Does every writer have a Princess Di story?

“Stick out your pointer finger and touch mine, now take your other hand and rub your pointer finger and your thumb up and down. That's what her body is going to feel like when you touch her”  

When I was 12 I drank enough vodka and tequila to one, never drink either spirit again and two, to land myself in a convent. It was 1987, our apartment was chaotic, casual inanity ensued like always and no one knew what to do with me when I got out of the hospital. 12 years old, pre pubescent and flat chested. I don’t remember the priest giving me my last rights, I just know it happened. I don't know if my mother cried over my comatose body. I have flashes of the day, mini breaks in the blackout. One is drinking a cup of cigarette butts and piss and another is  jumping off the lowest point of the overpass onto Sound Beach Avenue in Old Greenwich. That's where the ambulance would scrape me off the ground. It wasn't too high of a jump and I was really drunk- I remember thinking I could fly. By the end of the following week I was a resident of:  The Sisters of Charity Convent / Academy of the Holy Family- (the boarding school side).

My fathers mother died when he was a child. She had two sisters, Camilla and Lori. My Great Aunt Lori a Nun known as Sister Maria and Camilla who we all called Mima both lived at the convent. When I was really young Mima used to “rescue me” from my mother. As she got older and more fragile from her broken lungs that could not handle 2 packs of Benson and Hedges 120’s a day the nuns took her in. She no longer wore her beautiful 2 piece polyester checkered suits with slip on loafers with foamy bottoms. Her hair no longer looked like it had been styled by a hairdresser although I knew she did it herself. Now she wore nightgowns and wasn’t allowed to smoke. Her identity had been stripped for her in exchange for a “home”. 

I had never known Sister Maria out of her habit. She became a Nun before I was born and wore a black full length habit and family rumor had it she shaved her head under her veil. In the summer they switched to white, it was to stay cool, I remember her saying. I grew up visiting there every summer and random weekends. Our visits were usually in her classroom where she taught biology and other sciences under the guise of catholicism. It smelled of formaldehyde as all the cousins would open the jars filled with cow hearts, goat lungs, newborn sheep. One cabinet opened to a full body skeleton, he had a name but I don't remember it. There was a pay phone down the hall from her classroom where girls gathered mostly from Uganda and Uruguay, two countries I assume the Catholics were still trying to conquer in the 80’s by offering “their girls” the American Catholic dream, stealing their daughters voluntarily and bringing them to Baltic, CT. It's crazy that a few years later I would be standing at that very pay phone begging to go home.

Mother Teresita, the nun who ran shit had no idea what she was getting into when she agreed to let Sister Maria and Camilla’s niece live there too. Mima had a large bedroom with an adjoining bathroom on the second floor over the nuns dining room. Boarders, (that's what the students were called) were not allowed on that side, the one that was opulent, filled with chandeliers and china. Catholics with clout do not skimp. I ate most of my dinners those first few months in the priests dining room with Mima. It was quite luxurious and I was allowed to use the private elevator that had a swing open door and an accordion metal shutter in front of it - It controlled where you were heading.  If I close my eyes really tight I can even smell it. A fragrance that only exists in the company of housed clergy. Even then at 12 years old I brought me wherever I went and soon ended up in some sort of trouble and then Mima got sick. I was sent to the other side of the convent where the boarders slept, put in a juniors dorm with 16 year old girls. One of them, Holly, tried to teach me how to queef. “Lay on your back and hold your feet” this is way before I knew what Cradle Pose was. “Squeeze where you pee” she made farting noises that were a little wetter and more high pitched than a fart,  she was my roommate. 

By the middle of 8th grade I had lived with another student's family above the gym and finally with the janitor's family over the library. I had a twin rollaway mattress with a sheet that hung from a metal wire pegged into the ceiling above for privacy. It was quite a juxtaposition from the dining room dinners the year prior. I was now eating toast with mounds of butter and sugar and all my meals came from the cafeteria- rarely any special treatment. My novelty had quickly run off.

I would trade years off my life with the people I love most today to have ended those two school years differently. I believe layered trauma causes some sort of self induced amnesia and so does my therapist, Liza. She believes the erasure protects me, that I have been spiritually healed and I don't have to do hundreds of hours of EMDR to “fix it”. I don't remember much of my second year at the convent, 8th grade. I don’t remember much of anything to be honest. My earliest childhood memories are watching the 11pm news when John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980 a few months after my 5th birthday. The second is, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana, July 29, 1981 the summer I was 6. Lennon’s assination had me screaming downstairs to my mother and her boyfriend, Steven who had made chicken parmigiana that night if they knew him. My mother screamed and cried. I sat at the top of the steps listening. The same steps I would for years sail paper airplanes notes down: asking her to love me, asking for her forgiveness after she beat me, if I could just watch TV with her. The royal wedding had me standing in Mima’s small apartment that smelled like dill, cottage cheese and mothballs where a twin bed permanently housed my Uncle Jack. I stood in front of the tiny screen making myself part of the fanfare, I was excited. When I was 22  I would stand in my own living room the day she died in the same awe I had watched her wedding 16 years earlier. Apparently I only recall death and love.

I stood over her casket, the nun, my aunt had earlier that day explained to me what she was going to feel like. Remember, rub your thumb and your pointer at the same time. We had practiced this over and over. I know the feeling, I can conjure that, I made Todd mimic it not long ago, to see if it still worked. I don't remember how I felt though- drugs and booze were breaking me by this point. I was able to numb every single feeling that popped up by chugging dark liquor, mostly Southern Comfort. I couldn't imagine back then why people chose not to be obliterated, why someone would make a conscious decision to lay there and actually feel the pain they were in. To connect with what it felt to miss someone so much you wanted to disappear was too much for my 14 year old soul.Guzzle, repeat, pretend you're fine. Guzzle, you don't feel it anyway. Guzzle, no one can hurt you. Guzzle, you’re nearly dead anyway.