The Mystery of the Unborn Calf

I was a backward child, wandering dreamily in a world filled with mysteries and miracles. At ten, even as my breasts were starting to develop, my mother had to sit me down and inform me that it was  parents who gave their children gifts on the feast of the Epiphany--not the Magi following the star on their camels. Prior to her revelation, I had felt no need to question the story. I had been taught that my guardian angel hovered over my right shoulder as I went about my day, and the Virgin Mary personally kept vigil over my bed at night, so why not flying camels and wandering stars? 

One day a couple of years later, informed by the maid who made my bed that overnight I had transitioned from niña to mujer, my mother called me into her room and handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a belt.

“What’s all this?” I asked, oblivious to the events of the night.

She explained the basics. Thinking that menstruation was an annoying but temporary manifestation of adolescence, like acne, I asked her when it would stop. My mother smiled. “Not until you are very old,” she said.

Along with the supplies, she handed me a Spanish translation of a booklet published by Modess. It had line drawings of cool-looking American girls in circle skirts and saddle shoes, and, less interesting, sketches of the organs that menstrual blood came from. The booklet did not explain what the bleeding was for, and it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with babies, much less with men. I did notice that some pages seemed to have been cut out of the booklet, but I didn’t ask.

Now that I would have to carry those bulky pads around with me, my mother decided that I needed a purse. We were living in Quito at the time, and you couldn’t simply walk into a store and buy one. Like furniture and clothing, purses had to be made to order. She took me to the man who made things out of leather, and they had a conversation about the design of the purse while I stood on one foot and then the other, daydreaming. They decided on one in the shape of a flattened flower pot.

As they discussed the kind of leather--cow, pig, alligator?-- to be used, the man said something that startled me out of my trance. “I have something that would be perfect for the child,” he said, spreading a skin on the counter. It was covered in short, fine, honey-colored fur. He ran his fingers over it and smiled at my mother. “It is unborn calf. Feel how soft…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That is impossible. How can you make a purse out of a calf that is not born, that doesn’t exist?”

“Hush!” my mother said.

"No, really," I persisted. "It's absurd!"

My mother gave the man a deposit for the purse and hustled me out of the store. At home she explained that before birth calves grew for several months inside mother cows, just as human babies grew inside their mothers. Again, she made no mention of bulls or men, and again I didn’t ask. After all, hadn’t Our Lord been "conceived of the Holy Spirit"? But that was not the main issue on my mind.

“It must hurt a lot when the baby comes out!” 

“Yes, of course,” my mother said. “Maybe that is why mothers love their children so much.”

I remember feeling skeptical about this. Why would one love something because it hurt? But of course many other painful things were supposed to be good or even holy--fasting before communion, giving one’s allowance to the poor, not to mention Our Lord’s death on the cross—so the pain of childbirth fit right in with my worldview.

Although I am sorry that I embarrassed my mother and the leather man that day, I nevertheless recall my preadolescent self with tolerance. My lack of curiosity about sex was not evidence of an impoverished mind. On the contrary, my mind was already so full of unfathomable things that there was no room for thinking about mundane stuff like where babies came from. Figuring out what  impelled Saint Eulalia at age thirteen to confront the Roman governor of Barcelona, an avid persecutor of Christians, who then proceeded to torture and kill her, was more engrossing than wondering how that calf got into the cow in the first place.

I wore the calf-skin purse for a long time, until the zipper broke. Another thing that I neglected to wonder about during those years is what had to happen to the cow in order for her unborn calf to be made into a purse. I regret that I came late to an awareness of the suffering of animals, but I am making up for it now.

First Day of School

I started school when I was six, and until I entered that first-grade classroom I cannot remember having been in the presence of another child my age.

The school was run by an order of German nuns who had fled Hitler and come to impart punctuality, discipline, good posture, and the German language to the daughters of the Barcelona élites. It was an expensive school, and my parents would not have been able to afford it if I hadn’t been their only child. But the nuns’ German accents carried a whiff of exoticism that my mother, whose fondness for strange people and places would later lead the family to Ecuador, found irresistible.

That first morning, not just my mother but my father too marked the solemnity of the occasion by walking me to school. As my classmates and I were being marched into the building, I turned for a last look at them. Why weren’t they coming with me? When Schwester Maria showed me my desk, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was in a room without a relative in sight--no parents, aunts, grandparents, or great-uncles and -aunts—just strangers.

I already knew how to read, so that part was no trouble. Nor, unless she addressed me in German, was Schwester Maria a problem, since I was well accustomed to dealing with grownups, whom I usually found to be reasonable and who could be trusted to keep their word. What terrified me were the other girls.

I could make neither heads nor tails of these turbulent midgets, who exhibited none of the courtly manners I was used to from adults. On the very first day, in German class, we were called on to read a list of words: die Mutter, das Mädchen, etc. When it was my turn, all went well until I got to der Vater. Not realizing that in German “v” is pronounced “f,” I gave it the Spanish pronunciation, which, unfortunately, also sounded like the Spanish word for “toilet” (el vater, from “water closet”).

To say “toilet” instead of “father”! What could be more hilarious to a class of six-year-olds, on the first day of school? Instead of calmly correcting me, as my mother or my aunts would have done, my classmates burst into gales of laughter that only stopped when the Schwester rapped on her desk.

But that was nothing compared to the sufferings I experienced during playtime, when my classmates exploded out of the classroom and into the gravel yard, screaming at the top of their voices. Why were they yelling? Why were they running around? What was I supposed to do? I was used to being led and instructed at every step by adults, but here nobody was explaining anything. I had no idea of how to approach the other girls, start a conversation, or join a group.

We all went home for lunch, and when it was time to return to school, I told my mother that I was done. I didn’t like school, and wouldn’t be going back. She answered that of course I had to go, I was a big girl now, etc. I resisted. She tried to take my hand. I grabbed the arms of the rush bottomed chair I was sitting on and held on with all my might. But she pried my fingers loose and I had no choice but, sick at heart and weeping with humiliation, to go down the marble stairs of the apartment house and out on the street, to what felt like my place of execution.

One day I heard a girl ask another “me estás amiga?” (are you my friend? the use of the verb “estar” implying the temporary nature of these friendships). So the next day I gathered my courage and approached one of the more popular girls, the beta if not the alpha of the class.

Me estás amiga? I asked, tremulously. And she answered “no,” flicked her braids, and turned away.

That was it for me on the playground. All during class I dreaded the approach of play period, and all during play period I longed for the bell to ring so I could take refuge at my desk. I did finally find one girl to share the misery of those play periods. She was even shyer than I--the omega of the grade. We didn’t particularly like each other, feeling an obscure contempt for our mutual weaknesses, but we tolerated each other because we had no choice.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse, I developed amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” My mother rushed me to the ophthalmologist, who said that the only way to keep me from losing sight in the lazy eye was to cover the good eye with a patch for one year.

This did save my eyesight, but it was disastrous for my social life. One of my more boisterous classmates—bright blue eyes, blond curls, freckles—looked at my patch and screamed, “it’s contagious!” And the whole class squealed and scattered. Fortunately her father, who was a doctor, heard about this and made his daughter apologize, and I shed my leper status.

I spent my school years oscillating between mind-numbing boredom and heart-clenching anxiety. The boredom occurred in the classes that involved reading—History, Spanish, and Religion. Every year, on the first day of school, when the new books were distributed, no matter how hard I tried to control myself I would race through and read them to the end, which left me with nothing to discover for the rest of the year.

The anxiety-producing subjects were German (I never did understand the difference between dative and accusative); arithmetic (my father had no talent for numbers, so my family excused me on the grounds of heredity); handwriting (both my father and his father had exquisite handwriting, so there I was a bit of a disgrace); and handwork (crochet, knitting, and, later, embroidery).

But physical education was the worst. Until I entered first grade I had never thrown a ball or raced another child. My inexperience, combined with poor depth perception caused by my lazy eye, made phys ed. a trial all the way through college.

In grade school, calisthenics, for which we wore knee-length bloomers under our uniform, and which were led by a nun in full habit, was a relief, since I was tolerably good at following precise directions. Also, perhaps thanks to the flexibility I inherited from my double-jointed paternal grandfather, I excelled at forward and backward somersaults. (Since the nun in her long habit was our only phys ed. instructor, I can’t imagine how she demonstrated these.)

As it happened, the subjects that scared me most were taught by nuns (we had lay women, native Spaniards, for the others). However, despite the bitter stories that people often tell about their Catholic education, in my twelve years of Catholic school in three different countries I did not see a single instance of a child being hit or treated in an improper way. There was strict discipline, certainly, but by the same token, even in my co-ed high school we never had to worry about being threatened or harassed by our peers.

Nevertheless, it is true that I was afraid of the German nuns. But I think that that had to do with language. Their Spanish was far from perfect, and when they ran out of patience they ran out of Spanish too. Being scolded or simply instructed to do something quickly (schnell!) by a frowning nun in a foreign language terrified me, so my strategy was to pass unnoticed. At the end of the year I never got awards for academic performance. Depressingly, my prizes were for “buena conducta y aplicación”—in other words, I was well-behaved and did my homework.

The boredom/anxiety ratio shifted over the years. After I felt comfortable understanding and speaking English I grew less anxious and more bored, with the exception of math and phys ed. classes, which continued to mortify me all the way through college.

I am happy to report that my fears of other people disappeared long ago. But sometimes at night, when I think about that first day of school, I can feel once again in my palm the hardness of the arm of the rush-bottomed chair I clung to, and the despair at being fished out of the calm waters of my infancy and flung into the roiling torrent of the world.

Third grade. I'm in the middle row, next to Mater Hilaria. The girl who mocked my eye patch is at the other end of the same row, next to the lay teacher.

Boys in my Class

 For all my writing about the drama of starting high school without knowing English, you’d think that there would be some trace of that in the journal that I kept at the time. But if you read that journal, which I wrote in Spanish, you would never know that my English was anything less than perfect.

I did not write about my anguish when I had to diagram a sentence, or when the P.A.’s garbled announcements came on, or when I didn’t understand a test question. Nor did I write about my constant worry that my deficiencies would become apparent to my teachers, and I’d be cast into the outer darkness.

What did I write about in my journal? I wrote about boys.

Landing in Birmingham in late 1958, learning English, figuring out the school rules, trying to fit into a culture that was both alien and compelling—none of these challenges held a candle to the real shocker: there were boys in my class.

And not just in my class. The whole school was overrun with them--boys by the dozen, in the chapel, the stairwells, the gym. Boys in crew cuts, jostling each other in the halls, dropping books and slamming doors, stretching out their long legs under the desks. Boys with voices that switched unpredictably from bass to soprano. Boys who looked like men, and boys who looked like little kids.

Until 9^th grade, I‘d hardly ever spoken to a male my age. I was the only child on both sides of the family, and in my German nuns’ school the only man was an ancient Augustinian friar with a waist-long white beard who came once a week to hear our confessions. My school in Quito was also boy-free, with the exception of the ones from the Jesuit school who would follow our school bus on its rounds, shouting and gunning the engines of their motorcycles.

In my all-female schools, the smartest kid in the class was always a girl, as were the troublemaker, the shy one, and the mean one. When the teacher asked a question, whoever knew the answer raised her hand, without a second thought. If somebody made a mistake, no one hesitated before correcting her. The best mathematician, the fastest runner, and the daintiest embroiderer were all girls.

But now here I was in a class overflowing—they took up so much more space than girls—with boys. As with most aspects of life in America, I found them fascinating as well as terrifying. How was I supposed to behave around these odd beings? On the rare occasions when one of them addressed me my scant English would desert me, and I would stare and stammer until he turned and walked away.

I watched the other girls for hints of how to act. The more popular ones, the ones who got phone calls from boys and went out on real dates, seemed to smile and giggle a lot, and they didn’t speak up much in class.

The giggling and smiling disconcerted me. I hadn’t had any experience with boys, but I’d read a few 19^th century Spanish novels, in which the lady was always indifferent to the hero’s passion, which paradoxically made him desire her even more desperately. So imbued was I with this principle of female behavior, that whenever a boy showed the slightest interest in me--no matter that I would have given ten years of my life for a date or a mere phone call from him--I would instantly quash it with my severe looks.

My 19^th century tactics didn’t work with American boys, who were accustomed to positive, or at least intermittent, reinforcement from girls. My outmoded notions, combined with my general awkwardness, put them off, and they mostly ignored me except to make fun of my, to them, unpronounceable name.

But there was another factor behind my lack of success with the opposite sex that took me a long time to figure out. As a result of eight years of all-female education, I didn’t realize that certain ways of acting in class might repel my male classmates. Blithely unaware of the appropriate modes of feminine behavior, once my English improved, if I knew the answer to a question I never hesitated to raise my hand. Even worse, it didn’t occur to me to hold back from contradicting something a boy had just said. In those moments, I was more interested in impressing the teacher than in inspiring love.

So I spent those early years sitting at home by the silent phone, writing feverishly in my journal about which boy had said hi to me in the hallway, and which boy had kicked my desk in a meaningful way during Religion class. It is a wonder that I managed to learn anything—how to speak English, or how to write a term paper, or the five proofs of the existence of God—with boys all over the place.

Sadly, these days I periodically hear from former classmates that one or another of those boys has died. And when I learn of such a death, I mourn not the balding patriarch of a loving family, but the long-legged, mysteriously alluring teenager eternally barging through the school halls of my mind.

Only A Woman

When she was seven, the future Saint Teresa ran away with her brother to seek martyrdom among the Moors in Africa. An uncle found them outside the city walls of Avila and dragged them home. Later, as a Carmelite nun, she crisscrossed Spain on muleback, cleaning up corrupt convents, founding new ones, and doing battle against resistant clerics. And all the while she was writing masterpieces of literature that endure to this day, making friends with that other great mystic and writer, Saint John of the Cross, and having ecstatic visions of God.

Although she'd been dead for four centuries, Teresa's power radiated all the way through the chalk dust in our classrooms and the ink stains in our uniforms."She was a mystic, a writer, a reformer, a theologian, and a doctor of the Church," the teacher told us "even though she was ONLY A WOMAN!"

For us, Teresa was a no-nonsense saint, grown-up and bold, with none of the sickly prettiness of the little virgin martyrs (Lucy, Agnes, Margaret, Cecilia, etc.) whose main merit seemed to consist in their refusal to have sex. In the 1950s, a decade that revered domesticity, and in a culture where virginity, followed by marriage and motherhood, were practically the only options for women, Saint Teresa showed us a different picture of how to be a woman: brave, intelligent, determined, a leader of women and men.

If Teresa of Avila had been the only model held up for our admiration, all would have been well. But in counterpoint to the bold image of the saint we were offered a list of tamer, more "feminine" virtues: we were urged to be patient and humble, and to always think of others before ourselves. Unquestioning obedience was at the top of the list, as was the strictest chastity. "When you go to bed at night," I remember one of my German nuns advising us, "do not let your hands wander all over your body." (Years later, my college roommate said I was the only person she knew who fell asleep with her arms straight at her side, like a corpse in a casket.)

But it was that trio--humility, selflessness, and obedience--that was the most effective at quashing our girlish spirits. How could we nine- and ten-year-olds reconcile those ego-stifling virtues with the drive and assertiveness that Saint Teresa must have possessed in order to achieve all that she did?
It was a dilemma that we were too young to solve, and it caused us much confusion and uncertainty.

It was not altogether bad to have our vision of the indomitable aspects of Saint Teresa's character tempered with the milder virtues. But I shudder to imagine what life would have been like for us girls without the image of the great Saint fighting for justice, writing books, founding convents and monasteries. Years before we heard of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem we had Saint Teresa of Avila, in her sandals and brown habit, riding her mule in all weathers, showing us what a woman could be.

Temples of the Holy Ghost/Occasions of Sin

In the 1960's, long before bra straps became a fashion statement, we girls used to sew little tabs on the inside shoulder seams of our dresses to keep bra straps out of sight. To hide our incipient cleavage we used a dickey--a triangular piece of cloth that snapped into the center of a too-revealing neckline. At prom time in our Catholic high school, we were warned that if we showed up in a gown with spaghetti straps (or, God forbid, strapless), we would be sent back home. Our bodies were Temples of the Holy Ghost, but unless we were ever watchful, they could also be Occasions of Sin. 

1962 Senior Prom. Note the sin-avoiding straps on my dress.

 It was a difficult message for our hormone-marinated brains to disentangle because those same bodies, as our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and the entire culture never ceased to remind us, were our passport to the main if not the only source of personal fulfillment for women: marriage and motherhood.

Beauty and modesty were supposed to coexist in an eternally precarious equilibrium. Neglect your looks for a single day and you risked passing unnoticed by the Brylcreem-anointed boy who might have been your ticket to happiness. Disregard modesty and who knew what might happen? We certainly didn't, because it was never spelled out--nobody said the words pregnancy, or venereal disease, or rape as they might apply to us. But the consequences of immodesty were all the more alarming for being unspoken.

It was drilled into us that we had to make the most of whatever portion of beauty Providence had bestowed on us. Hair was supremely important. It had to balloon off the scalp to give us the wide-eyed, neotenic look that made us seem vulnerable and attractive. This required nightly work with brush rollers--I used to sleep with twenty-seven of them digging into my scalp--many cans of spray, and prayers for dry, windless weather.

Our skin gave us fits, being liable to erupt in pimples when we least wanted it to, despite copious applications of Clearasil. But breasts constituted the ultimate dilemma. From the movies--Sophia Loren! Marilyn Monroe! Jayne Mansfield!--we figured that they were a major asset, a helpful tool in luring the father of our future children. Yet because they also had the potential to provoke unbridled lust, they needed to be completely covered, although they could be hinted at by the artful positioning of darts in our bodices.

Legs were less of a liability, though we worried that our nylons would develop runs, a disgrace comparable to having our slip show. Until the blessed invention of pantyhose, stockings were held up by garter belts, an item that has since acquired fetishistic status but that I remember mostly as giving me severe pain in the lower back.

Sacred vessels on the one hand, agents of disgrace on the other, our bodies came to feel like two-edged swords, or UXBs that might go off unpredictably. It is a miracle that we managed to learn anything in school, worried as we were that the "rats" might be showing under the upper layers of our hair, or that the middle button on our uniform blouse might have popped open.

And yet we did learn, despite all the distractions, and ours became the first generation to aspire to having both meaningful work and a guy. And when the pill, the pantyhose, and the second wave of feminism burst simultaneously on the scene a few years later, we put away our dickeys, our garter belts and sometimes even our bras, and believed, at least for a while, that we could have it all.

Nuns, Absolved

Get into conversation with a lapsed Catholic like me, and before long we're rolling up our psychological sleeves and showing off our scars, the result of wounds inflicted by nuns.  They scared us half to death, those nuns, we complain.  They killed our joie de vivre and injected guilt into our young souls.  We spent our childhood trembling in the shadow of their long habits.

I have, over the years, done my share of scar-showing and nun-blaming.  But now that I haven't been around veils and wimples for more than half a century, I'm having second thoughts about the nuns who taught me.

By the time I was eighteen, I had experienced nuns of three different orders and nationalities, in three different countries.  My first nuns, in Barcelona, came from Munich, having fled nazism in 1939 only to land in fascist Spain.  The school I attended in Ecuador was run by Mercedarian nuns from Spain.  And my high school teachers were Benedictine nuns in Birmingham, Alabama.

The German nuns were the scariest.  This may have been because their Spanish was sketchy.  When they got angry they lapsed into German, and nothing's more frightening  than being yelled at in a foreign language for failing to follow an order that you didn't understand in the first place. 

The Mercedarians were the most elegant.  They wore habits of creamy wool with contrasting black veils and belts.  But their thick-heeled, lace-up shoes looked mannish, I thought, and spoiled the effect.

By contrast with the German nuns, the American Benedictines were a piece of cake. They made jokes in class and actually praised us for just doing our homework, something the Germans wouldn't have dreamed of doing.  But by then fearing nuns was part of my nature, and I continued to tremble until I left Catholic education and went to college.

Why did so many of us spend our childhood afraid nuns?  Was it because we couldn't see their hair, ears or legs, or because they were so boldly in charge and so different from our lipsticked,  domesticated mothers?

True, they were somber and strict and they taught us some silly things, such as (this from my German nuns) the proper way to sleep at night:  flat on our backs, our arms straight along our sides "and not the hands going all over the body."  They were obsessed with punctuality, posture, and penmanship .

But they also dinned into us the necessity of being good.  They taught us the nightly examination of conscience, which meant going over the day with a fine-toothed comb, looking for sins venial and mortal and also for good actions.  In the case of the latter we learned to ask ourselves, "Did I give my allowance to charity only to impress my teacher, or because I truly wanted to help?"

At the beginning and end of every class, we would stand by our desks, lower our eyes, and say a prayer.  Although they didn't call it "centering," that is what it was, and it was a useful habit to develop early.

The nuns taught us discipline, and kept things in order.  My classmates and I may, during those years of strict obedience, have had some of our exuberance stymied, but we never had to worry about being bullied or, in our co-ed high school, being threatened by boys.  And I never, in twelve years of nun schooling, saw anybody's knuckles being rapped.

In the pre-feminist 1950s there weren't many role models for girls.  But we Catholic-school pupils had them, every day, and we learned that women in authority could be smart and fair but also petty and fallible--human, in short.

Whether they knew it or not, nuns were feminists by definition and history. The founder of the order of my German nuns was a 16th-century Yorkshire woman named Mary Ward.  She wanted to affirm the role of women in the Church and in society, and to tend to their spiritual, intellectual and psychological development.  Inspired by the Jesuits--the most intellectual of the male orders--she structured her order along parallel lines and left her nuns uncloistered, something highly unusual for the time.

I believe that our fear of nuns was partly dictated by an unconscious sexism, a rebellion against women who were so unapologetically in charge and who, at least within the confines of school and convent, did not have to obey, make themselves attractive to, or in any way propitiate men.

So I apologize to you, Mater Leonarda, Madre Mercedes, Sister Dominica, wherever you are, for having made you the topic of too many party stories.  Thank you for keeping me safe, for forcing me to perform in the face of fear, and for teaching me the habit of self reflection.  You were tough, and you were women, and we found--and still find--that combination hard to swallow.  But that wasn't your fault.