doesn’t show much interest in her work,” they told her mother at parent-teacher meetings. “Nothing seems to interest her. She just does enough to get by.”
“Preoccupied,” was the sternly delivered verdict of Sister Lumina. “She seems totally preoccupied with something outside of her school work.”
The English and home economics teacher, Sister Anne Rochelle, was more forgiving.
“I think she just needs lots of encouragement. I sense something going on inside that head of hers, but she is more comfortable keeping it to herself right now. She needs time to find herself.”
“Find herself, my ass,” was the seething response Adele Mugan spat out, pounding across the school parking lot on her shiny beige high heels.
Twice a year Adele patted clouds of talcum powder under her plump arms, shellacked her bright red fuzzy hair firmly into place with hairspray, greased her mouth with tangerine lipstick, and dressed in her Sunday-best beige to attend the mid-term parent-teacher evening sessions. Twice a year she returned home, stormed up to her daughter’s room, bent her face to within an inch of Cathy’s, and told her that she had had a long talk with each of her teachers.
“And they have my full permission to watch your every move, young lady, do you hear me? I will not have any nonsense going on behind my back. You are there to learn and nothing else.”
Cathy, who was nearly always seated at her desk during these encounters, kept her head bent respectfully, taking care not to move her eyes too much lest she be accused of not paying attention and earn a smart slap across the mouth. Living with her mother was like living with a pool of gasoline. But occasionally, with extremely obsequious posturing by Cathy, Adele might grow bored and wander off to watch television. So Cathy kept her head down and her eyes still, suffering Adele’s hot breath and spittle landing on the side of her face.
During the school terms, Sister Anne Rochelle tried to cheer Cathy out of her lethargy with praise and overly jolly encouragement. Circling the classroom, talking, she often stopped behind Cathy and laid her hands gently on the shoulders of her shy, nervous pupil.
“Cathy, you can tell me the answer to this one. It’s right up your alley. Just take a moment to consider and then tell us what you think.”
The smooth, white, damp hands of this nun, weighing down on her shoulders like servings of cold porridge, always repulsed Cathy. There was something presumptuous about them, the way they landed without invitation, claiming her as some sort of pet.
“Hello, hello. Anybody home in there?”
Within seconds of the hands landing, cold, moist thumbs would begin to slowly, rhythmically stroke the bare flesh at the back of Cathy’s head, running upwards, disappearing into her hair.
“How’s that feel? Hmm? I’m trying to get the blood flowing to your brain.”
Cathy wanted to shrug, shake the hands off and scream, “Leave me alone!”
But she didn’t dare.
“Just relax and give us your answer, Cathy.”
Answering would make the hands go away. So Cathy stuttered out some sort of brief answer and then dropped out from beneath the hands back into the safety of her seat. There she poured all of her energy into burying her emotions before someone asked her what was wrong; what was the matter with her that she couldn’t ever look anyone in the eye, that she never seemed to want to talk to anyone? She told herself that everything was fine; no one had noticed anything. Then she opened her eyes as wide as she dared without attracting attention, tilted her head subtly backward, and looked at the ceiling so that tears wouldn’t drop down her face.
By contrast, Sister Lumina, the homeroom and mathematics teacher, never touched anyone except by way of her withering remarks. She remained rigidly upright behind her desk at all times, vigilantly surveying her pupils with her mica black eyes, her arms folded and hidden inside the wide black linen sleeves of her habit. Behind her back, the students referred to her as “Lipless Lumeanie” and “Nolips.” This was because at the spot on her face where her lips should have been there was nothing to indicate the presence of the instrument of her scorn but a small horizontal slash. Even in profile, a mouth was not even slightly hinted at by either an upper or a lower lip. When the slash in her face parted for her to speak, teeth the colour of maize, as hard and cruel as her remarks, ground their sharp, jumbled edges together in sound.
Occasionally this nun thought she could prod Cathy into working by embarrassing her in front of the whole class with a sneering remark about her laziness.
“In the name of efficiency, I see you have maintained your devotion to the path of least resistance, Catherine.”
Cathy did not react outwardly to this treatment any more than she did to Sister Anne Rochelle’s touch. She merely kept her head down and waited for the moment to pass. In the silence, her sweaty fingers quietly rolled a pencil back and forth in its groove on her desk. Sometimes, with her head bowed and her voice barely audible, she responded with a brief, mumbled answer to a question, hoping to shift the nun’s black-eyed glare away from herself. This reaction, of course, convinced Sister Lumina of the accuracy of her assessment of Cathy.
On the last day of school, in the year that Cathy was fifteen, Father McCoy came into the Grade 10 class to hand out final report cards. He took the cards from Sister Lumina and began circling the room, his black linen cassock making delicate little swishing sounds as he passed up and down the aisles. He read aloud selections from the character assessments of each student. Cathy had to wait for twenty minutes before he came to the M’s. By then, she was trembling. The instant she heard her name called, she rose swiftly upward, a balloon, a kite, passing right through the ceilings and floors of all five storeys of St. Joseph’s, through the roof and up past the tops of trees until the classroom and her desk and herself sitting in it became small specks below her.
“It says here that you appear to have potential that you do not live up to, Cathy, that you are secretive and uncommunicative. Is that true?”
From afar, she saw her body rise to stand beside her desk and look the priest in the chin. She was a slight girl, thin, standing a full head shorter than most of her classmates, with coal black hair, milk white skin, and violet-blue eyes that flagged, unmistakably, her Irish heritage.
“I don’t know, Father.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know whether you have secrets or not? That seems to me to be an easy enough question to answer. Just tell us, yes or no? Do you have any secrets?”
“No, Father, I don’t have any secrets.”
“Why would your teachers say that you have secrets, then?”
“I don’t know, Father.”
“Ah! You don’t know. The famous repeating answer. You sound like a parrot with only one trick, do you know that? I wonder if I can get her to say anything else besides ‘I don’t know.’ Does she ever say anything else to the rest of you?”
With both eyebrows raised in expectation, he looked out over the tops of the students’ heads. The girls shifted slightly in their seats, glancing sideways at each other. Father McCoy turned back to Cathy.
“Now
