The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  Here is Death, they said to me. Pluck.

  KIM DOESN’T UNDERSTAND. She thinks that if you want to be a nun, the Church lets you be a nun. I’m light-headed, having spent Friday fasting and then taking a glass of wine after Mass. It is no longer required that we fast, but I like to do it every Friday. My body feels cleansed after the purging. Sometimes I sleep better. Having not had the courage to take the sleeping pills Sister Ursula prescribed and let my dreams, whatever they may be, take hold of me, wine is my last resort.

  “It’s a much more difficult process than that,” I tell her.

  She has come to Mass this evening with me and a few of the other Sisters, and has offered to keep me company while I go through this month’s records for the rental of the basement. Besides the biannual rummage sale and the Lost and Found, this is my other responsibility. I am the person people call at the church office if they want to use the basement for events or meetings. My main client, of course, is Mr. Q. The government offers us a decent rate and is always on time with their payments. We hold addicts’ meetings, mostly Alcoholics Anonymous, Alanon, and Narcotics Anonymous, but there is also an Overeaters Anonymous group that meets twice a month, plus workshops on finding work, producing résumés, on keeping a marriage healthy and functional, on stress management for the modern mother. At least four evenings a week the basement of the church is rented. Outside on the steps the clients wait and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee beforehand and during breaks. Sister Katherine once said to Father B. that if it weren’t for the stained-glass windows and the heavy doors with a crucifix above the entranceway, a passerby could mistake our church for a rehabilitation centre. Father B. didn’t mind. He laughed. “Isn’t that what we are anyway? A rehabilitation centre for the soul?”

  I think Kim is kidding, anyway. A pregnant fifteen-year-old girl who wants to become a nun is a bad joke along the lines of “A bishop, a rabbi, and an insurance agent walk into a bar”—the kind of jokes Christine loves to tell me over the phone. She thinks it proves she’s accepted my lifestyle if she’s able to laugh at it. Once she even sent me a cigarette lighter in the shape of a nun, the fire shooting out of her mouth. I threw the nun lighter in the garbage bin outside the first chance I got when no Sisters could see me.

  “I realize that,” Kim says. She points to a blank spot on my calendar for an upcoming Saturday night. “You’d think something would be happening here. They had a wedding every Saturday at my other church. Every single week. I loved watching them from my house, hearing the bells ring.”

  “That’s the only time we ring the bell now, at weddings. We used to ring it for Mass, but the neighbours protested. Anyway, you can’t foretell these things,” I say. “People don’t fall in love on our schedule.”

  I wonder if Kim wishes to be married. I can picture her in a white dress with a modest train, an empire waistline to push up her small breasts, and a white veil over her olive face. She’d be stunning, virginal with her petite stature, if she weren’t pregnant. Yet I can still see her in my mind’s eye, walking down the church aisle while the Sisters sit in their pews, while Sister Josie and Sister Sarah are forced through our connection with Kim to attend the same event and bring the same flowers, while Father B. prepares for the New Testament readings. But I cannot conjure up a man for Kim; Kim walks down the aisle by herself, her middle swollen to the point of bursting, two weeks overdue, as if the marriage being consecrated were not between husband and wife but between mother and child. The daydream thrills me.

  Kim is in black today and could almost pass for one of us Sisters. She probably picked the black skirt and black sweater on purpose to blend in. She is still staring at the empty space on the calendar, circling it with her index finger.

  “I think I’ll phone back the gentleman who wants to give traditional Polish folk dancing lessons here. Maybe he’ll start right away.” He had spoken on the answering machine of the fact that dancing eases the soul. He also said he was willing to buy out someone else’s time slot, because the girls who take lessons are generally from wealthier immigrant families who want their children to carry on traditions from back home.

  “Do you have to fill them all?” Kim asks.

  “No, but I need to try. The Bishop phoned again last week. Father B. is concerned about money. It will ease his burden if I can.”

  I am about to dial when Kim speaks again.

  “Well, what do you need to do to become a nun?”

  I put my pen down on the booking calendar. “Are you serious?”

  “Why else would I ask?” says Kim, taking up the pen and biting the cap. “I mean . . . I’m just curious.”

  “Well, all right. First a prospective candidate for our convent, for example, needs to be recommended by a priest who’s known her for at least two years and can attest to her character, her religious training, and to her honest desire to live a life in the service of God. Then she needs to have contact with the convent and the Sisters within for another two years after that. It’s like an internship or residency, so she can decide if the life is really suited to her needs, or if she would like to try another convent. Then she is also required to go through a medical evaluation. She needs to be in good health. A psychological evaluation including a personality test is also mandatory.”

  “What? Why?” Kim glares with distaste while doodling on a piece of scrap paper.

  “The life here is not for everyone. People think we live in silence and in solitude, but as you know we live with other people. More people than those on the outside do. We form an entire society, with rules and customs. A prospective candidate must be assessed as to whether she will be able to perform her duties, whether she will be an asset to the institution. Just like a job interview.”

  I am upsetting Kim. She doesn’t want to hear about the procedures. She wants to believe anyone can find refuge here if they so choose. She twists her lips and folds her arms in defiance of what I say to her. The cuffs of her sleeves extend past her arms, hiding her fingers. I wish we had a pamphlet on hand in the church to answer these questions, like those they have in the hospital for various medical conditions. Are you sleeping well? Have you gained weight? Ours could say: Have you heard voices? Do you think living with forty or fifty other women is your ideal vision of life? Kim doesn’t want to be a nun. But she does want to live here, I gather. And she knows she can’t stay. Her time is running out.

  “Is it your soul you’re worried about?”

  She does not answer, regards my question as condescending. Or misunderstanding. I’ve never been good at assessing which when someone is silent.

  “Are you worried about God?” I prod again. If Kim can barely talk about her child, who will become a reality in the next two months, I’m not sure why I think she’ll be able to talk about God. But she tries.

  “I want . . . want . . . I want . . .”

  I can relate. It is difficult to ask for what we want, especially when we cannot know if the request is acceptable or not.

  “You want to be saved, maybe? From your life?”

  Kim unfolds her arms, her thin ringless fingers peeking out from her sleeves. She makes a motion with her thumb as if trying to pinpoint her words before speaking them.

  “I want comfort. I want to feel safe.” Her eyes reveal an earnestness I’ve rarely encountered from her, or from anyone. She is stripped bare in front of me now. This must be how my mother looked when I listened through the walls and she asked father why she was being punished. Did she too want comfort and safety? I do not know how to answer Kim.

  “Do you think that’s what nuns have? Comfort and safety?”

  “No. I guess not,” she replies, unsatisfied, dropping the pen on the table and placing her hands flat out, squarely on her knees. “I know you live a hard life and all. But don’t you feel good? Like you’ve been given something, I mean. That someone loves you? Maybe that you understand the mysteries of life?”

  The Lord works in mysterious ways. Father B. lectured on
it in Mass today. He would be pleased that one of his fold has been taking the time to meditate upon his teachings.

  Oh, Kim, those things have never mattered much to me. I don’t think the Lord works in mysterious ways. People live. People die. Some have babies, some do not. Some are poor, others are rich. Some get married, others stay single. A man gets hit by a car crossing the road to meet his lover. A child falls off a playground swing and wounds her knees. A bullet shatters glass. Body counts rise. People blow out candles on birthday cakes. We all return to dust and ashes. This seems fairly clear. Death, the equalizer of all life. His ways are not mysterious at all. In fact they are quite predictable.

  But you, Kim? You are mysterious to me.

  The mystery is why we carry on. Why any of us carry on. I glance at Kim’s belly and think that it is mysterious. Not because it is life. But because it need not be.

  “Comfort is for the dead,” I say. “Death is backwards.”

  Kim laughs and I have no idea whether what I’ve said is funny or if she’s laughing at me. Or maybe she’s laughing at the idea she could have wanted to be a nun at all after living with the lot of us. Especially when she has to deal with our odd talk sometimes and our badgering and our harassing her to eat. She also knows that all of her motions and movements are recorded, noted, and discussed. That even we, who have come together under what would seem to be common beliefs, disagree with each other continually and have as much or as little in common with each other as strangers meeting at the coffee shop outside our church. Kim is more confused now than when she first entered this place. She is probably starting to learn that this is the real mystery of us all.

  ON ASH WEDNESDAY, AFTER a solemn Mass in which our choir did not perform, but sat in the front pews on the left side of the church, Rachel and I went outside before afternoon classes.

  Rachel had just checked the crack in the wall, under the brick at the corner, and was holding in her mittened hands a message from Patrick, rolled up, which she did not unravel. On her forehead was Father McC.’s thumbprint where he had blessed her with ash. We hadn’t spoken in over a week, since I had been home for my mother’s funeral. I had hoped my father would keep Christine and me longer, but he gave us up as soon as Aunt Heather was on her plane back to England. He shipped us off to get back to work, he said. But really he was paralyzed by my mother’s death, wandering around the neighbourhood in his nightclothes, sitting up late by the fire watching the embers turn black. He had packed away none of her things, floating through the house like a ghost, haunting her, haunting the memory of where she had been. He mumbled few words to himself, but twice I caught him fingering her discarded rosary, saying, “There is no one to remind us any more.”

  Christine put up little fuss, which surprised me. She left with barely a sound, her school bag strap across her shoulder, a taxi waiting to take her back to her school, as a doctor had instructed my father that he shouldn’t operate a vehicle under the medication he had been given to get through the week of visitations, the funeral, and the wake. It was I who had a tantrum.

  “Please . . . don’t make me go back. Don’t make me,” I pleaded, catching up to him as he paced up and down the hallway, my arms tentacles trying to find the right place to latch on to.

  He avoided me, shaking his head, pounding his hands against his sides. His breath smelled strong and sweet, and I knew he had been drinking after Aunt Heather departed. He had taken a bottle and a glass of ice and had closed the door of his bedroom. He hadn’t showered or brushed his hair, which had an enormous cowlick—the kind Christine would get that Mother flattened out with water and a comb.

  “Daddy, don’t.”

  I didn’t know how to explain that I couldn’t go back to St. X. School for Girls knowing Bella was gone and my mother with her. My only consolation was that at least my mother had company. But it frightened me too. I imagined she had traded my love for Bella’s. What haunted me most was that I was sure Bella deserved her love more than I did.

  “But Daddy, I don’t know how—”

  My father locked himself in the washroom, pretending to take a shower. The water ran down uselessly, as I could see through the crack in the keyhole of the door that he was sitting on the toilet seat, fully clothed, with his head in his hands. Not crying, but in a posture of prayer or sickness, an anger shaking his entire body like a tremor. I knew the ground below him was frozen. Like the ground my mother died in. My father had turned to ice.

  “Does he want to see you again?” I asked Rachel, pointing to her note.

  “Who cares? He’s not that great. I’m going to throw it out.” She didn’t throw it out, though there was a trash can beside us, and she refused to read it in front of me.

  We sat on the remains of a snowman in our winter coats and boots. The air was crisp and Rachel’s hair flitted across her face. My cheeks were cold, and I rubbed them with my mittens, blowing hot air onto my fingers to warm them up. Some of the other girls were having a snowball fight, the white balls flying haphazardly through the winter day. Sister Beatriz, a nun whose primary job was supervision, walked around the fence, supposedly the chaperone of our lunch hour, ignoring them and their game. It was my first day back and Rachel had not mentioned anything to me about my mother’s death, although the nuns had informed the girls, and Father McC. had said the Ash Wednesday Mass in her name. Her silence hurt me; I wanted Rachel to acknowledge what I had been through. Since my father was unable to comfort me, I ached for Rachel to.

  “Esperanza is leaving,” Rachel said finally, tucking her note into her zippered pocket. “She told me so. At the end of term.”

  “We’re all leaving at the end of term,” I answered. St. X. School for Girls was a junior school, and those of us in the upper year would enter various high schools the following fall. We would need to start all over, at the bottom rung, making friends and finding our place in the new order.

  “I know, but I kind of figured she’d always be here.”

  Rachel’s green eyes glowed amidst the whiteness as she looked up and caught a snowflake on her chin.

  “She’s getting married,” she said, getting up from our stump, brushing off her coat. “I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.”

  Neither did I. The night I caught Esperanza with Mr. M. came back to my mind. Certainly Mr. M. would find out she was getting married and leaving the school. But then again, as I had reminded Rachel, we all were, and Rachel being an only child, he would no longer have any reason to come back to St. X. School for Girls. It occurred to me then that he wasn’t going to lose Esperanza, or Rachel, but all of us; his many daughters. He would be forced to stay at home with his wife, absent in mind if not in body. We were sentencing him to a life of loneliness.

  I followed Rachel to the door, where I thought we would enter, but instead she sat down on the steps, muddy from the slush mixed with the dirt on the soles of boots coming in and out, the constant traffic.

  “You know what they think about Bella, right?” Rachel asked, her left hand in her pocket, digging around, taking out a tissue to wipe her nose.

  “Yeah.”

  It was Caroline who had told me how Bella was found. Not Rachel. Caroline, who had heard it from Esperanza, before Esperanza was told by Mother Superior to keep her mouth shut. She would have told Rachel anyway at some point, but she told Caroline the day it happened, unable to contain herself. She told her because there was no one else to tell, having informed the nuns that they needed to call an ambulance. Caroline said Esperanza was crying; she kept crossing herself and saying that our school was a bad place. Haunted, Esperanza had said. Haunted since before we came here. The dead here. The dead here stay. Haven’t you heard them, crying in the night? Asking to be dug up. The children with their eyes covered died not knowing where they were. “A bunch of nonsense,” Caroline protested. “Just fooling with our heads because we call her Witch. She was just saying things because she’d found her and was scared.” But we all knew the rumours, had played upo
n them in The Sisterhood meetings: the tales of the nurses who cared for the sick and laid them under the floors because there was no room to house them. The children without parents, without relatives, their arms broken, or lungs failing, their hair and teeth falling out, their skin filled with lesions. The orphans.

  “Esperanza believes it,” Rachel said, after noticing my distress, thinking it was because I thought we would get caught for what happened to Bella. But I wasn’t afraid of that any more. The funeral was over and no one suspected us of anything. Rachel told me the silver candle holder was in the garbage. I wished it had been burned, but at least it had been delivered to the outskirts of the city, to a dump. The nuns only suspected Bella of a crime she never had the need to commit. “She believes Bella did it . . . it, you know?”

  I didn’t want to imagine it. The nuns and the doctor could not figure out what object Bella had used to perform the abortion. There was nothing but blood and sheets around her. There was no likely object in her room nor in the washroom when they checked. Bella had washed away the blood in the shower stall, and she had taken her bloody washcloth with her, where it was found amongst the piled sheets. In the end they decided it wasn’t necessary to know. Desperate girls used whatever was around—a coat hanger, knitting needles, eating utensils. They assumed Bella probably didn’t know enough about such things, certainly not enough to know there were men and women in the downtown streets who would take your money and escort you to a place to have it destroyed; she was so scared that she obviously told no one about her plans. They didn’t question her strange bruises and the object that might have caused them. She was dead; that was all they needed to know.

  “Well, Esperanza said it’s always the quiet ones you need to worry about, the ones you’d never think of doing anything. She knows about the stuff said about her . . . and she said she’s never been stupid.”

  The cars on the street drove by slowly, with their windshield wipers on, some brushed free of snow, others with up to half a foot on their roofs. Rachel watched them with an envious expression. She didn’t want to be here any more than I did. We needed to get out, far from the place of Bella’s death, far from our own guilt.