I still loved Julie Andrews and did an excellent impersonation of her singing “My Favorite Things.” Agnes knew that, so I thought her comment unnecessarily catty, but I chose to ignore it. She’d recently grown tired of her best friend, Susan, and I sensed a breakup coming on. Though I felt guilty about it, I listened to her complain that Susan was boring and didn’t have any original ideas.
Agnes and I spoke on the phone practically every night, dangling our legs off the bed and getting the most awful foot cramps. For some reason, we kind of enjoyed them, especially the way they crept up on us, like an excruciating orgasm, before they culminated in howling pain. “Isn’t it against the law for a nun to cut off your hair?” Agnes asked in between screams. “Isn’t it personal property?”
As someone all too familiar with the psychic ramifications of having a shorn head, I advised her to seek legal advice. “It’s a witch hunt,” I said. The pain was so bad I had to jump off the bed and hop around on my foot.
“Stretch your toes, stretch your toes,” Agnes yelled through the phone.
We ended the call as we always did, by singing the chorus of the Animals’ hit, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”
Soon we were plotting to do just that. It didn’t dawn on us that things might get better and that the nuns wouldn’t cut off Agnes’s hair or that I wouldn’t be friendless forever. It was imperative that we escape our hellish existence before we wound up in Danvers, like our new favorite heroine, Sylvia Plath. Plath actually wound up in Belmont, at McLean Hospital, forty minutes away, but to us it was all the same. We loved Plath for writing tortured poems, such as “Daddy,” in which she compared life with her father to living unhappily in a black shoe. We loved her for being a Mademoiselle guest editor and marrying a handsome British poet and moving with him to England. We didn’t love her for putting her head in an oven, but we understood where she was coming from. She had to get out of that place, if it was the last thing she ever did, and, sadly, it was.
Many of my friends at St. Augustine’s had gone to Our Lady of Nazareth Academy in Wakefield, which, unlike Danvers or Peabody, didn’t stand for going crazy or shopping. It stood for wicker. Named after Cyrus Wakefield, a former grocer who discovered the many uses of rattan, the town was best known for manufacturing wicker furniture and baskets. When considering high school, I hadn’t given it a second thought, but Agnes thought we should transfer to Nazareth. Though she’d be deserting Susan, she confided that she wanted me to be her best friend. That was all I needed.
“You want to do what?” my mother said. “Your father won’t hear of it.” But he did. The minute he got home.
“Patricia wants to go to another school,” she yelled from the other side of the powder room, where he’d taken temporary refuge. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
At dinner, I explained that the nuns were going to cut Agnes’s hair, and my mother, looking at Nancy, said, “Maybe we should send you to that school.”
“And I’m getting D’s in science,” I added. “I won’t be able to get into college.”
I started to cry, and fearing that I might wind up in Danvers, my parents relented, and I applied to Nazareth for sophomore year. As long as you were Catholic and could pay the tuition, you were in.
A few weeks before I was set to leave junior high, I looked down at the feet of the A-girl next to me in homeroom. I couldn’t believe it, but she was wearing ghillies. “I like your shoes,” I whispered. After homeroom, we started talking and she invited me to her house. I worried that it was a trap and that all the A-girls would gang up on me, but she was the only A-girl and it turned out her name started with C—for Carol. She said she’d loved my shoes the first day of school, but they didn’t sell them at Reinhold’s.
“We all wanted to talk to you, but you seemed stuck-up,” she explained.
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t stuck-up. I was shy and insecure and had a bad haircut.
“We can all be friends next year,” she added.
But we wouldn’t be friends because I wasn’t going to Andover High. I was going to the Wicker Capital of America, to a mediocre school that took anyone who applied, and I was going there because Reinhold’s didn’t stock ghillies.
7
A Bully in Brogues
A few weeks before heading to Nazareth, my mother and I went to a “uniform shoe” store that catered to the police, the military, and Catholic schoolgirls. A gray-haired saleswoman presented me with a tie shoe in rigid blue leather. I’d read Moby-Dick over the summer and the first thought that popped into my head was sperm whale. The shoes, especially in my then size 9, looked massive, with thick soles and a blockheaded mammalian shape.
“Are you sure these are the right ones?” I asked, hoping the saleswoman had given me the “Original Amphibious Navy Boot” by mistake.
“Nope, these are them,” she said. “They’ll last a lifetime, believe you me.”
“They’re what we used to call brogues,” my mother said back in the car.
Traditionally, brogues were sturdy, stout shoes that originated in Ireland and Scotland and were ideal for wet, craggy terrain. The leather was perforated to allow for water drainage. Though these didn’t have little holes, the word brogue perfectly captured their oafish appearance.
“At least they go with your uniform,” my mother added.
If you wanted something to complement a shapeless plaid skirt, itchy woolen sweater, and navy blazer with a baseball-size insignia, these were definitely the shoes.
“I hate them,” I said.
“Why do you always have to make such a big deal out of things?” my mother said. “No one asked you to transfer to Nazareth, but you had to follow your friend Agnes. So now you’re paying the price.”
After Labor Day, with a heavy heart and heavier shoes, I joined Agnes and my other St. Augustine’s friends at the Nazareth bus stop. It was several doors away from Reinhold’s, which was displaying its annual “back-to-school” collection in the window.
In comparison to my brogues, the shoes looked spectacular, and I immediately felt nostalgic for the good old days when I could freely waltz into the store, fight with my mother, and come away with something that didn’t scream “sperm whale.”
Across the street, I spotted Mary Kay Phinney, whose father owned the TV and stereo store. She was heading to Abbot Academy, the sister school to Phillips, and we were all envious that she’d been accepted. She waved but didn’t come over. She was an “Abbot girl” now, and we were practically invisible to her.
Everybody at the bus stop had dark tans from spending the summer slathered in baby oil. It made their teeth look extra white. I’d recently gotten braces on both my uppers and lowers. I’d wanted them for years, but my father was already shelling out a fortune on my regular dental checkups. Even though I brushed regularly, I developed cavities at a rate that defied modern dentistry. I never escaped Dr. Weinstock’s chair without having at least eight. Once I had a record fifteen. I’d constantly tell my mother that Dr. Weinstock was crazy, but she’d say that I thought everyone was crazy, which was true, but Dr. Weinstock, with his pronounced lisp, bad toupee, and fondness for the drill and mercury amalgams, was possibly the craziest.
“Oops, another catch,” he’d say, poking around with his pick. “I’m afraid it’s a cavity, you naughty girl.” Later, when Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory came out, he insisted on performing the movie’s theme song—“The Candy Man.” “Who can take a sunrise,” he’d sing. “Sprinkle it with dew.” Even with a drill and a wad of cotton in my mouth, he expected me to join in. What kind of sicko dentist sings “The Candy Man” to his patients? Answer: A dentist who’s bilking them by filling cavities that never existed. When the scam was exposed, Dr. Weinstock committed suicide and was found in his dentist’s chair. He’d either shot or hanged himself. I didn’t learn about it until years later, by which time
my mother had conveniently forgotten the salient details.
The Nazareth bus driver had to pick up the Lawrence kids first. Just as the Phillips students looked down on us as “townies,” we held the Lawrence kids in equally low regard. Though we’d never be so uncharitable as to actually refer to them as our social inferiors, they were city kids, and we lived in an affluent suburb. When the bus finally arrived, Agnes and I made our debut as “best friends” by sharing a seat. Sitting alone was about the worst thing that could happen to a girl, a public declaration that she was a freak and a loner. Though she might pretend that she preferred her own seat, stretching out her legs as if she owned the bus, no one was fooled.
A girl up front was trying to obscure her solo status by flirting with the driver, a wisecracking guy in his early thirties, with greasy, slicked-back hair. The girl was what my mother would have described as “cheap.” She’d ironed her dyed-black hair so that it moved in a solid block, and she’d artfully turned her eyebrows into the universal cheap girl shape: the tadpole. With her Yardley silver shimmer lipstick and kohl-rimmed eyes, she looked like a member of a girl gang. While normally I’d have felt bad for someone sitting alone, she didn’t elicit an ounce of my sympathy.
Nazareth, or Naz, as all the girls called it, was on thirty acres of woodlands that had once belonged to Charles Newell Winship, a knitwear millionaire. In 1947, Winship’s widow sold the property, including a beautiful Georgian Revival mansion, to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. Looking to expand their mission beyond their Kentucky home base, they sent one group of nuns to establish a girls’ school in Massachusetts and another to open a leprosy clinic in India.
Since I’d never encountered any Southerners before, I initially chalked up the nuns’ odd behavior to regional differences. People in Massachusetts call milk shakes frappés, which may sound strange to New Yorkers, so I vowed to be open-minded and perhaps even learn something about the South. But within weeks, I realized that the nuns’ strange behavior was nothing like calling milk shakes frappés. You couldn’t even call it eccentric, because that would imply a loopy Southern charm, and in no part of the country would these nuns be described as charming.
Our homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, had a flirtatious Blanche DuBois quality that was embarrassingly obvious whenever the school’s chaplain came to deliver his weekly lecture. I think it was about sex, but it was hard to know because he spoke in code. One day, he warned us against doing anything to “excite” boys, because we’d be responsible for them “spilling their seed.” I’d never heard the phrase before and had no idea what it meant. Did he think we were dating farmers? Sister Mary Elizabeth blushed and had to open a window because she was feeling faint. She then started wearing eye makeup, and while subtly and artfully applied, it did leave you wondering if she’d chosen the right vocation. Eventually, she disappeared. Some heard that she’d had a breakdown, others that she’d been “reassigned” to the leper colony. In any event, nobody really missed her, because there were plenty more like her.
Our English teacher, Sister Patrice was infatuated with a dead priest named Father Magee. She believed that he should be made a saint, even though he’d yet to perform any miracles. That’s where she came in. Before every English class, she’d lead us in the following prayer: “Please, Father Magee, send us a million dollars.” Who was Father Magee? And why did a nun who’d taken a vow of poverty need a million dollars? She told us that Father Magee had appeared to her in a dream, telling her that the money would rain down from the sky the following Friday. We were in the process of studying The Scarlet Letter, and Sister Patrice had chosen Christine, the most beautiful girl in our class, to be Hester Prynne. Christine was a groupie for the Fugs, the satirical rock band that attempted to levitate the Pentagon as a protest against the Vietnam War. The nun’s decision to make her stand on top of a desk with a big scarlet A on her chest was not purely coincidental.
While Christine read parts of The Scarlet Letter, Sister Patrice kept reminding us to pay attention to the story, although hers seemed far more thrilling. What if, like Hester Prynne, she and the priest had a daughter? I wasn’t sure where the money factored in, but maybe the girl had become a heroin addict and was mired in debt. With five minutes to go, we couldn’t stand it anymore and walked over to the window. The only thing that rained down from the sky was a leaf and a piece of plastic that caught on a tree branch. As Christine removed the scarlet letter from her chest, Sister Patrice fled to the ladies’ room. By the end of the semester, she was gone too.
The other students, even my old pals from St. Augustine’s, didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. Agnes was the only other person who hated the school, but by then she also hated me. I should have seen it coming. Girls who are capable of casting off one best friend will inevitably shed the next. Within several months, Agnes had ditched me for the girl with the ironed hair and silver lips, the one who was no longer sitting solo on the bus. Her name was Joan, and she was a junior.
Since Agnes was partly responsible for why I left my old school, it seemed particularly insensitive of her to dump me so soon after arriving at my new one. I wouldn’t have minded as much if she’d dumped me and then moved on to a life of gang violence with Joan, but Agnes couldn’t dump a girlfriend without also torturing her. She and Joan sat together on the school bus and whispered about me. They passed mean notes making fun of my braces. In ancient Greece, people painted a representation of their enemy on the soles of their shoes. Agnes and Joan took a different tack. After I told Agnes that I thought our Naz shoes resembled sperm whales, she and Joan began drawing pictures of whales in my textbooks. The drawings were in ink, and I couldn’t erase them. Time after time, I’d return to my homeroom to find an increasingly elaborate five-volume illustrated history of Moby-Dick under my desk. There were big whales, little whales, whales spouting water, whales with harpoons stuck in their sides.
Commuting to school was torment. Now I was the girl sitting alone, while Agnes and Joan sat behind the driver, giggled, and pointed at me. The ride home was the worst. Joan and some of the other girls had convinced the bus driver to stop every afternoon at a pizza and sub shop on Route 28. By then, it was already four thirty and we were only fifteen minutes from Andover and ninety minutes from dinner. Everybody except me would file out to order pizzas and huge submarine sandwiches and then eat them on the bus. It added another fifteen minutes to our forty-five-minute commute, prolonging my torture as the girl without a best friend or greasy sub.
One day, the Sister Superior called me into her office to let me know that she was aware of my “trial.” I thought, Okay, now she’ll put an end to it. But she said that I should view it as a “test from God” and that I should suffer quietly and with dignity. I’d seen The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn and found it infuriating when the Mother Superior asked Audrey to fail her medical exams as a show of humility. Eventually, Audrey left religious life, but I couldn’t leave Nazareth because I’d only been there a few months.
At the end of sophomore year, Agnes transferred to Andover High School and immediately cut her hair into a geometric bob. Given that she’d left her other school because she wanted to keep her hair long, the irony wasn’t lost on me, but at least my “trial” was over. Joan was riding solo again, spending the commute picking at her split ends and licking marinara sauce off her silver lips.
Moby-Dick disappeared for good.
During the summer between junior and senior years, I joined Andover’s new community theater group. I’d hoped Priscilla Lane might make an appearance, but after being a big Hollywood star, it was probably too much of a professional comedown. Only seven or eight people showed up, including two boys around my age, an elderly woman, and an attractive young married couple in their mid-twenties. The wife had been a theater major at Bennington, where she’d done Shakespeare in the nude or Strindberg in the nude or maybe she was just nude herself. I can’t recall all the details. Her
husband was a quiet man who wanted to open a bookstore. They seemed headed for divorce.
Due to our small size, we couldn’t embark on anything that required a Greek chorus or multitudes of peasants, so Euripides and Chekhov were out. The group’s founder, an attractive middle-aged woman who spoke with an Eastern European accent, suggested Edna St. Vincent Millay’s one-act play Aria da Capo. It featured the traditional commedia dell’arte characters of Pierrot, the melancholy poet, and Columbine, the beautiful amorous ingénue, along with two murderous shepherds and Cothurnus, the Masque of Tragedy. She explained that Cothurnus was not a mythological figure but the name of the high, thick-soled lace boots worn by actors in Greek tragedies. She seemed to be looking in my direction. My Naz shoes had finally found their métier.
The Bennington grad volunteered to direct. She had waist-length brown hair, winged eyeliner, and full lips, and wore dangly ethnic earrings, lots of rings, and shirts with plunging necklines. I hadn’t the slightest idea how such an exotic creature wound up in a run-down community center in Andover. Neither, I suspected, did she. “Mrs. Bennington” confessed that she’d vastly prefer to be working “off-off Broadway,” and that St. Vincent Millay wasn’t Pinter or Beckett or even her freshman-year roommate, who created a whole new kind of theater that involved astrology and Navajo blankets. Nevertheless, she’d do what she could with Pierrot and Columbine, describing them as Punch and Judy types. To my delight and abject fear, she cast me as Columbine. A cute boy named John was Pierrot.
“So, shall we start?” She looked at me.
“Pierre, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!” I said, sounding ludicrously like Katharine Hepburn. I’d recently watched The Philadelphia Story and had been practicing her accent. Oh, Dexter, I’ll be yar now, I promise to be yar.
“John?” Mrs. Bennington said.
“My only love, you are so intense! . . . Is it Tuesday, Columbine? I’ll kiss you if it’s Tuesday.”
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