by Caryl Rivers
“A writer, we have a real writer, at last!” Then she said to me, “Look, kid, you’re not Dorothy Parker but you’ve got a style. I can really make something out of you.” And so my career in journalism was launched.
Con got me started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, and, of course, her own personal heroine, Dorothy Parker. I thought Con’s philosophy of life was thrilling. I, too, wanted to be Beautiful and Damned. I wanted to fall in love in Paris with a beautiful young man who had a tragic war wound. I wanted to make love in a sleeping bag in the middle of a war. I thought of Sean and me in a sleeping bag. The only problem was that he’d have his damned Map along, and Hemingway never wrote about that:
Maria pressed her lips against the lips of Robert.
“No Maria,” Robert said, “it is a Near Occasion of Sin.”
“Roberto, my love, I must have you!” she cried, as the bullets ricocheted off the rocks above their head, rocks that were turning red in the blazing light of dawn.
“You may kiss me,” Roberto said, as the cries of the advancing fascist soldiers rang in their ears, “but no tongue kissing for twenty minutes, no touching below the waist, and no squeezing, only patting.”
“But Roberto, we may die before the sun is high in the sky. They may drill us before we even get to tongue kissing.”
“Yeah, but just think, Maria, we’ll go in the State of Grace.”
Con and I hung out, every minute that we weren’t in class, in the newspaper office, the Messenger room. She was the editor-in-chief and I was the managing editor. It was our sanctuary, our personal haven, our escape from the perennial wimphood that was decreed to be the proper mental state for nice Catholic young ladies.
“You and I, Peg,” Con decreed, “have minds like men. We’re different from most women. We’re not going to be like them. We’re not going to be people nothing ever happens to.”
That was the worst thing of all, I thought, a life where nothing ever happened. I looked around me and saw women ironing dresses and hanging out clothes and shopping for food and playing Mahjong on hot summer afternoons, and I knew I couldn’t bear to spend my life that way, day after drab day, with nothing ever happening. The world of women seemed to me like a huge, airless prison where things didn’t change. Inside it, I thought, I’d turn gray and small and shrivel up to nothing.
We are the intellectual elite,” Con said. “Most people are sheep. We have brains, and that’s why we were born to lead.”
And I ached to be a leader, to be the intellectual elite, to be bold and reckless and daring. But only part of me was like that, a small, throbbing mass of rebellion and independence inside me, surrounded by huge globe of niceness, hundreds of thousands of timid, conforming little cells desperately crying out for approval. I wanted to smash them, ruthlessly. I wanted to break all the rules—refuse to polish my oxfords, chew gum in class, wear sleeveless dresses (forbidden by the nuns), and let the masses thrill at the sight of my bare white arms; I wanted not to go to church on a Holy Day of Obligation and to eat meat on Friday. I wanted to live! And Con knew how to do it better than anyone else in the world.
Con had short, curly black hair, a perfect heart-shaped face, and beautiful skin; but she was what we called, in those days, “pleasingly plump” and it was the despair of her life. She cut out a picture of what she wanted to look like from Vogue—a photograph of a reed-thin, hard-faced blonde wearing the expression of a hanging judge. “A real ball-buster,” as Con put it. She talked dirty better than anyone else I knew. She was writing a novel, and she said it had oral sex in it.
“You mean they talk about sex a lot?”
Con rolled her eyes upward. “Oh God, you don’t know anything! You don’t know what oral sex is?”
“Not exactly.”
“A blow job.”
“Oh, that!” I said, but I blushed a deep tomato red.
“Peggy,” she said, “you don’t know enough about sex.”
“Sure I do,” I said, and I told her about Savage Warrior. “Ingrid and Soldred do lots of stuff,” I said. I told her about how Soldred and Ingrid lay naked in the big ship with the dragon on it and sated their lips with the sweet juices of passion, and let their fingers turn into little stallions wandering in an enchanted garden. (When Soldred was off whacking heads, Ingrid galloped her own little stallion through her enchanted garden, a revelation that got me to confession a lot more than ever before.)
“Kid stuff,” Con said.
I was shocked. Soldred and Ingrid, kid stuff? I thought they were dreadfully avant-garde.
“Just wait,” she said. The next day she smuggled into school a book she had swiped from her uncle’s house—he was a Navy commander—that he had bought in Paris. It had drawings of Oriental-looking people doing the most interesting things to each other. I never knew there were so many items that could be placed in so many orifices of the human body.
“Con, look at this. Those people, they’re doing it like, like—cocker spaniels!”
“Yeah,” she said, perfectly blasé. “So they are.”
“Con, you don’t think—that Aly and Rita do that?”
“Why not?” she said. “Peg, you know it does get boring doing it the same old way all the time.”
I certainly was learning a lot. I mean, I’d gotten pretty darn sophisticated, but to think of Aly and Rita doing it like Lassie and Spot—that was a bit much. Con told me that the pictures came from temple drawings.
“Temples? Like churches?”
“In the Orient, love is sacred,” Con said.
“Somehow, I can’t see Father Ryan ordering a stained-glass window for St. Malachy’s with pictures of people screwing,” I said.
“Wouldn’t be so many people asleep at nine o’clock Mass,” Con said.
Not only did Con further my sex education, but she enlisted me in what she called a Sacred Crusade in journalism. “We owe it to ourselves, and to History, to be magnificent!” she said, throwing up her arms to the sky. Con did get pretty dramatic at times. “We are going to be the Messenger staff that will be remembered as long as a single brick of Immaculate Heart High School is left standing under the sun. We must do it!” Then she recited:
One moment in annihilation’s waste
One moment of the well of life to taste.
The sun is setting and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing—Oh make haste!
“I’m not sure I get that,” I said.
“Don’t you see? We have only the moment. If we blow it, it’s gone forever. We have one chance to be brilliant, to be immortal! One moment of the well of life to taste, Peggy!”
Rules, Con said, were made to be broken, and we were going to break them—gloriously, stylishly, immediately. And so the Miracle Caper was hatched.
Con, myself, and our comrade-in-rebellion, Mollie, the page one editor, hatched it at the conference table under the portrait of our patron saint, St. Theresa, the Little Flower.
In the portrait, St. Theresa had her hands folded and she was looking heavenward, enveloped in a yellow ray of light, an expression on her face as if she had just swallowed a sour ball. That was the side of the picture we kept facing out when the nuns were around. But when we locked the door, we flipped the picture. There was St. Theresa’s face, still wearing the sour ball look, pasted onto a body wearing a white brassiere and girdle. Underneath we had written the caption: I DREAMED I WAS CANONIZED IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA.
But it wasn’t St. Theresa who was our concern at the moment, it was Mother Marie Claire. Mother Marie just happened to be the foundress of the Sisters of Claire, the order that taught at Immaculate Heart. The order was staging a big campaign to get Mother Marie declared a saint, but Con said that somebody who started schools in Tallahassee, Florida, Crystal Springs, Maryland, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, probably didn’t deserve to be canonized.
“God does not even know where Scranton is,
” Con said. “He may see every sparrow that falls, but ask Him about Tallahassee and He draws a blank.”
Nonetheless, we decided that in our capacity as the staff of the Marian Messenger, it was our duty to give Mother Marie a leg up on sainthood. Mother Marie was somewhat deficient in the miracle department—you had to have at least one first-class miracle to get to be a saint—and we were going to try to provide one.
Con and Mollie and I gathered one September afternoon in the far corner of the athletic field, behind the equipment shed, out of the sight of prying clerical eyes. Sean hopped the fence to join us. He wasn’t supposed to be there, of course. Fraternization between Sacred Hearters and Immaculate Hearters during school hours was an instant thirty demerits. But he couldn’t resist the chance to witness a bona fide miracle.
“You can be an official witness,” Con told him. “So when the Vatican needs a person to sign papers, you’ll be it.”
“Me? I’m not even supposed to be here,” Sean said. “I’ll get a shitload of demerits if I get caught.”
“Would you let a few demerits stand in the way of sainthood for Mother Marie Claire?” I asked him.
Sean looked thoughtful. Mollie said, “Look at it this way. Wouldn’t you want a saint in your corner when you hit the Pearly Gates?”
“You have a point,” Sean said.
“I wouldn’t count on Mother Marie Claire,” Con said. “Even if she gets to be a saint, she’d still be out in the left field bleachers. From where she sits, God looks like a flea.”
“Come on, Con,” I said, “she may be a two-bit saint, but at least she’s ours.”
“Yeah,” Sean said, “who else you got that has a shot at it?”
“Sister Justinian might make it,” Mollie said.
“What did she do?”
“Single-handedly wiped out the soul kiss at Immaculate Heart.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Sean said.
“For awhile, anyhow,” Mollie said. “She says that God punishes people who soul kiss by giving them cancer of the tongue.”
“What!” Sean said.
“Stick out your tongue,” Con ordered. Sean complied. “Oh yeah, little green things. Definitely cancer.”
“She didn’t really say that,” Sean said.
“Oh yeah,” I told him. “She told this story about a kid who soul kissed all the time. When he got cancer, he repented, and the last words he said before they cut his tongue out were Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“Oh God, that’s sick!” Sean said.
“Yeah,” Con said, “I would have asked for Scotch on the rocks. Stupid kid.”
“Enough talk,” Mollie ordered. “I got to be in geometry in twenty minutes.” She looked at me. “You got ‘em?”
I nodded. I took out a stack of 200 Mother Marie Claire bookmarks.
They showed a stern-faced woman in a nun’s wimple and veil, and the expression on her face made St. Theresa’s sour ball stare seem positively orgasmic.
Sean picked one up and looked at it. “Did they take this picture after she died? She looks awful.”
Con looked at the bookmark. “That’s her on a good day. Irene Dunne she is not.”
“Come on, hurry it up,” said Mollie. “Get the fire started.”
If Mother Marie had any miracle talents, stopping fires seemed to be the major one. The nuns claimed that it was her forte, and they were hopeful that her talents in that department were going to improve. That’s where we came in. If we could get a good fire going, and then throw in a stack of Mother Marie bookmarks, she’d have a chance to put it out cold. Mollie had the Messenger camera, and we’d get the miracle on “Candid Camera.”
Sean, who used to be a Boy Scout, was given the job of getting the fire going. He arranged the twigs and paper in a pyramid shape and lit them with a match (twenty demerits for possession). “That ought to do it,” he said.
When the fire was going good, I tossed in a bookmark.
“Mama, do your stuff,” Con chanted.
“That’s blasphemous,” I cautioned.
We watched the bookmark as the flames lapped at it, and slowly, Mother Marie’s unsmiling face curled, melted, and turned to flame.
“More,” Con ordered.
I tossed in more bookmarks. The fire licked at them, curled them, and turned them to flame.
“She’s not doing so hot,” Sean said.
“And it’s just a little fire, too,” I said. I was really disappointed. Some where deep down in my heart, I really had believed that Mother Marie Claire could pull it off. It was sort of like Santa Claus; with your rational mind you knew there wasn’t any fat guy with reindeers who stumbled down your chimney, but if he showed up one Christmas Eve, you wouldn’t really be surprised.
I threw in more bookmarks and we all stood and watched them burn. Just then, an unexpected puff of wind caught one of the flaming Mother Maries, picked it up and wafted it into the air. It landed about fifty feet away, in a patch of dry brown grass. There hadn’t been any rain in a week, and this part of the field had been untouched by the mower. The minute the flaming fragment touched down, the dry grass blazed up.
“Oh shit,” Con said.
We all ran to the burning grass and tried to stamp out the flames with the soles of our feet. But the wind had carried even more embers aloft, and we couldn’t stamp fast enough to keep up with the new tongues of flame licking at the grass all around us.
“Quick, the rest of the bookmarks,” Mollie shouted. This was Mother Marie’s big chance. I scattered more bookmarks among the flames. They curled and vanished.
“Shit, we got to get the fire department,” Sean called out. “We’re going to burn the whole fucking school down.”
We gazed in dismay at the spreading flames. Con looked up at the sky. “You really blew it, Mother Marie!” she said.
“Yeah, I guess sainthood just isn’t in the cards,” Mollie said.
“Will you kids move your butts! We really got to get out of here!” Sean yelled.
We all took off at a dead run for the fence, about fifty yards away. Sean and I, old hands at fence climbing, went over easily. Mollie followed suit.
But Con was only halfway over the fence when her underpants snagged on the wire notches on top of the fence. She was stuck there, with only one leg over on the safe side of the fence. She lifted her uniform skirt and tugged at the pants, but they wouldn’t pull free.
“Peg, help!” she screamed. I ran back and pulled and tugged at the panties, but to no avail.
“Hurry up, for God’s sake!” Sean yelled.
“No good. I may have to rip them,” I said.
“Do it! Just hurry!” There was a twinge of panic in Con’s voice. “Sean, turn around!”
Sean obligingly turned away.
I pulled with all my might. Con’s panties ripped down the middle and she pulled free, leaving the panties still caught on the fence, waving like a banner in the wind.
We sprinted into the woods that separated Immaculate Heart from Sacred Heart, and then we heard the wail of a siren. Fortunately for us, someone had seen the fire and called the fire department.
We walked along the path that led through the woods.
“We’ve got to get back into the building without being spotted,” I said.
That was going to be difficult. We couldn’t go back across the athletic field, and if we circled and came in through the front door or the side door, someone would see us and know we’d been out of the building when the fire started. For Sean it was easy. He could just slip back through the woods.
“We could hide here until they put the fire out,” Mollie suggested.
“No good,” I said. “We’re all supposed to be in class in a few minutes. If we’re all missing, they’ll smell a rat for sure.”
“We are in deep shit,” Mollie said.
Then I had an inspiration. “Hey, the big tree by the Messenger room. We can go
right up it and crawl across the limb to the window. The chem lab’s got the only windows you can see out of, and nobody’s in there now.”
“That’s on the second floor!” Con said. I knew about her problems with heights. Getting up on a kitchen stool made her dizzy.
“It’s either that or get arrested for arson,” I said.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Con reluctantly agreed. We all made our way to the base of the tree, a large old oak with a great many branches close to the ground, perfect for climbing. I scrambled up first, crawled out on the wide limb and crawled across it, opened the window, and dropped inside the room.
“Come on, it’s easy,” I called down.
Mollie climbed up next, and swung herself into the room. Con was still standing by the tree, next to Sean.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m sick. I’m nauseous.”
“You haven’t even left the ground,” Sean said. “How can you be dizzy?”
“Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up.”
“Come on, Con, you’ve got to. I’ll help you.”
“O.K.,” she said. Then she remembered. “I haven’t got any pants on.”
“O.K., I’ll go,” Sean said.
Con grabbed his arm. “No! You can’t! You have to help me!”
“Con!” I yelled. “Your tie! Use your tie!”
The red tie that we wore with our uniform dress was tied just above the breastbone in a square knot. It was the size of a large diaper, made of red nylon.
Con tipped off the tie. “Turn around!” she commanded Sean.
“I seem to be doing this a lot,” he said.
With a considerable bit of struggling, Con managed to wrap the tie, dydee-style, around her privates, and secured it with a knot. “I’m ready,” she said.
Sean helped her to get to the first branch. Then he climbed up on it too and helped boost her to a second branch, and then a third. Con was breathing hard and beads of moisture stood out on her forehead. Finally, with Sean keeping a tight hold on her, she made it to the level of the limb near the window.
