This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

  “How 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.”

  Sister 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.

  Then, in 2004, Sister Helen had a stroke. After she got out of the hospital she was sent to Mercy. For a long time Sister Melanie and Sister Nena thought that she’d come back, take up her place again in the third bedroom, but Sister Helen only got worse. Day after day, Sister Nena would drive the twenty miles out to Mercy to visit her friend and try to get her to do the puzzles in the children’s math workbooks that she had taught from for years, and sometimes Sister Helen would, but mostly she would sit and watch television. Over time she recognized Sister Nena less and less, and then finally not at all. It was because of Sister Helen’s stroke that I started seeing more of Sister Nena. We would have lunch after she played tennis, or have coffee in the afternoons. She would talk about her friend and sometimes she would cry a little. They had, after all, been together for a very long time. It was during one of those conversations she mentioned that Sister Helen’s last name was Kain, and I wondered how I could never have known that before.

  Sister Nena and Sister Melanie stayed in Green Hills, but by 2010 Sister Melanie was growing increasingly fragile, forgetful. It was the consensus among the other nuns, and Sister Melanie agreed, that she was ready to go out to Mercy.

  The question then became what should be done with Sister Nena? She was, after all, still playing tennis like one of the Williams sisters three times a week and didn’t seem like much of a candidate for the retirement home. Still, while one spare bedroom could be overlooked, the condo’s rent was $1,400 a month and there were no spare nuns to fill up what would now be two empty bedrooms. It was decided that Sister Nena could stay out of Mercy, but she needed to find an apartment that was significantly less expensive. For the first time in her life, she would be on her own.

  I like to take Sister Nena to Whole Foods. It is a veritable amusement park of decadence and wonder to one who has taken a vow of poverty. Her ability to cook is rudimentary at best and she doesn’t like to shop, so I advocate prepared foods from the deli. Sister Melanie, who adored the grocery store, made her pilgrimage to Kroger every Sunday. It is not a habit Sister Nena plans on picking up, claiming her Italian heritage will save her: as long as she has a box of pasta and a jar of sauce she will never starve. I can usually persuade her to let me get a few things now that I know what she likes. She is greatly enamored of the olive bar. After Sister Kathy’s visit, when the decision about everyone’s future was settled, I take Sister Nena to the store and we get some coffee and sit at a small table by the window to discuss the details. She tells me she’s found a place in a sprawling complex called Western Hills, on the other side of town. I don’t like the sound of it. I know the neighborhood, and the busy street is crowded with fast-food places, check-cashing centers, and advertisements for bail bondsmen. She is set on getting a two-bedroom so that she can have a little office for her computer and the chair where she says her prayers in the morning. I argue for a smaller place in the neighborhood where she lives now, but for once in her life the decision is Sister Nena’s to make and she intends to get what she wants. “It’s all going to be fine,” she says, trying to reassure me or reassure herself. “Sister Jeannine lives out there. She likes the place. I’ve got it all figured out. Sister Melanie’s helping me work on a budget. They gave me a checking account, a credit card, and a debit card.”

  There in the café at Whole Foods, amid the swirl of mothers with strollers and young men with backpacks, my friend, a slightly built Italian woman in a tracksuit, is not out of place. I have no idea what she is talking about.

  “I got a checking account,” she says again.

  “You’ve never had a checking account?”

  She shakes her head. “Melanie handled all the finances. She paid the bills.” Then Sister Nena leans in
, moving her cup aside. “What exactly is the difference between a credit card and a debit card?”

  The idea of going at the age of eighteen from your parents’ house into a convent, and leaving that convent at the age of sixty to live with two friends in a condo, and leaving that condo at the age of seventy-eight to live alone for the first time in your life, is something I can barely comprehend. Not to have had a checking account or a credit card makes me feel like I am having coffee with someone who just arrived from a Henry James novel.

  “I know,” she says, understanding my point completely. “In some ways I have a regular life and in other ways I don’t at all.”

  I try to outline the details of credit versus debit as clearly as possible, explaining the different ways either one of them can trip a person up. “When you use the debit card you have to write it down in the registry the same way you would a check. You need to write everything down and then subtract it from your balance each time so you’ll know how much you have.”

  She takes a sip of her coffee. “I can do that. I’m smart enough.”

  “You’re perfectly smart,” I say. “But I don’t know if you know all of this already. Once a month you get a statement from the bank. You have to balance your checkbook against the bank statement.” I never thought much of the intellectual content of my secondary education, which was weighed down by a preponderance of religion classes and gym. But while the nuns may have been short on Shakespeare, they were long on practicality. By the time we were in high school we had learned how to make stews and sauces and cakes. We knew how to make crêpes. We could remove stains and operate a washing machine. We were taught not only the fundamentals of sewing, but how to make a budget and balance a checkbook, how to fill out a simple tax form. Down at the primary school, Sister Nena had not received the benefits of any of these lessons.

  She puzzles over what I have been telling her about bank statements for a long time. When I get to the part about how she is supposed to put a tiny check mark in the tiny column once she’d received the canceled check, she suddenly perks up as if she has found the answer to the problem. Then she starts laughing. “You shouldn’t tease me like that,” she says, putting her hand on her heart. “You scared me to death. You shouldn’t tease a nun.”

  “I’m not teasing you,” I say.

  By the slight flash of panic that comes across her face I can tell that she believes me. Still, she holds her ground. “I don’t have to do that. I never saw Sister Melanie do that.”

  All the Sisters of Mercy living in their separate apartments submit a budget to the mother house, estimating the cost of their electric bills and phone bills, food and rent. What they come up with for their monthly stipend is a modest number at best. The order picks that up, along with all medical expenses and insurance. Two years ago, when Sister Nena’s car was totaled by a car that ran a red light, the order agreed that she could have a new car. I drove her to the Toyota dealership. All she had to do was sign a piece of paper and pick up the keys. “I hope it’s not red,” she said on the way there. “I don’t like red cars.”

  The car, a Corolla, was new, and it was red. Sister Nena walked a slow circle around it, studying, while the salesman watched. It wasn’t every day a car was purchased over the phone for someone who hadn’t seen it. “I take it back,” she said to me finally. “The red is nice.”

  When Sister Nena was a young nun teaching at St. Bernard’s, around the time that I was her student, she received an allowance from the order of twenty dollars a month. All of her personal expenses were to be covered by that sum: shoes, clothing, Lifesavers. Any cash gifts from the parents of students that came inside Christmas cards were to be turned over, as was any money from her own parents folded into birthday cards. It wasn’t a matter of the order leeching off the presents, it was the enactment of the vow. The sisters were still to be poor even when a little extra cash had presented itself. I can’t help but wonder if there was ever a small temptation to take a ten-dollar bill from one’s own birthday card, but the question seems impolite. “What if your mother sent you a sweater?” I ask instead. I am not being willfully obtuse; I am trying to figure out the system.

  “Oh, that wasn’t a problem. You got to keep the sweater.”

  It is possible that the only reason any of this makes some limited sense to me is that these were the lessons I was taught as a child. The notion of a rich man’s camel not being able to make its way through the eye of the needle was a thought so terrifying (my family was not without means) it would keep me up at night. I believed then that turning away from the material world was the essence of freedom, and someplace deep inside myself, someplace that very rarely sees the light of day, I still believe it now. I imagine that no one who has spent sixty years embracing the tenets of poverty thinks to herself, I wish I’d had a two-hundred-dollar bottle of perfume. That said, after our coffee and the perilous conversation about checking accounts, we go into Whole Foods to do some shopping. Sister Nena is adamant about wanting to go to Kroger, a less expensive grocery store a few blocks away, because the weekly nun dinner is going to be at her house that night and she’d promised to make pork chops. I tell her no, I am buying the pork chops where we are. I believe that pork chops are not an item that should be bargain-hunted.

  “When did you get to be so bossy?” she asks me.

  “I’ve been waiting my entire life to boss you around,” I say. I fill up the cart with salads and bread and good German beer while Sister Nena despairs over how much money I spend.

  In the checkout line I am still thinking about the twenty dollars a month, a figure she tells me was later raised to one hundred. “I worked almost fifty years and I never once saw a paycheck,” she says, and then she shrugs as if to say she hadn’t really missed it.

  Whole Foods is designed to look like a loft in SoHo—high windows and exposed pipes run across the ceiling. I watch a sparrow fly towards the cereal aisle. “When I was a little girl,” I say to Sister Nena, “and I would think about whether or not I was supposed to be a nun, I always thought I’d like to be in a cloistered order, a big wall, no visitors.” From the vantage point of the future, of course I can see that I would have chosen the cloister because it would have been a wonderful place to write—no telephone, no house guests, none of life’s thousand distractions, no place to go. I would have made a fine contemplative nun. I could easily excel at a vow of silence. I might even be good at poverty and chastity and obedience if, in return, I could have quiet days to work. Sister Nena and I continue to load the food onto the conveyer belt. For a moment I picture myself in white, in silence. “If I had been a nun I would have been a Poor Clare,” I announce.

  At this Sister Nena takes my arm she is laughing so hard. “You?” she says, gasping. “A Poor Clare?”

  Sister Nena has lined up plenty of help for the move to her new apartment. Although Sister Melanie moved out to Mercy last week, she has come back to lend a hand. Sister Nena’s eighty-year-old brother, Bud, is there, along with two of his children, Andy and Pam, and Sister Nena’s friend Nora has come too, and together we load up our cars with everything Sister Nena didn’t want to leave to the two movers. It is six-thirty in the morning and has just started to rain.

  “We can probably take all the boxes in the cars,” she says. “That way the movers wouldn’t have to bother with them.”

  “They’re movers,” I say, trying to remember if I have helped a friend move since I was in graduate school. “That’s what they do.” I go to take apart Sister Nena’s computer, which is a series of enormous black metal boxes with dozens of snaking cables coming out the back. It looks like something that might have come out of NASA in the seventies. I am very careful putting it in my car.

  The Western Hills complex is actually set farther back from the busy street than I had realized, and it is so big that it has the insulated feel of a small, walled city. Once our caravan arrives and the contents of ou
r cars are transferred into the apartment’s small living room, the rest of the group goes back to their lives and Sister Nena, Sister Melanie, Sister Jeannine, who lives in Western Hills, and I begin to put the food in the refrigerator and the clothes in closets while the movers bring in the furniture and the remaining boxes. The three nuns, all in their seventies, do hard work at a steady pace, and while I may be tempted to sit down for a moment on the recently positioned sofa, they do not, and so I do not. I tell the movers where to put the television.