This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (30 page)

The woman started to disagree with me but hesitated, looking over at her daughter. I could see the details of her decision playing out in her head: the stained carpet, the missing shoes. They had a perfectly good dog. “I didn't want a second dog,” she said finally. “My daughter wanted her.” If she knew I was lying she didn't care. “My daughter is deaf,” she said.

“Let her keep the puppy,” Karl said, but I shook my head. They didn't want a second dog. Karl looked at me despairingly, then said he would meet me back at the car.

The woman and I made our way into the crowd of children and dogs dressed to match—Superman T-shirts, Batman capes—until we reached the pair in tutus. The Labrador seemed like a very nice dog. The woman took the puppy from her daughter, and the girl started to cry. I'm sure there was something I should have said or done to be of comfort, but I had no idea what that might have been. I was with Rose now, who was my dog of all the possible dogs in the world. I moved quickly through the crowd before anyone changed their mind. When I found Karl I got in the car and locked the door. I told him to drive.

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.

(
Vogue
, September 2012)

The Mercies

L
ONG BEFORE ANY
decisions had been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the mornings, looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest contents of her life into three categories: things to keep, things to throw away, things to donate to Catholic Charities. Sister Melanie is doing the same.

“What's the rush?” I ask, picking my way past the long line of boxes that is already filling up the front hall, everything labeled and sealed and neatly stacked. It is August, and the heat and humidity have turned the air into an unbearable soup. I think they're getting ahead of themselves and I tell them so. Sister Kathy, who is responsible for assessing their situation and deciding where and when they should move, won't be coming from the mother house in North Carolina for weeks.

“We've got to be ready,” Sister Nena says. She does not stop working. Her state of being is one of constant action, perpetual motion. A small gold tennis racquet dangles from her neck where on another nun one would expect to find a cross. “I won't pack the kitchen until the very end.”

Not that the kitchen matters. I suspect that the nuns, who are small enough to emulate the very sparrows God has His eye on, should be eating more, which is why I've brought them dinner. Sister Melanie will be going to Mercy, the nuns' retirement home, but she doesn't know when. Some days she is looking forward to the move, other days she isn't so sure. She stops and looks in the bag at the dinner I've brought, giving me a hug before ambling off again.

Sister Nena is certain that she doesn't want to go to Mercy. She regards it as the end of the line. She's hoping to land in a smaller apartment by herself, or maybe with another sister, though finding a new roommate at the age of seventy-eight can be a challenge. “It's up to God,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone, then goes back to her boxes.

To make a generalization, nuns don't have much experience with moving.

S
ister Nena was born in Nashville, the city where we both live. She was eighteen when she entered the convent. Sixty years later the convent is gone and the few Sisters of Mercy who are left in this city are scattered. For almost twenty years, Sister Nena and Sister Melanie have lived in a condo they once shared with Sister Helen. The condo, which is walking distance from the mall, is in an upscale suburban neighborhood called Green Hills. It isn't exactly the place I would have pictured nuns living, but then everything about my friendship with Sister Nena has made me reevaluate how life is for nuns these days.

“It's like that book,” she says, explaining it to me. “First I pray, then I eat.”

“That leaves love,” I say.

“That's it. I love a lot of people. Pray, eat, love, tennis. I'm in a rut. I need to find something else I can do for others.”

I guess I always thought the rut was part of it. A religious life is not one that I associate with great adventure. But now that change is barreling towards her, Sister Nena is restless for its arrival. Day after day she is standing up to meet it and I can see she's had a talent for adventure all along. It seems to me that entering the convent at the age of eighteen is in fact an act of great daring.

“I didn't always want to be a nun,” Sister Nena says. “Not when I was younger. I wanted to be a tennis player. My brothers and I knew a man who let us play on his court in return for keeping it up. It was a dirt court and they would roll it out with the big roller and I would repaint the lines. We played tennis every day.” Nena, the youngest of three. Nena, the only girl, following her brothers to the courts every morning of summer on her bicycle, racquet in hand.

When I ask her what her brothers thought of her entering the convent, she says they thought she was crazy, using the word
crazy
as if it were a medical diagnosis. “So did my father. He thought I was making a terrible mistake giving up getting married, having kids. I liked kids,” she says. “I babysat a lot when I was young. I had a happy life back then. I had a boyfriend. His family was in the meat-packing business. My father called him Ham Boy. It was all good but still there was something that wasn't quite right. I didn't feel comfortable. I never felt like I was living the life I was supposed to.”

What about her mother, is what I want to know. What did her mother say?

Sister Nena smiles the smile of a daughter who had pleased the mother she loved above all else. “She was proud of me.”

There would never be enough days for me to ask Sister Nena all the things I want to know, and she is endlessly patient with me. She can see it plainly herself: it hasn't been an ordinary life. Some of my questions are surely a result of the leftover curiosity of childhood, the quiet suspicion that nuns were not like the rest of us. But there is another way in which the questions feel like an attempt to gather vital information for my own life. Forget about the yoga practice, the meditating, the vague dreams of going to an ashram in India: Sister Nena has stayed in Tennessee and devoted her life to God. She has lived with her calling for so long that it seems less like a religious vocation and more like a marriage, a deeply worn path of mutual acceptance. Sister Nena and God understand one another. They are in it for life.

T
he order of the Sisters of Mercy was started by Catherine McAuley back in Dublin. She recognized the needs of poor women and girls and used her considerable inheritance to open a home for them called Mercy House, taking her vows in 1831. Committing your life to God was one thing, but I think that choosing an order would be akin to choosing which branch of the military to sign up for. Army? Navy? Dominicans? From a distance it all looks like service, but the daily life must play out in very different ways. “The Mercys taught me in school,” Sister Nena says.

I nod my head. I was also taught by the Mercys in school. I was taught by Sister Nena.

“They never manipulated me,” she says in their defense. “But I admired them, their goodness.”

I spent twelve years with the Sisters of Mercy and I am certain in all that time no one ever suggested that I or any of my classmates should consider joining the order. Nuns have never been in the business of recruitment, which may in part account for their dwindling ranks. What we were told repeatedly was to
listen
: God had a vocation for all of us and if we paid close attention and were true to ourselves we would know His intention. Sometimes you might not like what you heard. You might think that what was being asked of you was too much, but at that point there really was no getting out of it. Once you knew what God wanted from your life you would have to be ten kinds of fool to look the other way. When I was a girl in Catholic school I was open to the idea of being a nun, a mother, a wife, but whenever I closed my eyes and listened (and there was plenty of time for listening—in chapel, in math class, in basketball games—we were told the news could come at any time) the voice I heard was consistent:
Be a writer
. It didn't matter that “writer” had never been listed as one of our options. I knew that for me this was the truth, and to that end I found the nuns to be invaluable examples. I was, after all, educated by a group of women who had in essence jumped ship, ignored the strongest warnings of their fathers and brothers in order to follow their own clear direction. They were working women who had given every aspect of their lives over to their belief, as I intended to give my life over to my belief. The nuns' existence was not so far from the kind of singular life I imagined for myself, even if God wasn't the object of my devotion.

I
n her years as a postulant and then a novice, Sister Nena moved around: Memphis, Cincinnati, Knoxville, finishing her education and taking her orders. When I ask her when she stopped wearing a habit she has to think about it. “1970?” Her hair is now a thick, curling gray, cropped close. “I liked the habit. If they told us tomorrow we had to wear it again I'd be fine with that. Just not the thing that went around the face. There was so much starch in them that they hurt.” She touches her cheek at the memory. “It got so hot in the summer with all that stuff on, you couldn't believe it. But if it got too hot I'd just pull my skirts up.”

It was around 1969 that she came back to Nashville to teach at St. Bernard's Academy, about the time I arrived from California and enrolled in first grade late that November. This is the point at which our lives first intersect: Sister Nena, age thirty-five, and Ann, very nearly six.

The convent where we met was an imposing and unadorned building of the darkest red brick imaginable. It sat on the top of a hill and looked down over a long, rolling lawn dotted with statuary. It was there I learned to roller-skate, and ran the three-legged race with Trudy Corbin on Field Day. Once a year I was part of a procession of little girls who settled garlands of roses on top of the statue of Mary while singing, “Oh Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,” after which we would file back inside and eat our lunches out of paper sacks. The cafeteria was in the basement of the convent; the classrooms were on the first floor. On the second floor there was a spectacular chapel painted in bright blue. It had an altar made from Italian marble and a marble kneeling rail and rows of polished pews where I would go in the morning to say part of the Rosary and then chat God up in that personal way that became popular after Vatican II. My mother worked long shifts as a nurse when I was young and she would take my sister and me to the convent early and pick us up late. The nuns would let us come into their kitchen and sort the silverware, which, in retrospect, I imagine they mixed together just to give us something to do. My sister and I were well aware of the privilege we were receiving, getting to go into their kitchen, their dining room, and, on very rare occasions, into their sitting room on the second floor where they had a television set and a fireplace whose mantelpiece was a madly grinning openmouthed devil whose head was topped with a crucifix. Still, in all those years, I never set foot on the third floor or the fourth floor of the building. That was where the nuns slept, where Sister Nena slept, and it was for all us girls as far away as the moon, even as it sat right on top of us.

“H
ow did we find each other again?” Sister Nena asks me recently while we are in the grocery store.

“You called me,” I say. “Years ago. You were looking for money.”

She stops in the middle of the aisle. “I forgot. It was for St. Vincent's School. Oh, that's awful. It's awful that that's why I called you.”

I put my arm over her shoulder while she steers the cart. Sister Nena likes to steer the cart. “At least you called.”

S
ister Nena lived in the convent at St. Bernard's until she was sixty years old. That was when the order sold the building. The large parcel of land, which sat smack in the middle of a hip and crowded neighborhood called Hillsboro Village, was valuable. A large apartment complex was built in the front yard where we had played. They had to rip out the giant mock orange trees first. Picking up mock oranges, which were smelly and green and had deep turning folds that were distressingly reminiscent of human brains, was a punishment all the girls sought to avoid. It surprised me how sorry I was to see those trees go.

An interior window over the chapel's doorway could be opened onto the third floor so that the nuns who were too infirm to come downstairs could sit in their wheelchairs and listen to Mass. When I was a girl I would try to glance up at them without being noticed. From my vantage point down in the pews they were tiny in their long white dresses, which may have been the uniform of advanced age, or may have just been their nightgowns. After the sale of the convent, the sisters who were retired or needed care were sent out to Mercy, which was then a new facility twenty miles outside of town. The primary school students were moved next door into the building that had once been the secondary school (the high school, never as successful as the primary school, was now defunct) and the convent building itself was converted into office spaces. Every classroom and nun's bedroom found another use: a therapist's office, a legal practice, a Pilates studio. The altar was given to a parish in Stone Mountain, Georgia. It had to be taken out through the back wall with a crane. The pews were sold. The now-empty chapel became a rental party space.

“That was hard,” Sister Nena says in a manner that takes hard things in stride. “We had a lot of fun there, especially in the summers when everyone would come home. The sisters who taught in other towns would all come back. We'd sit up and tell stories and laugh, have a glass of wine.”

I went back to St. Bernard's once, years later, and climbed the back stairs to the fourth floor and stood in an empty bedroom/office to look out the window. It was like looking down from the moon.

The vows for the Sisters of Mercy are poverty, celibacy, and obedience; and service to the poor, sick, and uneducated, with perseverance until death. Obedience is another way of saying that you don't complain when your order decides to sell the place you live. You don't get a vote in the matter. Sometimes this strikes me as grossly unfair. (“You should have told them no,” I find myself wanting to say, even though I have no idea who “them” might have been.) Other times, when I can manage to see outside the limitations of my own life, I catch a glimpse of what the move must have been to Sister Nena: another act of faith, the belief that God has a plan and is looking after you. It must be the right thing, because you had turned your life over to God, and even if you didn't understand all the intricacies of the deal, He wasn't about to make a mistake.

After the sale, the younger sisters, the ones who were still teaching, were relocated to rented apartments around town so that they could have an easier commute into work. “It was all right,” Sister Nena says. “We'd all still get together on the weekends and have dinner.” Sister Nena, who taught reading in grades one through three, and Sister Helen, my math teacher for those same grades, and Sister Melanie, the lower school principal, moved together into a rented condo, its three bedrooms making a straight line off the upstairs hallway. They were happy there. They continued to work until the time came to work less. They semiretired, retired, tutored children who needed tutoring, volunteered at Catholic Charities. After she left St. Bernard's, Sister Nena volunteered at St. Vincent de Paul's, a school for underserved poor children in North Nashville that remained in a state of constant financial peril until it finally went under.