Weekends weren’t much different from school days. I spent Saturday mornings with Elena and Saturday afternoons with Nancy. I learned Nancy had a fiancé, and when she showed me a picture of him, I was surprised to see he was strong-jawed and extremely handsome. I’d figured her as a spinstery sort who would go back to California and adopt three Great Danes and play the cello to them every morning and go protesting the atomic bomb with her knitting circle.
After my sessions with Nancy, I studied in the common room or sat by the fire while girls took turns to perform dramatic readings from care-package magazines. The engagement notices were most popular, followed by ruthlessly specific advertisements for home help. We had to place a ban on anything to do with Laika or else Greta cried. When I could escape, I went down to the garden to visit Isabella and Sister Teresa. Usually Sister Luisa was also there, picking vegetables or digging. If Sister Luisa was there, then I waved and smiled and walked on, as if I’d only happened to be passing. I don’t know how they could bear to exchange words while other sisters worked in silence beside them, listening. Something about seeing Sister Teresa speak in front of the other nuns made me more aware of their presence in the academy. I watched the sisters more carefully now. The slow, gliding way of walking that they shared. The downward tilt to their gaze. Perhaps because I had been away, or because of Sister Teresa, I noticed the nuns in all the places where I hadn’t before: trimming trees in the orchard, hanging bedsheets to dry on the lines behind the bell tower. When I watched Sister Benedict sweeping the steps with a fixed expression, or Sister Maria mopping the refectory floors, I wondered if they, too, were wearing away at themselves. If they were practicing their own numbing paths to oblivion.
If Isabella and Sister Teresa were alone in the yard, then I’d stop and ask them inane questions about herbs and vegetables. Isabella would come over and kneel on a sackcloth bag while I rubbed the stiffness out of her shoulders.
When it was the three of us, Isabella insisted on calling her Rosaria. But I couldn’t get used to the idea that she had another name. I thought Teresa was her name. It was so odd, to look at Sister Luisa and think she might really be Giulia or Holly or Delphine or Bridget.
“How do you pick your nun name?” I asked Sister Teresa finally, one Thursday afternoon. Why would anyone pick a name as ordinary as Teresa, if they had anything to choose from? I would have selected something delicate and classy. Sister Anastasia, perhaps, or Sister Hyacinth.
“It is personal choice,” she said. “But also, we must be able to sign for it.”
“What?” My mouth dropped open. I looked to Isabella and she was nodding. Clearly they’d already had this discussion.
Sister Teresa laughed. “How did you think we communicated?”
“I don’t know.” It had never occurred to me that the sisters would communicate with each other. I’d never seen two of them exchanging as much as eye contact. With the routine of the place, I figured everyone just knew their positions, their routines, their duties, and slid along as if on grooves inside a cuckoo clock.
“They have all sorts of symbols,” Isabella said excitedly.
“Oh yeah?”
“Like if they get sick or something.”
“Right,” I said, looking at Sister Teresa. But I was losing interest. It seemed prurient and unsettling to be privy to the intimacy of the sisters’ private customs, like spotting a teacher on the weekend, grocery shopping with her own kids. I would rather the sisters stayed part of the scenery of the academy, drifting peacefully in the background. Not miming to one another about their period cramps.
“Neat,” I said.
“Honestly,” Sister Teresa said to Isabella, “I shouldn’t have told you my birth name.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re not meant to be fixated on personal things, are you?” Wasn’t she supposed to be trying to kill her personality?
“I regret it,” Sister Teresa said.
Isabella grinned. “She didn’t want to say, but I got it out of her. I just knew she wasn’t a Teresa. Are you, Rosie?”
“‘Rosie’ is awful,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. The expression was so un-nunlike, so like a normal girl, it transformed her. She could have been one of our classmates.
“No, it’s not! What does old William say? Rose by any other name smelling sweet?” Isabella pouted.
“But that means despite my name I would be the same person.”
“Oh yeah?” Isabella bit her nail. I thought of the earth on her fingers and suppressed a shiver. “You think that can really be true?” She licked the corner of her thumb where she had chewed the nail away. “I think I’d be totally different with a different name. If I was, I don’t know, Cookie instead of Isabella.”
Sister Teresa frowned. “Cookie? That’s not a real name.”
“It is too,” said Isabella. “In my middle school class there was a girl called Cookie. And another called Muffin.”
“Those were their actual names?” Sister Teresa said.
“Well, no, nicknames.”
“Like Rosie?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I think Teresa suits me much better than my birth name.”
I winced. The phrase “birth name” was horrible.
“Don’t you mean your christened name?” I said. I knew I was being a know-it-all but, spitefully, I wanted to puncture their little moment of banter.
“No.” Sister Teresa held my gaze. “That’s very astute of you.”
I glanced at Isabella, expecting her to catch my eye. Astute. What a word. I waited for the spell of our joke about Sister Vocabulary to be cast, to link us back together. But she was watching Sister Teresa.
“Actually, my birth name is different from my christened name. The politics are complicated. In Ethiopia.”
“Don’t you miss Africa?” I said, not knowing I would ask that until I heard myself voice the question.
She stretched her neck. “Sometimes I miss my family, that’s true.”
“You have a family?” My mouth fell open.
She laughed at my incredulity. “My mother and my siblings are all living in my hometown,” she said. “And my brothers and sister are all married now. With their own families.”
“And your father?” I said.
“My father moved back to Italy.”
I stared at her, astounded. I looked at Isabella, who was wriggling her eyebrow at me meaningfully.
“Your father’s here?” My voice was stringy.
“In the south.” She pushed the rake over to the fence. I thought for a moment I had offended her and she was walking away to end the conversation. But instead she turned and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her tunic. She took off her gloves with her teeth, pinned them under her elbow, and shook the packet, offering it to Isabella and to me. We all shared a match. She blew it out and threw it carelessly toward the fence. It fell only a yard away and I watched the stalk still smoking in the earth.