the main street and went out a side road, in the direction of the lake. As we passed the water’s edge, several parcels of meat were pitched in.
“I have done the deed; didst thou not hear the noise?” said one of the senior girls, and the lake was full of little ripples as the small parcels sank underneath. The walk was short, and we were hungry and lonely as we passed the shops. It was impossible to go into the shops because there was a prefect in charge of us. We walked in twos, and once or twice the girl behind me walked on my heel.
“Sorry,” she kept saying. She was that mopey girl who kept passing me the bread the first evening. Her gym frock dipped down under her navy gabardine coat and she had steel-rimmed spectacles.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Baba said to me, but they were worth more. I was thinking of Mr. Gentleman.
After the walk we did our home lessons; then we had tea and then Rosary. Rosary over, we went around the convent walks. Cynthia came with us and the three of us linked. We walked past the gardens, and smelled damp clay and the spicy perfume of the late-autumn flowers; then we climbed the hill that led to the playing fields. It was almost dusk.
“The evenings are getting shorter,” I said fatally. I said it the way Mama would have said it, and the resemblance frightened me, because I did not want to be as doleful as Mama was.
“Tell us everything,” Cynthia said. Cynthia was gay and secretive and full of spirit. “Have you boyfriends?” she asked.
An old man, I thought. But it was absurd to think of him as a boyfriend; after all, I was not much more than fourteen. Already our day in Limerick seemed far away, like a dream.
“Have you?” Baba asked her.
“Oh yeh. He’s terrific. He’s nineteen and he works in a garage. He has his own motorbike. We go to dances and everything on it,” she said. Her voice was flushed. She liked remembering it.
“Are you fast?” Baba asked bluntly.
“What’s fast?” I interrupted. The word puzzled me.
“It’s a woman who has a baby quicker than another woman,” Baba said quickly, impatiently.
“Is it, Cynthia?” I asked.
“In a way.” She smiled. Her smile was for the motorbike, riding with a red kerchief around her hair, over a country road with fuchsia hedges on either side, her arms clasped around his waist, her earrings dangling like the fuchsia flowers.
“Tighter, tig
hter,” he was saying. She obeyed him. Cynthia was not an angel, but very very grown-up.
We sat in a summerhouse up on the hill and watched the other girls as they trooped past in groups of three or four. There were garden seats piled on top of one another in one corner of the summerhouse, and there were a lot of garden tools thrown on the floor.
“Who uses these?” I asked.
“The nuns,” Cynthia said. “They have no gardener now.” She laughed slyly to herself.
“Why?” I was curious.
“A nun ran away with the gardener last year. She used to be out here helping him, arranging flower beds and all that, and didn’t they get friendly! So she ran off.” This was excitement, the kind of thing we liked to hear. Baba sat forward and brightened considerably at the prospect of hearing something lively.
“How’d she manage it?” she asked Cynthia.
“At night, over the wall.”
Baba began to hum. “And when the moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting at the ki-i-tchen door.”
“Did he marry her?” I asked. I found myself trembling again, trembling with anxiety until I had heard the end of the story, trembling because I wanted it to have a happy ending.
“No. We heard he left her after a few months,” Cynthia said casually.
“Oh, God!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, God, my eye! She was no beauty when she climbed over the wall to meet him. Bald and everything. ‘Twas all right when she was a nun, she had the white wimple around her face and she looked mysterious. And I imagined that dress she wore was hickish.”
“Whose dress?” Baba asked. Baba was always practical.
“Marie Duffy’s. She’s the prefect this year. The nun was in charge of the Christmas concert, and Marie Duffy got a dress from home to play Portia in. After the concert the dress was hanging up in the cloakroom, and then one day it disappeared. I suppose the nun took it.”
The convent bells rang out, summoning us away from the summerhouse and the smell of clay and the joy of shared secrets. We ran all the way back to the school and Cynthia warned us not to tell.