Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 17

"So how often after that did you guys get it on?"

"Not very often after that week," Sister Rosario said. "Only two more times. For one thing we were all busy with our duties. And it was very difficult to find a time and place for any two of us to break away and find an opportunity. And all three of us had all sorts of moral qualms about what we were doing. None of us took our vows lightly, and the vow of celibacy is still a vow of celibacy whether you're a dyke or not. And then it didn't matter, because we were all assigned to parishes all over the West Coast, and we never saw each other again."

"You didn't write to each other? You didn't trade addresses?"

Sister Rosario laughed and fondly ruffled Carmen's hair. "You're such a romantic, aren't you? What would we write to each other? Love letters describing all the forbidden sex acts we wanted to perform on each other? Confessions of our lesbian longing that somebody someday might stumble across and expose us to the bishop? Do you think nuns can keep bundles of love letters in their rooms? No, my darling, there was nothing we could possibly write to each other that just wouldn't have made everything a hundred times worse. Sometimes you just have to break things off cleanly, and not leave incriminating evidence lying around."

A week later when Carmen went into the basement office she found Sister Rosario sitting there with a huge grin on her face.

"What?" Carmen asked, setting her college schoolbooks down. "Tell me, tell me!"

"I've got some interesting news for you," Sister Rosario said. "There's a big seminar the Department of Religion at Fresno State is putting on six weeks from now. It's a three-day event, a Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I told Father Eduardo I was very interested in going, and he grumbled and mumbled, but I'm on his favorite nun-of-the-month list, and so he said okay."

"That's great," Carmen said, not quite understanding.

"But here's the thing," Sister Rosario said. "This conference has been scheduled for a year and has been booked up for months. All the dorms rooms and accommodations are filled up, and the only way I can attend is if I find a cheap motel off campus somewhere. And I'll have to rent a car to drive up there, and drive back and forth to the conference, and then drive home here on Sunday afternoon or Sunday night. Father Eduardo grumbled some more, but he approved and the parish is going to pay for my trip and accommodations and expenses."

Sister Rosario could tell she didn't have to spell it out for Carmen, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes glistened. "Carmen," she said, smiling, "for four days and four nights I'm going to be living out of a suitcase in a motel room more than two hundred miles from here. To get there in time for the Thursday morning sessions I'm going to have to drive up there on Wednesday afternoon and evening." She grinned at Carmen. "I know you're a goody two-shoes, but how do you feel about cutting some classes for two days?"

***

But two weeks later when Carmen arrived at the office things were very different. Carmen found her sitting at her desk, her head in her hands. When she looked up, Carmen could see she'd been crying.

"What is it? What's happened?"

"Honey, sit down," Sister Rosario said. Carmen pulled the only other chair in the room over to the desk and sat, waiting. Her heart was pounding. Had someone died?

"Something has happened," Sister Rosario said quietly. "I don't know exactly what. Something to do with Father Eduardo. He's been relieved, and is being sent away somewhere. Missouri, or someplace. Someone has complained, the police are investigating, and the bishop is coming. My friend Beverly has been fired. I don't know why. All eight of us nuns are being transferred out, all over the country. I don't know where to yet. I don't even know why. I guess because of Father Eduardo. No one is talking to us, and no one will say anything." She took a tissue from the tissue box on her desk and wiped her eyes. "Needless to say, I'm not going to go to any conferences in Fresno." She sniffled and looked at Carmen. "I'm so sorry, baby."

Carmen burst into tears herself, and she and Sister Rosario hugged and sobbed. "Nooooooooooooo," Carmen wailed. Sister Rosario rocked her and let her go for a few minutes, and then she said, "Hey, come on, now. We can't keep crying like this. We've both got to pull it together, 'kay, baby? I'm going to need you to be strong for me, 'kay? Because you and me, we can't let this show. We can both be upset, but we can't let anyone see how much this hurts both of us. So you're going to have to be strong for me, just as I've now got to be strong for you. So let's both stop crying and let's just try to get through this the best we can."

Carmen sat up and did her best to calm herself down and not burst into tears again.

"You're going to go away," Carmen said, patting her face with tissues.

"Yes."

"I love you. I know I've never told you that, but I do."

"I know you do, baby, and I love you, too. And I'd love you as a person, as the most beautiful sweetest, most wonderful girl in the whole world even if we weren't lovers. You are the most special person in my life, and maybe you always will be. And I know I've been very special to you, too, and I want you to remember me forever and ever, okay? But now we have to do something very hard. We have to pretend we are just very good friends, and then we have to say goodbye just like good friends would, and we have to hide everything else that we're feeling, okay? Can you do that for me?"

"I don't know," Carmen said, tearfully.

Sister Rosario hugged her to her breast. "I know, baby, I know. But you're going to have to grieve for me the way you grieved for Lucia when she left. I know it's hard, and I know it's cruel that you're going to have to do it all over again. But some day you'll find somebody, and that person will become the love of your life, and that person will be the one who loves you and who will never, ever leave you, okay? I wish I could be that person for you, but we both know I can't. I am forever married to the church, but just because I've been unfaithful and weak and sinful doesn't mean I'm still not married to her. My heart and soul and my obedience belong to the church, even though there will always be a little small place in my heart that belongs only to you."

She stood up, bringing Carmen with her, and blotting Carmen's swollen face with a tissue. "It's best now that you go home, my dearest, and tell your family what's happened, that something's happened at the church, and that Father Eduardo and all the nuns are being sent away, and you don't know why, but there will soon be a new padre and new sisters, and life will go on in the parish, same as always. There will be weddings and funerals and baptisms and confessional, and catechism, and Bingo and choir practice, okay? Life will go on, my dear, as it always must. Take your schoolbooks, go home, do your homework, have dinner with your family. I'll let you know when I'm leaving, and we'll get to say goodbye. I promise."

***

Two days later a big limousine pulled up in front of the church and the bishop got out, accompanied by lawyers. There was a hush-hush meeting lasting several hours in Father Eduardo's office. By the end of the day it was officially decided to transfer Father Eduardo to a special retreat house in Missouri "for reflection and spiritual renewal." Further, all eight nuns assigned to the parish were to be re-assigned. Sister Rosario was ordered to report to a convent in Minneapolis. She was given two days to report, and only managed to have a brief, tearful farewell with a heartbroken Carmen. The farewell took place in front of many people, and so neither Carmen nor Sister Rosario could behave in the way they wished and say all the things they wanted to say. As far as anyone knew, it was just a popular nun saying goodbye to a beloved student, the parish angel. Sister Rosario whispered in Carmen's ear that she would write when she got to Minnesota. And so Carmen's heart was broken yet again.

***

"Sometimes you just have to break things off cleanly," Sister Rosario had told her, and Carmen decided it was good advice. It was time for a clean break. She'd already had many private misgivings, and now things had come to a head. Her church had told her never to use contraceptives, and she knew that was just plain foolishness. Her church had told her abortion was wrong, and that even if a woman was raped by a thug or a gang of them, she had to carry the rapist's baby to term, and love it and raise it, and Carmen knew that was nothing short of cruelty and sadism. No one "liked" abortion, but Carmen was fervently pro-choice. Her church had told her priests and nuns had to remain celibate, even as they freely dispensed all manner of advice to men and women about marriage and sexuality, topics most of them knew less about than any other humans on the planet. Her church had told her that an innocent child only a few minutes old was born in sin and needed to be saved, and she knew in her heart that was utter nonsense. No one was more pure and innocent than a newborn babe, and saying otherwise was plainly crazy talk.

Her church had told her quite specifically that lesbianism and homosexuality were deviant, an abomination and a sin. Her church told her that her sexual orientation was a choice, a decision, and an evil practice that must be stamped out, even as it turned a blind eye to hundreds of cases of pederastic priests abusing their child parishioners. Her church had told her there was no compromise, no room for discussion, no place for tolerance, no provision for the kind of diversity she and Sister Rosario and Lucia and all the gays and lesbians in the world represented. Her church had told her she could never marry another woman, and that her feelings for Sister Rosario, which were pure and beautiful and loving, were an abomination unto the Lord. Worse, Carmen recognized her own hypocrisy: She had gone to confession every week, and every week she had lied by omission, keeping secret and refusing to confess "sins" her church said the Lord hated, but which she herself loved. She had confessed only to silly things, inconsequential things, "impure thoughts" that she actually felt no shame over whatsoever. It was a mockery, and she was participating in it and enabling it, and it had to stop.

Finally, the last straw. Her church had taken Sister Rosario away from her and broken her heart.

It was time to sever this relationship. This was an abusive relationship, she thought, and it couldn't be fixed. Her church had told her a hundred ways that she was a sinner and it didn't want her, even as it pretended and claimed otherwise. The church was right about one thing: there was no room for negotiation, no place for compromise. When a relationship became abusive, you had to end it, walk away. You had to leave, and not look back. You had to make a new life for yourself, and find your spirituality elsewhere. Carmen loved women, not just sexually, but as a gender, a species, a sisterhood. She found herself in need of healing, and she believed that perhaps she could help heal others, as her father had seemed to be able to do. She didn't need the Pope, the Vatican, and two thousand years of its hegemony and male-dominated paternalism, its prudishness, its sexism and its hypocrisy. She was 19, and a free woman entering adulthood and a free world. She would find her own way, and find it without that church.