The Good Sister (5 page)

So.

Thanks to Jen, Carley gave it a chance.

And thanks to me, she’s absolutely miserable. Look at her.

There are dark circles under Carley’s bespectacled eyes. Her skin is broken out thanks to stress and hormones—also the culprits behind a noticeable recent weight gain. She’s never been a thin, wiry kid like Emma, but she wasn’t necessarily plump, either. Lately, however, sedentary habits, an insatiable sweet tooth, and a tendency to turn to food for comfort have caught up with her. She’s getting a double chin, and the buttons on her white blouse strain as she leans to drape her windbreaker over the coat tree by the door.

She sees Jen staring at her and scowls suspiciously. “What?”

About to remark that it’s much too chilly on this raw day for just a thin jacket like that, Jen thinks better of it. No need for criticism right now.

“Nothing.” She lifts her gaze away from the gaping buttons, away from the round, pimply face, and notices that Carley’s brown ponytail is damp.

Resisting the urge to pat her head or—God forbid—pull her into a big hug, Jen weighs her words carefully before asking the most innocuous question she can think of: “Is it sleeting out there again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little bit.”

“I was thinking the sun might peek out this afternoon, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to, does it?” Jen glances up at the gray, misty world beyond the glass pane in the door.

Carley mutely stares at her sneakers as she backward-skates the rubber soles over the mat, leaving thick streaks of March mud.

“It was snowing out this morning, did you see?”

Still no response.

“I’m glad it didn’t stick,” Jen goes on. “I was planning to put those pansies I bought yesterday into the window boxes, but it was too wet out there, you know?”

“Mmm hmm.”

Following her daughter’s gaze to her once-white Nikes, Jen finds herself wondering if things would be different, maybe, if Carley didn’t wear them, along with opaque navy stockings, to school.

While uniforms are still required at Sacred Sisters—although the plaid skirts are shorter and the navy blazers less boxy than they were in Jen’s day—they no longer have to be paired with low-heeled brown loafers.

Jen can’t imagine stiletto heels being tolerated, but she’s seen girls wear cute sandals and boots that almost border on sexy when paired with above-the-knee-hemlines. That particular style might not do pudgy Carley any favors, but there must be a look that would be more flattering than those clunky old—

No. Stop thinking that way. It’s not Carley’s fault. It’s not about what she wears, or doesn’t wear, and it’s not about her face being broken out or the weight she’s gained.
Other girls at the school are in the same boat, or worse off; girls who are tremendously obese, or physically disabled, or utterly impoverished charity cases, or brazenly nonconformist with shorn hair and hidden tattoos . . .

Why Carley? Why did the bullies have to set their sights on her, of all people? Why a sweet girl who’d never hurt a fly?

Carley isn’t talking, except to insist that she doesn’t want to leave Sacred Sisters.

Jen’s first instinct had been to pull her out—and she still might have done it, despite Carley’s determination to stay put, if both Thad and the school’s social worker hadn’t urged her not to react so drastically.

“If she’s willing to give it another chance,” Thad said, “then I think we should back her up. Situations like this can build character.”

He had a point, but . . .

“You should be proud of her for wanting to stick it out,” Sister Linda told her over the phone. “Your daughter isn’t a quitter. That’s something we admire here.”

She had a point, too, but . . .

Jen couldn’t stand—still can’t stand—the idea of her little girl facing down cruel bullies day after day.

Sister Linda repeatedly assured her that she would be meeting regularly with Carley and her team of teachers to make sure the situation had been nipped in the bud.

“I’d like to come in and meet with them, too,” Jen said, “and my husband could probably—”

“Mrs. Archer, I know you’re concerned, but let’s not blow this situation out of proportion.”

Jen bristled at that, but when she repeated later the comment to Thad, he shrugged. “I can see her point.”

“
What?
”

“You do have a tendency to get a little—”

“Don’t you dare say melodramatic!”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Or even just dramatic.”

“I wasn’t going to say that, either.”

“What were you going to say, then?”

“Just that you can get a little worked up sometimes when—”

“I do not get worked up!”

“When it comes to the kids? Really?”

All right, maybe she does. But this is serious, not something to be brushed off like an overdue library book.

To be fair, the social worker has touched base by e-mail several times since the initial phone call. Still, she’s made it abundantly clear that Carley is in high school now, and parents are encouraged to foster independence in their daughters.

You don’t have to cut the apron strings, Mrs. Archer,
Sister Linda wrote,
but it’s not a bad idea to loosen them a bit. We aren’t doing our young women any favors if we fight their battles for them, are we?

In that moment, Jen hated her with all her heart. Almost as much as she hated the bullies who chose Carley as their target.

She’s since conceded that Sister Linda wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t previously drilled into the parents of incoming freshmen. At Sacred Sisters orientation last spring and again at Back to School night in September, the message came with different phrasing, depending on who was delivering it: the principal, the guidance counselors, various teachers and coaches, even the school nurse.

But the basic theme was this
: It’s time to let go, Mama Bear.

In other words, the school dress code and the staff aren’t the only things that have changed in the twenty-five years since Jen graduated.

Back then, no one was encouraging the girls of Sacred Sisters to think for themselves or solve their own problems. They weren’t exactly coddled, but it wasn’t sink or swim, either. The prevailing message, when you had a problem, was “Give it up to God.”

Nearly all the teachers in the old days were nuns with a few priests thrown in, and unlike at many local Catholic schools, that hasn’t changed at Sisters.

Still, in some ways, the credo was somehow less conservative back then than it is now. Most of the staff when Jen was here had started teaching in the wake of Vatican II, and the nuns wore street clothes.

The pendulum has since swung back. Weekly Latin Mass has made a comeback. The current crop of teachers includes many nuns who belong to a conservative order and still wear traditional habits.

The only one who remains from Jen’s day is Sister Margaret, the elderly home economics teacher. Back then, her job—ironic in many ways—was to teach the girls to be competent housewives. She still conducts cooking and sewing classes, according to Carley, but her title is now home and career instructor, and computer courses have been added to her curriculum.

“Sister Margaret uses a computer?” Jen was incredulous. “She was half blind when I knew her.”

“She’s pretty much all blind now,” Carley said. “But that’s why she likes the computer. She has voice recognition software.”

That conversation took place early in the school year when Carley seemed tentatively optimistic about her future at Sisters. At that point, Jen was a lot more comfortable with the idea of letting go.

It’s not so easy to do now, when she feels like her daughter is dangling by a fraying thread—or, all right, by an apron string—high above a pit filled with rabid cats. Her maternal instinct is to yank Carley back to safety and hang on tight.

Jen looks at her, again noticing the weight gain and problem skin—and again hating her own critical eye.

She herself wasn’t a perfect teenager. She didn’t have acne and she wasn’t overweight or nearsighted, and she was considered pretty and popular, but there were other things . . .

She remembers her long dark hair being far too straight and flat at a time when curly, frizzy big hair was in style.

And she remembers thinking that her nose was gigantic, even begging her parents to let her have surgery on it.

“Are you crazy?” her mother shouted—shouted, because the Bonafacios weren’t exactly a soft-spoken bunch. “People would kill for that nose! That’s a good, strong Roman nose!”

“It’s
my
nose!” her father put in.

“That’s the problem!” Jen wailed. “It’s a gigantic
man
nose on
my
face!”

But her parents assured her that she’d grow into it, and they were right. Either that, or she eventually stopped caring so much, learning to be comfortable in her own skin . . . which was much easier to do once she was away from her high school boyfriend, who always made her feel as though she didn’t measure up.

Now that she’s in her early forties, she’s noticing tiny wrinkles around the big brown eyes she always thought were her best asset. There’s a faint network of wrinkles, too, at the corners of her wide mouth.

As for her figure—nothing is as taut as it used to be. The pounds have crept on over the years, settling around her hips and thighs. She’s not obese by any stretch, but she’s hardly the super-fit middle-aged woman she’d always assumed she’d become. Losing five, ten, fifteen pounds is no longer the no-brainer it was back when she was getting rid of postpregnancy flab. Somehow, it takes a hell of a lot more diet and exercise to get rid of far less weight. And somehow, she’s not very motivated these days. As long as she’s healthy, do her looks truly matter?

Not most days. And on days when she finds that her appearance actually does matter to her, she’s careful never to vocalize self-criticism when she looks in a mirror—not if her impressionable girls are in earshot.

Does Carley even care about her own looks, though? She doesn’t ever talk about it, and Jen doesn’t dare bring it up.

I’m her mom. I’m supposed to think she’s beautiful, no matter what.

And I do
, she reminds herself hastily.
I just don’t want others hurting her because they don’t agree.

But again—she doesn’t know if what happened has anything to do with the fact that Carley doesn’t conform to the other girls’ standards of physical beauty; she’s only using her own past experience as a frame of reference.

When she was at Sacred Sisters, the only girls she remembers being teased and taunted were—to put it kindly—rather unconventional in appearance. And certainly what happened to them was nowhere near as disturbing as what happened to Carley.

Although there was one—

No. Jen doesn’t like to think about that.

Sensing that her daughter is about to bolt for the stairs and disappear behind closed doors for the remainder of the afternoon, she returns her focus to the conversation, determined to keep it going, even if it is mainly one-sided.

“Oh, before I forget to tell you—guess what?”

“What?” Carley asks in a monotone.

“Guess who’s coming to visit next weekend?”

“Who?”

“Your godmother.”

“Aunt Frankie? Really?” Carley’s brown eyes, behind her glasses, connect with Jen’s at last.

Encouraged by the spark of interaction, Jen nods vigorously. “She called me today”—actually, it was the other way around—“and she said she’s been thinking it’s been too long since she’s visited.”

In truth, Jen reached out to her closest sister—in age, friendship, and proximity, as Frankie lives in Albany—and updated her on the situation with Carley. Not only is Frankie a social worker, but as both godmother and childless aunt, she adores Jen’s daughters.

“What can I do?” she asked immediately.

“Is there any way you can come this weekend? Maybe Carley will open up to you more than she has to me.”

“I have to go to Long Island for a conference. But I’ll be there next weekend—Ma’s doing Saint Joseph’s table on Sunday, remember?”

Somehow, Jen had forgotten. Saint Joseph’s Feast Day is right up there with Thanksgiving and Christmas in their family. They used to celebrate on the actual day, March 19, but now that everyone is scattered, her parents gather everyone on a weekend before or after. That means Jen will be spending the days leading up to it in her mother’s kitchen as usual, helping to prepare the labor-intensive feast.

“When is Aunt Frankie coming?” Carley asks now.

“Friday, as soon as she gets out of work. She wants to take you out to the Cheesecake Factory”—that’s Carley’s favorite restaurant—“and maybe to a movie.”

“Me and Emma?”

“Just you.”

Carley digests that. “How come?”

“Because you’re charming and adorable,” she quips, hoping her daughter will crack a smile.

Nope.

“Is Aunt Patty coming, too?”

Patty is Frankie’s longtime significant other. A rotund woman with a magnetic personality and an easy laugh, she might be just what the doctor ordered for Carley right now. But alas—

“She’s working next weekend, Aunt Frankie said.”

Carley looks disappointed. “She’s always working.”

“It seems that way, doesn’t it?”

Patty, a paramedic, seldom has enough time off to make the four-hour drive to Buffalo with Jen’s sister.

“Aunt Frankie is always working, too. I bet they wish they could trade places with you and do nothing all day every day.”

Carley’s comment is intended to be innocent enough, Jen knows, but it stings nonetheless. She’s tempted to point out to Carley that she’s hardly a lady of leisure.

It’s all she can do to keep up with the housework around here, making sure everyone has everything they need on a daily basis, like prescription refills and permission slips and today, a last-minute egg carton for Emma’s overdue science project . . .

Jen hastily emptied the eggs right onto the refrigerator shelf and sent Emma on her way. But when she opened the door again to grab the coffee creamer, several loose eggs rolled into each other, then onto the floor.