Not The Flying Kind

Ours weren't the flying kind. Their veils hugged their heads so tightly it made MY head hurt. Only the T-zone of their faces and their bare, chapped lips were visible from any angle.

For the longest time, I didn't think our Dominican nuns had hair, arms or legs. They seemed more like the robots I conjured up in my over-active imagination, scooting along with their arms folded under the flap atop their habit, as if accelerating upon a thin layer of air.

They always smelled of soap and bleach. Not even the aroma of mint toothpaste interrupted that steady scent of NOTHING.

As I made my studious way through the grades of St. James Elementary School, the mystery just kept getting reinforced. They never, ever ate anything in front of us. Not even the hard, sticky little Valentine candies grubby hands would place on their desks. Not one cough drop. In fact, I'm not sure if I ever saw one of them take a sip of water!

I was a premature bloomer. Embarrassing bumps began to show through my school uniform long before the other girls. And when I was age ten, my mom had to have "the private talks" with me. That really made her uncomfortable. She kept telling me that I was a Woman Now, which somehow made me feel a little tainted. "I'm ten!" my mind screamed. When I got to school the day after one of these sessions, I carefully inspected Sister Madonna Leo for signs of her womanhood, because mom insisted that they were women too.

All the mystery went flying out the window one day when I was asked to stop by the convent to pick up some graded homework papers from an ailing nun. The housekeeper answered the door just as the homebound sister was dashing, veil-less, across the visible hallway. Hair! Not much of it, but it was clearly there and fiery red at that. And she was wearing something that looked like one of my grandmother's pillow cases -- blindingly white, shapeless and covering from chin to toes.

I could hardly contain my shock and excitement as I scrambled back across the school ground to deliver those papers. Talking in class would result in a dreaded check on my report card in the Practices Self Control category -- the check meaning "Needs Improvement" -- so I couldn't share my news until much later when the school day ended.

My little sister, the person I sought out first in order to avoid "shirking my responsibility" to get her home in one piece, practically shouted "You're telling a story, L!" The word "lie" was on the list of forbidden utterances, at school and at home. She could not buy the concept of nun as human being.

When I was in eighth grade, being one of the exalted and much maligned teacher's pets, I was asked to go to the corner store to pick up a list of items needed at the convent. Ivory soap, Ivory Snow Washing Flakes, Clorox bleach, tampons...TAMPONS! What? Mama said tampons are only used by women who aren't virgins (oh, yeah, she was a real woman of the 1950s; don't confuse the child with the truth!)

Nuns had to be virgins...who'd want to kiss them? Maybe the tampons were for the housekeeper. The fact that she was about 75 years old made no impression at the time.

Years later, when I was a young mother and a third grade teacher in our local Catholic school, the nuns who ran the school moved into the house across the street from us. These weren't the "penguins" from my past. These Franciscan nuns were secularized. Yep, regular clothes, mostly regular shoes (not my style by any stretch of the imagination, though), styled hair and some even wore a little blush. One was a certifiable knockout, according to my husband.

The humanity of the sisterhood quickly came full circle when I heard one of the other "lay" teachers whispering about a parishioner who was raising holy hell about the fact that one of my nun neighbors was asking to "borrow" her husband at least twice a week. Lots of chores around the house, you know.