Me: Why are you in the forest at the back of the convent?
Micha: I happen to like this place. This is the only thing I ever liked about St. Bruno. I love it when we come here for studying in May at exam time.
Do you know that you tried to please everyone all the time?
You thought if you were good, did all that praying and all the Miss Congeniality stuff, that the sisters would like you. You became whatever they wanted you to be. You used to say, “When I grow up I’ll be a nun.”
Me: I meant it. I think I meant it. The life of a nun seemed so simple. There was no struggle for survival there. All they had to do was follow orders. I could do that. Not think, just follow orders.
Not have to be responsible for anything. And there was order in their lives. Mine was in chaos. They called it an Order. You joined the Order. Order, order, I loved that word. I wanted order in my life. The nuns had order. I wanted it.
I have to go, the timer just went. I have to go to work now. You’ve been screaming so loud these few days I had to start this dialogue. I’ll see you, I guess whenever I find time to come to the computer.
Nov. 27, 1998
Little Girl Lost (cont’d.)
Me: You can’t just keep nagging me all day long. I have to work. I can’t listen to you go on and on. I can come and talk to you when I’m at the computer, but otherwise I don’t want to hear you.
Micha: Excuse me for wanting your attention.
Me: I couldn’t pay attention to you. I had all kinds of responsibilities. I always tried to be grown up. I did what Mom asked me to do. I took care of Simon. I babysat. I fed him. I was with him all the time.
Micha: There was the time you fell at the park and you ended up in the hospital. You were supposed to be watching him. Instead, you went on the parallel bars. You fell and lost consciousness. You never tried the bars again. You gave up. You always give up. Why didn’t you go back on the bars and try again?
Me: They didn’t have any in the convent. I tried more gymnastic stuff in summer camp, but I’d grown so big for my age everybody called me big: “Oh, what a big girl!” “Oh my, she is big isn’t she?”
I kind of felt like a freak most of the time. Why couldn’t I be small?
Why did you have to be so big? Even in the convent, the girls laughed and called me fat, fat, FAT!
I have never been able to get rid of that fat. I am still big. I will always be big. Even when I lost weight I was still big. If I wasn’t too big, I was too tall. Thank God today’s children are big and they are tall. Now I can disappear in a crowd. I don’t stand out as much.
Micha: I don’t eat more than the other girls. As a matter of fact I have serious health problems; I am so anemic I have to take all kinds of medicine.
Me: I remember. Your place in the refectory was covered with medicine bottles. I felt like a freak. Besides, you kept fainting at Mass. The sisters were convinced you did it on purpose. Why did you have to be different? Why couldn’t you be like everybody else?
The other girls had their laundry done at home, not at the convent.
They had their parents coming to pick them up every weekend.
They were normal. You weren’t, and the sisters knew it. I mean maybe Mom hated me because I was so big. Simon was delicate like she is. Seems to me if I had been a delicate child she would have loved me too.
Micha: You can’t blame me for that. I am just a little girl. Why does it have to matter how tall or how big I am?
Me: Because nobody in the family is. So where did you come from?
If it wasn’t that I look so much like Mom I could pretend I was adopted.
Micha: You make me cry all the time. And, speaking of who is responsible for what, I like to draw. You stopped it. I like sports.
You stopped it. I like writing. You stopped it. All you ever wanted to do was go to the library and read.
Me: Well the library was safe. There was nobody to laugh at me and there were lots of books with nice stories to escape to. I could pretend I was all these things and I was the hero and nobody would laugh. The best thing about reading all these books was that I could pretend I was a beautiful princess, nice and small. And
don’t you know you can’t do sports in the convent, they have no sports facilities. All they ever had was gym class once a week, and again the girls laughed at me because I was big. I stood out like an elephant. And talking about talents, you couldn’t sing, you couldn’t dance or play the piano; those were Mom’s talents.
Micha: You never gave me a chance. You gave up.
Nov. 28, 1998 (Dialogue)
Little Girl Lost (cont’d.)
Me: Do you know that I visited St. Bruno in 1990? I had to see the convent again. I don’t know why. We had been living in Ottawa for two years, and we were visiting in Drummondville during the Victoria Day weekend. It must have been the month of May.
During the month of May my thoughts always seem to turn to the convent.
It was a nice drive coming down along the river, visiting all those little villages. Well, not so little anymore. But St. Bruno hadn’t changed much. The convent looked the same: three stories high, red brick, with a window it seems every five feet. That building is what the houses look like in Christmas villages. I’ve got one in mine that looks just like it, red and all, except it’s called ‘Post Office.’
The sisters must have sold the place because it is now an old people’s home. I didn’t go around the back so I don’t know if the forest is still there. I suspect they sold that land, too, and there are houses on it now. The little bridge across the ravine must be gone by now.
That big rock in the clearing must be gone, too. The forest was a good place to be.
I like that you are wearing that black-and-white checkered coat with the red beret. I loved that coat. In those days, May was still quite cold. Do you know that today, here in Ottawa, people wear shorts in May? Anyway, I am glad that you are hiding the uniform. You looked terrible in it. The other girls took theirs home on weekends and came back with the dresses all clean and pressed. Yours always seemed to be wrinkled and, if not dirty, dusty-looking somehow. The collar was sewn on wrong and so was the logo for the Sisters of St. Marie. The only thing I liked about the uniform was the blue sash, and even that
was sewn on wrong. Mom was never the best of seamstresses. Just one more way you were different.
Micha: She was probably drunk when she sewed it. Why do you always make excuses for her?
Me: Well, even then I understood she didn’t have it easy. No, she didn’t send you to the convent to punish you. Something happened that year, just about after my first communion. Try to remember.
I came home from school and, going up the stairs, I came face to face with Mom coming down in a stretcher. Aunt Josephine was there and she sent you and Simon to stay with the neighbours on the second floor. A few days later I was taken to the hospital; just me, not Simon. There she was with arms stretched out like she had been crucified. There were tubes in and out of her everywhere. Aunt Josephine was talking to the doctor and they said it was good for her to see me as she was dying.
If I can recall some of this without too much distortion, Mom had been pregnant. She was carrying twins. She had had a miscarriage and the doctor had not realized there was a second baby. The second baby was dead inside of her and it nearly killed her. This I gathered from hearing Aunt Josephine talking to Aunt Sophie.
Mom never spoke about it, so I never asked the reason she sent me to the convent. Could be, too, that she was in some sense trying to protect me. She had a boyfriend; maybe she thought it was better for me to be away.
Micha: She sent me away because she couldn’t stand the sight of my face. That’s the real reason. I know this for certain. And now you can’t stand the sight of your face.
Me: Yes, as I grow older, I look more and more like her. My face, that is, not the rest of me. She is even smaller today at five feet tall, and she weights a hundred and eight pounds. But my face is so much like hers I have trouble looking into a mirror. When I put on makeup I have to look specifically at the area where I am applying it, not at the whole face. Do you know that the other day I saw a red beret. I thought I’d try it on, so I went over to a mirror and put it on. The sight! I nearly threw up. I gagged! I hate my face.
Nov. 29, 1998 (Dialogue)
Little Girl Lost (cont’d.)
Me: It’s going to rain. Can you hear the thunder?
Micha: Why did you give up? You weren’t true to yourself. You gave up. You didn’t stand up for yourself. Even when I’d be punished for no reason, or because the sisters always thought I was guilty of something, you didn’t fight back. All you did was try to please everybody more. When I wanted to scream at the nuns, to yell at the girls, you stopped me. You didn’t want to fight. You just stood there like a lump of clay and you let the sisters mould you.
Me: All I wanted was to be loved. There was no one. No one. So I became Little Miss Goody Goody Two Shoes. I didn’t get angry. I tried to be friends with some of the girls, usually the ones that gave me the most difficulty. Sometimes it worked.
Micha: I miss Mom. The few times she comes to visit, she’s drunk and I get punished for it.
Me: She doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know how the sisters were.
They punished that girl whose father was Protestant. They had her pray at chapel, too, and do the Stations of the Cross with her arms in a cross, just like they made you do.
Micha: Why? My prayers are never answered.
Me: I don’t know. She brought you a cake for your eighth birthday.
Micha: I couldn’t eat it. The sisters put it away because it was Lent.
By the time I got to eat it at Easter, when everybody else had gone home, it was hard as a rock. It was beautiful, though, I must say. I loved the merry-go-round and the horses. Anyway it was thrown in the garbage. I think there were bugs in it. They had only put it in a pantry, without any protection. And there were mice in the convent.
I could hear them at night.
Me: Mom talks about that cake sometimes, that one and only cake.
She wasn’t told I never got to eat it. I don’t think it would have made a difference. I think it was her boyfriend who got her to buy the cake.
Micha: Where is Daddy? He never writes.
Me: He was the one who paid for the convent. But he never came to visit. And Simon and I never got to see him except a couple of times
when we were older and we could go to Aunt Pauline’s place and see him there. That was not very often.
I remember an argument one night, before Mom and Dad split up — not that Dad was home much anyway, but I remember hearing Mom say to Dad that no judge would allow him to take the children away from her. It was in the middle of the night and their argument woke me up. There was a terrible crash and the next morning I saw that the coffee table had been broken. He must have put his fist right through it. He was gone.
Micha: I try to remember Dad sometimes, but I have trouble. He wasn’t home when I was just a toddler. I only remember a few images. The time I set fire to the curtains and he spanked me. He came and sat on the bed and held me close. He explained that he’d had to spank me so I would understand not to play with matches, they were dangerous.
Me: I am not certain, but I don’t think Simon had been born at that time.
Micha: I only remember two other images, no more. One was at the beach and he was floating in the water. I was sitting on his big belly and he was explaining to me how he had air in his lungs and that made it possible for him to float. Then he taught me how.
I remember that so vividly. I don’t know why; I seemed to have forgotten everything else. Then there was the time Mom and Dad were talking in their bedroom and Dad was concerned about his arm. It doesn’t make sense, but what I remember is that he was talking about the doctor giving him arsenic to get the infection out of his arm. I was scared for Daddy. Mom put stuff on mouse traps with arsenic in it to kill the rats. I thought he would die.
Me: Mom says Dad was real lazy. She couldn’t get him to go to work. Seems he was a plumber and worked at some plumbing company. She said he went to the movies while the other guys got all the jobs. Dad was in the war. From the pictures Mom has, he didn’t get to see you for the first time until you were two years old.
I think Mom and Dad split up right after Simon was born. You were five then. So there are maybe three years there when Dad was home. I am not even certain it was that long.
Micha: So I don’t get any hugs from him either.
Me: No. No hugs. Not from anyone. I am so sorry I gave you up.
I am the one who has been crying all these years, not you. I am the one in the soap opera, not you. I am the unhappy one, not you.
Do you know I once met someone who read my palm. That was after Donald, but before Jos. He had said at the time, “You have a child.” I told him, “No I don’t.” You know, he didn’t believe me? He was convinced there was a child. He said that maybe I had had a miscarriage or had had an abortion. He was so sure of what he was reading in my hand. I guess now I can think he was seeing Eddy.
Or maybe he meant you. He further told me that the reason I never had any energy was because there was a hole in my aura. I didn’t know at the time that it was because I left you behind. I know that now.
Micha: It’s beginning to rain and it’s getting windy. It’s dark too.
I’m cold. I sure could use a hug.
Me: Me too. But, dear one, there is nobody. There was no one then and there is no one now.
Nov. 29, 1998 (Computer Journal)