Mary, Give It Back

The infirmary in Mans Hall is full of us. Shadows—lurking, stealing, we linger still, quietly lost. They have legends about us, about me. Some say they are silly ghost stories to scare the underclasswomen. Others have gone to the chapel to collect holy water, carefully carrying it down the long cathedral-like hallways back to their dorm and sprinkling it about the room. Some whisper incantations under their breath, like fearful exorcisms.

I do steal, but I’m not a demon. The water is refreshing. And I remain.

*

All those years ago, I forget how many now, he found me in the woods behind Holy Angels Hall. It was a hot, Indiana August afternoon, the semester just begun. I was sitting in my favorite spot, where a gap in the trees overlooked a wide meadow below, like a window into a new world. I was reading Virginia Woolf’s newly published To the Lighthouse, not for class but for fun. Someone tripped over a root behind me, rustling leaves and landing with a thud. I dropped my book and started to run. He didn’t follow, so I glanced back. He was brushing himself off, then picked up the book, and looked at the cover. He sat down where I’d been sitting, opened the book and started to read.

“Thief,” I said.

He stood and looked up at me. He had dark, thick hair parted at the side and brushed away from his face. His slacks and shirt were clean and crisp, apart from the mud on the knees and where his white shirt clung to the patches of sweat on his skin. His suspenders felt like intimate details of his wardrobe, holding everything in place on his body.  His eyes were dark.

“Sorry I startled you.” He was tall. His muscles looked new but strong. “I like to go for walks back here sometimes. The woods are more beautiful over here.” He meant, compared to his own university’s campus across the street. “Normally I don’t run into anyone.” He smiled.

“I’d like my book back, please.”

“Oh, right, of course.” He placed the hardcover in my outstretched hand but didn’t let go of the book. He didn’t move and neither did I, so we stared at each other for a long time. I wanted to know how his eyes got to be shaped like a ballad. He smiled sweetly, still holding onto the book, looking at my eyes. “I’m James.”

I laughed. “Well, James, I’m not leaving without my book.” I sat back down in my grassy spot. I didn’t invite him or gesture toward him, but he knew to sit down too, book in lap.

“Is it any good?” He meant the book, but I knew he somehow meant so much more.

We talked until sunset, counting hours by the faint tolling church bells. I could feel the sweat dripping down my back in my thick wool uniform. The cicadas buzzed in the heavy air like background music, growing louder and softer like undulating crescendos. He was like stained glass—tinted and brightly dark, telling stories, divinely beautiful. He asked me about books and home and dreams and seas. I asked him about God and art and hummingbirds. We missed dinner, parted before curfew, and made plans to meet again.

*

The girl who lives in my room now must be an English major. She has filled the built-in bookshelves with Shakespeare, Boswell, Aphra Behn, Keats, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Joyce, Austen and Elliot, and so many more I have never heard of. She’s always reading. She reads until she rubs her eyes and then reads more. She reads like it’s food and she’s on the brink of starvation. I wonder, if a boy tripped over a root, would she hear it? Perhaps it would be for the best that she didn’t.

I take her book one night and begin to read. Morrison. It’s like listening to music; the words are melodies—sad, longing croons. Like always, I forget to give it back. The next night, she searches for her book by her bed, in her backpack, on her desk, on the bookshelf. Finally, she sighs and tentatively says, “Mary, give it back,” almost as if she’s asking a question to which she’s afraid of the answer. “Please?”

After waiting a moment, she laughs and says, “Worth a shot, I guess.” I think I hear her mutter something like stupid ghosts under her breath as she leaves with her shower caddy in hand. While she’s gone I put the book back on her nightstand. Girls demand this of us all the time. Everyone knows what to do if your stuff goes missing: “Just ask her nicely to give it back.” I usually comply. But I don’t want to give it back. I want to keep reading. I want to dive into another world, explore new places and people. She has so many books, pages and pages of freedom on her shelves. I have nothing.

So I hold on to it for a little while longer. And keep reading music.

*

Falling in love happened like the moment we met. A sudden root upheaving your path forward, tripping, disrupting the story. It was my favorite interruption.

James and I would meet in those same woods in the afternoons to read. The nuns didn’t let men into our rooms, but anyway the woods were beautiful, and we’d watch the colorful world change around us. Sometimes we’d sit on a blanket, silently wrapped up in our own pages. Other times we’d read to each other, often a poem from his pocketbook of Dickinson. It became a song when he read, sweeter than hymns.

It was this music that Sister Mary asked me about when I turned in my poetry assignments. She’d keep me after class, holding my hand-written work in front of her frowning face. Perhaps her habit squished her features together, or my poems smelled bad.

“Where did you get such ideas like this, my dear?”

I paused, thinking. “Well, Sister Mary, I think perhaps it all comes from God,” I told her honestly. The boy, the words, the blood that beat inside me, demanding me to pay attention.

“Oh no, child,” she said. “This is not from God. This is not Godly work at all. I’d like you to redo the assignment without such . . . carnal language this time.”

I rolled the word around on my tongue: carnal. Of the body. Fleshy. Sinful.

I did the assignment again, using more virtuous words. The poem was lifeless, but I got an A.

When the fall turned cold and damp, we’d still walk in the woods, holding hands and smoking cigarettes to stay warm, and then grab coffee in the cafe. We leaned over the small bistro table and conspiratorially whispered about our dreams to live in Paris, like we were runaways, plotting our escape route. He’d continue to study architecture, I’d write novels like Woolf. We’d smoke cigarettes on the balcony overlooking the winding village streets of Montmartre. We’d meet artists and writers, drink and debate with them, getting drunk on the conversation as well as the cheap, plentiful (and non-prohibited) wine. When we’d return to our small apartment full of books, we’d make love as the moonlight spilled into the room.

James blushed when I mentioned making love. I wondered if he thought I was wrong—or worse, bad—for even mentioning it let alone wanting to do it. But then he smiled and said, “That sounds perfect.”

At Christmas, he went home to Chicago and I to Michigan. I wrote him letters by the dim candlelight in my small room in Aunt Sarah’s farmhouse, thinking of the way my body would flutter when I’d see him again. Sister Mary’s words came back to my tongue: carnal, ungodly. I thought of James’ eyes and disagreed. How holy indeed.

When we returned to campus, Hazel and Lizzie came to my room one night with a bottle of wine Hazel stole from her parish. “They won’t miss it,” she insisted. We sat on the floor and drank from the bottle, telling stories about our vacations, giggling about the high school sweetheart Lizzie finally kissed. They asked about James, if we would see each other this semester. I had never doubted we would. It was never an option in my mind.

“Will you get married soon?” Hazel asked. Her light eyes were droopy with drunkenness.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. It seemed like the other girls who met boys at school were always talking about getting married. As soon as they had a beau, they were planning a wedding. I knew it was why many of the girls were here, to meet a man studying business. But in my mind, I never saw us married in the future, not necessarily. Perhaps we were, but not in the sense that the other girls would be married. We were always just together, living life together.

Every Friday the sisters took us to confession. We lined up outside of the confessional, preparing our list of sins that we would recite to Father: lying, gossiping, not being helpful to our families or friends, being sassy to Sister. I wondered if I needed to confess my feelings about James. The feelings that rushed through me when we kissed. The way he touched my body. The way I imagined him touching my body, skin pressed to skin. Sister Mary’s words came back to my mind: carnal. But I delighted in these thoughts, and I wondered how God could punish someone for loving so fully. So I didn’t confess it to Father, and said five Hail Marys for Aunt Sarah and her children.

After the summer break, we met up in the woods again. He held me tight in his arms that had grown stronger. Tanned, toned, whispering love—it was easy to trip and fall again. We missed dinner once more and made love in the woods as the late August sun dipped behind the golden fields. It felt perfect and right. Like the best way to share the love God breathed into us.

*

There’s a little shadow girl who wanders the fifth-floor annex. Sometimes I hear the women who live in this building now talk about an orphanage that used to be held in the narrow, top floor hall in the extra wing. I don’t remember an orphanage being there, but this little girl who wanders about makes me think, perhaps they are right. At five or six years old, she could never have been a student. Unless she’s someone’s daughter, or sister. Perhaps it was before my time, during the Great War maybe. I can’t imagine the nuns operating an orphanage, tending to abandoned children. Unless, they weren’t really abandoned. Not willingly at least.

Perhaps I should ask her who she is. But even looking at her, with her dark brown ringlets and big green eyes, freckles splattered across her soft nose—just looking at her is too hard.

*

Sister Mary took me to the infirmary when I started vomiting during Shakespeare. The nuns there asked me a few questions and determined I would stay in the infirmary until I was healed of the demon within.

The infirmary was dark and the rooms were small, locks on the outside of the doors. Dark and detailed wood paneled the walls, like charming jail cells, an illusion to delude you into thinking you were there to heal. There was a bed with scratchy white linens, a nightstand with a glass of water, a closet for the clothes I never wore, a small dormer to let in little light, and a sink for nurses who painted shame on their faces and tried to paint it on mine. The walls were sickly white, peeling and towering in.

I knew what was happening to me. I wasn’t like some of the other girls here who didn’t really understand why they bled every month. I had seen my aunt give birth to three of my cousins. I understood what I’d done. What had been done.

I started to grow as I started to shrink. I bulged and expanded and shriveled and deteriorated like one giant breath in slow motion. The room shrunk too, each day a wall getting closer to my face, the ceiling gradually falling on top of me. My white infirmary gown was dirty, and my sheets smelled like sweat. My hair clung to my head like dead seaweed. I swam through a sick ocean every time I awoke from a dream.

They didn’t let me tell him, and they didn’t tell him. They didn’t let me see him. Or Hazel and Lizzie. For all James knew, I had fallen out of love and moved back to Michigan to help Aunt Sarah and the kids. For all anyone else knew, I was too sick to go home, too sick for visitors, I needed the nurses with the shame paint and the dirty bed in the infirmary for a few months, maybe a year, probably a little less than that. I stayed in my room and withered away like a wailing, eroding sand dune.

One night I thought I heard Lizzie and Hazel wandering the halls, calling my name in whispered screams: “Are you here?” I wanted to shout, “I’m here!” But my voice was gone, there was hardly anything left, and part of me still thought that perhaps I was dreaming.

When it started coming, I thought my bones were going to break. I screamed and the nuns sauntered over to my room. They moved with rough laziness. It was late May. No one was around except the nuns who told my aunt I was staying on campus to retake the classes I’d failed. It was hot and the air in the room felt thick, like I could run my fingers through it and watch the ripples.

I pushed, they pulled, and blood fell everywhere. A carnal mess indeed.

I listened for the baby. To hear her cries, the gasping of breath, taking in life. But she was silent.

“Sister Mary?” Everything was so silent. “Si-sister Mary?!”

Sister Mary shook her head, holding the dead bundle in her arms, and said, “The baby couldn’t survive your sin.” Sister Mary left with the bundle, slamming the door behind her.

“Come back! Bring me back my baby!” My voice was just an echo of fatigued screams.

*

They say I hung myself in that tiny closet—why the room is boarded up now. It would have been easy enough. I was hell-bound with nothing. But I didn’t hang myself from the rafters with my bedsheets. I spent three days in that room, burning until I couldn’t stand the fire anymore. Only Sister Mary knows how high my fever reached, until my body couldn’t take burning any longer.

There wasn’t a funeral, not for a sinner like me. Aunt Sarah tried to have my body sent home, but she couldn’t pay the fee. It didn’t matter anyway. I was already in the ground.

I didn’t find my baby there. I still haven’t seen her anywhere.

*

The girl who now lives in my dorm room seems so happy. She’s smart, the kind of smart I wanted to be. Her friend likes asking her spiraling questions about humanity, and God, and the Church. They talk beautifully, and I listen for hours to their languid, prodding voices, probing like curious scientists.

When she’s gone I read more of her books, as if they are refueling and repairing my erosion. I’ve read more Shakespeare now than I ever would have in the course I never completed—the one they yanked me from, just like they did with my degree. Every year I watch the next class of girls graduate on the lawn in front of this building. They smile, they cry, they move on. Every year I just watch. I keep waiting for James to find me. To call for me, “Anna! Anna!” Or maybe he’d whisper my name, like he did in the woods, wrapped sweetly, tightly in my arms, breathless: “Anna.”

Perhaps he has forgotten, or somehow gotten lost, too.

*

I see the little shadow orphan again, hiding behind the Virgin Mary statue at the end of the hallway. I notice her green eyes following me as I roam. Seeing her here squeezes my heart like a fist ringing out a rag. The dirty water stings, but she looks frightened. How long has she been here? Will she always be and feel only five years old?

“Hi,” I say. She doesn’t greet me. “Are you lost?” She nods. I think about all of us, all lost, or maybe stuck, or even worse: both.

I bend down to her eye level. “I’m Anna. What’s your name?”

“Katie,” she whispers. I wonder what her Irish mother was like. If her eyes were that green. Maybe her hair was red. Or maybe black. I wonder if Katie can even remember her after all these years.

“Do you want to walk with me, Katie?”

“I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“The ladies.”

I nod. “They can’t hurt you now.”

“I want my mom.”

Now I wonder about my own mother. I could still see her in that bed, white and sweating. Her breath raspy, the sound of it was the grit of her will, hanging on to life. I was only ten when she passed from the Spanish flu, older than Katie but still such a child. My father died in the war not long after my mother passed, so I was an orphan like Katie, too. I can’t remember what my mother’s actual voice sounded like, the songs she would sing to me. But I can still see her tall body, sunflower stalks bending gently in the breeze.

“Come,” I say. “Let’s walk together.” She takes my hand and we move through the hall. “That way we won’t get lost.”

*

Perhaps that’s why I steal. To not get lost. To not get forgotten. Though, they don’t know the real story. And what about the others? The other shadows in the hallway that was once a sick infirmary? They don’t know what they did to Katie, not really. They don’t even know our names.

So I take the books, I take the shiny trinkets, I take the beloved mementos. “Mary, give it back!” That’s what the legend tells the students to say. Their demands echo my own. Me, Anna, thieving in the shadows, I say, Mary, give it back. Give it all back.

Katie doesn’t steal with me, but I read to her every night from the books I find. We escape deep into stories, into other worlds and thoughts. We fly away from this dark, gothic dorm and live in Rome, or Morocco, or New York City. Her eyes widen as they fill up with stories, not realizing that we ourselves have become characters in a twisted plot. She giggles when she hears someone nervously call, “Mary, give it back.”

To which she says, “When we’re ready.”