Free At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott

year will be in Sister Miriam Joseph’s fourth-grade class this year.”
    At the head of the long center aisle that divided the rows of lunch tables, Sister Miriam Joseph held out both arms and snapped her fingers like a Greek dancer. “Come up here, little ones. Come, come, come.” She was tall and dark and slim and beautiful. She swung around to take the class list from the principal’s hand and then swung back again, her beads clicking, to say, “Come along, come along,” to the children, who had risen unsteadily from their seats and were now staggering toward her, their large empty book bags and new lunch boxes catching on every hip and chair leg.
    Maryanne, the younger girl, reached her first, or was drawn reluctantly into first place by the nun’s thin hand on her head. “Every little one line up behind this little one,” she said. She was twenty-six years old and had entered the convent at nineteen. Under her white scapular, which swung close enough to brush Maryanne’s forehead, her waist was defined by a man’s
black belt, fastened at the last notch, and her stomach was flat and taut between the bones of her hips. She seemed to move constantly, even as she stood to read out the name of each child, her free hand still placed on Maryanne’s head (so that when the child said, “Here,” her voice was muffled by the woman’s robes) and her scent of starched wool and soap and sharp cinnamon rising in short puffs from the various breezes the movement of her garments sent across the child’s cheek.
    When the last name had been read, Sister Miriam Joseph lowered the paper and raised her hand and with another snap of her fingers said, “Come along.” She turned. The pale tile floor was newly waxed but it might have been ice the way she spun and glided, her black shoes flashing as she led them across the front of the cafeteria, past the shining silver lunch counter behind which the three fat lunch ladies nodded and smiled in their own September amnesia, loving their jobs, and then out into the hallway.
    She swung around constantly to look over her shoulder and to say again, “Come along,” and Maryanne, who had spent last year under the care of Mrs. Shaw, a chubby, middle-aged woman with pearls and perfume and six children of her own, realized for the first time how much she had missed the daily proximity of a nun, gazing up at her tall black veil and down to the flash of her black stockings and heels with all the grateful nostalgia of a penitent returned to the flock.
    She loved her. She loved her even before they reached the classroom door and, stepping back, Sister Miriam allowed Maryanne to be the first to see the long, black chalkboard filled to every corner with butterflies and flowers and Snoopys and Charlie Browns, drawn in such a variety of colored chalks—the first colored chalk Maryanne had ever seen used in this school—that each letter of Welcome, Sister Miriam Joseph, O.P., and Class 4-A had been written in a different
shade. She loved her before she had a chance to study her lovely face, her dark eyes and her long lashes and the cheekbones that her white wimple made ever more pronounced. It was dazzling when Sister Miriam smiled but Maryanne loved her even before she’d seen the white teeth and the flashing eyes and the dimples, before she realized that her accent was a city accent and that, as Sister erased part of the board for the first lesson, she was cracking a small piece of gum between her back teeth. Loved her even before, at the end of this first day, Sister Miriam closed the classroom door and distributed to her class of thirty-eight one piece each of Dentyne gum which she allowed them to chew for three minutes by the clock and then collected on two pieces of lined paper, saying now that she had let them chew their gum in class they couldn’t hold it against her when she chewed hers, printing out the word