The Snow Geese (10 page)

‘You were destined to play tennis.’

‘Exactly. I played tennis whenever I could. I loved it. But we were having a little trouble at home. After school my father locked me in my room. I heard him yelling at my mother and then he started to hit my mother and yell at her more and more. So I went to live with my sister in a boarding house. We had this funny old landlady with I don’t know how many cats. I lived there until I finished high school. We had very little money. My sister washed hair to keep our heads above water. At the grocery store cans of vegetables were seven for a dollar, so each week we saved a dollar and ate one can of vegetables every day of the week.’

‘What happened when you finished high school?’

‘I’m going to tell you. I went to the convent. Not in New Orleans, but in St Louis. I became a sister. Something in me was saying, “The thing for you to do is be a sister.” Recently, a woman who was a baton-twirler at the University of Texas asked me, “Aren’t you embarrassed that you were a nun?” and I said, “Aren’t you embarrassed that you spent all that time throwing a stick in the air?” I wasn’t embarrassed. I knew it was something I had to do. I was clothed, fed and educated; I had friends; I got to help people. We spent a significant part of each day in silence and I believe that silence healed me. I learned discipline. We were taught to feel ourselves unworthy. We prostrated ourselves on the ground. If you broke something, there was a punishment. We had to lie flat on the ground with our arms extended like this and say Hail Marys for close to ever. We had to sleep with whatever we broke, just so we never forgot it. People were sleeping with fans, bowls, pots, plates, cups, you name it. Once I broke a statue of St Joseph. This statue was Mother Superior’s favourite. It came from France. I had to sleep with the statue of St Joseph and a lot of people said I was lucky just to have a man in my bed.’

We heard the indicator clicking; the driver manhandled the wide steering-wheel; the Greyhound turned off the Interstate. I’d got used to the bus making these stops, pausing at gas courts for short breaks between terminals. Passengers disembarked, lit cigarettes, sought restrooms, performed simple stretches, and made calls in hooded telephone booths, saying, ‘Did you feed the fish?’ or, ‘See you tomorrow, Mushroom,’ or, ‘Don’t ask me what I was doing, Marla! How should I know what I was doing?’ Exhausted, far from home, we roamed the store aisles, fluorescent lights glaring on washed white-tile floors, the outdoor smells of exhaust fumes and gasoline mingling with the aromas of stale coffee, hot dogs, microwave burritos and drooling yellow cheese sauce squelched on to card boats of Gehl’s tortilla chips. On the Greyhound you had only to gaze from the window and daydream, but now you had to reckon with the siren-song of brand names in brimming racks – Chex, Dots, Runts, Twizzlers, Munchos, Rain-Blos, Lorna Doones – and weigh the merits of Dakota Kid sunflower seeds, Chupa Chups lollipops, Jack Link’s Kippered Beefsteak Jerky, forty-four-ounce pails of Barq’s ‘Since 1898’ Root Beer, and powdered, chocolate-dipped and honey-dipped donuts, French Twirl Donuts, Mickey Egg Fluff Donuts, Mrs Freshly’s Creme Filled Gold Fingers, and Flaas Raspberry Bismarks. There were refrigerated cabinets stocked with sodas, iced teas, spring waters, juices and flavoured milks, and sometimes there were elaborate pipe displays featuring Irvin S. Cobb’s Corn Cobb pipes and ‘pre-smoked’ Dr Grabow filter pipes – the Riviera, Duke, Royal Duke, Omega and Savoy – made from imported briar, with standard bits and military bits; and Bryn Mawr Ream-N-Klean bristle pipe cleaners; and pouches of Black Cavendish, Gold Burley and Borkum Riff ‘without a bite’ tobaccos. We moved like sleepwalkers through this trove of nouns, drifting one by one back to the Americruiser, the door sighing shut when a complement was counted.

Jean and I settled down again in our seats towards the front of the coach on the right-hand side, the hands on her watch sweeping through the hearts. The Greyhound returned to the interstate, continuing north and north-east towards Kansas City. The driver spoke into his microphone.

‘Your attention please,’ he said. ‘Now, I know you’re going to think I’m going bald, but I found a hairpiece that belongs to one of you. I understand that you may be embarrassed to come up here and claim it, so I’m going to leave it at the front here and you can just wander up and claim it when we make the next stop and you get off the bus to smoke a cigarette or what have you. That’s the end of my announcement. Thank you for your attention.’

We watched him lob the hairpiece at the windscreen. It slid down the glass and came to rest on the dashboard ledge, a curling, glamorous, brunette wig, tight-fitting, like a swimming-cap. It was dark now.

‘Did you wear a habit?’ I asked Jean.

‘Oh yes. I wore a full white habit, starched and crisp. White because I was a novice. Black shoes, stockings, garter belt, gabardine petticoat, a white linen wimple covering my hair and both sides of my face, and a loose white scapular on my shoulders, hanging right down to my black shoes. What a business that was!’

‘What about your tennis?’

‘Oh, we had a court. There was a convent court. I played all the time. The tennis court was about the only place I felt at home. I remember one Sunday afternoon four tennis pros came to play a doubles game on our court. Every Sunday afternoon we’d have some kind of entertainment – someone would visit the convent to give a talk, or there’d be an activity of some sort or another. When I heard that these four tennis pros were going to visit I asked Mother Superior if there was any way I could get to hit some balls with them. That was so exciting to me, just the idea of playing with actual professional tennis players – you didn’t get a chance like that every day of the week, and all I wanted to do was knock up for a few minutes, maybe have a game or two just for the experience of it. Anyway, Mother Superior looked at me for a while. She didn’t say anything. I could see the wrath of God in her face and I thought that she was about to explode. She didn’t say a word, she just stared at me, and I knew she was doing it to make me feel small. I started to apologize, but still she didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do. I looked around the room. I looked at my shoes. And then here it comes, oh it was the wrath of God, this terrible long lecture on my lack of humility and modesty and my arrogance. I was mortified. I felt truly shamed.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, let me tell you. Sunday came around and the four professionals showed up, four lady tennis players in little white skirts and brand-new sneakers. All the sisters were sitting in the bleachers – there were three or four tiers next to the tennis court – all trussed up in stockings, garter belts, gabardine petticoats, wimples, scapulars, you name it. The pros started playing. They played a couple of sets. Mother Superior stood up by the net and made a speech, thanking the ladies for their exhibition. Then, I couldn’t believe it, she said that Sister Jean-Marie was especially appreciative. Especially appreciative! One of the tennis pros said, ‘Why doesn’t she come and hit some tennis balls?’ and another pro said, ‘Sure, let her come and hit some tennis balls,’ and of course this is in front of everybody, so Mother Superior doesn’t really have a choice, she has to let me go and play with the professionals.

‘I climb down off the bleachers and walk out on to the court, and remember I’m dressed in a habit and the pros are in these precious little tennis dresses, right up their butts, excuse me. One of them hands me her racquet and says she’ll sit out so I can play. But I’m shaking. I’m on the forehand side. I’m receiving serve. I haven’t even had a warm-up. I’m trying to stay low and concentrate on the server, who’s bouncing the ball, preparing to serve. I could tell she wasn’t going to go soft on me just because I was a nun, and sure enough the next thing I knew she sent down a firecracker, and I was so pent-up because I’d been so shamed that I hit it back with fury in it, I returned her serve as hard as I could, and the ball whizzed past the net person, straight down the line. It was a clear winner, no question. I’d watched the toss and seen just where she threw it. It came perfectly to my forehand and I made perfect contact, just as though the racquet were an extension of my body, and all the sisters in the bleachers jumped up and down and cheered. They whooped and hollered, and grabbed their scapulars, and shook them, and waved them in the air, their holy scapulars!’

It was getting late; people were sleeping. Reflections of red and yellow lights were sliding across the glass to my left, beyond Jean, then appearing unmediated on the near side, and other reflections were sliding across the glass between me and the lights, as if the Greyhound were revolving, or moving at the centre of revolving carousels of lights: streetlights and headlights, the red lights on rear fenders and radio masts, the winking red winglights of planes, hazes rising off the thick-sown lights of conurbations, the brightness of car lots (buffed hoods gleaming under Klieg lights), the neon fantasias of funfairs and casinos. The driver switched off the lights inside the bus, and stars were suddenly visible, constellations in the east: Hercules, Boötes, Virgo.

In the 1950s, the German ornithologist Franz Sauer suggested that birds might refer to the stars in order to determine their migratory direction. In the late 1960s, Stephen Emlen studied indigo buntings, a species that breeds throughout the eastern half of the United States and winters in the Bahamas, southern Mexico, and Central America south to Panama. Caged indigo buntings display intense nocturnal Zugunruhe in April and May, and again in September and October, the two periods during which their counterparts are migrating in the wild. When this restlessness began, Emlen placed his buntings in special circular cages: funnels of blotting paper mounted on ink pads and covered with clear plastic sheets. Birds in these cages could only see the sky overhead; all ground objects were blocked from view.

‘A bunting in migratory condition,’ Emlen wrote, ‘stands in one place or turns slowly in a circle, its bill tilted upward and its wings partly spread and quivering rapidly. At frequent intervals the bird hops on to the sloping paper funnel, only to slide back and continue its pointing and quivering. Each hop from the ink pad leaves a black print on the paper. The accumulation of inked footprints provides a simple record of the bird’s activity: they can later be counted and analyzed statistically.’

The buntings kept diaries: footprints lettered their seasonal restlessness.

Emlen put the cages outside on clear, moonless nights. In September and October, the buntings tended to hop south. In April and May, they tended to hop north. The cage walls screened the horizon from view: the birds could only see the sky. On cloudy, overcast nights, their orientation deteriorated significantly. Emlen hypothesized that buntings were able to determine their migratory directions from visual cues in the night sky.

Emlen then took his buntings into a planetarium. In September and October, using a Spitz Model B projector, he shone the normal autumn stars onto the dome. The buntings, appropriately, left footprints in the southern sectors of their cages. In April and May, Emlen projected the stars of a normal spring sky. The buntings hopped north and north-east. But when Emlen switched off the projector and filled the dome with diffuse light, the buntings behaved just as they had done on cloudy nights outside: they were unable to determine their migratory direction. And when Emlen shifted Polaris to the east or west, the buntings changed their orientation to match the new ‘north’ or ‘south’, depending on the season.

To understand the significance of Polaris, the North Star, you first have to imagine that all the stars are fixed to a celestial sphere centred on the Earth. You have to imagine the axis on which the Earth is spinning. And then you have to follow the line of this axis from the North Pole up to the celestial sphere. The line intersects with the sphere at the north celestial pole, which happens to be very close to Polaris, a bright star located just off the tip of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. Due to the rotation of the Earth, the celestial sphere appears to rotate clockwise around Polaris.

The axis of celestial rotation is always aligned with geographical north. Buntings, Emlen found, were determining direction by reference to the rotation of star patterns. The constellations move across the sky with an angular velocity of fifteen degrees an hour, but their shape remains constant, and each maintains a distinct relationship to the North Star. When Emlen made his fake firmament revolve around Betelgeuse, a bright star in the constellation Orion, the buntings flew as if Betelgeuse, not Polaris, were the North Star. By systematically removing and reinserting portions of his planetarium sky, Emlen found that his buntings relied especially on constellations close to Polaris, such as Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, Cepheus and Cassiopeia.

‘These are the Flint Hills,’ Jean said. ‘In daylight this is beautiful open country, very green.’

She paused.

‘The Flint Hills of Kansas,’ she said, as if quoting the title of a plangent popular song. Another pause. I gazed out of the window at all the passing lights. The curling brunette wig lay unclaimed on the dashboard.

‘We had a laundry in the convent,’ Jean continued. ‘A professional laundry. It was one of the ways we made money. We used to laugh because we knew we were washing Mother Superior’s pantyhose or the chaplain of the University’s boxer shorts. We were like naughty schoolgirls. We loved to giggle. We washed underthings, delicates, petticoats, scapulars, wimples, veils, habits, bedclothes, you name it, pressing and starching, finding a partner to fold the sheets with. We used rollers to squeeze out the water, and big industrial presses. We were supposed to keep silence. You just heard the machines going. I started to love laundry, the smell of clean clothes and the way they feel.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Do you? I
love
laundry. I love to do my husband’s laundry. I love to wash clothes for friends of mine. I think of myself as a radical feminist, but I love doing people’s laundry. For me, the best way I can show affection, or the warmth I feel towards someone, is to launder their clothes. Delicates I like to wash by hand with soap flakes. I’ve got a wicker basket for things waiting to be ironed. Don’t you love the smell of fresh laundry? Sometimes when I tell my so-called feminist friends that I love to wash my husband’s clothes, I hear them tut-tut as if I’ve committed a crime, but I don’t think it’s a crime that I like doing laundry.