The Taste of Soap

Michael Sullivan

“In all my years of teaching, 53 to be exact, I tried to remember the good things my students did. There is no room in my memory for other things. Let them fade away.”
     — Sr. M. Bronesia
         September 7, 1994

Sr. M. Bronesia entered the eighth-grade classroom like a giant bell buoy bobbing in front of a bow full of adolescents. She was a stout woman, short and immovable, with a face that was stuck permanently in disapproving, pursed lips. The face was round, perfectly shaped by the habit, and the same 436 grayish-brown hairs lapped at her forehead everyday. I imagined that she counted them every morning and scolded any that were out of place, making them do a penance of five Our Fathers and 10 Hail Mary’s. (God above in heaven with a clicker, like a baseball umpire, ticks them off, ready to throw some bad pitches your way if you cut corners.)

We had a love/hate relationship, the good sister and I. I hated her for the pious manner in which her whole body had to move for her to turn her head to the side, and she loved me as she did all 20 students in the small classroom at Holy Spirit School. When she spied one of the wayward young men leaning back in his chair and made him kneel for the next 30 minutes as he took notes, his chair in a corner, she was correcting faults that would inevitably lead us into armed robbery or multiple homicide. When she questioned a girl on why the green plaid skirt she was wearing was inches above her knees, she was preventing the development of the next Mary Magdalene, before Christ. In all her duties that she waddled to like the Pillsbury Doughboy, she was a woman who had cast her character in stone decades before and no 12– to 13–year-old was about to change that or make the slightest chip in her demeanor.

How children love challenges!

Placing the American flag on the flagpole in the morning and folding it up Marine-style at the end of the day was the boys’ job and there was fierce competition to be one of the two picked for the duty. For most of us, it meant a chance to miss morning prayers, a grueling 20-minute litany of the Act of Faith, the Act of Hope, the Act of Love, the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Apostles’ Creed, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a number of other prayers that time has thankfully washed from my memory. For some reason I was lucky enough to be a frequent visitor to the flagpole. I missed morning prayers and I also got to knock on the kindergarten window where my little sister was and make faces at her. The smallest boy in the eighth grade and not much bigger than the smallest girls, puberty could kiss my ass as far as I was concerned because it certainly hadn’t kissed any other part of me. Seeing my sister and getting a brief respite from those beady black eyes, therefore, was a real bright spot in the day for me, one in which I certainly wouldn’t be hoisted up from behind by the human carpet, George Kakaletris, or have my chair delegated to the storage closet.

Fall and winter passed uneventfully at the school, besides getting caught in the girls’ bathroom after school one day with Rob Klaassens. I’d never seen a girls’ bathroom before. Lots of pink. Monsignor Al caught us. He had a glass right eye. His fellow priest at Holy Spirit Church, Father Ruffin, had a glass left eye. Talking to the two of them you went nearly cross-eyed yourself trying to figure out whom they were talking to.

Rob and I had one other incident at the school. Sometime during the year we’d discovered two things together — one was that by standing on the rail of the library you could easily boost yourself up onto the roof. The “library” was really a portable classroom with a catalogue of only a couple hundred books. It stood in the courtyard facing the flagpole. The other thing we discovered was the joy of soap, what we came to feel was a truly underutilized writing instrument.

With only a few weeks left in school, Rob and I rode our bikes up there one Saturday afternoon. Parking beside the church, we walked back to where the school was. There were no cars in the parking lot and no sign of the one-eyed Monsignor Al. Crossing underneath the now empty flagpole, we approached the library rails, scaled them, then pulled ourselves up onto the low roof. From our pockets we then pulled out two Ivory soaps, the thin ones you find in public stalls, and went to work.

When I was still living in Cincinnati, a few years before we moved to Connecticut, I had the pleasure of discovering the much-maligned parts of our language. In a house where the taste of Ivory soap was quite familiar, we learned quickly that their use was to be restricted to outside the home. Nonetheless, in a fit of anger and utter stupidity, I decided one day to write all the words I knew onto a poster board...in large, felt black marker. When my mother found the poster underneath my bed, my father was made aware of the transgression when he got home from work. The belt came off the tie rack, the pants came down, and my father swore he’d spank me for every letter of every word. He got as far as “Mother F–,” I think, before he realized to complete the task would have brought social services.

So, perhaps with this in mind, wondering what discovery of my most recent plot would mean in terms of weeks grounded, we limited our tongues to two words. Each of us wrote in two and a half foot letters, 99 and 1/4 percent pure, “ASS.” As an afterthought, I tacked on the word “LOVE.” Feeling cheated somehow in our rebellion, we nonetheless finished quickly and rode home, waiting for Monday morning. When it rained Sunday evening, we weren’t quite sure if we were grateful or not.

Monday morning, Paul and I got the call for flag duty, the tallest and shortest boys in the class. I tried to act surprised when Paul noticed a not-so-faded grouping of not-so-dirty words on the black shingles of the library roof. I think the fact that I had avoided looking in that direction for even the slightest moment may have given me away. We hoisted the flag up, me holding the loose end until red, white and blue cleared the dewy grass, then made our way across the courtyard, in front of the classroom windows to the school entrance. I don’t remember if I waved to my sister that morning. I do remember Paul saying something like, “Is that the best you could do?” and me not answering, debating how an innocent party should react. It was a good idea to figure that out now, the same way I’d found my “Oh my gosh, what’s that on the roof?” face.

As luck would have it, fourth period was a computer lab where you got to learn how to make your name dance sideways across the screen. “Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike” running diagonally across in a column one way, then slamming into the right side of the monitor to bounce back, “is cool is cool is cool is cool is cool is cool.” The computer lab was housed in the library. Girls lined up on one side, boys on the other and the two rows strode out of our homeroom, into the hallway, out the front side door and into the courtyard. By the time we were underneath the flagpole, snickers were popping up and down the lines. Only two people tried not to laugh, to maintain faces of complete innocence and non-chalance. Rob Klaassens and myself. With the nun buoy lighting our way, never bobbing sideways to cast a magnifying, piercing eye on us, we made our way to the library.

Dolores Rubino, one of those blossoms of early puberty with a skirt inches above her knees, turned to me and said in a cherry voice, “I bet I know who did it.”

The smile on her face, the white blouse two buttons short of heaven, full lips. It was a struggle not to scream that it was my doing. That I was the reason everyone was giggling. That Rob and I had written “ASS, ASS, LOVE” on the roof and we’d have written harder stuff if it weren’t a Catholic school. But I didn’t say anything. Instead, I quickly grabbed my face of innocence to replace my face of hormonal angst and entered the computer lab.

Sr. Bronesia never questioned any of the boys or any of the girls. It’s possible the habit was so stiff that she couldn’t see above five feet off the ground and therefore never noticed the writing on the roof. It’s also possible that our trip to confession the next day was bugged and she hoped to catch the criminal that way. But I never confessed anything important in there, too many Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. The rains continued on and off that week so that bit by bit the words faded, not nearly quick enough for Rob and I, the bad boys of Holy Spirit. Soap, you’d think, would wash away after a few showers, but it was at least two weeks before the last of the lines disappeared. Until then, we tried not to look Sr. Bronesia in the eyes, especially after she did finally see it and announced that she knew it must have been one of the boys in our class. That’s as far as she ever got, though.

Seven years ago I wrote to Sr. M. Bronesia as part of some spring-cleaning of the mind. More like a moving sale, really. I told her what I’d done and apologized for how disturbing I had been in class. She’d retired by then and was living on a nun farm somewhere. She wrote me a letter in return that’s lovingly tucked away in my belongings. She said it was never worth it to hold a grudge, that “there are so many much more worthwhile things to do and think about.” She said to “enjoy the experiences you cherish” and to let the others fade away. She also asked if I was living at home and had a job. Half wasn’t bad. At least I hadn’t resorted to robbing liquor stores. I owe that to the chair treatment, I think.