The Kitchen Sink: Summer of ’65, the Nunnery

Welcome to another episode of The Kitchen Sink, bits of writing I did years ago that didn’t make the final cut for my memoir, Undertow (which included everything but the … ). Either they were off-ramps from the storyline or unnecessary backstory. In case you missed them, the first two Kitchen Sink episodes are:

The Kitchen Sink: The Catholic Girl Who Got Left Out | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)

The Kitchen Sink: Prisoner for a Day, 1972 | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)

But first …

Yes, I’m going to publish another book. Soon. It’s a collection of flash fiction (really short stories), poetry, and bits about the craft of writing and what a writerly kind of life is like. Stay tuned for more details. Target pub date is mid-November, in time for holiday shopping.

For more about book number two, here you go: News Flash: My Second Book Has Sprouted | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)

Now for another bit from The Kitchen Sink.

Summer 1965: The Nunnery

Before school let out in June, one of the Sisters pulled me aside and cast a peculiar Catholic light on my summer. Before I had the chance to get lazy, Sister Matilda solicited my help for a work day at St. Francis. Often students pitched in with cleaning up from the previous school year and getting ready for the next one. We would scrub black boards, dismantle bulletin boards, clean glass flower vases (the ones we filled with blossoms to honor the Blessed Virgin) and generally assisted the nuns with any tasks they needed doing. Serving The Church meant serving God, for every one of us Catholics, even for people like the President of the United States.

Right after President Kennedy’s assassination [Friday, November 22, 1963], some people, like my parents, said we Catholics had been outright attacked. I overheard their chats with friends on The Church sidewalk, before and after Mass. They speculated that Kennedy may have been murdered by someone who did not want a Catholic President. Some Protestants definitely did not like us, they said, and neither did the Jews, although we, like the Jews, belonged to a minority religion in this country. I heard that there were other people who thought Catholics weren’t even Christian. I heard these things repeated by my parents and their friends as they cracked open Chesapeake Bay crabs at the Knights of Columbus during Saturday night seafood feasts. Too bad so many people didn’t realize we were the One True Church.

When Sister Matilda drafted me for year-end clean up, it had been about two years since President Kennedy’s death, but it was always in the atmosphere like dust. My memory of school life immediately after his killing was that we were tense and alert like abused animals. In school, at least, we often seemed to function under a cloud of apprehension, not overtly expressed in conversation, but expressed nevertheless by the Sisters as they perpetuated with more zeal the already longstanding dogma that our faith was the only one descended from the Apostles. Sometimes this was said in a defensive way, insinuating that outsiders just weren’t as holy or acceptable to God as we were. Despite the fear flooding our parish in the aftermath of the President’s assassination, I felt our faith in God intensify. Vocations to The Church were promoted more often at school and from the pulpit. The Church was looking for fresh young advocates to heal the suffering in the world, as the Vatican Council had decreed.

The question from Sister Matilda

Sister Matilda had taught a few classes I had taken the previous year, and I avoided her. I didn’t like her sour disposition. That June day before school let out, she approached me somewhat enthusiastically, smiling when we met in her office, stating her end-of-year tasks would take only a day if only I could help her. They included redoing the bulletin board designs for her classroom, she said, betting that was something I would like to do. She was right. Maybe she pitched that specific chore because she’d observed my interest in arts and crafts. I’ll never know, but she ended her solicitation with a bonus—lunch. I said sure.

So, there we were, Sister and I standing on stepstools in her classroom, stretching to reach the strips of narrow bulletin board set above the chalk boards. She began a friendly conversation, asking about my plans for the summer. I told her about swimming lessons, family trips to Ocean City, and visits to our cousins across the Chesapeake Bay. Before I realized it, she swung the subject around in a totally different direction.

“What would you want to study should you ever go to college?” she asked. College? I hadn’t thought about college yet, I told her. My parents had not raised the topic with me. My older sister by this time had taken some college courses, but I hadn’t talked with her about how she liked them. A few years before this, up until I injured a toe in ballet class, I’d dreamt of becoming a ballerina. That physical art inspired me. Mom had taken me to professional performances at Salisbury State College in our town, and I’d been mesmerized by the dancer’s grace, the pathos of the orchestra’s music, and the romance and drama of stories like Swan Lake. But I had given up on that career since my feet didn’t seem strong enough. As for college, I had not thought about that.

A college education was something Mom had never attained, unlike my father, a microbiologist, who had earned his degree on the G.I. Bill after World War II. He had even completed his Master’s Degree after he married my mother in 1943. In my parent’s middle-class circle, though, it seemed to me as if it were more important for men than women to be college educated, although I knew my mother was smart. She had completed secretarial school before she met my Dad; was a talented, skilled dressmaker and homemaker; and an avid reader. To earn money for my ballet classes, she had taken jobs downtown in dress shops and then worked in the Public Library. She also volunteered her talents in the Women’s Guild at Church. There was no question about her hard work and love of The Church. I suspect the nuns admired her devotion to the parish and probably expected the same of me.

Nunnery sandwiches

At lunchtime on my volunteer day, to my surprise Sister Matilda invited me upstairs to the convent. It was a mysterious and private place, and I was amazed to be allowed up there. It was the third level on the school, partially covering the length of the building. To get there, Sister unlocked a door next to the Principal’s office revealing a narrow staircase. I followed her to the top where we entered a well-lit dining room with several long tables. Again, to my surprise, a counter and stools, like those at the soda fountain in Reeds Drugstore, stretched along the wall on one side of the room. My amazement grew even more when she cooked us grilled cheese sandwiches in a frying pan all by herself and added a pile of potato chips to my plate, an extra I was not allowed at home.

Having time with Sister outside the context of a school day took me a while to get used to, especially eating with her in the convent. After a few hours, though, she became more of a person to me—and a cook—not solely a nun and authoritative adult. She even disclosed that when she was about my age, she decided to be a nun and never regretted it, not even once.

After lunch, we returned to her classroom downstairs. We resumed our work and chatted about summer, but then she steered the conversation back to her being a nun and to serious things about me. She said she knew I attended Mass early in the morning before school without being required to; that I sang in the children’s choir; that I brought fresh flowers for Mary’s alter in the classroom all the time; that I helped other students with homework; and that I’d shown an effort to overcome my bad habits like talking too much (yes, she’d reprimanded me a few times herself). She also pointed out something no one had ever said to me—that I had a very private element to my character, which she thought was good. She also complimented me on my aptitude for what she called “theology,” since I did so well in Religion class and tried to understand God and our spiritual lives with Him. Finally, she came out with what I later realized she had waited to say all day: she thought I would make a wonderful nun. I should think about it seriously. That was the biggest surprise of all.

Underage thinking

She didn’t give me much chance to reply, though. She hurriedly went on to be sure I understood this: I truly would be serving God as a nun…emphasis on “truly.” She thought I would make a very good one, given my contemplative nature, as she called it, that private side of me she’d mentioned before. She reminded me I’d be putting my efforts to the very best possible use, since religious life was the highest vocation in The Church. The best way to serve God in this troubled world of ours, she declared as she pounded the stapler over top handouts for English class (about diagramming sentences) and set them in a neat pile, was to serve God through the one true Holy Roman Catholic Church. She paused after this, waiting for my response. I couldn’t speak. Even though I respected her, I felt shy about discussing so big a personal topic with her, and I couldn’t think of what to say. I didn’t even know how to talk about such a thing. Seeing that I had no immediate reaction either way, in fact I must have looked full of stage fright, she gently asked me to think it over. I said okay, I would.

I did think it over. And unbeknownst to her or anyone else, it wasn’t the first time I had. Whenever the Sisters talked up vocations, I had conducted a few chats with myself later. That day I had another chat. When I got home, I went upstairs and climbed onto the stool at my bedroom window overlooking our back yard. That was my favorite spot in the house. Sister would probably expect an answer when I next saw her, so unlike other open-ended chats with myself about this, that day I felt I should make up my mind. Back and forth went the pros and cons of the nun issue like a ball in a game of tennis. There, in the stillness, I hugged my cat, Dusty, gaining some measure of calm from his soft fur against my arms and his loud purring.

The pros? I knew the major one from the nuns, especially from that afternoon with Sister Matilda: being a nun was serving God and The Church, His church, in the best possible way. The cons? The major one, it seemed to me, was that nuns could not marry and have kids. I often dreamed of doing just that even if it was second best to nunhood. Being a good Catholic was still possible without entering the convent, I told myself. Or wasn’t it?

Pressure at only thirteen years old

From that back window I had a grand view of our woodsy backyard where our religion infused even that. It was filled with tall fragrant pine trees, bright yellow forsythia bushes, plenty of lawn, a clothesline, and in the far back a lovely white dogwood tree grew, one of many in the neighborhood. Mom had proudly told me the story of its blossoms, how their four petals bore the reddish marks of the wounds of the crucified Christ. The legend she cited said his cross had been made from a dogwood tree. Off to the side under a pine tree near the back porch was my altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Every May I assembled my private tiny shrine, installing a small glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary the Mother of God that I bought from The Church at the Christmas Bazarre. I would lay dandelions and small violets in front of the statue and say my prayers.

Directly below my window was Mom’s garden. When we’d moved to this house, she’d carefully transposed the garden setup from the backyard at our old house. It was a circle of small granite rocks around a bed of flowers with a birdbath placed in the center. I had helped Mom plant bright marigolds, violets, purple irises, pink petunias, white lily-of-the-valley, and orange day lilies that leaned towards the sun by day and closed up at night. I had helped her select the rocks from Rhode Island near the shore during our summer visits to Nana’s, my mother’s mother, in Newport. Each year we hauled a few more rocks home in the trunk of our car.

That’s when my decision hit me. Nuns could not have experiences like that. They could not make their own beautiful gardens whenever or however they liked. They had no home or yard of their own to do that. They sacrificed their freedom to do things like that when they made their vows to “marry Christ.” They even wore a silver wedding band to show their unbreakable commitment to him. Sister Matilda’s plea to work for God as a nun came back to me in wave after wave of emotional tugs, but I dismissed it now. Being a nun would be awfully hard, I figured, judging by what I saw the Sisters of Mercy going through trying to teach obedience to kids like me and giving up their personal lives. But being a nun couldn’t really be the only way to live for God. It might be the best choice, but I had a sense it wasn’t the only good one for me. Did I even have what The Church called a “vocation” to be a nun? How would I know? Nothing in my experience told me for sure that I did. These thoughts I kept to myself that day, though. I didn’t feel any need talk to my parents about the subject. Maybe I feared they would encourage me to heed Sister’s advice, since it was such a holy mission. Or maybe they had not thought seriously about the issue so would side with Sister, thinking she might know better about these spiritual things than they did. But I felt that the convent was no place for me and that was that. The main reason was that someday I wanted to get married and have children. I didn’t want to give up on that dream in spite of unhappiness I sometimes witnessed in my own family. No family was perfect, right?

Done deal

I waited until the fall to give Sister my answer when I started eighth grade, the last one our school offered. I didn’t tell her the first day of school, though. Or the second. Or the third. Worry over the possibility she would be disappointed in me and might try to talk me into entering the convent anyway, kept me at arm’s length—even farther—the back of the room. But one day I got up the courage to approach her after school, after my classmates had left for the day. I got up from my desk, buckled up my book bag, straightened my skirt, and determined to make this quick. She was erasing the blackboard up front.

“Sister, excuse me. Sister?”

She turned around, laying the eraser on its ledge at the base of the board. “Yes, Charlene. What is it?”

“Well, over summer I thought about what you said…you know about becoming a nun. When we were taking down the bulletin boards last June, remember?” I tried hard to smile.

She nodded expectantly and her black veil fluttered around her shoulders.

“I thought about it a lot and prayed to God about it, too. But…um…I just don’t think I can do it, Sister. I just don’t want to. Not right now, anyway.” I hoped she understood that I meant I didn’t want to now, or ever, without saying that outright. Apparently, she got the message. She nodded and smiled. To my relief, she raised no objections.

She thanked me for telling her and said, “I understand. You must follow the path that’s best for you. God will show you.” She patted me on the shoulder and sent me out the door. That was it. She probably knew I wasn’t ready for such a commitment. At least not then. In spite of the world’s need for love, justice, and improvement, and the Church’s need for fresh young advocates, I just did not want to get myself to the nunnery.

—THE END—

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene