Never Raise Your Hand

On the Granta blog this week – our occasional series, ‘What I’m Reading’. Between books, Granta’s Patrick Ryan digs out the guidelines from his Catholic School.

What I’m Reading (and What I Ate)

In a box of old letters and documents, I recently came across a booklet typed up for the parents of Divine Mercy School, where I was a student in Florida. It’s a charming-enough read, but doesn’t quite match up with my memory of the place.

I was seven in 1972, and what I remember is that the Principal adored me, the head pastor tolerated me, and Sister Margaret, my second-grade teacher, despised me. But then, Sister Margaret despised everyone. To this day, I’m terrible at even the most basic addition and subtraction because of Sister Margaret’s teaching philosophy.

‘Raise your hand if you don’t understand what I just explained,’ she’d tell us, pinching a piece of chalk.

Just once, I raised my hand. She threw the chalk across the room, walked straight over to my desk and slapped me across the face.

‘Do you understand now?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Sister.’

She was as red-cheeked as I was, had a perpetually runny nose, and she was maybe a hundred years old (or so I thought at the time; thinking back on her now, she was probably all of 23).

‘I was in the supermarket last week,’ she told us one afternoon, hefting a yard stick, ‘and I saw a detergent named after all of you.’

‘Must have been a long name,’ Donny MacAvoy snickered from the front row.

I don’t know what he was thinking. No one made wise cracks at Sister Margaret. The next thing we knew, the yard stick was slicing through the air and breaking in half against Donny’s nose. When he started to bleed, Sister Margaret huffed in frustration, dug her own used tissue out of her pocket, and shoved it against his lips. ‘Bold,’ she told us. ‘The detergent was called Bold.’

The discipline was bad enough. But the food! Divine Mercy was an institution built on rules and regulations – even the parents were given a dress code for what not to wear (shorts) when attending parent-teacher conferences – and in the school booklet, the lunches we were required to purchase were spelled out in the uneven lettering of a manual typewriter. For $1.25 a week, we were fed the following:
{blockquote}
Monday: Hamburger and Potato Chips
Tuesday: Soup and Sandwich
Wednesday: Hot Dog and Potato Chips
Thursday: Sloppy Joe and Cup of Fruit
Friday: Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Fritos.

I picture all those wet mouths obediently chewing. All those 5-cent cartons of milk warming in the un-air-conditioned classroom. All those little orange lips.

I was tapping my foot during lunch one day without knowing Sister Margaret was behind me. She smacked the back of my head, causing me to bite my lip and pee. Later that year, the head pastor – who chain-smoked Marlboro reds when he wasn’t behind the alter – dropped dead of a heart attack at 43, and Sister Margaret punished those children who didn’t cry enough on the day of his funeral by making them skip lunch altogether.

But it’s poor Donny MacAvoy who got the worst of it, for on the day we were learning about First Communion and were each handed an unblessed wafer, he made the tragic mistake of swatting a fly that had landed on his desk.
Sister Margaret made him place the fly on the wafer and glared at him, ruler in hand, until he ate it.

(For a less horrific and more humorous take on the nun-as-teacher phenomenon, take a look at Christopher Durang’s play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.)

Be sure to catch the latest writer in our New Voices series, Kseniya Melnik, whose story ‘The Witch’ was published yesterday.

Previously on the Granta blog... Ollie Brock on phototextual translation and Nicholson Baker; John Freeman on driving in Lahore.