care unit bed. The difference was that I chose to undergo the rigorous training and was free to leave. I couldn’t leave Rosary—I was a prisoner.
One afternoon an eighth grade girl came over to my bed as I woke from my nap. She had short, curly, dark-blond hair and thick pink-rimmed glasses. Her royal blue school uniform blouse fit tightly around her arms. The top of my head reached to her waist.
“Come with me,” she said. “I’m supposed to give you a bath.”
She led me down the hall by the hand.
This bathroom looked as large as a ballroom. Like the dorm, the walls were white with dark wood wainscoting. Several overhead lights hung down with bare bulbs sticking out of silver cone fixtures. The black and white square floor tiles were several times larger than my feet. Little light got in through the narrow windows. A large, institutional bathtub sat in the middle of the room. A bar of Ivory soap lay in a silver tray near the water taps.
The girl turned on the water tap and helped me undress. She showed me where to hang my clothes on some hooks. She walked over to a metal cabinet and took out a white towel, which she placed on the floor near the tub. She turned off the water. Steam rose from the high surface of the water like the wisps of smoke from my mother’s and aunt’s cigarettes. I hugged my arms around my chest to warm myself in the cold air.
“Get in the tub,” the girl said.
I felt the water with my hand, the way Margie taught me to do at home.
“It’s too hot,” I said.
She swished her hand through the water.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Sister said to give you your bath or neither of us will get any supper.” Her voice was louder now. I thought she must be angry.
I couldn’t move, stiff like one of my dolls. I didn’t want to get into that hot water because I knew it would hurt me, but I was also afraid of this girl. On the other hand, the threat of missing supper didn’t bother me at all.
“It will burn me,” I cried.
Suddenly the girl picked me up and put me into the bathtub feet-first. I screamed from the pain of the scalding water, but she held me down. Her fingers dug into my arms as she struggled to push me farther into the burning water. I screamed, “Please, please, please let me out.”
The bathroom door crashed open. Sister Mary Joseph ran in, yelled at the girl to get away from me, and picked me up out of the water. She gently wrapped me in a stiff towel. She inspected my bright red legs, which stung the way my face did after my mother’s slap.
Still carrying me, Sister Mary Joseph rooted around in the metal cabinet draws and took out a big jar of Vaseline. She sat down on the floor, held me in her lap, and gently spread the Vaseline on my legs. I didn’t complain that it hurt every time she touched my skin because it felt so good to lean against her and have her take care of me. I almost felt safe.
If my mother noticed burn scars the next time I was home, it didn’t bother her enough to take me out of Rosary. It’s unlikely that Sister Mary Joseph reported the incident—the Catholic Church keeps such things secret. After this, though, only the nuns gave me my baths.
Medical school would help me realize how much I’d suffered as a child. I’d learn in a pediatrics lecture how to recognize the signs and symptoms of child abuse. I listened in a frozen state, remembering my own abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to take care of me.
I’d learn in microbiology about a condition called scalded skin syndrome, in which an infection with certain strains of Staphylococcus bacteria causes skin to blister and peel off, as if boiling water had been poured onto it. Until they heal, patients are vulnerable to dehydration and infection with other bacteria. After my scalding at Rosary, I felt exposed, as if my protective coating had been peeled away. Until I could escape that school, I was vulnerable to attack.
At Rosary, there were safe times of day and there were dangerous times. I felt safe with my kindergarten teacher and the other students in my class. Sister Mary Joseph wasn’t the cuddly type, but she had a kind voice and smiled frequently. But when I wasn’t 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
