THE SYSTEM

1 0 5 R T H E S Y S T E M J E A N M c G A R R Y They were not married, but they were part of a system. In it, a certain freedom; outside, nothing. One was built low to the ground, chopped-o√ black hair, glasses, round face; the other, tall and seedy, a tea drinker and lover of ancient texts. Fatty lived in the present, patrolled the school with a raggedy hemline and clunky shoes. She was brilliant, and a fine singer, with an easy reach to high C. Betty and Boris, we called them, thrilled to see their command, in old days when two women were too many for one house and one bed. Not enough of something, and too much of something else. They had their routines, and never shared an o≈ce or a lunch where people could see. The nuns didn’t seem to mind. How could they, living the way they did, in twos and threes with wedding rings and Jesus as their bridegroom? They looked the other way; the spiciness came from us, although they tried to thin it out with vinegar and water, a panful of Ivory flakes, and rafts of Modess ‘‘. . . because.’’ Because why? Just because. And we were satisfied. The system made us strong. There wasn’t much room for speculation. There was fact: a joint 1 0 6 M c G A R R Y Y car and a house far enough away from campus, and from snoopy neighbors, to elude detection. For holidays with a religious note, each went home alone to a houseful of Catholic brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandmas and kids. Boris was born with a face of crumbly plaster and a wall eye. Even as a baby, never smiled, and grew her body into a barrel, whose hoops would last as long as she did. The ‘‘hand grenade,’’ boys her age had called her, but they liked her. Everyone liked her, or was it fear? She had a mind of her own and an appetite – not just for food, which, in those days, was plentiful, coarse, and styled to fatten the best of the herd. She was secretive and lived inside her head, stocked with whatever she could find to read. She also liked gaping into front windows , eavesdropping in rude cafés and diners, hiding in the card section of the drugstore to hear what people were demanding, with or without a doctor’s order. Boris knew everything there was to know about the neighborhood, the parish, and the precinct by sixth grade, which she skipped. And suddenly, in junior high, having no boys to pal around with, her view darkened, and she spent more time on her knees in front of Our Lady of Fatima. That was the name of her church. In some ways, she was a boy, forced to be a girl, with a widowed mother and older brother studying to be a priest – and more than a priest, because already in Rome. So it was just mother and Boris at home. Her given name was Mary. Betty was born into a family of eleven boys. She was the baby, and lugging her home in a taxi, her mother took a spill on the ice, cracked her skull, broke her arm, and baby blue, for she was a blue baby, the first to survive, caught a cold and lived her first year in the hospital, an asylum, really, for the blind, the deaf, the retarded, the crippled, the defective at birth, the injured, and the sick. As soon as Betty could put two and two together – early, because she was a genius – she was a baby to watch. The nuns wanted to keep her for their own, for many of the surviving inmates joined their order the first day they could do it, at age fourteen, by the bishop’s special dispensation, because sta√ was needed and vocations to that servile order rare, and because their mother house was in the far reaches of Canada, and no one had heard of them. But Betty’s mother, never too hale and...

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