style="font-size:15px;"> After we were out of the teacher’s sight, the big girl pinched my arm.
“Ow,” I cried.
“That’s so you don’t tell on me,” said the girl. “Or next time I’ll pinch you harder.”
I arrived at the cafeteria in tears.
“What’s wrong with her?” asked the nun who monitored the lunchroom.
The girl shrugged.
I wasn’t averse to all food at Rosary. I coveted the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches that another kindergartner, Marie, brought each day. Her mom cut off the bread crusts for her, which made the sandwiches even more enticing. One day Marie gave me a quarter of her sandwich—she must have noticed my hunger. The taste was even better than I had imagined. The next weekend, I asked my mother to make me a sandwich like Marie’s.
“Cream cheese is Jew food. We don’t eat cream cheese.”
I didn’t know what Jew food was. She made me cottage cheese and jelly sandwiches instead, and she didn’t cut off the crusts. The bread was soggy, and little curds fell out the back of the sandwich when I took a bite.
My morning sickness at Rosary wasn’t an early case of bulimia—my fingers were too short to reach the back of my throat. No, this was real, honest-to-goodness heaving my guts out, like I was trying to exorcise something evil inside myself, something that made my mother banish me. I don’t recall lunches or dinners at Rosary, but I must have eaten very little. Over the next several months I steadily lost weight and soon looked like a skeletal version of myself. I was starving to death.
I learned in medical school that pediatricians refer to this experience as “failure to thrive.” With just basic needs met—food, shelter, and loving caretaking—most kids will eat, grow, gain weight, and develop cognitive and emotional skills. Failure to thrive occurs when something goes very wrong, and it can be deadly: children raised in orphanages with minimal human touch have an increased risk of dying. The nomenclature is unfortunate, implying culpability on the child’s part. More appropriate would be to label the adult with “failure to parent” or “failure to care.”
The nuns must have been concerned about my not eating and weight loss because they began to give me a sandwich each afternoon in the dormitory when the older girls were still in class. Sister Mary Joseph cut it into quarters just the way I liked it. Sometimes it would be spread with molasses, which made me gag, but other times it would be filled with peanut butter and honey, which I liked. None of the other girls were given food in the dormitory. I knew they would have been jealous.
The kindergarten class was half-day. As the only boarder in that class, I was on my own in the afternoons. One winter day, I ventured on to the playground. I shivered in my coat and wool hat, as I sat on a wooden merry-go-round and idly pushed myself around with one foot. An image of a man scurrying away sticks in my mind. He wore a brown overcoat, a thick scarf, and a brown fedora pulled low on his head. Later, I’d tell my mother a boy put a stick into my bottom and it hurt to go to the bathroom. I wonder what really happened to me that day. Was the stick just a stick, or was it something else? Was the boy just a boy, or was it an older male? Whatever did or did not happen that day, it’s clear that I was vulnerable. No one was watching out for me.
Frequently, I wandered the hallways at Rosary, not sure what to do with myself, feeling lost. The nuns did have me take a nap in the afternoon, so someone must have tracked me down occasionally.
Sister Mary Joseph supervised the dormitory. At night she wore a white muslin gown with matching robe and cap. As with her daytime costume, a string of beads hung from a black rope around her waist. She told me these were rosary beads. I thought maybe they were named after the school and wondered if they hurt her legs when she slept on them.
The dormitory followed a bedtime ritual. The girls went in small groups to brush their teeth. Sister Mary Joseph stood outside the open bathroom door to make sure they were making progress, while also keeping an eye on the rest of the room. After all the girls finished in the bathroom, Sister Mary Joseph told us to kneel by our beds with our hands folded, our heads down, and our eyes closed.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art though amongst women . . .” After Sister Mary Joseph finished the Hail Mary prayer, she would be quiet for a few seconds, and then say, “Dear Lord, thank you for our blessings today. Please help us to be good and holy girls. Amen.”
“Amen,” the girls said in unison. I wasn’t sure what “amen” meant, but I said it too.
“Girls,” she said, “remember that nighttime is for sleeping. All lights need to be off now. If you have to go to the bathroom, be quiet and don’t turn on your light. The nightlights will be on, and you’ll be able to see your way. Be quick and then go right back to bed. No stopping to see your friends. If any of you need me in an emergency, you know where my room is, right at the end of the dormitory.”
It felt comforting to hear her say these things, but she didn’t come over to each girl’s bed to tuck us in. I didn’t dare get up because Sister Mary Joseph had said that we were supposed to stay in our beds unless it was an emergency. Some nights the bigger girls would sneak into the bathroom after Sister Mary Joseph’s room went dark. I’d hear them whisper and giggle. One night, through the open bathroom door, I could see them eating toothpaste. Sister Mary Joseph suddenly appeared.
“What are you girls doing up?” she asked. “You know you should be asleep.”
“We were hungry,” said the six-year-old whose bed stood next to mine.
“Come along now,” said the nun. “Breakfast will come soon enough. You need to make sure you eat all your dinner so you won’t be hungry at bedtime.”
I could understand why they were hungry. I’d barely tasted any of the congealed food the kitchen workers glopped onto the boarders’ trays. But even if the meals had been as good as at home, I wouldn’t have wanted them. My throat clamped up at the thought of eating there.
I lay awake most nights at Rosary. The nightlights around the room caused dark shapes and shadows to appear on the walls. I tried closing my eyes, but the darkness under my eyelids frightened me even more than the shadows. I could hear various noises: a bed’s springs squeaked as a girl tossed around in her sleep, an arm hit the wall, a doll’s head thudded on the floor, a girl called out “Mama.” In the months I spent there, my only deep sleeps were on the weekends at home.
On particularly bad nights, when I’d cry from terror, Sister Mary Joseph would take me to her room and let me sleep in her bed. She wasn’t Margie, but it was so comforting to have her nearby that I’d drop off to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I doubt if Mother Superior would have approved. Maybe Sister Mary Joseph came from a large family, or maybe she’d learned over the years how challenging boarding school was for the little girls.
Looking back from the perspective of a mother and grandmother, I am grateful that Sister Mary Joseph cared for me on difficult nights. While I found it comforting, it could be a dangerous situation for a vulnerable child at a boarding school. If my mother knew about my sleeping in the nun’s bed, it didn’t seem to concern her.
In my thirties, on night call during medical training, I’d again sleep in strange institutional
