Amongst Women by Kathryn O’Day

Amongst Women | Kathryn O’Day

I’m rushing off to the twentieth reunion for the Immaculata Class of 2004 when I realize I’ve misplaced the postcard.

The back of it says something like, “Merry Christmas and Blessings for a Faith-Filled 2001.” Turn it over and you’ll find a photograph of several hundred women, most of them young. I’m in there somewhere, though it’s impossible to find me among all the blurred faces. Behind us, the beige-yellow bricks of the school, a scraggly leafless tree, and, in sharp focus, a heavy-browed, hollow-eyed statue towering three stories up into a gloomy, overcast sky. This metallic colossus is Our Lady of the Millennium, a supersized iteration of the BVM (the Blessed Virgin Mary, for anyone not in the know). 

I thought of the postcard immediately when Cherise Johnson invited me to the celebration. I’m honored by the invitation – how many teachers go to their students’ reunions? Still, time and distance can create awkwardness, and a relic of a shared memory might ease conversation.

The postcard isn’t lost-lost. I’ve simply hidden it from myself, as I sometimes do. I’ve no time to search, though, having squandered all my time trying on different teacher-y outfits. I rifle through a drawer, glance at my watch, and head out, sighing.

I’ve never lived close to Immaculata, not even twenty years ago before I moved to the Chicago suburbs. I’m a North-Sider, and Immaculata is on the South Side – south of the Loop, south of Comiskey Park, south even of the University of Chicago, and another five miles west from there. I remember driving that first day, foolishly taking Western Avenue instead of the highway. Seventeen miles of interminable red lights. Of car dealers and empty lots and taquerias. Of dodging potholes and aggressive merges, two lanes squeezing into one at each overpass.

Until the turn at 67^th Street, where industrial sprawl gave way to evenly-spaced catalpa trees and well-tended front lawns. Two-flats, bungalows, the red-brick motherhouse for the Sisters of St. Aldabert, and, finally, the parking lot and the back of the school.

There’s something soothing about this hidden place, I remember thinking on that first day in 2000, before reminding myself that my work here would be temporary.

***

I never wanted to work in a Catholic school. 

The problem wasn’t the size of my paycheck (painfully small). Nor was it the commute (painfully long). It was the fact that I wasn’t Catholic. 

Yes, I’d grown up in the church – mass on Sundays, CCD on Mondays, forehead-smudge on Ash Wednesday, and so on. I even fantasized at twelve about joining a convent. By the time I got to college, however, I realized how deeply uncool Catholicism was, particularly when I viewed it through the eyes of my militantly secular boyfriend. The church was misogynistic, homophobic, corrupt, and, above all, weird. 

Now, however, I was 28 and desperate for work. I’d bounced from city to city, job to job, having graduated with an English degree and no plan beyond marriage to my militantly-secular boyfriend under the foolish assumption that I’d find my place through him. Unfortunately, he was just as lost as I was. 

We finally settled in Chicago where I decided to try putting that English degree to work in a high school classroom.

I sent out my resume and waited.

Weeks passed, but I received no responses, save one: Immaculata, a Catholic single-sex school almost twenty miles south of my apartment.

“They’re barely even paying you!” my new husband protested.

But I needed work. So, I packed a few decorations into a crate and gassed up for a long drive down Western Avenue.

***

Walking into the school on that first day, I couldn’t believe how still the halls were, my footsteps the only sound beyond the gentle hum of fans. The air was warm but clean, permeated by the scent of Murphy’s Oil Soap. 

 A nun greeted me in the front office, gray curls peeking from beneath a crisp blue veil, and handed me the keys to my new classroom. 

“Who will I be sharing with?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who else will be teaching there?”

 “Oh no, dear. It’s your space!” she said, then wished me luck, eyes twinkling.

The room was a revelation. Its walls were a buttery shade of yellow, and sunshine poured through an entire wall of windows. All the furniture – desks, chairs, and podium – was made of wood and stained the color of honey. I strolled between the rows of round-cornered student desks, wondering if I could fit them into a circle rather than rows. I breathed deeply, my extremities slowly loosening and unfurling like the petals of a flower.

This will be my sanctuary, I thought. 

Then, I spotted the crucifix.

Right in the middle of my classroom wall.

I’d never been much of a crucifix fan. At mass, I’d usually ignore it, preferring to gaze at the pictures in the stained-glass windows. Or sometimes I’d simply close my eyes and allow the woody aroma of incense to carry me off to an imaginary realm. 

This time, however, I found it impossible to ignore the bowed head, the slumped, defeated body. How gruesome it was, how barbaric. Like a public hanging, or a head on a pike. 

It had to go.

I peeked out the door to check for stray nuns. Moving quickly, I dragged a chair from one of the student desks and climbed it, replacing the crucifix with a picture of Virginia Woolf. It wasn’t long before Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, and Eudora Welty joined her in a line above the chalkboard. Women writers for a class of women, Jesus tucked away in a cupboard.

It was my space, after all.

***

A week later, the freshmen paraded in. They marched solemnly, single-file and silent, a row of penguins.

After selecting their desks in the large square I’d arranged, they waited silently for class to begin. One girl sat frozen, spine straight, eyebrows raised, mouth in a small “o.” Next to her, a girl with stud earrings shaped like aliens, eyes flitting from face to face. Only one girl seemed unfazed by all the newness. She swept the room with a haughty glance, then opened an enormous leopard-print binder and brandished a feather-topped pen. 

The bell rang. We stared at each other.

A sweet-faced girl raised her hand.

“May I lead the class in prayer?” she asked. 

I nodded, grateful she’d taken the reins.

“Does anyone have special intentions?” she asked.

My students peered at each other, strangers with whom they would learn and pray for the next four years. I didn’t know this yet, but since preschool, many of them had never ventured beyond their ethnically-homogenous parishes. 

Eventually, the silence gave way to a few tentatively raised hands as they took turns sharing their prayers. God bless my family. God bless my friends. May God grant me a good start to high school. “May God grant me a boyfriend,” the girl with the feather-pen prayed. The other girls giggled, then made the sign of the cross.

Prayers said, my students looked up at me, all smiles now. 

I was smiling, too.

***

Over the course of the first week, my freshmen became acquainted with the school rules. A sample:

Prayer: Listen to the Bible passage over the intercom. Do not giggle, even if it’s the one about the ravens pecking out your eyeballs and eating them. 

Liturgy: Every Wednesday, your homeroom teacher will guide you to your seat in the auditorium. Everybody must stand and move towards the front when it’s time for communion. Do not goof off when we sing that song about the BVM. Nothing about the BVM is funny. Ever. 

Halls: Silent during school. Do not look up at the sound of Sister Maria’s scooter. 

Library: Do not touch the ferns. They are the pride and joy of Sister Marianne. Do not visit pornographic sites on the school computers. Everyone will know.

Cafeteria: Remain at your table until you are dismissed. Do not scream or catcall should a workman happen into the cafeteria. 

Computer Lab: Do not touch the computers. Do not touch the blinds. Do not close the door. Do not open the door wider than 45 degrees. Do not sit down until Sister Petra has told you to do so. Be respectful. Sister Petra has just celebrated her eightieth birthday, her sixtieth anniversary as a bride of Christ. 

***

There were rules for me, too. Most of these were unspoken, others broad and open to interpretation. A few, however, were absolute and explicitly delineated on my contract as conditions of my employment. 

I was to attend all after-school prayer meetings (approximately six per year) as well as the annual faculty retreat. I was also to attend one after-school tour of the motherhouse to learn about the Sisters of St. Aldabert, their migration from Poland to the South Side, their vision of Catholic womanhood, and their mission to mold generations of South Side girls into lovers of Christ. Part of my job, therefore, was to promote and model this vision: speaking gently, dressing modestly (toes and shoulders covered regardless of the weather), bowing my head in prayer, and queuing up for communion. 

The good news was that I could simply fake it. All I had to do was go through the motions, motions that were already rote, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Stand up, sit down, genuflect. Like clapping along to the song about the Farmer and the Cow Man in a high school musical. I didn’t have to believe anything.

I got along just fine until mid-September, when a nun interrupted my class to call me into the hall. 

It was Sister Maureen, the guidance counselor. Normally, she was quite friendly, but today, she wasn’t smiling. 

“Your cross is missing,” she hissed.  

“My what?”

“The cross in your room – it’s missing!”

“No!” My eyes opened wide, feigning innocence, though I could feel the warmth creeping into my cheeks. How had she noticed? Had she somehow seen me pulling it down? Or had she been snooping in my room?

Sister Maureen moved a step closer, besieging me with the powdery aroma of Dove soap. Her icy eyes bored into me. A tight sensation moved from my chest to my throat as I pictured her charging into the room and rifling through my cabinets and drawers, locating the crucifix and waving it before the shocked eyes of my students.

“We’ll take care of this,” the nun finally muttered, then marched toward the front office.

Not even ten minutes later, the school custodian was banging away with a hammer in the spot between Gwendolyn Brooks and Sandra Cisneros, my students all the while diligently completing their grammar exercises. The custodian stepped down from his ladder, revealing a brand-new crucifix twice the size of the original. Nobody, including Jesus, looked up. 

It may have been my space, but I was expected to share it with Jesus.

***

Once up, however, I came to accept the crucifix as a condition of my employment. I didn’t want to leave Immaculata. I liked it.

I liked the South Side, its boulevards and bungalows. I liked its pace, slower than the North Side, slow enough to provide a hint of warmth to the usual gruffness of Chicago interactions. I liked the school building, its uncluttered halls, my divine classroom, cross included. Truth be told, I liked the Sisters of St. Aldabert. I even liked Sister Maureen, crucifix-enforcer, whose beatific smile returned with the restoration of Jesus to my classroom walls.

Best of all, I liked my students: South Side girls whose meekness in the classroom gave way to a wonderful boisterousness once the bell rang.

“Hey, Girl!” they’d holler from their lockers. “Hey, Girl!” they’d call out at lunch. “Hey, Girl!” they’d scream at pep rallies, to the girls on the team and especially to the members of the surprisingly raunchy cheerleading squad.

Soon, they were shouting at me, too, whenever our paths crossed in the hall. “Hey, Ms. O’Day Girl!” Cherise Johnson would shriek before school and “Hello, Ms. O’Day Dahling!” Crystal Jefferson would trill after.

Once the school day ended, they’d drop by to say “hey” again. Some lingered, bragging about their ruthlessness on the community water polo team or recounting the highlights of a recent pro-wrestling match. They shared stories of trips “back home” to Mexico or Mississippi, showed off pictures of pets and grandparents and crushes. I found myself leaving the school later and later as the year progressed, though it prolonged my commute-time.

“You love those girls more than you love me,” my militantly secular husband pouted one night in between fights.

“That’s ridiculous!” I replied, laughing uneasily.

***

I want to say it was a Monday in early December when she arrived. 

The morning was raw, I remember. Still groggy from the weekend, I turned off 67^th Street to behold an awesome erection in the school parking lot. It was Our Lady of the New Millennium, the BVM herself, cast in thirty-four feet of stainless steel.

I staggered out of the car and approached the platform, the statue’s toe peeking out at me like the burnished head of a newborn baby. I craned my neck, taking in two stories of billowing stainless-steel robes, modest undulations at the breasts and belly. Wrists peeking from bell-like sleeves, hands not quite meeting in prayer, hollow of neck, jut of chin. 

It wasn’t my first run-in with the statue. She’d been making the rounds in Chicago church parking lots for well over a year, and I’d caught glimpses of her head poking out from behind steeples from time to time. Word was that a devout millionaire had been inspired by the statue of Ceres on the Chicago Board of Trade to sponsor the creation of an even-taller BVM, upping the ante by casting it entirely in stainless steel. The millionaire was so taken by this idea that he oversaw and funded the entire project, including a flat-bed truck to cart her around and a hydraulic lift to hoist her up. She had even traveled down to St. Louis to be blessed by the Pope during his visit a few years earlier.

And now she was here. I shuddered. This was worse than the crucifix. 

Still, what could I do? School was about to start. Sighing, I headed into the building and up the stairs to my classroom where the statue’s hollow eye stared zombie-like into my window. It couldn’t have been more than half a foot wide, but it seemed so much bigger, like the eye of a monster. Kong eyeing Fay Wray in her bed or a giant octopus glaring into a porthole.

Unblinking, the eye saw all. It saw my room, my decorations, the replacement-crucifix. It saw the place where the first crucifix had hung.

The eye saw me, too. And it knew me for what I was: an imposter. 

Shuddering, I pulled the drapes shut, reminding myself that the statue wouldn’t be there forever. I just had to endure it for a week or two, then the truck would haul it off to another parking lot.

***

“Hail Mary,” I murmured along with the Immaculata students and staff. A thousand hushed recitations reverberated around the auditorium. It was Wednesday, liturgy day, with a few added Mary prayers because of the statue.

From what I could tell, I was the only person in the school creeped out by Our Lady of the Millennium. The nuns loved her. The students mostly regarded her as a curiosity, an extra-large, extra-shiny tchotchke. Eye-catching, perhaps, but hardly menacing.

“Blessed are thou amongst women,” we chanted. How would I have seen that statue when I was the age of my students? In those days, I rather liked the BVM. I even displayed an old bust of her in my bedroom, and in spring, I’d scatter fallen blossoms around her base, infusing my space with a sweet scent. The practice would make me feel deliciously feminine, at one with a long line of Catholic women ancestors. 

“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” It was a prayer I’d known as long as I could remember. I might have recited it fifty-three times in a single sitting when I was younger. That’s how many “Hail Marys” there are in the Rosary – fifty-three. Each “Hail Mary” represents a rose for the BVM, making the full Rosary a “crown of roses” for the Queen of Heaven, not unlike the blossoms I once scattered around my bust. 

I never believed anyone was listening when I prayed. Still, I’d say the Rosary from time to time. The practice reassured me, sheltered me, quieted my teeming brain. 

I snuck a glance at the bowed heads around me. What did prayer do for them? Did it soothe them when they were uncertain? Steady them when they were anxious? Comfort them when they were lonely?

Could it comfort me, too? Could it provide a safe space for my restless soul? Warm me, embrace me, accept me? Could prayer be a place? Could it be my space?

“Amen,” we all said, standing for the final hymn.

***

By Friday, the school was crackling with excitement. Christmas was approaching, and afternoon classes were suspended for an all-school gathering under the statue.

“It’s time, girls!” a voice called from the intercom. My students slammed their books shut, springing from their seats. The hall was swarming, lockers crashing open and shut as girls collected coats and greeted friends with screams of delight. Clutches of nuns chattered and giggled, joining the students down the stairs to the parking lot.

Together, we poured out the back door into the icy air and the soaring strains of an aria. Puccini, I thought, scanning the scene to detect the aria’s source, when I spied two smiling student faces posted with speakers at an open window. I looked up at a fleeting break in the clouds where beams from the sun ricocheted off the statue like lights from a mirror ball, the parking lot transformed momentarily into a giant outdoor discotheque. 

Somehow, a photographer corralled us all into a group. “Smile,” he said, and I could swear we all smiled, the BVM towering above us like a massive hen guarding her chicks.

***

And yet, we look somber on the postcard, the statue staring zombie-like, its steel dulled by a gloomy overcast sky. How I wish now I had taken the time to search for it before leaving the house. Then, maybe, I could have asked my students about it. Did they remember the Puccini? Did they catch the rays of the mirror-ball, too? 

How will I approach my girls now? Will I pour out my heart, tell them how they changed my life, what it meant to me when they called out to me in the halls, or stopped by my room to chat, or introduced me to their dates at prom? Will I finally tell them about the sudden protective urge that swept over me our second year together as we watched the towers go down on television, a moment I will never forget, not only because of its awful place in history but because it was then I realized I wanted to be a mother? 

My militantly secular husband was on to something when he accused me of loving my students more than him. Certainly my love for them and the school would last far longer than my marriage, which collapsed at the end of my second year at Immaculata. And my love for them would nurture and fortify me until I was ready to move on. Unlike my love for him, it would never fully leave me, not even when I left for a public school job on the North Side, married again, started a family.

My students, meanwhile, would also move on – graduating, taking jobs, some as teachers. Others are now raising daughters the same age as mine, the same age as that girl with the feather-topped pen.

She, incidentally, is a fashion-influencer now. The girl with the alien earrings is a Chicago police officer. Cherise Johnson is a “Crafting Connoisseur.” Pulling my car into the lot, I can hear their voices escaping from the windows of the cafeteria. “Hey, Girl!” the voices call out, high over the bass of a song by J. Lo.

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