The Painted Mirror

BFFs and then some: A trip to Boston to see my lifelong friend, Susie, brought me back to the hallowed halls of St. Bridget's Elementary School and the nuns who shaped my youth.

I shifted from left to right, the tight Buster Browns making my feet hurt worse. Good grief, when would this be over? I tried to wiggle my big toe, then my baby toe, and repeated the exercise on both feet as a sort of self-afflicted hypnosis to lessen the degree of my humiliation. Then I heard it:

"Miss Natale!" I WILL ASK YOU ONE MORE TIME! Nine times eight equals WHAT? " Seventy two. I knew it was 72. Why wouldn't I say just say it? "If you do not tell me the answer you will write it on the board 72 times!" I stood there as my classmates giggled. Others shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Such was the intensity of the moment that one such classmate recalled this exchange over 40 years later, when we met up on a business trip: "Why didn't you just tell Sister Irmita it was 72?"

She was scary as hell and I was frozen in my tracks, that's why. All of us third graders at Framingham, Massachusetts' St. Bridget's Elementary School lived in fear of the old nun. On that particular fall day in 1968, I had time to ponder Sister Irmita's nasty ways as I scrawled "9 x 8 = 72"on the chalkboard, 72 times. She's a big crabapple, I lamented. Old, crotchety, with milky gray skin and wrinkled jowls similar to Winston Churchill's Bull Dog, she was an unpleasant site indeed. I regularly whiled my days away in her humid classroom, my eyes following one jowl to the next as they embraced the thinly-drawn lips that rambled on about arithmetic, perfect penmanship and Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And when she locked her piercing blue eyes on you from behind those horn-rimmed glasses? Your knees went weak and you had to go to the bathroom.

Sister Irmita's vitriol was matched only by a rare brand of fury bestowed upon us by Sister Mary Joseph, the bombastic, senile nun who had it out for me from the day she saw me passing a note to Patty Morris. It was all personal hellfire and brimstone from there, growing worse in intensity after my mother spoke with the principal about how I was being treated. Sisters Irmita and Mary Joseph were joined by a host of other women, the names of whom I can no longer recall but whose long black habits brushing the floor, rosary beads dangling loosely over large white collars, and tight, stiff headpieces attached to flowing black veils are forever etched in my mind.

These were the nuns of St. Bridget's Parish. Women of God. Married to Christ. Good with a ruler, especially on your knuckles. Stern. Strict. Mysterious.

I'm not sure if it was this mystery or the memories that beckoned me, but I felt compelled to see the school during a trip to Boston this past summer while visiting my lifelong friend and former classmate, Susie. As we drove up that familiar hill and I caught my first glance of the stoic brick structure, it hit me: Forty-four springs, summers, winters and falls had passed and thousands of children had graduated from this institution, but it was unchanged. I stepped out of the car and looked up--even the signage, even the gray-taupe brick--it could be 1968 and I could be eight years old again. The building seemed to glare back at me, as if to ask where I had been all this time.

As luck would have it, the school's facilities manager, Henry, was there, all too pleased to let us in once he realized that the two 50-year-old women peering through the windows meant no harm. As we stepped inside and saw particles of dust swirling in the afternoon sunlight, I heard the whispered secrets of my friends and imagined countless giggling school children jumping down the stairs two at a time toward the basement as the sisters gripped their skirts and yelled at us to take off our snow boots. I touched the cool, metal railing and let my eyes drop to the multi-colored tiles...the same ones upon which I walked, always in single file, from class to class so many years ago.

"Oh my God," said Susie. "Here's Sister Irmita's classroom. Remember nine times eight equals 72? Hah!" I walked inside and took it in. Other than new desks and whiteboards replacing the chalkboards of old, it was the same. I sat at one of the desks and envisioned the old sister pacing in front, addressing her young charges in a clipped tone that meant business.

Henry was a delightful tour guide, pointing to mid-60s photographs on the walls and pulling out a dusty photo album featuring our very own third grade class. There I was in the second row, with my popular "pixie" haircut of the day, and Susie, cute as a button, a few rows over.

"Do you want to go upstairs?" said Henry.

"That's where the fifth graders were," Susie reminded me.

Our family's move to Michigan precluded my fifth grade year, so I never made it to the second floor. Still, we went up there and wandered the halls.

Beckoning us to follow, Henry said "Here's something you need to see before it's torn down." Although the school remained nearly untouched, the left wing of the second floor was about to be renovated.

"This is where they lived," he explained. Where they lived? Who's they, I wondered? We followed Henry further, and stood in stupefied amazement as Henry showed us the nuns' living quarters. "We don't have nuns at the school anymore. It's all lay teachers now, but the nuns in the 60s and early 70s lived right here, in tiny cells along this hallway."

"You mean they lived right upstairs from our classrooms?" I couldn't believe it. This was a small school, known for cold, drafty afternoons in the winter and non air-conditioned, over-heated rooms in the spring and summer. I fainted once while reciting the alphabet, sweat dampening my chest and back. Who knows if it was really the heat or just another episode with Sister Irmita.

So the women who taught us woke up every day in this less than accommodating building, donned their heavy black habits, walked down one flight of stairs to guide us in our academics, and then proceeded to go back up to their quarters--again and again. Their meals were served in the nearby rectory, Henry explained, but they didn't have cars or a means to transport themselves anywhere else. This was it. We were their lives.

Then Henry brought us into one of the cells, nothing more than a closet with a sink. That's when I saw it: the mirror. "Of course it's painted over, since the nuns weren't allowed to look at themselves. They took a vow to avoid vanity." I approached the sink, the mirror. I ran my fingers over the paint, so old that it chipped beneath my touch. Amazing, I thought. I had no idea.

I videotaped Henry giving us a tour of the tiny cell, the result of which is below. When it was over, we thanked him profusely, took one last look inside, and then walked back into the schoolyard. Susi and I then stepped around the side of the school where we spotted the same horizontal, metal pole I used to do backflips on. She took a picture of me trying to do a flip, an act from which my 50-year-old body recoiled, and then we strolled to the neighbor's garage where we once played hide and seek before the sisters yanked us out and gave us a scolding.

The sisters. I wondered then: What kind of person vows to live in such isolation, with no outlet whatsoever? To do the same thing over and over and over so that days blend into months and months into years--in which you rarely, if ever, consider your own needs? And who other other than a prison inmate could sleep in a closet? Prisoners had no choice, but the nuns did, and most of them chose this life. They chose us.

It's then that other, more distant, memories came to me. I glanced back at the schoolyard and saw four sisters on dusty, make-shift softball bases, adorned in their heavy habits with sweat trickling down the sides of their foreheads as they waited in anticipation, catchers mitts in hand. Sister Irmita presided over the spectacle with a sly smile, exclaiming "Miss Natale, throw that ball the right way!" Glancing back at the school door, I remembered a young nun washing a cut and placing a bandaid on my knee, looking up with warm, brown eyes while chiding me for playing tag in the rain. I could see the sisters stomping through the snow, bundled in coats while pulling up at their skirts so they wouldn't get too wet and cold, leading us through the flurries to the school's church. I looked at the playground, recalling two nuns holding and swinging two ropes at a time as I attempted Double Dutch, going faster and faster until I tripped, laughing and asking to do it again. I remember their hands, rough from hard work and utterly unadorned except for the gold wedding bands representing their marriages to God.

Again I thought: What kind of person could live as they did, singularly focused on teaching, disciplining, and in some ways, raising us? Dare I also say, loving us? This thought led to further consideration regarding all the painted mirrors in my life. When have I chosen to see only one side of an individual, making assumptions without looking beyond the exterior?

As Susie and I got back into the car, I took one, last, long look at my school. The sisters who taught us there are long gone now, and although I use my 9 x 8 = 72 and Sister Mary Joseph stories at cocktail parties for a laugh or two, I view them now in a different light.

When the contractors come later this year and demolish the tiny living quarters and painted mirrors of St. Bridget's Elementary School, a piece of history will surely be lost. Yet, as the nuns of my youth knew a long time ago, material things are just material things. It's what's in your heart that counts, and they have forever left an indelible print on mine.

Henry showing us how the nuns lived.

Name that 1968 Third Grader!

So much for back flips...