a smirk. I nearly gasped. He was perfect—smart and handsome and personable but also a touch shy to make him sweet. He made me feel more special in that moment than the men I dated, sometimes slept with, so I wouldn’t have to be alone. After that, whenever he said Mass I thought good but walked out the side door and didn’t greet him. He was a priest. Besides, the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was celibacy. I’d been running from it ever since I was eight and, sitting in St. Bernadette’s one night, I felt God calling me to become a nun.
It was after five o’clock Mass on a Saturday, and I was headed out the door when something made me pick up The Tablet’s Special Vocations Issue and stay a while. Nestled into hewn rock high above the altar was the Blessed Mother in a beautiful white dress and powder blue sash with fourteen-year-old Bernadette kneeling beside her and gazing into her face. It looked like a giant circle of love surrounded them, but not one that made me feel left out like I had ever since Nellie was born. I walked a few feet down the long aisle, sat down in a pew, and opened The Tablet. There in the centerfold in big bold letters was GIVE YOUR LIFE TO GOD. I stared at it for a while unsure why God would want jealous eight year old me to give my life to Him or what that even meant until I turned the page and saw picture after picture of smiling nuns and priests. God was telling me to become a nun. I was sure of it. Why else had I picked up the paper that week and not another? Why weren’t there any pictures of regular people? Why did it say Give and not you Can give? I knew nuns and priests marry God, and I felt a tug on my heart, but I was embarrassed and afraid. When I got older I wanted a husband I could see and feel, who would talk to me with a real voice. I wanted to feel special and beautiful, the way I did when James Gardini touched my hair in school, not plain and invisible the way I did during Princess Hour when my mother and teenaged sisters transformed the kitchen table into a pink baby spa and took turns bathing Nellie’s cherubic, glistening body. It felt like there wasn’t enough love even though Baby Jesus had promised me there was the previous Christmas Eve when He whispered it to my heart during Communion. It felt like his Father was giving me an order like Papa always tried to give Mommy. Sometimes he’d pound his thick fist against the dinner table, and I’d jump.
I brought The Tablet home that night but didn’t say a word. I was afraid if I talked about it, I’d make it real and God wouldn’t leave me alone. I filled out some of the return cards for more information, but I never mailed them, and then one day The Tablet got thrown away with The Daily News. I still went to Mass every week even when my mother couldn’t take me, but I wouldn’t stay afterward anymore, and as the months went by, the calling dimmed, though not my hunger. One day when my mother was kissing Nellie all over and calling her Gioia, joy, what she used to call me, I cried out, “What about me?” Janine and Julie looked at me with open mouths, but my mother narrowed her eyes like I was mean, which devastated me. From the moment Nellie was born, my mother saw her blond, fair-skinned self; she didn’t want Nellie, who was the baby like her, to feel as insecure as she had growing up in the shadow of older sisters. For the first time in my mother’s life, she wasn’t working and could enjoy being a mother. She had also almost lost Nellie. The doctor had told her that because she was thirty-five and had had tuberculosis, the pregnancy could kill her. The appointment for the abortion was scheduled, but the night before, twisting and turning in bed, my mother knew she’d never be able to answer to God or live with herself. Nellie was a miracle.
If my father had been there for us, I don’t think I would’ve been as needy or jealous. The only time I had with him was a few minutes on his lap, but he’d either jump up nearly dropping me, or he’d fall asleep with his arm across me like a bar. Even though my mother worked the same grueling hours in the pastry shoppe as he did, he believed it was her job to raise us and wouldn’t help with anything not even to run to the pharmacy to get us medicine. She didn’t mind the hard work or the serving; they fulfilled her. But she couldn’t stand that he was never home for us, that he was mean. When I came down with recurrent bronchitis at three—probably from his chain smoking—and she had to stay home with me for weeks, he blew up. I imagine my father yelling, “Non puoi!” the huge vein in his forehead throbbing as my mother shouted back, hands on hips, her face pulled in a little in case he tried to hit her, “Watch me!” Sometimes he’d wear her down so much, she’d take us to Grandma Giulia’s or one of our aunts for the night, or she’d lock him out. It got so bad once that she packed our bags and took us to Kennedy Airport to board a plane somewhere, but Aunt Anna and Uncle Dom showed up at the gate just in time to change her mind. For a while my father would do better, take some time off to be with us, but it didn’t last, and he’d be back to driving him and her into the ground. Then, after seventeen years of second chances, when I was nine and Nellie was one, she told us they were divorcing. I stormed out of the kitchen demanding, “Who’s going to be my father now?” What I really wanted to say but didn’t dare was, Bad enough you dropped me for Nellie. Now you’re sending away the man who kisses my hair and calls me Bella?
Nellie was so gorgeous with golden locks and such a fungita, pouty lips, that none of us could keep our hands off her. Her looks were only half of it. Once Julie had a friend over who had an enormous pimple on the tip of his nose, and two year old Nellie said, “What’s that ding on your nose?” Even my mother hid a chuckle. There was no way I could compete with that. When Nellie misbehaved, my mother screamed and punished her and cancelled our plans, but then they’d snuggle and make up like I wasn’t there. The fact that I was growing chubby and awkward made me more insecure. My mother did everything for me, but I felt I couldn’t say what I really felt without upsetting her, so I kept it in and made believe I was perfect. In fourth grade, I passed a note to my friend Leslie that said I wanted to “do it” with some boy whose name I don’t remember, but I used the nasty word Frankie LaVerde taught everyone in school. In sixth grade, when I was far enough from home I started rolling up my skirt. In seventh, I hid in the Brooklyn Public Library to read the dirty parts of Judy Blume’s Forever. One summer, I even bullied two sweet, overweight kids in the neighborhood.
When my teachers took us to church, I looked forward to it, paid careful attention, loved the clean way my soul felt after receiving Penance and Holy Communion. But it wasn’t until I was fourteen that I really started searching for Jesus. Initially I’d chosen a large communications high school, but I was intimidated by crowds, so it was hard for me to make friends. I wandered the loud hallways alone until I got to the quiet library carrel where I listened to “You’ve Got a Friend” and imagined Jesus singing to me. When I transferred to a Catholic girls’ school the following semester, I still felt lost, because everyone had already made friends. I started wearing the cross I received at baptism and showing up to Prayer Group every Tuesday morning where a Sister of St. Joseph led a faith sharing. There’d be a candle burning and a song like “Here I Am Lord” or “Be Not Afraid” playing, and I’d cry. The following summer when I turned fifteen and James Gardini asked me out, I told Julie, “If I don’t marry James, I’m becoming a nun.” I was trying to keep my hopes low, so I wouldn’t get hurt, but I also had a feeling that I wasn’t meant to get married, that it wasn’t what God wanted, or what I was born to do. I don’t know if I remembered that night in St. Bernadette’s. I just knew that I felt more peace with Jesus than I did with James, and I sensed that would be the case with every boy. Still, when James kissed me, I started dreaming of taffeta wedding dresses. When he broke up with me two months later, I was crushed.
At the end of sophomore year, I threw out the poem my mother had written for me about how she hoped the world would never steal my innocence. After reading Ronald and Nancy Wilkins’ Man and Woman in Sister St. Paul’s religion class, the only book from high school that I saved, I wanted to remain pure, but the thought of it made me feel more invisible. A lot of the girls in my school teased their hair and wore diamond ankle bracelets their boyfriends bought them and hiked up their skirts higher than I did. Except for the occasional awkward boy I met at a dance, I felt that no one ever saw me, as if God had thrown a sheet over me to keep me for Himself. In spring of senior year, when my friend Leslie found The Nautical, a bar that let us use fake ID, I fell for Gary who I made out with even though he didn’t buy me drinks and who cancelled on me a week before the prom. It only got worse in college where I fell for more Garys. I even fooled around with one who had a girlfriend. I
