LITMIR.BIZ

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      I must have gotten the answers right because he smiled and patted my head. Then he examined me. My head still hurt, and I wanted to curl up and sleep. But I felt less groggy than I had in the Mother Superior’s office.

      “How long has she been at Rosary?” he asked my mother.

      “Since September,” she said.

      “I saw her last August, when she was four.” He looked at his notes. “She weighed forty-five pounds then. Today she’s only thirty-five. What the hell have you been doing to her for nine months?”

      “Nothing, doctor. She says she feels sick a lot.”

      “Didn’t you notice that she’s lost weight? She looks like a goddamn concentration camp survivor.”

      “It’s not my fault. I can’t help it if she doesn’t eat at Rosary.”

      The doctor looked at her over his glasses.

      “Is she at Rosary on the weekends?”

      “No, we take her home on the weekends.”

      “Does she eat at home then?”

      “Yes, she seems to enjoy eating. Except on Sundays, when we have to get her ready to go back to Rosary. She’ll often throw up her Sunday dinner.”

      “Jesus Christ, I’ve never seen such neglect. You need to take her out of Rosary immediately.”

      “But what am I going to do? I can’t take care of her. I have to work.”

      “I don’t know what you’re going to do. But, if you send her back to Rosary, I’ll have no choice but to call social services. I’ve a good mind to do that anyway. They could take her away from you, and you could get arrested for child neglect.”

      My mother was sobbing now, but she agreed to follow the doctor’s instructions and took me out of the school. I never returned to Rosary. The doctor insisted on seeing me each week. Sometimes my mother or Margie brought me to his office, and sometimes he made a home visit. He always weighed me and asked what I was eating. He asked who was taking care of me and seemed satisfied when my mother told him about the various ladies who watched me during the day. After about a month, he started to smile when he read the numbers on the scale.

      I could have died that year at Rosary, yet I had no medical problems to account for my nausea, vomiting, reduced eating, and subsequent weight loss. I was just sad. So I wasted away. In my medical school psychiatry class, I’d learn that loss of appetite and weight loss can be signs of severe depression. My sadness at Rosary was starving me.

      Years later, my mother told me that her decision to send me to Rosary was financially driven. It was less expensive to board me there than to send me to a day school and pay for after-school care. It seems that in those days the Catholic Church, with money to spare, had special interest in holding children captive round-the-clock. The Church subsidized the indoctrination of its children. And for my mother it was a welcome relief not to have to deal with me on weeknights.

      Soon after I left Rosary to live in the Watertown flat with my mother and aunt, I found myself standing alone outside our front stoop, face-to-face with three brilliant red tulips. I was struck at being able to see such beauty so close. Usually, I had to crane my head up to see something pretty, such as gilded statues at Church or a lady’s necklace. The sun beamed down and warmed me while it released a faint fragrance of spring from the tulips. It felt good to be home.

       CHAPTER 2

       Fattening Up

      I stood next to my mother in front of a large, dark-red brick building. It was July, 1958. We had just moved from Watertown to a flat in Brighton, a working-class section on the western edge of Boston. I was so happy to be living with my mother and Margie again that I didn’t much mind the move to a new apartment. As long as I could be with them, I’d live in a shack. When I was home, it was always my mother, Margie, and me. Margie held a variety of amorphous roles in the family. She was a second mother to me, the one I ran to for banishing the pain of cuts and scrapes. She sometimes acted like a daughter to my mother and a sister to me. Then, when she was angry with either my mother or me, she’d pull back and act like we were roommates.

      I now shared a room with my mother. Sometimes she made me lie next to her in her bed for a morning snuggle. I hated being that close, hated the vinegary smell of her before she washed and applied perfume. I didn’t dare complain about this new arrangement for fear that my mother would get mad and send me away again. At least Margie still gave me big hugs at night and rubbed my back to help me get to sleep.

      Some of my dresses that used to hang loose were snug around the waist, now that I’d had five months of my mother’s cooking and Margie’s goodies to fatten me up. My shape was getting closer to its genetic roots—my mother was always overweight. She’d bemoan her girth frequently. “You just have big bones, Mary,” Margie would say.

      “Where are we?” I asked my mother as we gazed up at the brick facade.

      “That’s your new school, God willing.”

      I shivered in spite of the heat. School meant being sent away and sleeping in a strange room with children I didn’t know. It meant I would hardly see my mother and Margie.

      “I feel sick,” I said.

      We had walked the mile to the school, keeping to the shady sides of the streets. On our block, we passed two- and three-family houses that housed typical, large Irish Catholic families, each with a father, a mother, and half-dozen kids. We avoided the Projects, a public housing development filled with the larger Irish families, often with twelve or thirteen kids. Many would be “Irish twins,” born ten months apart. We walked along a street of single-family houses that my mother said were where the well-to-do lived, the middle-class couples who might have only two to four children. These were a mixture of Catholic and non-Catholic, Irish and non-Irish families. The fathers were professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants—but not making quite enough to live in the wealthy suburbs to the west of Brighton.

      My mother dressed nicely today, like she did for work, even though it was a Saturday. She wore a yellow shirt dress that reached just below her knees. A thin belt matched her white patent leather pumps. Pearl clip earrings, a single-strand pearl costume necklace, and white cotton gloves completed her outfit. Her short dark hair rose straight back from her forehead, and pancake makeup reached perfectly to her hairline. She made her thin lips visible with a careful application of red lipstick, and her eyeglasses with turned up corners matched her hair color exactly.

      My blue and green plaid taffeta dress crinkled as I moved. I carried a miniature version of my mother’s purse, which housed my white cotton gloves. A tight ponytail and plastic headband controlled my blond hair. I felt very proud to be all dressed up and walking with my mother.

      If I’d known how to read, I’d have seen “St. Columbkille School” engraved in large letters over the rounded stone alcove. My mother hesitated, took a deep breath, and opened the dark wooden door. Inside, cool stale air and red linoleum-covered staircases greeted us. I stopped, unable to move. The dimly lit stairs and strong Lysol scent reminded me of Rosary Academy and caused a wave of nausea.

      “Come on, Anne Marie,” my mother said. “We’ll be late.”

      I climbed the steps slowly, my feet like blocks of wood. My mother grabbed my arm, her fingers pressing in deep. We stopped at a door to our left. My mother opened her purse and pulled out a piece of paper on which I recognized her sloped handwriting in blue ink.

      “I think this is it,” she said.

      She

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