by Ann Patchett
“I’m sorry,” the young man says to me. “I know you told me your name but I don’t remember.”
“Ann,” I say.
“Sister Ann?” he asks.
It is true that in a room with three nuns I could easily pass for a fourth. We are all dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. We have all forgone mascara. “Just Ann,” I say. I think about my mother, who, like the nuns, is in her seventies now. She was and is a woman of legendary beauty, a woman with a drawer full of silk camisoles and a closet full of high-heeled shoes who never left the house without makeup even if she was walking the dog. My sister and I have often wondered how her particular elegance and attention to detail passed over us, how we have inherited so little of her dexterity where beauty is concerned. But as I talk to the mover, a Catholic kid with a shamrock tattooed inside his wrist, I think of how we would arrive at the convent very early in the morning, and how we would stay sometimes until after dark. Maybe what rubbed off over the years was more than faith. Maybe the reason I’m so comfortable with Sister Nena and the rest of the nuns is that I spent the majority of the waking hours of my childhood with them. Where influence is concerned, timing is everything.
That first time Sister Nena called me all those years ago, when she was looking for someone to help her buy school supplies for the children at the St. Vincent de Paul School, she told me she had prayed about it for a long time before picking up the phone. She wasn’t happy about having to ask for money, but the children didn’t have paper or crayons or glue sticks, and she knew I’d done well over the years. She’d read some of my books. “I taught you how to read and write,” she said.
“You did,” I said, and didn’t mention that she had in fact done a great deal more for me than that. Sister Nena had been the focal point of all of my feelings of persecution, the repository for my childish anger. I knew that she had thought I was lazy and slow, dull as a butter knife. I watched the hands of other girls shoot up in class while I sat in the back, struggling to understand the question. Even though I had no evidence to the contrary at the time, I was certain that I was smarter than she gave me credit for being, and I would prove it. I grew up wanting to be a writer so that Sister Nena would realize she had underestimated me. I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life’s great motivators, and my success would be my revenge against Sister Nena. When I was a child I dreamed that one day she would need something from me, and I would give it to her with full benevolence. It was true that she had taught me how to read and write, but what she didn’t mention on the phone that day, and what she surely didn’t remember after nearly fifty years of teaching children was what an excruciatingly long time it had taken me to learn.
I had started first grade at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Los Angeles when my parents divorced. In late November of that year, my mother took my sister and me to Tennessee for what was supposed to be a three-week vacation to see a man she knew there. We never went back. In California, I had not yet learned to read, and when I was eventually enrolled in St. Bernard’s, I landed on Sister Nena’s doorstep. I remember her well. She was child-sized herself, wearing a plain blue polyester dress that zipped up the back. She had short dark hair and the perpetual tan of a person who played tennis on any passable day. She moved through the classroom with enormous energy and purpose and I could all but see the nonsensical letters of the alphabet trailing behind her wherever she went. I was perilously lost for all the long hours of the school day, but I had yet to conclude that I was in any real trouble. It was still a time in my life when I believed we would go home again and I would catch up among the children and the nuns I knew in California. In Nashville, we stayed in the guest room of strangers, friends of the man my mother was seeing. These people, the Harrises, had daughters of their own who went to St. Bernard’s and the daughters were not greatly inclined to go to school, nor were the Harrises inclined to make them. Many days we all stayed home together. It was 1969, a fine year for truancy.
I started second grade at St. Bernard’s as well, having learned very few of the lessons that had been laid out in my first year there. The enrollment at the school was small and we had the same teachers for grades one through three. Again, Sister Helen was there with the math I didn’t understand. Again, Sister Nena rolled up her sleeves, but the making of letters eluded me. We left the Harrises’ house and found our own apartment, and then moved again. After Christmas we moved to Murfreesboro, a less expensive town thirty minutes away where I was enrolled in public school, but we didn’t stay there either. A few months into third grade we were back in Nashville and I was back with Sister Nena. I still couldn’t read whole sentences or write the alphabet with all the letters facing in the right direction. I knew a handful of words and I did my best to fake my way through. Sister Nena, seeing me turn up for a half year of school for the third year in a row, had had enough. She kept me in from recess and kept me after school, badgering me with flash cards and wide-ruled paper on which I was expected to write out letters neatly, over and over again. I had fallen through the cracks and she had plans to pull me up, by the hair if necessary. She would see to it that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life not exactly knowing how to read or write. Cursive was waiting just ahead in fourth grade, she warned me. I had better get up to speed. In fourth grade there were great expectations and no one would be there to drag me along. (She might as well have said that in fourth grade classes would be conducted in French, a confusion that came from a Babar book my sister had. Because it was both in cursive and in French, I believed that cursive was French.) I was terrified of all there was to do, of how far behind I had fallen, and somehow I convinced myself that I was terrified of Sister Nena. I wouldn’t be in trouble if it wasn’t for her because no one else in my life had noticed I couldn’t read.
The only thing interesting about my anger towards and blame of Sister Nena was my willingness to hold on to it, without any further reflection, until I was in my thirties. I had let my seven-year-old self, my eight-year-old self, make my case against her. How much happier I would have been never to learn anything at all! It wasn’t until I sent her a check for school supplies that I found myself wondering how often I was in her classroom those first three years, and how much work she had in front of her every time I wandered in. It isn’t often the past picks up the phone and calls, affording the opportunity to reconsider personal history in a way that could have saved countless thousands of dollars in therapy had I been inclined to go. I found myself thinking about my childhood, my education. It is a pastime I am particularly loath to engage in, but I was struck by the fact that all I had made a point of remembering was her exasperation with my epic slowness, and not her ultimate triumph over it. To overstate the case, it was a bit akin to Helen Keller holding a grudge against Annie Sullivan for yanking her around. When the children of St. Vincent de Paul ran out of glue sticks again and Sister Nena called me a second time, I suggested we go shopping together and buy some.
She was standing outside her condo in Green Hills when I arrived, waiting for me. Sister Melanie and Sister Helen, still in good health, were home as well. Tennis and prayer and a habit of eating very little must agree with the human body because Sister Nena seemed to have forgone the aging process completely. She was exactly the person I had known when I was a child, and she was nothing like that person at all. She opened up her arms and held me. I was one of her students, one of who knows how many children who had passed through her classroom. That was what she remembered about me: I was one of her own.
There have been very few things in my life that have made me as happy as taking Sister Nena shopping. In the beginning, it was all school supplies, though eventually she confessed her longing to buy small presents for the teachers at St. Vincent’s who were every bit as poor as their students and were paid a sliver of the wages a public school teacher made. She picked out bottles of hand lotion and boxes of Kleenex, staplers and Lifesavers, gifts too mode
st to embarrass anyone, but her joy over having something to give them all but vibrated as we walked up and down the aisles of Target, piling things into our cart. It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.
Despite my constant questions about what she might need for herself, it was years before Sister Nena let me buy anything for her. She wouldn’t dream of letting me take her to the olive bar back then. That came later in our friendship, after Sister Helen had her stroke, after her best friend Joanne died of cancer, an immeasurable loss. We inched towards each other slowly over many years. At some point I realized that the people she was closest to were dying off or being sent away. Over the course of the years there was a place for me.
“You’re at the top of my prayer list,” she tells me. “And not because you buy me things.” She has come to understand that letting me buy her things makes me happy, and my happiness, instead of the things themselves, is the source of her joy.
“I know,” I say.
“It’s because I love you,” she says.
So ferocious is my love for Sister Nena that I can scarcely understand it myself, but I try. Hers is the brand of Catholicism I remember from my childhood, a religion of good works and very little discussion.
“I like the Catholic Church,” she says to me sometimes.
“Good thing,” I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible: bringing soup to the sick; visiting the widowed husbands of her friends who have died; sticking with the children who are slow to learn and teaching them how to read, because it wasn’t just me—it turns out there are legions of us. She babysits two Haitian girls, Islande and Thania, and helps them with their reading and their math. They ask their mother to bring the phone to their beds before they go to sleep so they can call Sister Nena and say goodnight, tell her they have said their prayers. I think of how Sister Nena spoke of the Mercys who taught her in school and how she had admired their goodness. I think of how it took me half my life to fully comprehend the thing she had discovered as a child. (I have no doubt that she had been a better student than I was.)
She is happy in her new apartment, though she probably could have set up camp in a closet somewhere and been fine. Happiness is her mind-set, her decision, and though she often reminds me that God will take care of things, she is also determined not to trouble Him if at all possible. It’s a little bit like wanting to move all the boxes before the movers come. She will take on the work of her life quickly, do it all herself when no one is watching so that she can show God how little help she needs.
Any worries she has these days are focused on Sister Melanie, who is adjusting slowly to her new life at Mercy. Sister Melanie is shy and had long relied on Sister Nena for her social skills. “She stays in her room all the time,” Sister Nena says. “Whenever I go out to see her, there she is. I tell her, no one’s going to find you in here. You have to get out.” She is reaching down into that place where Sister Melanie has wedged herself. She is trying to pull her up.
We get together the day after the funeral of her friend Mary Ann. Mary Ann was the other Catholic in her tennis group. “I’m fine. I’m not sad,” Sister Nena tells me when I call. I know better than to believe her. “You don’t have to take me out.”
“What if I just want to see you?” I say.
Over lunch she tells me that the last time she saw her, Mary Ann was very peaceful. “She looked at me and said, ‘Nena, I’m ready. I want to see God.’ ” Then Sister Nena corrects herself. “I’m wrong. That was the time before last. The last time I saw her she couldn’t say anything. When I went to her funeral and I saw the urn there I thought, ‘Where is her soul?’ ” Sister Nena looks at me then, hoping that I might know. “Is it with God? I want to believe her soul is with God. She was so certain. I’m just not sure. I shouldn’t say that.” She puts her hand flat out on the table. “I am sure.”
“Nobody’s sure,” I say.
“Sister Jeannine is sure.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m contradicting myself. I know God made us but I’m not so sure about what happens afterwards.”
“What do you want to happen?” I ask her.
This she knows the answer to immediately. It is as if she has been waiting her entire lifetime for someone to ask her. “I want God to hold me,” she says.
You above all others, I tell her. You first.
(Granta, Spring 2011)
About the Author
ANN PATCHETT is the author of six novels and two books of nonfiction. She is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, England’s Orange Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Also by Ann Patchett
State of Wonder
What now?
Run
Truth & Beauty
Bel Canto
The Magician’s Assistant
Taft
The Patron Saint of Liars
Credits
Portions of this work appeared, in both slightly and significantly different forms, in the following:
Atlantic Monthly: “My Life in Sales”; “ ‘The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal’ ”; “The Bookstore Strikes Back”
Audible Originals: “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”
The Bark: “On Responsibility”
The Best American Short Stories 2006: “Introduction”
Byliner: “The Getaway Car”
Gourmet: “Do Not Disturb”
Granta: “The Mercies”
Harper’s Magazine: “Love Sustained”
New York Times: “Our Deluge, Drop by Drop”
New York Times Magazine: “The Paris Match”
Outside: “My Road to Hell Was Paved”
South Carolina Review: “The Right to Read: The Clemson Freshman Convocation Address of 2006”
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America: “Tennessee”
Vogue: “The Sacrament of Divorce”; “This Dog’s Life”; “Dog without End”
Wall Street Journal: “The Best Seat in the House”
Washington Post Magazine: “How to Read a Christmas Story”; “The Wall”
Copyright
THIS IS THE STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE. Copyright © 2013 by Ann Patchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-06-223667-8
EPub Edition November 2013 ISBN: 9780062236692
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