around these people, I tensed with fear for stretches of minutes or hours.
One day I was walking down the hall from my classroom toward the girls’ bathroom. Two bigger girls approached from the other direction. I looked at the floor, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. Suddenly I was looking at two big pairs of black and white saddle shoes. I moved to the left to get around them, but they blocked my way.
“This is the little brat who told on me to Sister Mary Joseph,” said one of the girls.
I looked up and recognized the girl who had given me the scalding bath. Her face squished into a sneer. She pushed my chest with her fist.
“Know what happens to tattletales?” she asked.
I shook my head. She pushed me again.
“They get hurt, that’s what,” she said.
Finally they left me. Afraid to be alone in the girls’ bathroom, I ran back to the kindergarten room. The teacher asked me what was wrong. I stood there holding my legs together tightly, afraid I’d wet my pants. The teacher must have realized something was wrong because she called over to another classroom for a teacher to watch the kindergartners while she brought me to the lavatory. After this, the teacher took all the children to the bathroom at one time.
On Friday mornings, Sister Mary Joseph would tell me to come up to the dormitory after school to pack for the weekend at home. I would be so excited during the school day that I couldn’t concentrate. The nuns often found me wandering the halls outside of the kindergarten classroom as if I were trying to go home early.
Several of the girls didn’t leave on weekends. Some of them lived too far away for their parents to make two trips each week. Some, my mother told me later, were so wild that they had been sent to Rosary because their parents couldn’t handle them. I felt sorry for these girls but thought they must be really bad if their parents wouldn’t let them come home at all. They had a haunted look on Friday afternoons as we lucky ones packed up our weekend suitcases and laundry bags.
Not much happened at home on the weekends, but I loved being there all the same. After enrolling me in Rosary, my mother and aunt moved to the first-floor apartment of a brick duplex in Watertown. My mother and Margie worked, so weekends were for housecleaning. I loved helping with the cleaning because I got to follow Margie around.
On Sundays we went to 8:00 A.M. Mass. Afterward, my mother made Sunday dinner, which we ate around two o’clock. Then it would be time to get ready to go back to Rosary. As soon as my mother put my suitcase on my bed, I’d feel sick to my stomach. She called it “butterflies in my tummy,” but it didn’t feel like butterflies to me. It felt like I was going to throw up all the Sunday dinner I’d just eaten.
One weekend late in December, my mother didn’t tell me it was time to go back to Rosary. She didn’t bring me back on Monday, nor on Tuesday. I knew that Christmas was coming soon because Margie had put up our few decorations—antique ornaments she hung on a tree and an old crèche. Three personalized Christmas stockings my mother had knitted lay across the cherry veneer coffee table because we had no fireplace. Tuesday night Margie told me that Santa would bring me presents that night.
“What do you want for Christmas, Anne?” she asked.
“To stay here forever with you and Mommy,” I replied.
Margie bit her lip but said nothing. I don’t remember what presents I received but I loved being at home with Margie, who took the week off as vacation time. After a breakfast of French toast, we’d walk to the local park. Margie loved the seesaw and swings as much as I did. After a couple hours of play, we’d drag ourselves home for a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. Then I’d cuddle next to Margie on the couch while she read me a story. She’d tuck me in my bed for a nap and give me a little back rub to help me relax.
My mother was home during part of the Christmas break. I loved seeing her too, although I could never figure out why she got so mad at me. I wanted her to love me so she wouldn’t send me away again, but I couldn’t figure out how to make her love me. Too soon it was Sunday afternoon again. When my mother said it was time to get ready, I burst into tears.
“I don’t want to go back to Rosary!” I cried.
“You have to go. I don’t have a choice,” said my mother, firmly. She stood tall, hands on hips.
“But why can’t I just stay here?”
“Don’t be difficult, Anne. You have to go back to school. I can’t stay home with you. I have to work.”
“Margie could stay home with me.”
“Margie doesn’t want to stay with you. She’s not your mother. Now, go to your room and open up your suitcase so we can pack it.”
“Please don’t make me go.” I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up in my eyes and pouring down my cheeks.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Anne, if you don’t stop this bawling I’ll really give you something to cry about.”
My mother didn’t wait long; before I could catch my breath, she swatted me across my face. Then she did it again and again until I stopped crying. I went to my room, opened my suitcase, and threw up into it. My mother rushed in, and after she saw what I’d just done, slapped me even harder. That made me sick again, but I still had to return to Rosary.
My mother and Margie never visited me at Rosary, even though they lived within a couple of miles of the school. Sister Mary Joseph helped me compose a weekly letter to my mother. I told her what I wanted to say, and she printed it on a piece of paper. Then, I copied it over carefully onto another piece of paper. She put it in an envelope, let me lick the envelope and stamp, and mailed it for me. I don’t remember receiving any letters from either my mother or aunt, but on Valentine’s Day my mother did send me a card printed on a puzzle. Sister Mary Joseph read the message: “To my daughter, please be my Valentine. Love, Mom.” I loved pulling the puzzle apart and putting it together, over and over again. I had the message memorized and pretended to read it every time I assembled the puzzle. It was as if I was trying to piece together my fractured family, attempting to make sense of my life.
One afternoon in May of 1958, I woke up on a couch in Mother Superior’s office. The sun streamed in the windows and hurt my eyes. My head throbbed the way your hand hurts after being caught in a drawer. I desperately wanted to sleep, but a nun shook me each time I nodded off. I wished she would just leave me alone. To my surprise, my mother’s voice appeared at the edge of my consciousness. Maybe I’m dreaming, I thought. One of my knee socks was bunched around my ankle. I wanted to pull it up but didn’t dare move.
“She’s hurt her head, Doctor,” I heard my mother say. She must have been using Mother Superior’s phone. “The nuns couldn’t wake her up for an hour.”
There was a pause, then she added, “I don’t know why they didn’t call you sooner. They called me first to come over. I had to wait for a taxi to pick me up at work.”
Then there was another pause until she said, “Okay, I’ll bring her right in.”
Slowly, my memory cleared like a cloud-filled sky making a slit for the sun to push through. I’d climbed the ladder to the top of Rosary’s playground slide. I’d sat down at the top of the slide and carefully arranged my wool skirt under my legs. I gave myself a gentle nudge down. The third grade girl behind me, impatient at my cautiousness, bore down on me without waiting. She body-slammed me a third of the way down the slide, sending me over the side, headfirst onto the concrete. No nuns patrolled the playground—perhaps they were at afternoon prayers. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on Mother Superior’s couch with two nuns looking down at me as if I were a science lab specimen.
A yellow taxi took us to our doctor’s office in Brookline.