Ch 07: Forbidden Passageways
My new life in a Catholic girls boarding school taught me more than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
When I arrived at St. Joseph’s Academy five years after seeing the iconic 1966 movie The Trouble with Angels, which depicted a comedic version of life in a Catholic girls school, I had little idea what to expect. I knew there would be nuns. I knew there would be girls and, most importantly, no boys. I knew there would be books and classes and studying. I knew there would be church and religion courses. I knew my class would be much smaller than it was at Rogers High School—thirty students compared to several hundred. But would there be devious pranks designed to outsmart the sisters like those shown in the movie? Would the girls be as boy crazy as those at my current school? Would I like it there? I didn’t know. All I knew was that it was worth the risk, or at least I prayed it would be.
Most of the students in my class had attended the Academy since freshman year—a couple had been attending as day students from the community since they were in first grade. But a few, like me, were new. Some of those who’d been around for a while struggled to adjust to jarring changes, while others, along with many of us who were new, relished in them, like nuns who no longer wore habits, more relaxed school uniforms, and field trips to see two radical Broadway productions, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. The times they were a-changin’.
Of the thirty-six students in my junior and senior years combined, six students were from Central and South America who had been sent to the U.S. to develop their cultural competency before returning to their home countries to resume their lives. Some spoke solid English, a few did not. Four of the students were Black. I had never met people of other races and ethnicities before, so this was all new to me.
My hometown, Rogers, Arkansas, publicly prided itself on being a white community, a documented sundown town (though I didn’t know that term then), where people of color were warned to be out of town by sundown or face dire consequences. Fitting into this diverse educational and living environment presented new challenges to this awkward, shy girl trying to find her way in a new world.
Because my parents were not from Arkansas, I had never developed the “hillbilly” accent of the people born there. And yet, I soon discovered that I did not speak like the other white Michigan girls in my class. My speech had a twang that was decidedly not northern. I found myself listening closely and doing my best to mimic what I heard, all to fit in. My mother taught me well. Losing what little accent I had become an obsession. Above all else, I wanted to connect with those girls most like me—the smart, mostly well-behaved white girls.
At the same time, I had two years of Spanish behind me and had even taken a class trip to Mexico in my sophomore year, so I enjoyed talking with the “Spanish” girls and learning about their countries and their cultures.
The Black girls in my class were harder for me to bond with. In retrospect, I know that, although I didn’t grow up in racist household, my town’s racism had infected me. Most strikingly, I didn’t believe that the Black students were as smart as the white girls (a belief I now know showed that I was the stupid one), so I didn’t treat them the same. By the spring of my first year there, I acted on this unconscious racism by challenging the girl who had served as class president for the previous three years.
Sheryl was a Black girl from Detroit who touted her association with the Black Panthers and presented herself with an air of certainty and sophistication. There was no doubt she was smart, but I figured, by luck of genetics, I was smarter. Soon after I announced that I was running, Sheryl dropped out. It never occurred to me to wonder why, and I didn’t ask. Chances are she wouldn’t have told me anyway. I was not someone she had a reason to trust. It would take me a number of years to learn and understand what it meant for a white person to step back and support BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) leadership.
By the spring of my senior year, I had proven myself as a dependable, responsible leader to many (most?) of the students and faculty.
Michelle changed everything.
Except for a few who lived too far to travel for such a short break, most Academy students had gone home or to a relative’s or friend’s house for Easter vacation that year. Michelle and I were seniors, only a month or so from graduation, so while the nuns who managed the dorm tended to the younger kids, we were pretty much left to our own devices. Michelle lived only a couple hours from school, so I don’t remember why she couldn’t go home. I can only suspect that she had plans unrelated to Christ’s resurrection.
At some point each day, Michelle and I would make our way through the tunnels from our dorm to the Motherhouse for hand bell choir rehearsal, an important piece of the upcoming Holy Week services. Some students were afraid of the tunnels that laced their way like rabbit burrows from one end of campus, which housed the Montessori through high school academy, under the Adrian Dominican Motherhouse, to Siena Heights College (now University). But I loved them. And even though we weren’t supposed to use them, I relished any excuse to have to take them somewhere, anywhere. Each time I slunk into them, I pretended I was on a spy mission, had secret access to a palace, or was a criminal mastermind about to rob precious jewels from a stodgy museum.
To get to rehearsal, Michelle and I slipped down the long, forbidden passageway, past the giant salt bin (the purpose of which I never understood), around a dark corner, through the nun’s dining room, up the back stairs, and then up one more set of stairs to arrive in the choir loft above Holy Rosary Chapel, never once having to brave whatever foul weather might be churning outside. There we’d meet Sister Magdelena and other nuns poised to play their bells in celebration of Jesus’s resurrection.
If you’ve never played hand bells, you might not know that it’s not as easy as it might appear. First, it’s important to understand that each bell rings a different note, so you might be assigned responsibility for playing little bells that produce high end notes on the scale, or big bells that produce deep, resonating sounds. In essence, all the members of the bell choir join together to become one instrument with each person playing one or two notes in concert with others to make a melody.
Ringing them is not a simple matter of holding up the bell and hitting it incessantly like Sister Ursula, portress in The Trouble with Angels did. She used the bell to call the students to chapel, to meals, and awaken them every morning at 6:00 am. I’m sure if we had had a Sister Ursala, I wouldn’t be clamoring to play in the bell choir. But these were very different kinds of bells.
It took me a while to learn the correct technique., including the proper way to hold the bell, which is straight up but leaning a little bit back toward your body, while maintaining a good grasp on it so the handbell doesn’t fly across the room as you ring it. To sound each bell, you draw a circle—down, forward, and then up and around. The clapper is supposed to hit on the downstroke and, if you bring it back properly, it doesn’t ring errantly on the upstroke—a definite no-no.
Once the bell sounds, it typically needs to be damped by touching it to your body or, if you’re picking up another bell, laying it on the table. In this way, members can ring all the notes in whatever piece of music the choir is playing.
I was not gifted with tremendous rhythm. Despite that, at thirteen, I took up guitar—it was the 60s after all—and I got to be a decent rhythm player. I played at parties with others who were typically better than me, and at guitar masses where I would accompany a choir belting out the latest post-Vatican II (aka modern) hymn.
But rhythm guitar is very forgiving, especially compared to handbells. If you’re a little slow in changing chords on a guitar, most people don’t notice much, especially when accompanying a church choir or after a few beers with semi-intoxicated vocalists. But when your single note in a bell choir chimes early, late, too softly, loudly, or long people notice. Even though I had become a class leader at the Academy, I didn’t like standing out. To play my notes at the exact right moment, with the right force, and for the right length, I had to practice—hard.
I still cringe when I remember the poorly timed notes emanating from the bells in my hands. Michelle, on the other hand, a lithe brunette with a knowing smile and confident air, rang her bells in perfect time, never missing a beat. I couldn’t help but admire her gift. She did her best to help me, encourage me, and teach me, but I struggled even under her attentive tutelage.
I don’t know if it was the bells that brought us closer. All I remember is that during this time, when other students were gone and the sounds of bells echoed in my head, Michelle and I found ourselves sitting on a shabby old couch in a little used room on the first floor of our dorm sharing a contraband bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.
I remember the dreary light emanating from the hall. I remember the distance closing between us. I remember kicking the now empty bottle on the floor at our feet. I remember the touch of a butterfly on a delicate sunflower. I remember tingling.
This was not my first kiss. My first kiss was with a boy. His name was Kevin. We dated for a few months and went to the junior prom together. That’s where we kissed. And kissed. We both discovered that we loved kissing. In my senior year, though, just a few months after the junior prom, I got a call that Kevin was in the hospital. The psychiatric wing. Kevin had attempted suicide.
Only later, when I was in college, did Kevin invite me to join him at a gay bar in Ann Arbor. That’s how he came out to me. He died a short time after that. I never learned if he died by suicide or, if, given it was the 1980s, AIDS was the culprit. I just know I’ll always remember those first passionate kisses—kisses that eventually led me to drinking a bottle of cheap wine with a girl on a raggedy couch in a Catholic girls school dormitory. (Read more about Kevin in A Ghost in a Michigan Cornfield)
This kiss was nothing like Kevin’s. I couldn’t believe what I was feeling. All I wanted was more. All I wanted was her.
Ironically, although this kiss changed my life in ways I couldn’t even comprehend at that time, I don’t remember when we moved beyond kissing to making love. Being one of the few kids who insisted on and had been afforded a private dorm room, we had the luxury of closing my door, and despite the fact that it wasn’t lockable, closing everyone else out. Michelle would sneak into my room late at night and we would frolic around until dawn was about to break. Then she’d creep back to her four-bed dorm room so we could greet the day, without anybody being wiser. Or so we thought.
Clichés aside, I was in heaven. As far as I recall, I had no concept of what it meant to be a lesbian. I don’t think I had ever heard the word. I might be fooling myself when I say that. It’s possible that I knew more than I remember. But I do know that I was in love, that it felt right to me, and nothing could be better than that.
I knew not to talk about it though. Even if I had words for what we were doing, I knew what was happening between Michelle and me had to remain a secret. I don’t know how I knew that. I don’t know if Michelle and I talked about it. Surely, we must have plotted our clandestine rendezvous—one of which took place in that giant salt bin hidden in the restricted tunnels to the Motherhouse. All I know is that being well-schooled in secret-keeping by my parents, I fell right into my own undercover world. While other girls my age boasted about their handsome boyfriends, I smiled and didn’t say a thing about my love life.
When I tell other lesbians that I went to an all-girls high school, they often get dreamy-eyed at the thought of it. Although it took me to the spring of my senior year to live up to their imaginations, our antics far exceeded anything Haley Mills tried in The Trouble with Angels.
Whatever I knew or didn’t know, I recognized what we were doing would not be viewed positively by the nuns whose trust and respect I had earned. The question was, would they catch on?
It didn’t take me long to find out.
Read Chapter 8: “Holy Outing”
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Wow, what a cast in The Trouble with Angels! :) Similar moment coming this week in "Lamb" - those first teenage fumblings under the pall of fear...