Air Force Brat by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Read Free Book Online

wasn’t nice and Ma
Soeur wasn’t happy. Her eyes spoke the
truth that her smiling lips and sing-songy voice belied: she hated
children. She was completely and totally feared by all my
classmates—even the “good” ones.
    While I was at the school,
I saw Ma Soeur repeatedly demand that little sobbing girls
“ removez les lunettes ” in order that she might more effectively strike them across
the cheeks with her ruler. I once saw her rip out months of
embroidering in front of the whole class—while she berated and
humiliated the poor girl whose gift was, evidently, not
needlepoint.
    My own relationship
with Ma Soeur was
somewhat complicated. Clearly, she was not allowed to strike
“ l’Amercaine ” and
yet I may have given her more cause for frustration and fury than
any of her obedient, cowering pupils.
    I sat at the back of the class in a double
wooden desk that I shared with a girl named Michelle. Michelle was
assigned to me to help me along. Because she was considered the
smartest girl in the class, the ideas was that I would not drag her
down too much.
    The other American girl in
the class was Susan Scibetta. She was less of a problem in class
because she was totally compliant, extremely gifted, and very
quickly fit into the flow of the class day. She was soon getting
B’s on her own dictees . I, on the other hand, was apt to disrupt class by asking
where the water fountain was (there wasn’t one) and whether or not
we got Halloween off.
    Susan sat with Nicole, who
was recognized as the second-smartest child in the class. Unlike
Michelle, who was big and plain, Nicole was delicate and beautiful
with a serene Madonna’s smile. Even so, as smart and sweet and
determined to please as both Michelle and Nicole were, in my year
there I saw both of them brought to tears by Ma Soeur .
    The schoolroom was large,
with a set of four floor- to-ceiling windows on opposing sides of
the room. Ma Soeur sat at the front of the room before a cracked blackboard that
stretched the full width of the room. The opposing wall, where I
sat with Michelle, held the massive double doors that led to the
hallway and out to the cement courtyard. My job was to
“ fermez la porte ”
whenever someone visited our classroom. This was usually the
village priest, who came to torture us every Tuesday with readings
from our Catechism and to hear our recitations of the same. If
anyone could be more sour and mean-spirited than our little nun, it
was “ Mon Pere .”
Since I wasn’t positive he was in on the “be nice to the Americans”
pact that Ma Soeur and the other teachers seemed to abide by, I kept a low
profile when Mon Pere visited. It was just as well. While I quickly picked up the
language, my recitations were less than perfect and my dictee always a
downright disgrace. Much of this was due to my personality: I was a
bright but indifferent student—even in American schools. The idea
that I needed to memorize four or five pages of French poetry for a
solo recitation the next day was almost immediately dismissed by me
as unnecessary. I remember Michelle telling me one day that I
didn’t need to worry about memorizing a particularly long and
boring tract—I just needed to read it over. I needed to read it
over “one hundred times!” That initially amused me, I realized it
was an insult.
    The school was very
primitive. It had been standing for over a hundred years, and
looked it. There were no ballpoint pens. We used dip fountain pens
that held only a charge of ink for every dip into the well. We had
pencils, to be sure, but we did our sums on little chalk slates
that we held up when Ma Soeur barked at us, then erased with little
pastel-colored sponges.
    Not surprisingly, Ma Soeur tied Michelle’s
success together with mine. If I did not perform, Michelle would be
punished. It was a painful motivation, forcing me to step out of my
natural inclination to “let it slide” and take the “C.” With poor
Michelle taking the bullet for