THE NUNS OF CHILDHOOD: TWO VIEWS 1. O where are they now, your harridan nuns who thumped on young heads with a metal thimble and punished with rulers your upturned palms: three smacks for failing in long division, one more to instill the meaning of humble. As the twig is bent, said your harridan nuns. Once, a visiting bishop, serene at the close of a Mass through which he had shambled, smiled upon you with upturned palms. “Because this is my feast day,” he ended, “You may all have a free afternoon.” In the scramble of whistles and cheers one harridan nun, fiercest of all the parochial coven, Sister Pascala, without preamble raged, “I protest!” and rapping on palms at random, had bodily to be restrained. O God’s perfect servant is kneeling on brambles wherever they sent her, your harridan nun, enthroned as a symbol with upturned palms. 2. O where are they now, my darling nuns whose heads were shaved under snowy wimples, who rustled drily inside their gowns, disciples of Oxydol, starch and bluing, their backyard clothesline a pious example? They have flapped out of sight, my darling nuns. Seamless as fish, made all of one skin, their language secret, these gentle vestals were wedded to Christ inside their gowns. O Mother Superior Rosarine on whose lap the privileged visitor lolled — I at age four with my darling nuns, with Sister Elizabeth, Sister Ann, am offered to Jesus, the Jewish child- next-door, who worships your ample black gown, your eyebrows as thick as mustachioed twins, your rimless glasses, your ring of pale gold — who can have stolen my darling nuns? Who rustles drily inside my gown?

THE SINGER SEWING MACHINE In the thirties, I attended Charles W Henry Elementary School in Germantown, then a sleepy suburb of Philadelphia. School was a sturdy down-one-hill-and-up-the-other one-mile walk from our house, and I trudged there and back twice a day. In those days, kids walked home for lunch and returned for afternoon classes, which consisted of home economics for the girls and shop for the boys. No one questioned this arrangement. It was simply a given. In sixth grade we girls went to sewing class, presided over in real life and half a hundred nightmares by a supreme harridan named Miss Morrison. At the front of the room an oilcloth chart the size of a pull-down map of South America displayed the steps to be followed in threading this diabolical invention, the Singer sewing machine. This is my garbled recollection of the eight steps, as foreign to me as a Sanskrit text. First you set the spool on a little spindle, then you gingerly coaxed the thread end through one little eyelet, then you drew this spidery thread across the top to· another eyelet, then down and around a small cog. Next you looped the thread under an upside-down hook, then crossed to another eyelet, finally down to the foot, after which you trepidatiously threaded the needle and lowered it with an abrupt snap-think spider trapping its prey-to catch the bobbin thread. That’s if you were lucky and had wound the bobbin correctly. (Winding the bobbin was another exercise in arcana.) Once these two threads had mated, you placed your right hand on the flywheel drawing it authoritatively toward you and at the same instant began to pump the treadle, one foot slightly behind the other. At this point the thread invariably broke, flew out of its several eyelets, and you began again. I could swim the Australian crawl, post to the trot, and smack a softball past third base, but I could not coordinate the flywheel and the treadle. My thread, so painstakingly arranged, broke and flew out of its settings. The bobbin thread, so assiduously wound, drawn up from its little coffin and conjoined with the needle, snapped free and retreated underground. Prisoner of clumsiness, I was told to begin again. “Follow the chart at the front of the room,” Miss Morrison said grimly. Eventually matters got personal. Why couldn’t I follow directions? Was there something the matter with my eyesight? Why did my fingers tremble? She disliked my hair, in two long fat braids that I was to scissor off the next year, to my mother’s dismay. I was terrified of Miss Morrison, who hinted that my hair was dirty, that it harbored disease, and that if I didn’t master the Singer, I would receive an F in her class and be forced to repeat home economics another year. 0 Sisyphus! Follow the chart at the front of the room. I sat frozen at the prospect, then put my head down and to my great surprise threw up all over the machine. A horrified Miss Morrison sent me to the nurse, who called my mother, who rescued me. Miraculously, I was excused from home economics the rest of the term and allowed to spend that period in the school’s little library, rereading my old favorites. To this day I like to think of Miss Morrison, imprisoned by my vomit, cleaning her perfect Singer eyelet by eyelet, visited by the gods’ own vengeance.

LOOKING BACK IN MY EIGHTY-FIRST YEAR How did we get to be old ladies— my grandmother’s job—when we were the long-leggèd girls? — Hilma Wolitzer Instead of marrying the day after graduation, in spite of freezing on my father’s arm as here comes the bride struck up, saying, I’m not sure I want to do this, I should have taken that fellowship to the University of Grenoble to examine the original manuscript of Stendhal’s unfinished Lucien Leuwen, I, who had never been west of the Mississippi, should have crossed the ocean in third class on the Cunard White Star, the war just over, the Second World War when Kilroy was here, that innocent graffito, two eyes and a nose draped over a fence line. How could I go? Passion had locked us together. Sixty years my lover, he says he would have waited. He says he would have sat where the steamship docked till the last of the pursers decamped, and I rushed back littering the runway with carbon paper . . . Why didn’t I go? It was fated. Marriage dizzied us. Hand over hand, flesh against flesh for the final haul, we tugged our lifeline thru limestone and sand, lover and long-leggèd girl.