Lindsay / Hagen / Sweeney Altered

Stories We Found In Our Closets
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 979-8-3509-7012-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Reihe: Altered

Every piece of clothing tells a story. After meeting for years, supporting each other's work, these colleagues decided to try something new-a collaboration. They dug into their closets and discovered that personal essays about clothes-on everything from fringe jackets and fishing vests to bridal tulle and Beatles T-shirts-have the power to evoke memories, not just for themselves, but for everyone that reads them.

Patricia Stiles worked professionally as an illustrator, a model, and a popular Professor of Fashion Illustration at Otis College of Art and Design, but she reserved her deepest love for writing. Her fiction was published in literary magazines and was recognized in a number of literary competitions, including the NY Stories Short Fiction Contest, the William Faulkner Competition, New Millennium Writing, and The Speakeasy Prize judged by Amy Bloom. The essay that appears in these pages was previously published in the anthology Garb: A Fashion and Culture Reader. Pat was a founder and guiding light of our writing group and a beloved friend. She died in 2023.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lindsay, Tinker

Hagen, Kathryn

Sweeney, Barbara

Baz, Bev

Lucre,

Leseproben

Old Habits

Monique de Varennes

Until the day I started boarding school, I’d never seen a nun up close. But on that afternoon, the convent door opened and there one stood, immensely tall and draped from head to toe in cloth, except for her hands and a small patch of face. I backed away until I rested against the safety of my mother’s legs. I was five, and took the nun to be some sort of alien being.

My mother did not seem distressed by this apparition, nor did the two maiden cousins who had brought us here. We stepped inside, my mother nudging me forward.

As the grown-ups talked, I studied the peculiar figure of the nun. Her grape-colored robe nearly touched the tops of her shoes. It was cinched at the waist by a long rope belt, tasseled at the ends. A kind of giant white bib covered her chest, with a white wool cross, sewn to her dress, peeping out from under it. A creamy veil flowed over her shoulders.

Why would someone dress like that? I wondered. I could think of no reason.

Without warning, the nun bent toward me. “Welcome, my child,” she said, her face alarmingly close to mine. I shrank back. “Shy, I see,” she murmured. Aiming a small smile at my family, she added, “A tour of the school might give her time to adjust.”

The nun skimmed ahead of us, magnificent in rich purple, her gait so smooth that her veil barely fluttered. Still, something rattled faintly as she moved. She took us first through the mansion at the school’s heart, built decades earlier by a man known as the Quinine King, because he’d made his fortune developing synthetic quinine. Vestiges of his years on the property still remained, in the acres of garden and orchard outside, in the paneled library and formal rooms, and in vast vitrines displaying curios from his travels: spears and shields, writhing carved animals, menacing masks. They made a startling contrast to the austere woman leading us along. Even a five-year-old could see that this was a very strange place.

The mansion was only the start of our tour. There were newer buildings, so many that I got tired of walking. By the time we returned to our starting point, I was ready to go home. Instead, we stood in awkward silence by the door.

I had known all day that something was wrong. The cousins had been even more somber than usual, and my mother had gloomed silently at my side, gripping my hand way too tight. Still, I had failed to grasp that they planned to leave me here. Given my family’s penchant for secrecy, it’s possible they had not mentioned it at all.

It was only when they kissed me and turned to go, the nun holding me firmly in place, that I understood. As the door slammed shut behind them, my world cracked open, splitting forever into Before—the safe time, the predictable time—and Never Again. I let out a wail of outrage and grief.

Stumbling and crying, I let the nun lead me up the mansion’s carved staircase, to a room near the top lined with neatly made beds. Next to one of them I spotted some of my own dresses, their puffed sleeves and full skirts poking out from a narrow cabinet. I ran over and touched them, to be sure they were really here. My mother and I had just moved, and I’d thought those dresses had been lost. Finding them in this place was worse, though—it confirmed the fact that I’d be staying. A lump of new sadness grew thick in my throat.

The nun reached for a pale blue garment lying across the bed. Made of cotton, it had long sleeves, a full skirt gathered at the chest, and, like so many of my dresses, a rounded Peter Pan collar.

“Your smock,” she explained, as she buttoned it over my dress. “The other boarders are older, so they’ll be wearing uniforms. But tomorrow, when you go to class, the girls your age will be dressed like you.”

Soon after, the nun took me down to dinner, carrying eight linen napkins and a silver napkin ring engraved with my name, part of the boarding school trousseau. A flock of the older girls gathered around me, dressed in identical navy blue. “Why are you here?” they asked. “Where’s your family?” I didn’t know how to answer, and began to sob. One by one they slipped away from me, into their seats. They had sorrows of their own, no doubt, and could not deal with mine.

The next day I met my fellow kindergartners, in their smocks of pink and blue and mint green. I began to make friends. Too soon, though, the school day ended, and my new friends went back to their homes. After they left, I was expected to tag after the older boarders. In evening study hall, I had to sit quietly for hours like the others, even though I had no homework. Lonely and bored, I pulled up the hem of my smock and stroked the familiar dress underneath. I would have stripped off the smock entirely if I could, but the buttons were in the back, where I could not reach them.

In those early days, grief often overwhelmed me, and I would sink to the ground, legs failing me, and cry. The nuns were kind but detached. One might lay her hand on my cheek or trace the sign of the cross on my forehead, but no one hugged me or presented a comforting lap to crawl into. It was not their way. “Offer this up as a sacrifice to the Baby Jesus,” they said more than once. I had no idea what they were talking about. It would take a long time to understand that they viewed everything through the lens of eternity. Life on earth was, for them, just a proving ground, a place where we struggled to earn a seat in heaven. My misery, so huge for me, was, in the great scheme of things, a mere blip, inconsequential.

I do not remember much from my first months at school, but I do remember the silence. The nuns spoke solely when need demanded; silence kept them closer to God. Only for a brief period after dinner could they speak freely. On warm evenings, chatting in muted tones, they walked the garden paths in two rows, one facing forward, the other backward. The backward-walking nuns never stumbled. “God watches over them,” one boarder told me. But perhaps it was years of treading the same paths that kept their steps so sure.

We girls were allowed to talk during school hours, and at meals and recreation, but we walked from place to place in silent lines. Contemplation was encouraged. I had been a robust, lively child, but soon fell into silence myself.

As a young boarder I was allowed to visit my mother most weekends. A taxi would appear at the convent after Friday dinner and ferry me to her tiny apartment across town. School followed me home, haunting my first hours there. Sundays, too, were poisoned, by a tide of rising dread that started when I opened my eyes and ended when I returned to school and the nuns buttoned me, yet again, into my smock. Only Saturdays shone. My mother had a gift for making everything an adventure. She felt terrible that I had to go to boarding school, just as she had, years before. And so, though she was clearly exhausted after her long work-week, she packed as much fun into those hours as she could. This one glorious day made losing her each Sunday all the more painful.

After my first year of boarding school, I was given a reprieve. Our cousins, unable to find a religious camp that took very young boarders, settled for a summer program run by a nonsectarian school. I loved it. No silence and no smocks, just shorts and sneakers and dirty knees. Our small group of boarders included both boys and girls, and there were very few rules. It was like living in a large, raucous family. By the end of summer, I looked so much happier, so much healthier, that my entire family agreed to let me remain there for first grade. If it had not been for my rosary, I might have stayed longer still.

Our maiden cousins were deeply religious, and never went anywhere without a rosary in their purse. If, at a play, the dialogue got the least bit salacious, out came the rosaries, and with closed eyes they prayed their way through the naughty parts. They had given me a lovely, blue-beaded rosary as protection in my heathen school. The other girls called it my necklace. Soon I took to wearing it around my neck as jewelry, forgetting all the associated prayers.

The cousins were scandalized, and begged their brother, the family patriarch, to send me back to the convent. Although he was an atheist, their distress was so intense that he agreed. My mother had little say in the matter—not when these cousins were, out of pure kindness, paying my tuition. And so, in the fall of second grade, I was returned to the silence and the rules.

Things had changed in my absence. We now slept in a newer building, where each of us girls had a tiny curtained cubicle of our own. Even better, the school had acquired a small huddle of boarders around my age, one of whom became my best friend.

Now that I was a grown-up second-grader, I wore a uniform: a navy blue bolero jacket bearing the school insignia, matching knee-length skirt, white blouse with the inevitable Peter Pan collar, navy knee socks, and heavy lace-up shoes. Blue, the nuns told us, honored the Blessed Virgin; just wearing these garments declared our devotion to her, and to our faith.

From the nuns’ perspective, our uniforms had another important purpose: they served as a great leveler. There was a vast disparity in wealth at our school, from the families that struggled to come up with tuition each term, to the moneyed foreigners who sent their daughters to the U.S. to be “finished” before settling into society back home. I had a foot in both worlds. Though my mother had fallen into poverty, our cousins made sure I had all the advantages: exposure to theater...