by Suzan Saxman
I was seething with rage. I wanted to explode. I wanted to leap out of my seat and shake her. But I didn’t. I controlled myself somehow. Tapping, counting, twitching. Still, I knew she killed those snakes and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could do such a thing. There was nothing holy about a person like that.
Sister Patricia called my mother.
My mother told me that I was so bad that I was going to grow horns on the top of my head. I ran to the bathroom and pulled back my hair to see if it was true. Were they showing yet? How big would they grow? If I had horns, could I charge the kids who teased me at recess? Could I charge the nuns? Could I fight back at last?
All the other kids loved Sister Patricia, but I seemed to bring out her vein of cruelty. I ate too slowly, in her opinion, and one day she grabbed my sandwich out of my hand and shoved the whole thing in my mouth until I felt like I was choking.
If kids chattered, she took a piece of red construction paper she had cut out and colored to look like a tongue and pinned it onto the child’s shirt. The tongues were long and red and looked vaguely obscene dangling from your chest. You were supposed to take them home and have them signed by your mother, but whenever I got them, I threw them away. It disturbed me to think of Sister Patricia, night after night, alone in her room, cutting out grotesque red replicas of human tongues to pin on children. Was that her only joy in life?
“Are heaven and hell real, Sister?” I asked as the years went on. “How come unbaptized babies have to go to Purgatory? What did they do wrong? Is it because of bad things they did in past lives? Because that would make sense. Why doesn’t God just forgive them and let them go to heaven and let them have a fresh start? Why does God punish suicides? Aren’t they already unhappy? It says that Noah was eight hundred years old, Sister. How can that be? Couldn’t he just have been coming back over and over again, one life after another?”
I didn’t ask these questions to be provocative, but as I realized how uncomfortable they made the nuns and priests, I began to take a kind of perverse joy in annoying them. Still, my spiritual hunger was real.
I wanted to know about God. I loved going to church. I loved the stained-glass windows, the bells, the smell of the incense, the smoke drifting up towards the vaulted ceiling. I even loved the rhythmic repetition of the prayers. Words said aloud have power as they send their vibrations into the air.
But Mass at my school was endless. The priest was just going through the motions in his self-satisfied way. The kids fidgeted and endured it. The nuns couldn’t wait for coffee hour and the plates of pastries. I sat there silently seething. The service was monotonous and it should have been electric. Jesus may have said that whenever two or three gathered in his name he would be there, but believe me, he wasn’t coming to this party. Why would he show up for stale Communion wafers and grape juice? He wanted home-baked bread and wine and joy.
I kept looking around for Him, for the angels, for God. I saw spirits, after all, but I didn’t see any in that church. None at all. It was a dead zone.
None of the nuns or priests ever talked to us about mystical experiences. They didn’t even teach us how to pray the rosary. We didn’t read the Bible. They wanted us to repeat back the words they told us, but not think about what they meant. It was a Catholic-generating factory, that was all.
“Don’t wear makeup; make sure your skirts cover your knees; watch out for vanity.” Those were the rules the nuns tried to drill into our heads. They were all about proper behavior and how we looked and acted. Although the most important rule was not to question what the nuns said.
Sometimes when I spoke in religion class the nuns just glared at me, sometimes they icily told me that I would have to study theology one day, and a lot of times they kicked me out and made me sit in the hall. But I didn’t shut up. I couldn’t.
The nuns wanted us to believe that God was a man with a long white beard who lived in the sky and was just waiting to trip you up and catch you. They didn’t put it quite like that, but that was the general feeling. They didn’t talk a lot about Jesus. It was the sixties and plenty of young men were beginning to walk around with long hair and beards and messages of peace and love, but the nuns hated the hippies. I had a feeling the nuns would hate Jesus if he actually showed up. He’d probably get a red tongue pinned on his chest.
I knew that the nuns didn’t have a clue what they were talking about when it came to religion. Their whole understanding of the universe was wrong, and I could tell they were actively bringing harm into the world. I was surrounded by blind, dumb, unthinking faith.
After one Mass, I asked a sister about the bells that were rung to keep away the demons. Like many things, I knew all about this, but I didn’t know how I knew it.
“What are you talking about?” she said, irritated.
“The bells have always been rung during church services to frighten away demons. I just wanted to know more about the demons, what they’re like.” I was thinking of the man in the black hat, but I knew enough, at least, not to bring him up. “Are they really dark and scary? If Lucifer was the angel of light before he fell, couldn’t they look like they were angels and fool us?”
“You are a very rude child,” Sister Helen said haughtily.
As I got older, I became more and more upset with religion class.
I had no exposure to other cultures or other religions or different belief systems, but in my heart I knew that the priests and the nuns were caught up in a colossal delusion. Why was Eve to blame for all the sin in the world? Was that why the poor Virgin Mary had to keep herself all covered up? Was that why the nuns had to hide away from life and love? Was that the only way to be good and pure?
I knew there was another Mary and that she danced and laughed. She had wildness in her. She took lovers because she reveled in love. She wanted to touch and be touched. I knew nothing about the Wiccan ideas of the Goddess, but I believed that the real Mother of God would know how to live life to the fullest. She wouldn’t be controlling and judgmental. She wasn’t prissy. She wouldn’t be embarrassed about the things that happened down there.
I got my period when I was eleven, and I had no idea what was happening. Basically, I thought this was another strange thing that only I was experiencing. My mother sent my sister to the store for pads and told me that I should never speak of this again. If I bled, I was to tell my mother that I had hurt my leg. That would be our code. Reading a Cosmopolitan magazine at the library on a Saturday morning was how I finally figured out what was really going on and that all girls got their periods.
Soon after this I began to hear bells in my room. They were beautiful, soft and tinkling. I knew that they were bells being rung in a church somewhere. They were both surprising and peaceful, their sound clear and pure. Other kids were listening to rock music in their rooms and I was transfixed by my bells.
“Do you hear them?” I asked my mother.
“There are no bells in this house,” she said adamantly.
But one day I heard her whispering to my sister, “The bells are coming from her room again.” My sister nodded furtively and they both shut up when they saw me.
I began waking up before dawn, at five o’clock each morning. No matter the weather or the season, I would go open my window and kneel before it, looking up at the sky. There was one light in the heavens that I found particularly comforting. Maybe it was Venus, the morning star.
I began bringing whatever book I was reading with me to the window. It might be The Secret Garden or Great Expectations or one of my beloved Narnia stories. I would get down on my knees, hold the book before me, and begin reading out loud.
I knew someone was listening. I knew someone could see me. I could feel the deep, still pond of memory held in the sky. Was I reading to the spirits of the dead or to the angels? I don’t really know, but I could feel the gratitude of my listeners. I was always very careful about the books I chose. They had to be classics. I wasn’t going to read Judy Blume to the heavens. I h
ave no memory of anyone ever reading me a book as a child. Not my mother, not my older sister, not my father. But I read to the dead.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, I did this. At eight o’clock my mother would call me down for breakfast before school and I would stand up, stiff from hours of kneeling, and put my book away. My father teased that I was going to wear out my knees. My sister called it my chanting. My mother never once spoke of it. My aunt Mary brought me a music stand so I wouldn’t have to hold the book. But I needed to hold the book before me. It was part of the ritual of my “morning prayers.”
I suspected I was participating in some ancient tradition from another life that I couldn’t abandon. I loved this time of day. It was my time. I didn’t have to face my family or the nuns or the other kids. I didn’t have to answer to anyone or try to behave normally. The whole neighborhood was sleeping, the world was quiet, and I could be alone with the spirits.
Years later, when I described this event to a friend, he told me about the medieval anchorites. They were women, often healers and mystics and seers, who lived in a small hut or building attached to the church. They were both a part of the religious community and separate from it. They lived alone, but they would open their windows to read the Gospels to the illiterate villagers and to offer counsel and advice.
Whom was I reading to?
I still don’t know.
I do know that I began to realize that the bells were welcoming. My mother was aghast at my becoming a woman, but something, or someone, in the spiritual realm was celebrating it.
I felt very connected to Mary Magdalene. I wasn’t sure she’d been a prostitute like the nuns said and my mother clearly believed, but I felt that she was an outcast like me.
Ten years later I would read the just-published Holy Blood, Holy Grail, one of the books on which The Da Vinci Code would be based, but as a young girl in the early 1970s in New Jersey, I already knew that Jesus Christ had been with Mary Magdalene. I just knew it. But I probably shouldn’t have brought it up in religion class.
“Couldn’t Jesus have had a child?” I asked Sister Perpetua, a giant old nun with hairs growing out of her chin. “With Mary Magdalene?”
There was dead silence in the room. Even the kids stopped breathing. Sister Perpetua looked liked she was about to explode.
“Of course not!” she spat.
I suppose psychologically there was a part of me that wanted my mother to revel in the full-blooded woman she really was, like Mary Magdalene, rather than hide behind the good lady she pretended to be, like the Blessed Mother. When any kind of sex scene happened in a movie, my mother would be aghast. “This is disgusting,” she would hiss. Yet as a little girl, I had sat outside her bedroom door each day while she “entertained” Steve. Wouldn’t she be happier just being with my father instead of sneaking around behind Daddy’s back? Wouldn’t the nuns be less ferocious with us if they were allowed to love whomever they wanted?
Wild images from a long-ago time often arose in my mind of myself dancing in the woods in the moonlight with other women. We were naked. We were healers. Needless to say, I didn’t share these particular thoughts with the sisters. Even I knew that there were some things you just didn’t say out loud or the nuns would have had to erect a stake in front of the Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child and burn me while toasting marshmallows.
When I was twelve years old, I saw the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon about Saint Francis of Assisi. I had always felt close to Saint Francis because of his love of animals. He knew animals had souls; I was sure of it. In the movie I realized that he also had visions, like I did sometimes. As a young man in medieval Italy, he went off to war, ended up in prison, and came back a changed man. In the movie everyone thinks he’s retarded because he’s so mesmerized by the flowers and in love with the birds. “Your son is touched,” people tell his father.
I knew what it was to have people think you were touched.
There’s a scene when Francis goes to church and he’s horrified by the gold everywhere and the elaborate rings on the priest’s hands. Francis starts to feel suffocated. “No, no,” he says. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” He starts pulling off his silks and satins until he’s stripped off all of his clothes. Naked, he heads out into the streets and gives everything away to a beggar.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I watched that scene. This was the message of Jesus. It wasn’t about stuff. It wasn’t about the nuns’ comfy chairs, endless meals, and fancy televisions in their residence. It wasn’t about saying these words or that prayer for protection. It wasn’t about eating a lamb at Easter; it was about bringing the lamb inside and recognizing it as a being just as important as you were. It was about kindness. It was about celebrating life.
I had a little money from my aunt Mary, so I went out and bought myself a Saint Francis medallion. I loved Saint Francis. Maybe he would protect me from the nuns.
“I’m looking for the psychic,” said a very put-together woman who came into my store.
“I’m her,” I said. “But I don’t do walk-ins.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“It’s always an emergency,” I noted. “I’ve already done my two readings for the day.”
“But I need you. I need to talk to my husband. Today.”
“And how long has he been dead?” I asked.
“Two years.”
“And this is an emergency?”
The woman sighed heavily, put out. “Yes.”
I don’t know why, but something about her intrigued me. “Okay,” I decided. “C’mon into my room.”
“Do you know how my husband died?” she asked when we sat down. It was her way of testing me.
“He killed himself.”
She nodded. “Tell me what his name was.”
“Michael,” I said. He was already in the room. “He was happy to go, but he stays close to you, doesn’t he?”
“I can’t get rid of him!” she exclaimed. It was the first real emotion I’d seen her show.
“And you want to get rid of him?”
“Yes! No! I don’t really know! I miss him, but I’m ready to move on, too!”
“No,” I told her. “He doesn’t want you dating.”
“I know; that’s what’s making me crazy.”
“He says you’re his wife and you’re his responsibility.”
“Then why did he kill himself?”
“You know he worked for the CIA?”
“Of course.”
“Did you know he was a gambler?”
She gasped. She swallowed and nodded. “I thought so, but I was never sure.”
“Well, he was,” I told her. “And he owed $350,000…”
His wife interrupted me. “That’s the exact amount.”
“He couldn’t think of a way out, so he went into the garage and turned on the car—”
“That’s what he did.”
“But he didn’t want to stop being married to you. He did it because he loved you. He didn’t want to destroy your life together.”
“I want him close,” she whispered. She was crying now. “But I need to see other people again.”
But Michael was telling me the whole time that he was willing to go, only his wife wouldn’t let him. She kept begging him to stick around, but then she’d be going on dates with other guys, like she couldn’t make up her mind. “Is that true?” I asked her.
“Why can’t I do both?”
“He’ll go or he’ll stay. It’s up to you. But he says you have to choose.”
“But I don’t know! I want both.”
I felt like I was doing couples therapy with a dead man and his dysfunctional wife.
“It wasn’t my fault he killed himself, was it?” the woman asked.
“No. It was the money, the debt, and the fact that if the CIA found out about it, he’d have lost his job and been blacklisted.”
She nodded.
“You know, you don
’t need me to talk to him. You knew all of this before you came in here, didn’t you?”
She looked up at me through her tears.
“It’s funny,” I said. “Now I see your husband and he looks like a boy, like he’s twelve years old. He’s with another boy. They’re both wearing red swimming trunks.”
“That’s Michael and his brother! His brother died of a brain aneurism when he was fourteen.”
“They’re together again. That’s why your husband is happy. You can let him go. He’s happy now. He’s a little boy again. It’s all right now. Just let him go.”
4
All They Can Do Is Bite Ya!
We moved from Staten Island to a haunted house in New Jersey when I was ten. No one admitted it was haunted, of course, but it was. It was the kind of old, dark house that gives you the chills and raises the hair on your arms when you walk into a room. It was filled with all kinds of unsettled spirits.
There are so many different kinds of hauntings. People don’t have to have been murdered in a house to fill it with ghosts. They can have been miserably unhappy and their strong vibrations will linger behind. When you buy a house, it’s not a bad idea to cleanse the energy, whatever it is, before you move in, although even then, there are spirits that will linger behind, if they choose to, if they need something. I have to kind of wonder if my mother didn’t invite the bad spirits to come out of the woodwork in that house. She was very upset because just when we moved out to New Jersey, Steve went down to Florida to live with his parents, and she couldn’t see him anymore.
Between her muffled fury and the unhappy ghosts, that house was very frightening. One day soon after we moved in, I knocked on the door to the attic and it knocked back from the inside. It unnerved me and I had to tell someone about it.
“Mommy, Mommy, the door knocked back at me!” I shouted.
“Don’t be silly,” said my mother dismissively.
I pulled my fears back inside of me where they made me jittery and upset. I was always ready for something terrifying to happen.