There were nuns at Assumption School during my primary years, though fewer with each passing year, just like at my formerly Catholic college. Some wore habits, different than those of my lay teachers in second, fourth and sixth grade. None wore pants, or anything but bland, modest, mono color skits and sweaters. Veils and prominent crucifix necklaces for everyone. The convent next to the church lot must have been progressively drab and persistently lonely.
My odd numbered years were taught by nuns. I’d like to think there was design in that. In first grade, after an unexpectedly rocky start in public school kindergarten, Sister Rosemary sat behind the teacher’s desk on my entrance to parochial school, all of us in our costume. She taught letters and words, numbers, addition. I learned something else too. How to lie. That I learned on my own, very early in the school year. Sr. Rosemary taught lots of things, but the lesson on lying didn’t come until the day before summer.
Sister’d started our first week with letters printed on perforated manila folder-type paper. Under fierce religious control, we were permitted to tear the letters, row by folded-over row. Fold and separate. Multiple copies of each letter were needed. Then folding, ripping some more, building alphabet collections to last the year. We began writing immediately, typesetting our names and the school’s on our desktops, Sister pinballed from desk to desk dispensing prim guidance. It couldn’t have been more difficult than our names, perhaps something simpler. I knew I didn’t have to bother completing the task, can’t say how. So I didn’t.
While I swirled the letters around the wooden desktop, Sister visited my small desk eventually. There may have been a sort of smile as she told me I could return my letters to the box. As far as she was concerned, I’d completed my letter arrangements. She conveyed her sense that I already knew just how to do what she’d asked. I did not disabuse her of that understanding. I was reading before Labor Day that year, certainly, but still, lie of omission. I knew how to spell, and sin. I was a front row kid, with three siblings at Assumption. Sister assumed much. I did learn deceit, even if I couldn’t have spelled it at the time.
Sister Rosemary’s lie, at least the first one I identified, came during our last week at grade one. Parents hovered, mysterious and silent in our classroom one hot day. We played a game very new to us prospective second graders–a once-only entertainment. With some fanfare, crepe paper glued to a brown box style, Sister announced her need for some help in the next school year. The paper slips she pulled from a small box contained the names of two students who’d help Sister in the fall. Or, at least, there were slips of paper, two names, a box and one big lie.
The parents maneuvered the winners out of the room quietly, immediately. Lisa Halas, one of the two, had only a mother there. I found Lisa again in high school. I hadn’t seen her since she’d won her prize that afternoon some ten years earlier. Lisa was again in the same year as I, so the holding back hadn’t held. We never spoke or even met eyes in three years. She did not join me in graduating. I’m not sure she remembered me.
The confusion created by these special prizes and parents, the excitement and strangeness of it wasn’t something we could question. We didn’t, anyway, and some even complained, wanting to be teacher’s helpers as well. At home, my mother explained something about these anomalies–the no-father family. And the girls, how they were smart, but only enough to have to take first grade twice. Mom let me in on the lie. Because I actually could have spelled out any of the words asked of me and my manila alphabet, I didn’t feel guilt then or now. I’d rather a child lie to an adult, a nun even, than a nun to torture and manipulate any child. I’d learned the trick-a-nun lesson all by myself.
I remember Lisa’s name because of the special role she played in teaching another crucial first grade lesson. There was a toilet in our classroom in a small windowless room at the back. We were children, after all, but pupils were to raise their hands and ask to go. Suffer them to go unto god, not unto themselves. Lisa blithely failed to live up to first-grade expectations. She broke the rules doubly even–she had not raised her hand to discuss the urine running down her leg. Who knows how long the puddle under Lisa’s chair was there, calmly radiating out onto dismal grey tiles. Seconds, minutes, but not hours–Rosemary was attentive.
I don’t think even a moment passed between the nun’s understanding of the situation and her vocal condemnation of it. Sister spat words at Lisa in the interim between the religious woman’s first step toward the girl and the moment both of them, connected, disappeared behind the bathroom door. From the pebbled glass in the door’s top half came only Lisa’s wordless muffled sobs and the much louder, sing-songy reproach flowing from our Sister.
A mop bucket preceded them out of the bathroom, Rosemary steering with her right hand on the mop’s handle, left hand buried somewhere near the neck in the Lisa’s hair and clothes. Each, everything, landed at The girl’s desk. I don’t know that desks and chairs near the puddle scraped away, even unconsciously, under the power of the students whose desks bordered the you-can-smell-it-too problem. It’s understandable if they did. It’s just reflexive.
Again, mercifully again, the details of the mopping and squeezing, sounds of drops on galvanized metal, are not part of it in my mind. They resounded though, those drops. For Lisa and all of us. Lisa certainly would have finished the job, and there’s the lesson in it, at least for me. See things through, and avoid any and all eliminative functions when at Assumption School. The troubling consequences of this lesson manifested for me first in Sister Catherine’s grade three classroom. Doctor’s visit was required that time. We were just kids, after all.
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