Alice McDermott - After This

She turned her eyes back to the girls. “Of course, I thought of my parents when I first read Medea. I couldn’t help but see the parallels. That’s the thing about the Greek tragedies, isn’t it? Centuries later, there are parallels.” She paused and then added, sounding more like herself. “Although, as we il see tomorrow, Saint Augustine had no use for the Greeks.”

She paused again. She seemed to have lost her train of thought. Some of the girls wondered if they should open their notebooks. “I don’t know,” Sister Lucy went on, “if my mother ever felt any of Medea’s anger. Or if she considered what it would be like to deprive him of this last child, the one still in her womb, the one he had abandoned even before she was born.”

Sister Lucy leaned forward a bit, her hands on the edge of the desk, and as she did, her right hand brushed her crutch and it began to slide. Quickly, adeptly, she reached for it, steadied it. And then she lifted it and placed it across her lap.

“Girls,” she said again, more forcefully, as if she were now girded for battle. “The men who make our laws see women as being as capable of murdering their unborn children as men have always been of abandoning them. They see all women as equals to Medea, should the circumstances arise. They are blind to women like my mother who put their children above all else, who labor and worry and die…”-she paused, her large round eyes seeming to search for the word, her two hands clutching the crutch she had placed across her lap. Her voice had not risen an octave. “Die tired,” she said finally, and then raised her eyebrows as if she was surprised to discover that the word she had searched for was such a simple one. She looked again to the long wall of windows.

For a moment, they all listened to the rain. It hit the windows without rhythm or pattern, as listless as tears. A few of them thought of tears.

The light outside gave no indication of how much class time was left, but Sister Lucy knew instinctively that the time was short and she was losing the thread of what she’d meant to say.

She turned back to the girls’ faces. Some of them were looking away, playing with their fingers or studying their pens. Two or three were staring cross-eyed at the ends of their long hair. But more still were watching her, their faces serious, lovely, still emerging from the faces of their childhood, and raised toward her now as if to catch the solemn rain.

“Iron or stone,” she said again, trying to remember the thread. “That’s what they’ll say about you. A woman made of iron or stone.”

Sister Lucy looked down at her crutch. A few of the girls, only partially attentive, tried to remember if that was good or bad, to be iron or stone. Clare Keane thought that her mother had been like iron, in the cold pew at St. Gabriel’s on the morning her brother was buried. Clare knew she had been grateful for it, the cool stone of her mother’s face and hands. The iron of her arm.

Barb Luce wrote in her notebook again. Clare glanced at the page. It said, “Things are tough all over.”

Then Sister Lucy looked up again, dry-eyed.

“I realize we’ve gone off syllabus today,” she said softly. “Sometimes circumstances make their demands. We’ll return to Saint Augustine tomorrow. And Saint Monica, of course.” Nodding at Monica Grasso, who suddenly raised her hand.

“Yes,” Sister Lucy said, expecting a question about this week’s quiz, the paper due next Friday, expecting the obliteration of all she had just said by the girls’ preference for practical priorities. “Yes, Monica,” she said.

Her thick black hair, straight and silky and falling well below her shoulders, caught the white fluorescent light, broad sparks around her face. “When abortion is illegal,” Monica, the captain of the debate team, said clearly, “women die.”

Kathleen Cornelius turned in her seat as if she’d been stuck with a fork. “But babies die when it is,” she said. Two or three other girls cried out in wordless agreement.

“You can’t legislate morality,” Monica snapped back. “Look at Prohibition.”

Now the class was alert, and Sister Lucy saw that even the indifferent students were interested: not so much in the substance of the debate as in the joy of the rebellion.

Kathleen, having spent her rhetorical trove, looked rather desperately back to Sister Lucy. The other girls looked to her as well, some of them smirking, some anxious, others only curious. At their age, Sister Lucy recalled, she had craved piety, undaunted innocence, even naivete. Now, worldliness was all they wanted. Sophistication.

She held up a hand, put a finger to her lips. “Girls,” she said. “We’re not here to debate.”

“No kidding,” she heard one of them say.

“Thousands of babies are killed,” another girl said.

Under the sudden ringing of the bell, Monica cried, “Thousands of grown-up babies died in Vietnam. Why didn’t they pass a law against that?” There was laughter. Barb Luce looked quickly at Clare.

When the bell stopped, echoing, there was only the familiar sound of the whole school population, four hundred girls, stirring, standing, pushing back chairs, picking up books. They shook out their skirts and pulled up their kneesocks and flipped their hair. Sister Lucy watched them as they passed her desk, the crutch across her lap.

Monica Grasso, ever mindful of her grade, said, “Good discussion, Sister.” And Sister Lucy nodded, smiling, disdainfully perhaps.

Clare Keane, passing by, glanced briefly at the nun. Unlike so many of the teachers at Mary Immaculate, Sister Lucy had never before spoken about her life-her parents, her childhood, her time outside of school. Never a word about her crutch and her limp. It had lent her a certain dignity, her reticence. Clare thought it gave her a kind of professionalism. Now she wondered, glancing briefly at the nun, if Sister Lucy would take it all back if she could. If, given the way the girls were shaking off her story-her mother’s poor life, her father’s, all that sadness-laughing, moving on, following the bell, Sister Lucy now wished she had kept it to herself. Instead of turning it into a single day’s lesson for a bunch of heedless teenage girls.

Joining the crowds in the long hallway, Clare checked the books in her arms. She was headed for geometry. This year, much to her own surprise, it was the one class where she felt sure of everything.

Her husband was exquisite. Ginger-haired, as the British would have put it, but the two American girls would have said ginger as well-although not for the color but the taste: gingersnaps, gingerbread, ginger ale. Some mild and easygoing spice that nevertheless prickled the tongue.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by wineglasses. He wore brown corduroy pants and a shirt that was a soft, autumn-evoking shade of gold, an ascot-a pattern of greens and browns-tied loosely at his throat. His ginger hair curled over a broad forehead that might have been deeply tanned earlier in the year but was now faded and freckled, a burnished ginger itself, as were his cheekbones, his handsome man’s dimpled chin. His eyes were brown or dark green, the whites bright against his skin.

“Loo paper,” he said by way of greeting. And held up a single sheet. “The cheapest kind. Nothing like it for getting lint off the crystal.”

Professor Wallace had a hand to the small of their backs, ushering them in. “David,” she whispered, reverentially, bending to place her cheeks beside theirs, as if David were some distance away, on a pedestal perhaps, and, like his namesake, carved out of white marble. “My husband.” And then, straightening, raising her voice. “Two more of our American students.”