If in the Convent You’d Found a Friend

Maybe you saw her serving champagne on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis at a big nun party, shooting corks for children to catch. Later, you’d bond that one summer week watching science fiction movies in the novitiate basement. You’d be thrilled when she came to live in your same convent. It would make sense, the life-sized poster of Spock in her bedroom, just down the hall from yours.

You would admire everything about her. The prestigious schools she qualified to attend. How she balanced a twelve-string guitar between elegant arms and delicate fingers, teasing out chords to Joni Mitchell songs. The way she wore whatever she wanted because she worked with foster kids in a public agency. The sundresses she made from remnants of ditsy fabric, one pink and one blue. The whole Maria von Trapp in Birkenstocks at a Dead concert vibe.

*

Her volume would amplify yours. Maybe you’d both jump from the table every night to clear, exclaiming, "Clean everything up!" like the little boy in Close Encounters. You’d take turns standing on a kitchen stool dropping petrified bread chunks onto a metal cart in the quiet hours after dinner. The howl of your laughter would sunder convent silence.

Maybe after dinner, walking through the neighborhood, you’d teach her the correct voice for speaking with cats you stopped to pet.

Maybe a kid on a bike would yell you sure got big legs and she’d yell shut up you little prick. When he circles back to say he’s sorry, you’d be amazed what can happen if you stick up for yourself. I wish I had a tenth of your beauty you’d say.

*

On weekends, you might ramble together past vineyards and feed apples to a horse you named Pigbutt. You’d drift through construction sites, collecting empty soda cans you could convert to cash for frozen yogurt. Maybe sometimes you crossed the highway to Long’s and perused ninety-nine cent nail lacquers. She’d choose a shimmery silver, while you chose a shiny gold. If an older sister observed it’s the sign of a true contemplative, the patience it takes to paint your nails, you’d take the compliment even if all you’d wanted was pretty-looking hands.

You might envy her bold stance toward ground-borne contaminants while she sits on the asphalt lot behind the kitchen, tying her shoes before a walk. She might lay down an unpeeled carrot she intends to eat. “Ten second rule,” she might say, and then, “Oops, thirty.”

*

She would teach you about Donald Winnicott and good-enough mothers and you’d analyze the dysfunction of your earliest attachments like the queens of meta-emotion.

You’d both love friendship metaphors from The Little Prince. Like the fox who begs the prince to tame him, to sit a safe distance from his burrow, to come a little closer every day and—it was important—at the same hour.

“If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you…”

You’d learn to listen for her rushed arrival home from work, and smile when she entered the chapel a little late for Evening Prayer. You’d go walking with her after dinner, and feel unresentful tucking into teacher work in the hours until eleven.

*

You would go away to study. You’d share one more summer walking among the vines before she writes to say the pain of staying has eclipsed the pain it would take to leave.

You’d have no choice but to wish her the best because she is your friend.

*

You’d come to miss the funny things, like how you’d both skip Saturday evening Mass and instead clean bathrooms and laugh so hard when she caught you with your Walkman, singing, Break down—go ahead and give it to me.

You would walk solo past the vineyards and new construction, thinking of the fox when he told the prince, “I do not eat bread.”

“Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.”

Specters of a friendship would haunt you: traces of your industry in floor plans of newly constructed homes, the gesture of arms from the corner of your eye and the echo of voices you used talking to cats.

You would wish her the best, and pay close attention when she writes about finding a place to live and a person to love.

*

Maybe you are a woman in your sixties, and you have kept your friend. She and her husband visit you and your husband every other year. Maybe you FaceTime on your birthdays, and exchange artsy trinkets through the mail at Christmas. Maybe you remind each other of a life you barely believe was real.

And in a time of pandemic, when the sisters invite ex-members to live-zoom their annual jubilee Mass, you both decide to join; she from California, you from New Mexico.

Maybe she starts the salvo of texts. “Checking everyone out,” she’d probably begin. She might add she’s using ear buds to avoid triggering her husband, who thinks global overpopulation is one-hundred percent due to Catholics.

You’d tap a “HA HA” into her word bubble. You’d send her a video roving twelve inches of standing water in your yard from the previous day’s rain, and she’d send you five Edvard-Munch-The-Scream emojis.

You’d express sadness seeing frail sisters once icons of vitality. You would tap exclamation marks into the bubble where she praises the sister preaching the homily. You’d both be silent as all the sisters rise to renew their vows. When they are done, “Still gives me chills,” she’d probably write.

You’d watch the sisters merge into the aisle once the priest exits the gathering space to the twang of guitars that sound like forty years ago.

Who’d have imagined, back in the eighties, you could side-talk through Mass from the comfort of your home?

“That was fun,” you’d probably write, if in the convent, you’d found a friend.

-Maria Hetherton

Maria Hetherton is a retired teacher pursuing her dream of being a writer. Her nonfiction appears in Hippocampus, The Malahat Review and the blog at Dappled things, among other publications. She studied women's oral narrative while completing a doctorate in folklore at Indiana University and recently earned an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. She's working on an essay collection exploring the fallout of vows broken--fourteen years as a Catholic nun--and preserved as a woman who married in middle age. She lives in New Mexico, along the beautiful bosque lining the Rio Grande.