Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story. Karen Armstrong
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that at the time I preferred not to examine too closely. It was to be some years before the seeds blossomed into a decision.
The year 1960 was an important one for me. I was fifteen and eager to break out of the sheltered world of childhood, but the adult world turned out rather differently from the way I’d expected.
One thing that turned out badly was my friendship with Suzie.
I remember how it all came to a head one hot September afternoon. Suzie and I were sitting in our garden. She was lying sprawled in a deck chair, her skin-tight jeans stretched over her thighs, her breasts peaking provocatively under her orange tee shirt. I glanced down at my own lumpy body. Suzie was formed. She was complete and ready for life. Her lips were coated with orange lipstick; her nails—why would mine never grown that long?—were gleaming orange talons. She had done her best with me. Under her tutelage I was wearing a similar pair of jeans and a grey shirt, and my lips were covered with a chalky pink lipstick. Like Suzie’s, my hair was back-combed into a tangled beehive. I should look all right, I reflected sadly. In fact, if I concentrated on my face, I didn’t look too bad. My teeth were much too big, of course, but from the neck upward, I would just about pass. My body had nothing to do with my head, however. I could never look finished, all of a piece.
“How can you bear the thought of going into the Sixth Form, Karen?”
“I don’t know,” I replied untruthfully, “it seems endless.” The trouble was, I thought, I wanted to do A-levels and go on to college. Suzie—and indeed all my friends—couldn’t wait to get into the real world. Suzie herself, having scraped through five O-levels, was leaving school and was about to embark on a secretarial course. The prospect of that just didn’t appeal to me. It was no good; I was just different from her. But I did so want to belong to her world.
“You really ought to get out more,” she said, “you know, drink a bit, smoke a bit, find a boyfriend. You’re really not a bluestocking, you know, Karen. You can be really good fun once you let yourself go a bit. And you would, once you got a boyfriend!”
“Fat chance!” I muttered gloomily. Fat, I thought, looking down at myself, was the word.
“By the way,” she asked casually, “is Tony in?”
“Who?” I asked blankly. “Oh, you mean Anthony! Yes, he’s here. He’s in the sitting room, I think, doing something or other. Why?”
“Just wondered,” Suzie replied lazily.
Anthony, my cousin, was staying with us. Two years older than I, he was about to enter the police force, having decided not to carry on doing A-levels at school. Another one.
“It’s no good,” I said in a burst of honesty. “I’ll never be successful with boys like you are! I just don’t look right and I can’t talk to them.”
“Goodness, you don’t want to talk to them, do you? There are much more interesting things to do with boys than just talking, for God’s sake!”
I laughed knowingly, hoping that it was convincing. In fact, the whole area of sex was a mystery to me. It seemed hedged round with dangers. It was a wonderful thing, I had been told again and again. But if you did it when you were not married or when you were deliberately preventing a baby from being born (by means of some mysterious devices), it was a mortal sin. And that meant that if you did not truly repent you went to Hell for all eternity. And what exactly was “it” anyway? In biology lessons the nun who taught us made us read the chapter on reproduction by ourselves. It seemed to be all about rabbits, and I didn’t think I had much in common with a rabbit. The technical details of sex were shrouded in a disturbing obscurity. And then once you got a boyfriend there was all that business about “going too far” or “making yourself cheap”.
“Suzie,” I asked diffidently, “aren’t you ever afraid that you’ll get pregnant when you go with boys?”
“Course not!” she laughed confidently, happily ignorant of the fact that in three years’ time she would “have to” get married. “There’s loads of things you can do before you go that far.” I blinked uncertainly. What on earth could she be talking about? And what about those dark masculine urges that I was constantly being warned could not possibly be controlled? But confessing my ignorance would be too humiliating.
“Yes, I know,” I lied, “but don’t they want to do the whole thing?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered complacently, stretching her body in the sun like a contented cat. “But I can always handle them. By the way,” she sat up suddenly, “can I go and phone my mother to tell her when I’ll be in?” She dusted a few blades of grass off herself.
“Sure,” I said, reaching for my book. It was The Mill on the Floss. I watched her go into the house and turned back with relief to the ordered world of literature. I’d nearly gotten to the end of the novel. Poor Maggie. I knew just how she’d felt as a child. Ugly, precocious, a misfit. Then she’d become a beauty. Her position was hopeless, but the ugly duckling blossomed into a swan. I read of her drifting down the river with Stephen Guest, conscious of impending disaster.
After a while I glanced at my watch. Good heavens, Suzie’d been gone for a quarter of an hour. Her telephone conversations with her mother were usually brief to the point of rudeness. What could be keeping her? I went in to see.
I walked through the kitchen into the front hall. There, through a crack of the door that had been carelessly left ajar, I saw them.
Suzie was sitting on the hearthrug, her head bent back, her eyes staring blindly at the window. My cousin Anthony leaned over her. One of his hands kneaded her back, the other hand squeezed and paddled in her neck. Even as I watched, their lips joined in what I recognized was a familiar embrace.
I watched the long kiss, mesmerized. Then, shamed, I stole into the kitchen. Sitting there at the table, I reviewed a world made suddenly impossible. Anthony and Suzie must have been laughing at me for suspecting nothing of their relationship. The feeling of exclusion I had experienced in the garden flooded back, more intense. Seeing them like that made all the difference. Hitherto the only kisses I had really seen were on the television screen in plays and films that glamourized them, presenting love as a cataclysmic,all-revealing passion. But this was the real world. I could not go along with it.
This, I told myself in a sudden cold certainty, was not passion. But it was the stuff of which most marriages were made. No one would ever want to do that to me, I knew. But no longer did I want them to. How could Suzie do it? Anthony, with his pimples and his moods—like all his friends.
No! The whole thing was certainly not for me.
With a shock I heard the front door opening. My mother was back from the hairdresser’s. Guiltily, I stole into the garden and picked up my book.
“I don’t mind! Really, Anthony! I don’t mind for myself. But with Suzie! … She’s such a little slut! … She’s having such a bad influence on Karen!” I heard snatches of my mother’s fury.
Suddenly the idea of being a bride of Christ seemed enormously attractive. I thought of Anthony. There seemed no comparison. Of course I wasn’t going to be a nun, I told myself. The idea was ridiculous. To be as fulfilled as Mother Katherine was a reward for having given up an awful lot. Books, theatre, freedom—until an hour ago I would have added sex. But that no longer seemed any sacrifice at all.
“Karen!” my mother called me. I turned round and squinted up at the house, narrowing my eyes against the sharp glare of the evening sun. My mother was standing at my bedroom window. Her face was tense, and momentarily I compared it to Mother Katherine’s, which was always so serene and untroubled. No, marriage was not all it was cracked up to be.
“Come up here a minute!” Her voice had that deliberately casual tone it always took on when she was upset and was trying to pretend that nothing was the matter.
“Just look at yourself,” she commanded, turning me round to the mirror, gripping my shoulders as though she were about to take me into