May 2002 Issue - Essay # 5
Nun
Too Soon
By Linda Jasmine
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I
was sure I could make a break for it. A
thin brown blanket stretched across my child-size metal bed and was
tucked in tight on each side of me like a restraint. At least it felt
like a restraint to me, with its two-inch band of sheet folded crisply
over the top edge of the blanket and cinched tightly across my chest.
Kind of like the metal band that kept the Frankenstein monster from
leaping off the laboratory table and clomping to the village to terrify
the townspeople. In
formulating my escape plan, I figured I could slip down to the cold
linoleum floor and crawl on my hands and knees between the long,
straight rows of identical metal beds toward the emergency exit door. It
was only that door that separated me from the outside world and freedom.
But,
to get to that exit door, I first had to get passed the door to Sister
Dorothea’s cell, the tiny room in the corner that was strictly
off-limits to all the children. No one was ever allowed to enter the
room where at night she took off her black nun’s habit and stiff
headdress and changed into a long white nightgown and elastic sleep cap.
During the day when I got bored, I scrutinized the edges of her
headdress, hoping to get a glimpse of a stray hair at her temple. Never
once had she revealed a single one. I wanted to find out what color it
was. And was it long or short under there? Straight or curly? Or, hot
damn, maybe she even shaved her head bald. Earlier
that December day at recess, I called to my younger brother through the
chain-link fence. At the St. Jude’s Orphanage, just like in a prison,
the boys were kept in a separate building and on separate playgrounds on
the other side of the fence. Apparently, siblings were never allowed to
visit one another and I didn’t know how my brother was taking to all
this. We’d only been there a short while.
The
day was as cold as a witch’s you-know-what and icicle daggers had
formed along the roofline of the redbrick buildings. At the fence, my
brother’s gloveless fingers clutched through the links in the fence.
Right away he started to cry as I approached, and his nose began to run.
I watched the trail of clear snot inch down toward his upper lip. “I
hate it here,” he wailed through the fence. “When is Daddy going to
come and get us?” Puffs of steam from his sobbing breaths swirled in
the cold air around his contorted face. Being
his older sister by two years, I explained as best I could. “I don’t
know, kid. Soon, probably this weekend,” I told him, not really
knowing whether that was true or not. “Oh,
Lord, Henry,” my aunt had said, “I don’t know if I could handle
any more.” Our aunt had three kids of her own and had already taken in
another stray niece as well; she didn’t need two more. Not
long after we first arrived at our aunt’s house, my brother and I were
playing with our cousins in the basement when we heard the raised voices
coming from upstairs. From what I was able to glean, my aunt had one
stipulation my father would not agree to. But before I could find out
anything more, the door at the top of the stairs was slammed shut. It
could have been extra money, tax exemptions, or custody--I don’t know.
Probably money. Everyone said she was tighter than the bark on a tree. Whatever
it was, it made my father hopping mad. He quickly gathered us up and
carted us off to this orphanage across town for who knows how long, he
wouldn’t say. He was never a man of many words and he gave us no
explanation. Just dropped us off and left.
All
I knew was that, during the three weeks we’d been at the orphanage,
not one couple that came to our ward to look at the girls for possible
adoption ever looked at me. This either meant that I wasn’t up for
adoption or they weren’t interested in a scowling 9-year-old with a
7-year-old kid brother.
Or
would they even try to keep us together?
If
we were to be separated, my brother would be chosen first, naturally,
because he was cuter. Dumber but cuter. But I was more worried about the
‘cute’ little twerp being helpless without me. Some kid had already
talked him into licking the metal monkey bars and his tongue froze to
it. I had to do something and soon. The
only way out of there would be if I escaped through that exit door at
night when Sister Dorothea was asleep. It would be freezing outside and
there was snow on the ground but I was a fast runner and I knew how to
find my aunt’s house about a mile from the orphanage. I would plead
with her to take us in--it was almost Christmas--or to, at least,
contact my father so I could find out if he had left us there for good.
I
worked on a plan all week and decided to make my run for it that
Saturday night when there were fewer girls present on my ward. I
didn’t know where some of them actually went on weekends. Who knew?
Maybe prospective parents checked them out like library books and
returned them when they were due back on Sunday evening--sort of like
seeing if they liked them before they took them in permanently. But
all day Saturday, each time the sister was distracted by other things, I
made a trip to my clothes
drawer and pulled out an extra undershirt or an extra pair of socks. I
hid the socks in my pillow and I put on the extra undershirts, one over
the other. So by the time I crawled into bed that night, I had four of
them on under my nightgown. When
lights went out, I lay there--ready--staring at the big round
schoolhouse clock on the wall, painstakingly waiting for the hands of
the clock to crawl toward the Tick-tock,
tick-tock, tick... The
next thing I knew a skeletal white hand had clamped down on my upper arm
and I was being shaken awake. “Huh?
Whut?” I stammered, still in a stupor. It was the middle of the night. “Shh!
You’ll wake the others,” hissed Sister Dorothea. As
she yanked me out of bed by one arm, the thin mattress bounced up and,
from the light of the hallway, the twinkle of heavy-duty safety pins
underneath caught my eye. One pin at each corner of the mattress secured
the blanket to the underside. I knew it. Still
half groggy and unable to move, I stood next to my bed, three socks on
each foot. Before I could rub the sand out of my eyes, Sister began
stuffing my limp arms into the sleeves of my winter coat over my
nightgown and hustled me out of the ward and down the hall. As
we turned the corner, I saw my brother being escorted toward us from the
opposite direction. Holy
Criminy! They were on to my escape plan and were kicking us out? Then
from inside the Mother Superior’s office, I heard the voice of the nun
in charge. “You must realize, sir,” she adamantly protested. “The
children would be much better off if you left them in our care here at
St. Jude’s.”
“They’re
going to live with my sister and her family,” I heard my father’s
tired voice say. He’d given in to my aunt’s conditions.
My
brother and I exchanged goofy grins just outside the office door. “Daddy!”
we both cried when he exited the office.
“C’mon,
kids, let’s go.” He scooped my brother into his arms and grabbed the
handles of our small bags. “I
told you he’d come,” I said to my brother and ran to get the doors
for us. When
I looked back one last time at the three nuns watching us leave St.
Jude’s Orphanage, I saw Sister Dorothea shake her head disapprovingly.
And, in doing so, her tousled sleep cap slipped to one side. She
had red hair! |
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Author's Biography Linda
Jasmine spent years in the corporate world as a human resources manager
writing policies (yawn) and procedures (Zzzz). Behind the business
veneer, she wrote three novels, then said "so long" to 9-to-5
and is now working on book number four. E-mail
Linda at
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