Light came through the stained-glass windows and splashed colors over everything. A red circle fell on my mother’s white throat. Incense roiled around us, and I looked down to compare the shiny toes of my black patent-leather shoes with those of hers. When we left, lining up to shake Father Dove’s hand, I was able to study the faces around me and confirm that my mother’s wide hazel eyes, her long nose, and high, white forehead made her more beautiful than anyone else.
For Christmas the following year I received, in my stocking, a boxed set of four volumes of Lives of the Saints, intended for children. There were two volumes of male saints, which I read once, flipping through the onionskin pages, and then left in my dresser drawer, and two of female saints, which I studied and slept with. The books contained color plates, illustrations adapted from works of the masters. Blinded Lucy. Maimed Agatha, her breasts on a platter. Beheaded Agnes. Margaret pressed to death under a door piled high with stones. Perpetua and Felicity mauled by beasts. Well-born Clare, barefoot and wearing rags. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi lying on the bed of splinters she made for herself in the woodshed. Veronica washing the floors with her tongue, and Angela drinking water used to bathe a leper’s sores. I saw that there were those who were tortured and those who needed no persecutors – they were enemies to their own flesh.
Saint Catherine of Siena began by saying Hail Marys on every step she climbed. Soon she slept on a board, with a brick for a pillow. She did not like her hair shirt because it smelled, so she took to wearing an iron chain that bit into her waist. As Catherine’s Dialogue (dictated years later while she was in a sustained ecstasy that lasted weeks, even months) makes clear, she believed earthly suffering was the only way to correct the intrinsic baseness of mankind.
My mother also held forth an ideal of perfection, an ideal for which she would suffer, but hers was beauty. For beauty she endured the small tortures of eyebrow plucking and peel-off facial masks, of girdles and pinched toes, of sleep sacrificed to hair rollers and meals reduced to cottage cheese. I knew, from my mother’s enthusiastic response to certain pictures in magazines and to particular waifs in the movies, that the child who would best complement her vanity was dark-haired and slender and balanced on point shoes. I was blond, robust, and, at thirteen, still given to tree climbing. Because my conception had been accidental, because I ought not to have been there at all, it must have struck my mother as an act of defiance that I was so large a child, taller and sturdier than any other girl in my class.
I wished myself smaller. I began to dream at night of Beyond the Looking Glass potions, little bottles bearing liquids that shrank me to nothing and mushrooms that let me disappear between grass blades. I began, too, to dread Sunday lunches with my mother, who fastidiously observed my fork in its ascension to my mouth.
Saint Catherine was fourteen when her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth. Catherine blamed herself for her sister’s death. She believed God had punished her and Bonaventura because Catherine had let her big sister tempt her into using cosmetics and curling her hair – because she had let Bonaventura’s example convince her, briefly, that a woman could embrace both heavenly and earthly desires.
Whatever buoyancy, whatever youthful resilience, Saint Catherine had had disappeared when she lost her sister. She became uncompromising in turning away from all worldly things: from food, from sleep, from men. Their mother, Lapa, a volatile woman whose choleric screams were reputedly so loud that they frightened passersby on Siena’s Via dei Tintori, redoubled her efforts to marry her uncooperative twenty-fourth child. Some accounts hold that Catherine’s intended groom was Bonaventura’s widowed husband, a foul-tongued and occasionally brutish man. Catherine refused; she had long ago promised herself to Christ. She cut off her hair and fasted, eating only bread and uncooked vegetables. She began to experience ecstasies, and it is recorded that when she did she suffered a tetanic rigor in her limbs. Then Lapa would lift her daughter from the floor where she had fallen and almost break the girl’s bones as she tried to bend her stiff arms and legs.
Though it had been ten years since my mother moved out, she had yet to find a place that suited her for any length of time, and so she received her mail at the more permanent address of her parents and would stop by after work to pick it up. She came in the back door, cool and perfumed and impeccably dressed, and she drifted into the kitchen to find me in my rumpled school uniform, standing before the open refrigerator. One day I turned around with a cold chicken leg in my hand. My mother had tossed her unopened bills on the counter and was slowly rereading the message inside a greeting card decorated with a drawing of two lovesick rabbits locked in a dizzy embrace. She smiled slightly – a small and self-consciously mysterious smile – and kept the content of the card averted from my eyes. When she had had her fill of it, she looked up at me. She said nothing but let her eyes rest for a moment on the meat in my hand; then she looked away, from it, from me. She did not need to speak to tell me of her disapproval, and by now my habitual response to my mother had become one of despair: muffled, mute, and stumbling. But in that moment when she looked away from me, hopelessness gave way before a sudden, visionary elation. I dropped the drumstick into the garbage can. The mouthful I had swallowed stopped in its descent, and I felt it, gelid and vile inside me as I washed the sheen of grease from my fingers. At dinnertime, after my mother had left for her apartment, I pleaded too much homework to allow time to eat at the table, and I took my plate from the kitchen to my bedroom and opened the window, dropping the food into the dark foliage of the bushes below.
When I was fifteen my mother forsook the parish to which we belonged, and we began to attend one of the few Los Angeles churches that offered Latin mass. It was a romantic choice, I believe, one that justified for her the long and mostly silent drive we took each Sunday. During the celebration of the Eucharist, the priest would place the Communion wafer on my tongue. I withdrew it into my mouth carefully, making the sign of the cross over myself. Back in the pew I knelt and lay my head in my arms in a semblance of devotion, stuck out my tongue, and pushed the damp wafer into my sleeve. I was a little afraid of going to hell, very afraid of swallowing bread. My rules had grown more inexorable than the Church’s; they alone could save me. But the Host was the Host, and I could not bring myself to throw it away. So I kept it in my sock drawer with my other relics: a small fetish of my mother’s hair, stolen strand by strand from the hairbrush she kept in her purse. An eye pencil from that same source. Two tiny cookies from a Christmas stocking long past, a gingerbread boy and girl, no taller than an inch. A red leather collar from my cat, which had died.
I still had my little books of the female saints. I looked at them before bedtime some nights, stared at their little portraits, at bleeding hands and feet, at exultant faces tipped up to heaven. But I read longer hagiographies now, grown-up ones. When Catherine was twenty-four she experienced a mystical death. ‘My soul was loosed from the body for those four hours,’ she told her confessor, who recorded that her heart stopped beating for that long. Though she did not want to return to her flesh, Jesus bade her go back. But henceforth, she was not as other mortals; her flesh was changed and unfit for worldly living. From that time forward she swallowed nothing she did not vomit. Her happiness was so intense that she laughed in her fits of ecstasy; she wept and laughed at the same time.
I began to lose weight and watched with exultation as my bones emerged. I loved my transformed self. I could not look at myself enough, and I never went into the bathroom that I did not find myself helplessly undressing before the mirror. I touched myself, too. At night I lay in bed and felt each jutting rib, felt sternum and hipbone, felt my sharp jaw and with my finger traced the orbit of my eye. Like Catherine’s, mine was not a happiness that others understood, for it was the joy of a private, inhuman triumph and of a universe – my body – utterly subjugated to my will.
My life was solitary, as befits a religious. Too much of human fellowship was dictated by taking meals in company, and what I did and did not consume separated me from others. Since I had not yet weaned myself completely from human needs, I drank coffee, tea, and Tab. I ate raw vegetables, multivitamins, NoDoz, and, when I felt very weak, tuna