“What do you like to read?”
Sister Marie Claire was old. She wanted nothing to do with the Second Vatican Council, and her habit was black, and it completely covered her hair, and her face below it was creamy white and puffy.
She was the Principal at Immaculata Preparatory School on Tenley Circle in Washington, D.C., where we sat in a tiny dark room, just the two of us, for the entrance interview. I remember velvet chairs and heavy curtains.
“Anne Frank,” I said without hesitation.
Her eyebrows shot up.
“She only has one book, you know,” she half-smiled at me.
“I know,” I said. “But I’ve read it. A lot.”
When I walked into Immaculata for that interview, I desperately wanted those nuns and dark hallways and marble staircases, the breezeway with light, and the chapel with high windows to take me in.
But I also wanted to do it on my own terms.
My mom and sister and I lived in a planned community outside of D.C. called Reston, named after the architect who designed a town to bring people together by mixing housing because he knew that socioeconomic factors were the main things keeping people apart.
Our townhouse was on a cul de sac between a golf course and the Virginia Gentleman Bourbon Distillery – literally on the border where the new south met the old. Beside the distillery was a little pond whose banks held my middle school body while I wrote poems in my journals.
In Reston, for the first time in my life, I had attended a public school because the parish priest, when we’d first moved there, refused to admit my sister and me to the parochial school because my mother was divorced. As we drove away from the appointment in his office, my sister and I were quiet because we had never seen our mother so angry and heartbroken at the same time.
Citing Anne Frank in the Immaculata interview, I think, was a way of saying, “There’s more than one religion. And very bad things happen in the world because of religion. I need you to know that I know this.”
I wanted to be able to be intelligent and not suffer for it. I wanted to be praised for what I knew.
At orientation, I gathered with 113 girls in an auditorium where the Latin word, audire, to listen, could live out its purpose.
“You are the cream of the cream,” Sister Marie Claire said from the podium.
It reverberated throughout the auditorium. We listened. We heard.
“You are the cream of the cream,” she said again. “You are the best, you are the ones we wanted, you are the smartest and the kindest and the best girls.”
In that moment, there in one body of 113 girls in an auditorium with a stage filled with only women faculty and an ancient woman as the leader telling us this—it was balm, it was vision, it was a revelation of what was possible for us as girls and women when we are loved and praised and accepted and embraced.
It was a mountain of sage in bloom.
Thirty percent of the girls who attended Immaculata were African American.
This was because, we on student council were told by the nun who trusted us with this information, Sister Marie Claire grew up in Chicago and had been a terrible racist.
But she knew this about herself, she accepted her prejudice in the same way she’d accepted us, and she did something about it.
While Reagan raged outside our windows, slashing and burning help for the poor and communities of color, inside Immaculata there was a diversity unlike anyone had ever heard of before.
Their parents were diplomats and college professors and doctors and FBI agents and state representatives and lawyers and the faithful federal workers who kept the government going day after day after day.
I took three busses, and it took over an hour and a half to get from Reston to Immaculata each school day.
One bus would take me from the side of the golf course by my house all the way down Route 7 (there was no 66 or Dulles Toll Road yet) to Farragut Square.
There, I would take another bus to Georgetown and get off at the corner of M and Wisconsin where I would catch another bus heading up Wisconsin to Tenley Circle.
I did it happily.
I set my own alarm, made my own breakfast, brushed my hair, and got into the uniform, a seersucker light blue in early fall and late spring, and a teal blue polyester skirt and blazer in winter and I waited for the bus in the dark.
I had done all my homework the night before – it usually took me about four hours to complete – and then I spent more time each morning on the bus doing reading or studying for an upcoming test.
I followed the rules. I excelled. Even when I failed.
After that interview with Sister Marie Claire, I had been admitted to the honors program, which meant I had to attend summer school before freshman year. I stayed with the family of a co-worker of my mother’s – the Siegels.
They lived close to Tenley Circle in a big, beautiful house, and they were Jewish and loud and liberal and political and loving. Their dog’s name was Cyrus Vance.
I went to my room after dinner and read Moby Dick. I studied Latin for the first time. I struggled with pre-algebra.
I had never worked so hard intellectually in my life. I was floundering.
Unlike many of the girls, I had not been trained in elite schools. I was drowning. My brain hurt.
Eventually, I had to admit I could not keep up. I asked to withdraw from the pre-algebra class, which meant that I would be in the track of classes with the average learners for math and science.
This turned out to be a boon, for it meant that I would know everyone in the school because I attended classes at different levels.
I stayed in the Latin course, though, even though I struggled tremendously, because without it, I could not have taken Honors English nor been able to take third-year French in freshman year. All the French classes were taught by Madame Myers-Kung, who was so thin she could cross her legs at her knees and ankles and wore scarves and had short, chic straight hair and was married to a Chinese diplomat.
And in that French class freshman year, there were juniors – upperclassmen who wore the dark blue uniforms, not the inferior teal blue of underclassmen – and they laughed and joked with MK, as they called her, and they exuded a confidence and ease about themselves that I emulated, and my spoken French would probably be a lot better today except for the fact that I was tongue-tied much of that year.
Sister Petra was the Latin teacher for the honors students. Petra means rock in Latin. It’s why they call Peter the rock of the church.
She was a tiny old nun, but round and strong like a stone. She knew I was hopeless. I sat in the back row, trying to hide the little green crib book of translations when she called on me to translate in class.
“All Gaul is divided into three parts.”
“The mountains having been moved.”
I was overwhelmed by the declensions and tenses and genders. I loved the gerunds, though.
The idea that a verb could become a noun.
That language can take an action, something moving and changing and swift and transforming, and with the magic spell of an -ing ending, make it into a thing.
And at the same time, the th-ing is not really a thing because the ending reveals its origin in motion, which means it is alive.
I love cooking with my wife.
Kissing her is fun.
It’s a good thing I didn’t get married in the Catholic Church because I would have been kicked out for divorcing my husband.
“Socks up, Premo!” Sister Petra would bark when she saw me with my socks slouched down around my ankles in an act of micro-rebellion.
I’d smile and pull them up, then push them back down after I went through the double doors to the right of the principal’s office that led to the staircase.
I knew it was important not to conform completely.
Even when I loved where I was.
The nuns and the women they hired to work in the cafeteria made us fresh, hot lunches every day. The food was good and healthy and homecooked and hearty.
Some girls complained or brought lunch from home that their moms had made or skipped lunch all together to go outside and have a meeting in a club they called The Pigs because they were practicing anorexia together.
But not me.
I was happy to eat.
Glad of it.
Loved it.
And I sat at a table with an eclectic mix of people.
Ruby Chen, the smartest girl in school, but also sad.
Leonora Saavedra, who carried her books in a rolling suitcase because her father forbade her to take time away from studying to go to her locker the one time a day that we were allowed to switch from carrying morning books to afternoon books.
Viki Clark, who could make me laugh so hard milk came out of my nose.
Eileen McCarthy, who got 1600 on the SAT, and was the un-ironic definition of sweet and humble.
Claire Magner, who sometimes came over from the jock table to join the rest of us misfits because we were funnier and didn’t criticize her performance in the last game.
Sometimes, maybe when one of the nuns had been sad the night before, or maybe when they were all especially happy, we would have éclairs for dessert after lunch. Freshly made, the cream inside, the heavy yellow, the puff crunch outside, the silken chocolate sticking to the roof of the mouth, the combination of taste and texture.
I remembered how puffy Sister Marie Claire’s face had been during my admission interview, and I realized now how it that had happened. My face was puffier, too. Because we all got them.
The éclairs were free. No one had to pay. Everyone got one. That was also part of the sweetness, too.
During my first three years at Immaculata, I was surrounded by girls and women who were both smart and kind, and right and wrong seemed clear, and this was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted.
And then it ended.
During my senior year, it was announced that the school was closing.
The bishop made the announcement.
We, the student body, were shocked. We loved this school, we said to each other. How could they do this to us?
The parents were shocked. Some began an investigation and a lawsuit.
But even the nuns were shocked.
Behind the scenes at executive student council meetings, Sister Katherine Francis shook her moon-shaped face and lowered her doe brown eyes and said, “We did not want this.”
It was the closest any of us had come to hearing an outright statement against the leaders of the church, and we were silent with awe.
I sprang into action. I called an all-class assembly in the auditorium for that very day. I basically took over the school.
When I look back now, this was a clue to how overwhelmed the nuns really were by the news.
I sat on the steps of the stage with a microphone, my legs tilted to one side, and I talked to them.
I said we would fight back. I said only we could do this because only we knew, those of us within those walls right then, really knew what this school meant to us.
I said that it was ridiculous for the bishop to blame the closing of the school on the fact that students were not becoming nuns anymore.
I said that whether or not we became nuns had nothing to do with the worth of our education.
I said that even if all of us became nuns, that would not solve the problem of aging nuns and their need for health care. That was another kind of blaming the victim.
I said that to take young women and old women and blame both of us for something that he was doing was ridiculous, and we wouldn’t stand for it. We would fight back.
They rose to their feet and applauded.
We got to work on the protest posters.
We called the media.
We staged a public protest right on the front lawn facing Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue, where thousands of bus riders and commuters passed each day. Cameras were there.
We were on the local news. There were articles in the Washington Post.
And still, the school closed.
We hadn’t done anything wrong.
That was when it hit me: you can be the best of the best, the cream of the cream, supported and loved in a nurturing environment, and still you can be whacked.
You can try to fight back. And still, you lose.
You can use your voice and organize and gain the attention of the press. And still, the case turns against you.
What this allowed me to see was that perhaps my own trauma when I was 8 was not my fault, either.
Maybe I didn’t do anything wrong.
Maybe I was a good girl, maybe I was not evil, maybe I did not deserve to be hurt.
But it happened anyway.
Cassie Premo Steele is a lesbian, ecofeminist, mother, poet, novelist, and essayist whose writing focuses on the themes of trauma, healing, creativity, mindfulness, and the environment. She is the author of 16 books.