Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [12]
As the teachers began to arrive, a shoe box was passed filled with balled pairs of white gloves, each with name tags sewn on by our mothers. Most of the gloves were thick brushed cotton, like mine, but some were trimmed with gold—a chain or a bow—and others were almost transparent, silky like a skating skirt or how it felt inside the top drawer of my mother’s bureau. The gloves were always tight, as though the shoe box were magic and the stiff cotton shrank from week to week. Even when I used my teeth to nudge them up, they barely made it to my wrist.
At the end of assembly, we filed up two by two to be received by Reverend Mother. The procession was elaborate and choreographed, and the nuns rehearsed us endlessly—the spacing, when to turn, how deep to curtsy. Ball heel, ball heel. Like water ballet or a bride’s walk. And when we finally got close enough, her eyes, magnified by the thick glasses she wore, were a filmy cornflower blue, and you could see the down on her cheek. She always smiled, but if she said something, you would answer, Yes, Reverend Mother. Thank you, Reverend Mother.
Prizes were given: medals, calligraphed cards, the pink and red sashes, and smaller ribbons in green and blue that we fixed to our jackets with tiny gold safety pins. I got ribbons for social studies, music, and drama, but what I wanted was the one for religion. For two months, I wanted it more than anything. I went to great lengths to furrow my brow in chapel and refrained from sliding down the banister, but the ribbon remained elusive. It always went to the same two girls—one with Coke-bottle glasses who told everyone she wanted to be a nun and the other who had the face of a Botticelli angel.
By the end of the year, I’d lost interest. I started reading books about Anne Boleyn, Sarah Bernhardt, and Lola Montez. I wanted to be an adventuress, an actress, or an archaeologist. But when Masterpiece Theatre began on PBS, I knew. I was transfixed by Dorothy Tutin in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R, and each morning during summer vacation, I would practice the two things that seemed essential to my future: how to raise one eyebrow and how to cry on cue.
There were games we played then. Hopscotch with colored chalk on the sidewalk and jacks on the slippery floor of my building’s lobby. In second grade, there was Dark Shadows and Lost in Space, and we’d fight over who was Angelique and Mrs. Robinson. Elizabeth Cascella and I had queen costumes from FAO Schwarz. With the phonograph blaring, we would dance around the floral couches in her mother’s living room and act out all of The Sound of Music. We adored Captain von Trapp—his profile and his uniform; we loved Liesl and her dress; but we wanted to be Maria in the opening credits, and we spun ourselves dizzy until the white ceiling of the room became an alpine sky.
And there were board games: Who Will I Be?, Trouble, and Mystery Date.
When I was ten, we had a new game, Paper Fortune. You rolled the dice, and that was your number. Then you made a list: five boys, five cars, five numbers, five cities, five resorts, five careers, and another five careers. On a piece of paper, you wrote each list on a separate line. Then, using your number, you began to count the words, crossing off the one you landed on. In the end, there was just one word in each row. You circled them with Magic Marker, and there it was: Your life. Who you married, what you drove, how many kids, where you lived, where you vacationed, what you did, and what he did.
The problem was boys. We didn’t know any, or at least I didn’t. For vacations, you could put down Monte Carlo or Colorado or the North Pole, places you’d never been. But the names of the boys had to be real, and though we didn’t have to know them, they had to be our age, not Davy Jones or David Cassidy or any of the Beatles. Invariably,