The Guineveres (5 page)

The Guineveres knew exactly what Father James was referring to, and in some ways he was right. As we brooded churlishly in the chapel, as we repented and bewailed our fates, outside the convent the War had already been declared. There were soldiers in the War, boys who would fight, boys who would become injured, grievously so. Some would die. But we could think only of ourselves in this moment. We didn't care to know how a war a continent away could impact our lives or that it would. It did. But that day, while we sat in the first pew of the small chapel at the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration Convent—and despite the War—we were sure Father James was wrong.

To The Guineveres the outside meant leaving behind our histories as throwaways. We'd heard what the other girls said behind our backs in the cafeteria. They would cluster together at their tables, paying no attention to the way sound carried through the arched ceilings and into our ears.
Their parents just gave them away,
they whispered. Outside we wouldn't have to worry why our parents didn't write, even though we begged them in our letters, or why they didn't come back for us. Sure, they had problems, but why? Why us? We were tired of asking why, of throwing up our prayers to some higher being that ignored our pleas. Outside we could reinvent ourselves, create our own lives, become The Guineveres, the ones with an apartment and jobs, with boyfriends who worked in the city. We'd wear high heels and lace bras and lipstick, and we'd laugh, and men would clamor to light our cigarettes. We wouldn't have time to feel sorry for ourselves. Outside we could make something of our lives, something out of nothing, like the fishes and the loaves. And maybe then we'd find our families and ask them that burning question in person:
Why?

Because what we wouldn't have given to be
normal
girls; that's all we really wanted. We wished we could tell Father James that we knew the outside was far from perfect—we all remembered our homes—but it was better than convent life. That's what we thought we knew back then. But what we didn't know, what we couldn't yet because the spirit works in mysterious ways, was that the universe had a larger plan for us, one that was taking shape, even as Father James left the chapel, even as Sister Fran laid her now sorry eyes upon us and said in a perky tone, “God loves a gracious giver.” The Guineveres collected ourselves from the pew, straightened our skirts, and walked slowly to the cafeteria for lunch.

Although girls were assigned to beds in the Bunk Room, we could freely pick our seats in the cafeteria. As a result, the cafeteria became a microcosm of the convent's social order, designated by the very girls who resisted such order in the first place. We hated that Sister Fran assigned us to desks during Instruction or, with the zip of her whistle, commanded us to line up alphabetically by first name when we filed as a group from one room of the convent to another. And yet, meal after meal, you could find each girl in exactly the same chair at one of the cafeteria's long wooden tables that the Sisters waxed so often it felt sticky beneath our arms.

We divided ourselves by story. The Guineveres called them our Revival Stories, our reasons for coming to the convent. During Morning Instruction, Sister Fran had taught us that a revival was a moment of spiritual reawakening. She said we'd been given a second chance at an obedient life, a clean slate. “It's hard to stumble, girls, when you're on your knees,” she said, taking long strides in front of the chalkboard. We held our pencil tips to our notebooks. “I think this is an important point, and you should write it down.” We did as she instructed. For us, however, our Revival Stories were those moments when our eyes
really
opened to the truth. At the table closest to the serving buffet sat Lottie, Shirley, Nan, Dorrie Sue, and the other girls who still had contact with their parents, who received letters and birthday cards and postcards and—the lucky ones anyway—occasional phone calls that had to be taken in Sister Fran's office since that was the only phone at the convent. Ginny nicknamed these girls The Specials, because that's how they acted, even though they weren't special, not in our book. Their parents had good reason for leaving them, and these girls knew as much. They sat with stiff postures of superiority. Their noses tilted ever so slightly upward as though attached to the ceiling by an invisible string.

Barbara and Irene and Judy and those girls—they were stationed at the table nearest the Sisters, who arranged themselves at the far end of the room, closest to the kitchen. Win pointed out that these girls never appeared to be speaking to one another, and rightly so. They were the ones we called The Sads, the girls with the most depressing Revival Stories, the ones whose parents had died suddenly and sometimes violently: in fires, in automobile accidents, in suicides. The Sads hunched over their trays, even the weight of gravity making them despondent.

The next table over, the one right beneath the only large rectangular window in the room, sat The Poor Girls. These girls, Jeanette and Polly and their friends, we'd heard, had been taken away from their parents. Most of these girls came from destitute families, poorer than ours, even. The kind of poor that meant their ribs were showing like little accordions on their torsos when they first arrived. We'd heard the rumor that in Jeanette's Unholy Life, she used to eat only grease sandwiches made of bread and lard. She, unlike the rest of us, actually thought the convent's food tasted good. The Poor Girls were usually the first to return their trays to the bins; their plates never needed scraping.

Next to The Poor Girls sat Reggie and silent Noreen, just the two of them, all by themselves. They'd been at the convent for only a few months, and since they weren't much of a group, we didn't have a nickname for them yet. If we had, however, it might have been The Delusionals, because Reggie claimed that their parents were coming back for them any day now, just you wait and see. She swore to God—even though we were forbidden by Sister Fran from swearing to anything holy—that they weren't staying at the convent for long, just temporarily, not like the rest of us. Nobody believed her.

Reggie was broad-nosed and pear-shaped. She had short arms and big, fleshy wrists, and sometimes when she'd walk through the vaulted hallways, she'd stop midstride and say to whoever would listen, “When I'm out, I'll write you letters just so you don't feel so sad.” Reggie meant well, though she annoyed us, and we never knew when she was telling the truth. Her feathery eyebrows arched dramatically, giving her the constant looked of feigned surprise. When she first arrived at the convent, before she found Noreen, she had asked to sit with us.

“Is your name Guinevere?” Win had asked. Reggie shook her head.

“My dad almost named me Guinevere,” she said. “I swear.”

“This table's reserved only for
actual
Guineveres,” Gwen said, rubbing her lips with the guts of her grapes.

“You can call me Guinevere,” Reggie said, biting her lip and swiveling her wide body to scan the cafeteria. Her water glass sloshed as she steadied her tray. “It's my middle name,” she added, then scratched the inside of her ankle with the tip of her shoe.

“We're sorry,” Ginny said sincerely. “Rules are rules.”

“It's God's plan,” I added. Gwen smiled at me in approval, and Reggie found somewhere else to sit.

At the table next to Reggie and Noreen sat The Delinquents, a dead-eyed, slack-jawed lot. These girls could only blame themselves for their current predicament. In their Unholy Lives, The Delinquents had been a source of trouble, truants or users—the kind of girls you'd find in the backseats of cars smoking cigarettes that didn't smell like cigarettes. A table over from them sat the girls who were almost eighteen, the ones whose friends had already left and who'd be leaving the convent themselves as soon as their birthdays arrived. And next to them sat us, The Guineveres, who, as we rested our trays on the table, heard the other girls snicker in our direction.

“Guess you thought you'd
float
away,” Shirley hollered, cupping her hands like a bullhorn around her already large mouth, and at that the cafeteria roared with laughter so boisterous Sister Fran had to zip her whistle several times to call for order. The Guineveres poked our forks at the hard crust of the potato pie. We swallowed away the lumps in our throats. Despite the fact that we hadn't eaten since the funnel cake, we weren't hungry. None of us took a bite.

*   *   *

Our punishment required that immediately following Afternoon Instruction, during Rec Time, while the other girls visited the library or congregated in the basement for Ping-Pong tournaments, The Guineveres report to the Sick Ward on the east wing of the convent. Sisters Connie and Magda, who supervised the ward, dressed in all white when they were on duty, from their frocks to their stockings and shoes, and each wore a white paper hat pinned primly to her head. They were an odd-looking duo: Sister Connie was almost unnaturally tall, willowy and fair. Sister Magda, on the other hand, was short-legged and swarthy. They both had formal training as nurses and, we later learned, had even worked in a hospital overseas. It was hard for us to imagine a time when they were not nuns, a time when they were single young women on a boat to a foreign land. We pictured them standing on the bow of a ship, their long, silky hair blowing in the ocean breeze, their young faces tilted toward the open sky. We wondered what would make them want to return here to the convent when they could have traveled the world instead, the way The Guineveres had planned to do someday when we were older. We never did, of course—not together. But we couldn't imagine a future where we weren't together, where we didn't live the same days or dream the same dreams.

Ebbie Beaumont had also recently been assigned to Sick Ward duty. Tall and pretty, with dishwater hair she wore in a low ponytail that draped over her shoulder, Ebbie was almost eighteen, and we admired her for that fact alone. Her pin-straight bangs fell just above her dark brows, and sometimes when she was wringing out washcloths or scrubbing the floor, she'd blow them out of her face with a slow puff of air, as if she were exhaling cigarette smoke. Of all the girls who were almost eighteen, Ebbie, The Guineveres believed, was the most sophisticated, despite her Revival Story. Her mom, we'd heard whispered through the darkened Bunk Room, was a prostitute, like Mary Magdalene only less pious. Nobody knew what had happened to her dad. Ebbie had been placed on Sick Ward duty because Sister Fran discovered she'd been scratching tick marks on the wall beside her bunk with the point of her compass. When confronted, Ebbie explained in a calm voice, but one that contained a recognizable resentment, that she was tracking the number of days until she could leave the convent. “Then we shall make good use of your time here with us,” Sister Fran had scolded. “Every one of those tick marks will count.” “Yes, Sister,” Ebbie had replied politely, but we knew from her glazed look that she didn't care. In her mind, she was already gone.

Ebbie was quiet, but never rude to us. It was a generally accepted rule of the convent that the girls who were almost eighteen rarely spoke to the younger ones, so we didn't take offense at first when, on our breaks, Ebbie chose to sit in the corner of the courtyard alone, her back to the stone wall. Her knees were bruised purple from kneeling to scrub the floor, and she'd lean back her head and look up at the sky with a half-crooked smile, as if it were the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. The Guineveres looked up at the sky, too, to see what she was seeing. Above the trees, small planes sometimes left billowy white streaks, the sight of which reassured us that a different world existed out there and someday we would join it.

At that point, the Sick Ward was still just a repository of old men and women; rows of beds lined the white walls, parted by a wide aisle between them. This made the place feel like a church, especially when Sister Fran ceremoniously walked up and down the aisle when she visited, the hard bottoms of her shoes clunking on the linoleum, rhythmic like the ticking of a clock. “Christian charity, girls. That which you do to the least of my people…,” she would say. Most of the patients were like us—left behind, clinging to hope—and so we couldn't say we
hated
them, even though we pretended to. We were only girls, after all, hadn't yet learned to be kind, hadn't yet realized that we're all fighting a great battle. That's something Win says to me now; she regrets her behavior in her younger years, though I tell her not to. We all did the best we could.

The Guineveres usually kept to the Front Room of the Sick Ward, away from Ebbie and her domain, not because we were afraid of her but because we found her intimidating. It wasn't just that she was older, though that was certainly a part of it. There was an easy unflappability about her that we couldn't quite pinpoint. We tried to mimic the way she wore her uniform, which seemed utterly cosmopolitan: the waistline mid-hip, her socks just barely slouched, her shirt softened, on the verge of wrinkled, so that she always looked relaxed. In the Wash Room, we'd witnessed Ebbie and her friends dampen their shirts to remove the stiffness of the starch. They swung them over their heads to dry, like white flags of surrender. Of course, when nobody was looking, The Guineveres tried this, too, but the result was never quite the same.

The Front Room of the Sick Ward was reserved for the most lucid patients, the ones who occasionally got out of bed, the ones who didn't have regular coughing fits that left them breathless. It's not that we weren't allowed in the Back Room—we'd later spend a great deal of time there—but from the Front Room we at least had a good view out the windows, beyond the wall that lined the property and above, to the trees just starting to turn, their leaves tipped red like little tongues.

To begin our duties, we selected a Bible stacked in a black cabinet—the Holy Cabinet, we called it, though it was also full of board games and decks of cards and puzzles—and we stood by the bedside of an old man or woman, wrapped up in blankets like a mummy. “How are you doing today?” we asked, but we didn't often listen to the replies. We took the temperatures and pulses of our patients and recorded the vitals on the clipboard fastened to the bed. Sister Magda taught us to count the beats in the neck, since some of the patients had circulation problems.