The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  Mother Superior was waiting for me as my mother had promised. She resembled the war monuments I had passed on the bus, heavy and solid, her facial features square and thick. Her nose in particular, protruding at a right angle, could have been cut out of stone, and her breasts moved up and down with her breath like large steps.

  “Welcome,” she began, and motioned to a cardboard box filled with clothes.

  “Find two uniforms that fit. No more. That’s all we can offer you at this time. You’ll need to start wearing them right away.” She spoke all her sentences as if she were listing rules, jutting out her chin in tandem with the first syllable of each line, stressing it by stretching out the vowel sound.

  The uniform consisted of a navy blue cardigan with a crest bearing the motto of the school, “Our Eyes to Heaven,” stitched in fine gold-coloured thread, a plain white blouse with buttons up to the neck, and a grey wool skirt to be worn at calf length.

  “Socks must be white or blue. You may not wear nylons.”

  I didn’t own any nylons, and all the socks I’d packed were white. My mother had guessed the nuns would require white socks, and I felt somewhat comforted by the fact she had been right. I sorted through the box, checking tags for sizes and claiming the clothes without measuring them against my frame to determine whether they would actually fit. I didn’t want to appear finicky in front of Mother Superior or to take up too much of her time. She seemed in a hurry to get me out of her office.

  “Sister Marguerite will give you pencils and notebooks and the textbooks for your classes. She teaches you in the mornings. Sister Aline teaches you in the afternoons and runs the choir. I teach you History. This is the way with your grade. Sister Marguerite will answer your questions, if you have any.”

  She smiled then, and it didn’t suit her face, her lips abnormally wide, though she had a regal handsomeness about her. With my two uniforms, hand-me-downs, draped over my arm, I awkwardly grabbed my luggage and was directed to wait in front of Sister Marguerite’s classroom until she had finished teaching the hour. There was no window on the classroom door, and I stood against the wall. When the bell rang for lunch, Sister Marguerite welcomed me and immediately led me to my room in the dormitory section of the building. The uniforms on my arm informed the passing girls that I was staying. Their eyes glanced over me as if I were only slightly noticeable, possibly irritating, like a leak in the roof.

  I passed my introductory week in an anxious state. Never having slept away from my family before, I found the nights terrible, alone in my room, unsure of whether or not to speak to girls in the communal washroom area for our floor or ask directions when I had trouble finding my way around to classes, the cafeteria, and the library. I began having nightmares, waking up in my foreign surroundings, sweating in my new sheets, afraid the wetness might mean that I’d peed myself. I dreamt of my mother. She appeared in the room beside me, tended by a child, a little girl in a nurse’s outfit, a stethoscope hanging like a necklace, the monitoring device a locket against her chest. I tried to tell the girl that it was I who should be there, administering medicine and water to my mother, but she just ignored me. My mother told me angrily to leave; I was not wanted here. Two large orderlies shoved me out, warning me that I’d be taken to the police if I continued to bother her. I’d wake upset that my mother had not phoned to check up on me. I had tried to phone in the evenings to ask about coming home for the weekend, but no one had answered. I cried into the sheets until it was time to prepare for class.

  Although the classes were not as difficult as I had first imagined they would be, they too filled me with dread. It took time to discover the correct decorum and protocol. I learned that putting one’s hand up to answer a question did not necessarily mean the teacher would ask you for a response. The nuns liked to pick on those students whose hands weren’t up, and even when they called on you, and you stood to answer, you would not be allowed to sit down if your answer was wrong. You were required to stay standing, in front of all the girls, until someone else provided the correct answer to save you from further embarrassment. The lunch bell rang every hour since the classrooms had no clocks, deemed to be distractions. This did not indicate that classes were over, but that one hour was up. The nuns could extend class if they felt like it, and on my first day, Sister Aline did so because she said the class had spent time being introduced to me and summarizing material that should have been mastered by now. I hated being singled out; the other girls were tired of studying and wanted to go back to their rooms. I became the cause of their frustration.

  At the end of my torturous week, my father telephoned to inform me that as the new man at his company he would have to work on the weekend. I was told I wouldn’t be able to come home for a while, and certainly not that weekend. I tried to hide my disappointment from him, to act like the grown-up girl my parents expected me to be, but I had been looking forward to seeing them both and couldn’t conceal the anger in my voice. Without seeing Mother for myself, I could only wonder if her eyes were less sore or if she was able to take walks on her own again. Father told me she was fine and could even read a little bit when the afternoon light came in through the window of her bedroom. He told me to be a good girl and use the time to make friends. Surely there would be other girls staying on the entire week. Other parents must work out of town or on the weekends. I wasn’t listening. I was remembering the card games we used to play as a family on Friday nights, drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream even in the summer. It was a tradition that went back as far as I could recall. Mother’s illness hadn’t changed that; she’d get Christine to help her decide how to play out her hand, or we’d play a three-person game instead of one that required partners. Every once in a while I would drink too much and go to bed with a bellyache, suffering through it so that I wouldn’t be scolded for complaining for what was my own fault. Father didn’t mention what he and Mother would do now without us. He also didn’t ask how I liked the new school or how the nights had been without my family. I wanted to tell him I was miserable and this was all their fault. I wanted to tell him I was meant to be at home, that God had made it clear to me that I should be at home. Anything to get out of here. But he didn’t ask.

  When Friday classes finished, I returned to my floor in the dormitory. Bella, a girl who wore her hair in braided pigtails, roomed beside me. She was difficult not to notice, although she wasn’t physically striking in any way, merely pleasant. She had black hair and a smooth, milky whiteness to her skin, a few tiny beauty marks at the corners of her eyes. But if she was not the most popular with the girls, she was clearly the favourite of the nuns in the school. Bella had the right answers. Bella was attentive and responsive to instruction. When they inspected our hands to make sure we had washed, Bella had no dirt under her fingernails. When Sister Aline handed out music sheets for choir practice, Bella was delegated all the solos, though I had yet to hear her sing. It was obvious she liked it here, and the nuns liked her for it. She was polite to the girls too, in a reserved adult manner. Passing others in the hall or the washroom she would say hello and carry on her way without fuss.

  With her mother waiting downstairs for her in the lobby, Bella asked me how I liked my first week at St. X. School for Girls.

  “It’s all right,” I replied, noticing that she had packed a book for an assignment handed out that day and not due for a couple of weeks.

  “You staying?”

  I shrugged. “My father works on the weekends.”

  Bella flung her bag over her shoulder, catching her hair. She groaned and lifted the strap to release the braid.

  “I’ve heard it can be fun here on the weekends. Mr. M. comes down and takes some of the girls to the movies and stuff.”

  I didn’t yet know whose father Mr. M. was, or if he was someone’s father at all. But it was an indication to me that there might be some advantage to staying at the school and I was interested, although Bella was eager to greet her mother.

  “Yeah?”
She was friendlier to me than some of the other girls, so I wondered why I didn’t feel the urge to befriend her. Perhaps I felt we weren’t the same kind of girl. I had no idea whether to define Bella as a potential friend or an enemy.

  By informing Bella I was staying because my father worked on weekends, I’d hoped to demonstrate my superiority, my parents’ belief that I was capable of being on my own. Instead, Bella saw through me and offered some comfort.

  “I’m sure the girls will find something to do together,” Bella replied, and walked off to meet her mother, leaving me at the door of my empty room without any idea of what I was going to do next.

  I watched the other girls packing up their tote bags and small suitcases or simply carrying a few books outside with them to their parents’ cars. They broke out of the gate like horses, sprinting to be on the outside after being kept in. They would have the pleasure of sleeping in their own beds and eating at their dinner tables instead of in the cafeteria. Perhaps they would choose what they wanted to eat instead of being served whatever the staff made. I imagined they had the luxury of two sets of friends, those at school and those in their neighbourhoods, and the knowledge that they were missed at home, for it didn’t cost parents any extra to keep their kids at the school for weekends. Tuition, plus room and board was a blanket price. It cost more money for parents to take their children home, for the travel, the outings they might have, and for the extra food. The girls were aware of this. When their parents came to pick them up, they knew they were wanted.

  “I SPENT MY WHOLE allowance already,” said Rachel. “But we could go window-shop until tomorrow. My dad’s gonna take us to see a movie.”

  “I don’t know,” Caroline, the tall girl with a French-Canadian accent, wavered, swinging her dark ponytail from side to side around her shoulders while she dried her hands. “Maybe we should just stay in. It’s no fun if we can’t even get Cokes and sit by the fountain. They’ll ask us to leave.”

  “We could have our meeting tonight then,” said Francine, a girl with almost orange hair and with freckles on her cheeks, nose, and forearms.

  I ascertained that the two girls who were with Rachel relied on Rachel’s money, or at least couldn’t keep up with her escapades without it, as neither offered to pay her own way. These two girls leaned against the wall of the washroom as Rachel put on a layer of pink lipstick, smacking her lips in the mirror, betraying annoyance. I knew who they were because I’d jotted down their names in class. Rachel commanded attention, an incredibly pretty girl with curly blonde hair cut at her shoulders and light-green eyes. The other girls in the class deferred to her when she spoke, and no one snickered when she stood to answer a question and got it wrong. Even the nuns were a bit less strict. On my second day of class, Sister Marguerite did not ask her to write the answer to a geography question she had missed three times on the blackboard, because Rachel claimed she hadn’t understood the question properly. The classroom went silent. No one except Rachel would have dared turn the blame around on one of the nuns.

  Rachel, Caroline, and Francine had a club. I’d heard about their club while they were talking about it in class: The Sisterhood. Their classmates were envious, even a little scared of them, I gathered as I watched from my desk or cafeteria seat, eavesdropping for information about who hung out together, who was well-liked and who was shunned. As Sister Marguerite wrote with chalk, her black back merging with the blackboard, I copied her handwriting in my notebook but kept my attention on the girls.

  I saw Rachel the day after my arrival. I came in through our classroom door and stood near the radiator, waiting to see which seat was free. She strolled in, her bookbag held underneath her arm, her blonde hair catching the autumn light coming in through a small window at the far end. Her green eyes flickered. She waved to Caroline, whose dark hair was tied back into a neat braid, hanging down to her tailbone. Caroline’s cheekbones were high and pronounced, her skin abnormally pale. She had harder facial features than most of the girls her age, strong lines and a rectangular jaw, dark bushy eyebrows. She resembled a horse and, compared to her, Rachel was reminiscent of a wild bird. Rachel sat beside her and sifted through the contents of her bookbag, removing her cardigan and shaking it out like a feather pillow. I could tell she was the kind of girl who cared little for things that didn’t affect her directly, and the glint in her eye alluded to a continual search for amusement. Caroline appeared more serious and was the tallest girl in the room, almost six feet. She held herself without slouching, which made her height doubly pronounced. The seats around them were quickly taken up, and I was left to sit at the other end of the classroom, Sister Marguerite directing me to an empty desk with a small crack in its wooden seat. The desks were lined up so that two sets, on opposite sides of the classroom, faced each other, while the desks in the centre faced forward to the blackboard. The white tiled floor was slippery, recently washed, and dirt from our shoes instantly clung to it. The radiator gurgled on behind us and Sister Marguerite lectured loudly, tapping her pointer against the desks at the front for emphasis. Initially I was disappointed to be far from Rachel, but when the lecture began I realized I would be able to view her every movement, admire Rachel from afar.

  It was Francine’s association with Rachel and Caroline that I could not quite comprehend immediately. She was a mousy girl compared to them, a little more like me in that respect. Her reddish-blonde hair had unruly ends that curled in opposite directions, and the freckles on her face were unsymmetrical and blotchy. She squirmed in her skin whenever she moved, and she spoke demurely when forced to. Only later would I discover that Francine and Rachel had gone to elementary school together and their parents had lived on the same street before Francine’s father got a job that required him to travel, his wife accompanying him on the business trips. Out of the four of us, Francine was the one who wasn’t always forced to stay over for the weekend. She chose to and her parents didn’t complain, were perhaps thrilled that their unspectacular daughter had friendships, and didn’t want to interfere. Rachel genuinely liked Francine, and protected her as she would later protect me, but you could sense if they hadn’t shared a past and had met for the first time at St. X. School for Girls, they wouldn’t have been friends. It was from Francine’s mouth that I heard about The Sisterhood. After a grammar lesson on active verbs and a short quiz on the Confederation of Canada from which I was compassionately exempt (it being my second day), we were excused for lunch. The bell clanged loudly in my ears, the noise escalating instantaneously as shoes shuffled and voices called to each other, desk chairs screeched across the tiled floors, and doors opened and closed down the hallway. Francine rushed by me, knocking my arm as I swivelled out of my seat, while I worried about who I might sit with at lunch or if I’d be alone. She quietly apologized and continued scrambling to the other side of the room, where Rachel and Caroline were gathering their pencils and books.

  I waited outside the class like a shadow without an object as girls from other grades breezed by me. I caught the girls discussing their club as they exited.

  “We’ll have The Sisterhood meeting on Saturday,” Rachel said.

  “After the movie?” Francine asked, eager to keep pace with Rachel and Caroline, who walked side by side down the right side of the hallway as girls walking the other way came by on the left. I shoved my loose-leaf papers into my binder without ordering them and followed behind. The hallway was narrow. A new row of orange lockers had recently been installed, and their shiny rectangular boxes jutted out, forcing girls to brush arms and offering a stark contrast to the dullness of the white tiled floors. The cramped hallway worked to my advantage, because there was no room for someone to steal my place in the line.

  “Should we invite Yvonne?” piped Caroline, her long braid swinging along her waist.

  “Nah,” said Rachel. “We don’t need her any more.”

  Francine laughed uncomfortably. I judged at the time that she had not been part of their group long enough to make a
ny decisions or offer her own opinions. But that was just the way Francine was, content to follow. I learned quickly that most girls were cruel unless you could force them to respect you. They didn’t want to suspect you needed them. They needed to feel like they needed you. And I didn’t have anything to offer. As they turned the corner, Francine shuffled alongside Caroline. If the girl named Yvonne wasn’t invited, it was apparent Francine could not invite her herself. I wondered what she had done to displease them, but my locker was not near theirs, and I lost sight of them and could no longer hear their conversation. At lunch in the cafeteria, after standing in line for my food and scanning the area as I stood with my plastic tray in hand, content not to get bumped and spill my juice or mashed potatoes on my new uniform, I ended up sitting beside two girls in a grade lower than mine. They asked me questions about where I was from and how long I’d be staying, what I liked to do, if I’d seen this movie or that one. They seemed like nice girls, polite and friendly, offering me advice on which meals to avoid (they were right about the mashed potatoes, dry and crunchy) and how to know whether Mother Superior was having a good day or a bad day (depending on whether she used the long pointed stick when she taught); but I guess I’d already decided which camp I wanted to be part of, and watched as Rachel, Caroline, and Francine ate quickly and left the dining hall to go outside, Rachel’s blonde locks leading the way.

  “They won’t ask us to leave,” Rachel said, untangling her hair with a round brush and handing a dark-blue scarf to Francine, who proceeded to tie it around her neck.