The Daze of Whine and Dozes

I went to boarding school. That sounds extremely fancy but that wasn’t the reason I was sent there. I was shy…to a crippling degree. By the age of 12, I would often start to cry if anyone asked me anything or even spoke to me. Mostly people new to me, but with the odd familiar folk, at school and at large. It was paralyzing and suffocating.

My parents thought it would build my self-confidence if I were someplace I couldn’t hide from my extreme social anxiety in situations that would be trifling to others. I wouldn’t be able to come home and hide from the world with my animals and my music. It was a decision they made with love and, from what I knew about boarding schools – from my mother’s experience and from the Hayley Mills’ movie, “Trouble With Angels” - it sounded like a right jolly bit of fun.

It wasn’t. The school was a beautiful building, a Motherhouse for the Sisters of St. Joseph. We were mostly a Catholic bunch, but there were a few other religions and ethnicities in residence. (This was Canada of the late 1960s). Though the uniforms were anything but trendy, I loved not having to contemplate what clothes to wear. It was easier to blend in. Sadly I was also very overweight.

My weight was very much causative for a good portion of my shyness and lack of self-confidence. This did not change with my relocation to communal living. It, as one with my luck might expect, got much worse. At least at home I could retreat from the name-calling and taunts (usually in tears) and hide until I lived to flight another day. Sharing a dormitory – St. Joe’s – with seven other 13- and 14-year-olds quite simply robbed me of my refuge and thrust me into the tyranny of – we’ll call it – ‘teasing’ and torment.

Not a day, or night, went by that I didn’t get called ‘fat’ or some derivative thereof. It was like a plague that swept through the resident population. It became rather an inside joke, and my insides caused me extreme bouts of physical illness and deposited me in the hell of nervous anxiety. I could list every one of the epithets slurred at me, if I had time, and anyone were interested.

I wasn’t the only victim of teenage savagery. The nun responsible for keeping us ‘St. Joesers’ in line was a lovely Dutch woman, Sister John Michael. From the get-go, she was fighting a losing battle against her charges. She couldn’t cope with our dorm and its inhabitants, the ‘St. Joe’s Shit Disturbers’ as we came to be called. She certainly couldn’t win. To make things worse and I’m sure humiliating for the poor nun, she had extremely buck teeth, so bad that it affected her ability to speak. And with her accent unfamiliar to my co-dormers, she was fated from the beginning. They nicknamed her ‘John Fang’, or ‘Fang’ for short.

They were a vicious lot, my dorm mates, and I constantly felt heart sorry for Sister John Michael. And, to be honest, for myself. I hated it there. I went through my first December nursing some inexplicable abdominal malaise that sent me to hospital just before Christmas. I got comments about my chunkiness in the hospital too. There was also absolutely nothing wrong with me except what stress and worry were causing.

They became a feral lot, the girls who shared my dorm space. One boarder was particularly cruel to just about everyone, though she reserved most of her acerbic commentary for the good Sister and me. When I was going home with a fellow student for a weekend visit, (let’s call her) Diane informed me that I didn’t have a chance with my friend’s brother because no one could like anyone as fat as me. Was that truly necessary? I had no designs on the brother in question, but that did nothing to lessen my discomfiture.

And it didn’t stop with her. It’s hard to single out the most upsetting and humiliating thing this exceptionally insensitive lot plotted and engineered for my ‘benefit’.

St. Joe’s had a dedicated shower room with three stalls. Nothing unusual about that. Generally, we’d enter the cubicle in our uniforms, with pajamas and towels, and all the usual shower paraphernalia. After the shower, the routine was to towel dry, don pajamas and slippers, collect our items and head back to the dorm. Nothing unusual about that.

Most of the time.

On two occasions, one taking me totally by surprise – horror more like – and another because I stupidly forgot what happened the first time, my fellow dormsters left me in no doubt that I hated boarding school and everyone in it. Uniform, pajamas, slippers, towels all left within easy reach in the adjacent shower cubicle, I showered and washed my hair. I then reached through the curtain for the towel to dry my hair but – hold on – I couldn’t reach it. I stretched a bit further. Still nothing. It occurred to me at that point to take a peek at where I must have stupidly left them out of reach. And there was nothing. Not anything. Empty. And a lot of laughter cascading down the hall towards me.

Needless to say I was not only mortified, but practically catatonic with rage and free-falling tears. There I remained, naked in the shower stall until it was time for lights out, when Sister John Michael began looking for the escapee only to find me in the state they’d left me.

There was a lot of yelling down the hall. The laughter quietened. Sister fetched my clothes from the perpetrators, brought them to me and graciously did what I asked before I returned to my bed. I begged her to let me stay outside the dormitory until lights went out. That way, at least, I could make my way back, and avoid detection. I couldn’t face them, and the titters of amusement that rippled throughout the room until Sister John Mary returned and, to the jeers of my fellows, screamed her usual, “You’re just a bunch of keeds.”

And so it went. And the taunts and cruel references continued. The song, “Guantanamera”, was popular at the time. Because my first name is pronounced ‘Maa’ (flat A) ree’ and not ‘Mur-ee’’ (emphasis on last syllable), my jolly crowd deftly retitled it “One Ton of Marie”. I did appreciate the parody since, luckily, I still had a sense of humor, but it was brutal and a hateful thing to do. I’d kept to myself for most of the year, so avoiding everyone completely for the rest of my sentence was a simple adjustment.

But it wasn’t all hell. I did love school work and writing poetry and songs. After finishing my homework during one of the evening’s two Study Hall sessions, I’d spend what time remained writing or learning new words from my “30 Days To A Better Vocabulary”. ‘Bilk’. That was one, and I thought it pretty good for a 13-year-old.

And there were music lessons. On two nights a week, I was excused from Study Hall for an hour to take my piano lesson. I’d been learning piano at home since I was five, so continuing with it had always been a given.

All the music lessons – piano, violin, voice – took place in the Nuns’ living quarters, where four rooms were set aside for the purpose. My teacher was Sister St. Jerome, who was on the hind end of her 70s, with a memory and stamina definitely the worse for wear. When she wasn’t dozing off to sleep, she was keeping time on the keys by tapping a ruler, occasionally rapping me on the knuckles when I made mistakes. My last lesson, before school ended for the year, was held on a particularly hot day, in a searingly hot room. Sister had a fan blowing gently onto her face, and seemed especially casual and serene for the duration of the lesson. No key tapping. No knuckle rapping. Just a gentle wave back and forth with her signature ruler.

By the time I finished my last piece, and waited for commentary on the day’s performance, she had fallen asleep. Usually she snored when sleep overtook her during a lesson, but she was quiet, sitting beside me with a smile on her face as gentle as her waving ruler. I quietly gathered my things and left her to rest. It was the last lesson of the year. I didn’t much care how I’d done, and had no intention of waking her for the adjudication. I scurried away before she had a chance to wake up, congratulating myself at making it through the full year.

And, joy of joys, school was set to let out for the summer in two days.

The next morning – the penultimate to final – we all went as usual to the cafeteria for breakfast. Near the end of the hour, our Principal, Sister Marie Therese, appeared with a small microphone. What was this fresh hell, I wondered? Anything out of the ordinary tended to be bad news, so I braced myself and prepared to be deflated.

“Good morning, everyone,” Sister began. I noticed a slight waver in her voice. “I have some very sad news,” she informed us. “Sister St. Jerome passed away peacefully yesterday evening around 8 o’clock. Miss Traynor will be conducting all lessons for anyone scheduled for today. I know there are a few of you.”

Our principal had us join her in a Requiem prayer, followed by a decade of The Rosary. She was definitely crying, which suggested she wasn’t the battle axe I’d always believed her to be.

I was shocked. Upon reflection, however, I wasn’t shocked. I was horrified. My lesson the evening before had ended at 8:00 p.m. The dozing Sister St. Jerome I didn’t awaken for my performance report was more than likely a dead Sister St. Jerome when I left her to return to Study Hall.

I began to worry. Surely the music department had a record of all the lessons and students from yesterday and, surely, it would be discovered I had been the last person to see her more or less alive. Of course, such a thing had never occurred to me, given her habitual checking out and into sleep at random moments throughout every lesson. But, being only too familiar with how my luck generally ran, I figured something bad was about to befall me. Had I played any part in her untimely demise? I worried all through the day and into the night, but nothing happened. No one branded me culpable and the horrible situation was shamefully back-burnered in my joy waiting for my parents to pick me up and spirit me away from the godawful place.

Did I return for 10th grade? I did, but only remained enrolled until November. The reason for that is a whole other story unto itself. I’ll recount it some day. But, like most everything else that happened me – and it’s been a lifelong constant – it didn’t end in the most positive fashion.

But it ended. And I was free.