Modesty, Part 1: Beauty’s Condom

St Anne’s Catholic School was housed in an old church that erupted into the sky from the cracked asphalt of a Birmingham suburb. It had all invitation and gaiety of a crab. Like a crustacean, it was spiked and hard, and, like a crustacean, had reached a level of evolutionary laziness where it refused to change with environmental pressures, working instead on hardening its carapace and tightening its claws.

The ground about the main entrance was littered with dead cigarettes from the church’s moonlighting as an Alcoholics Anonymous rendezvous. Stone steps leading to the door were haunted by unsatisfied AA patrons on Sunday evenings and unfulfilled sisters on the weekdays, only one set of which was regularly filled with any kind of spirit. A copper steeple pierced the sky with a gothic malcontent, softened not a bit by the patina of verdigris. Inky porticoes tunneled along both sides of the building where dawn shadows roosted, and the black grime of the city ran from deep window ledges like cheap mascara.

Teachers were mined from the local nunnery based on their ability to frighten children into line, or who had mastered the dark, paralytic power of strategic guilt thinly applied. Over the years the promise of no sex and the growing certainty that there was no God anyway, had brought up nuns in short supply. Of those that remained, their view of the world resembled their habits: black and white and stiff around the collar.

Recess in the weedy asphalt lot was positively feral. Boys, a wreckage of untucked shirts and cowlicks; girls, budding and gossiping, an impervious bait ball of giggles and plaid skirts. There were the stragglers commonly seen in such herds: piggish boys plopped along the chain link fence, pink and porky, ruminating the stats and powers of Pokémon, or the string bean girls perched on the graffitied bench escaped into paperback fantasy. Now and again the boys would send an emissary to the female clan parlaying terms of relationship, or the annulment of one that had budded that morning. But most of the young men in rut and ladies fair vibrated within their prospective habitats in such patterns which, if quantifiable, would predict every outcome of every mathematically based system. In short, it was exactly like every middle school recess since the dawn of man.

The girl was small for her age, with thick golden hair running half the length of her body and bruised legs the other. As the mice said to inhabit such churches, she was quiet. Her pale, heart-shaped face was stitched with a dimple in the left cheek. Blue eyes sponged up the world and wrung it out in her mind where it watered a flowering curiosity. She was thoughtful and polite, though with an impish mischief that danced on the corner of her smile. On the same school day, she could be found reciting a verse of Donne, offering a fervent prayer aloud for a classmate with a ruptures appendix, and testing the pH of cuss words on her tongue during the bus ride home.

Presently, she was orbiting around a nucleus of the female students with a friend discussing some bit of trivia that had happened with a boy, each of them reading further into the meaning than the other, and building a scaffolding of meaning about the incident that would be sure to crumble into disappointment, when she drew the attention of a nun.

“Jennifer,” shrilled the nun.  

Instinctively, Jennifer snapped to attention. Though frail and old, the woman held all the fear of Sinai’s fiery summit. The giggling stopped and the pack of girls pulled away and shuffled back.

“Go tie your jacket around your waist. Your skirt it too short. Two inches above the knees.” 

In fact, the skirt was not two inches above the knees. That morning, when she donned the dress, it was on the level with both patellas, but running around had caused the skirt to hike up to one inch above the knees. When it comes to dress codes, nuns round up.

“Yes, sister” she replied in a honeyed southern accent. Under the watchful eyes of the nun, she wiggled down the skirt and turned back to her friends.

“Jennifer,” the nun called again.

Slowly turning, the girl obediently walked back to the nun and stood before the black cloak, which, standing this close, was indistinguishable from the robe of a judge.

Kneeling with a quick and ugly grace, she snatched the girl’s chin with a crabbed hand. Rosary beads clacked. Jennifer’s eyes scurried around the crinkled landscaped of the nun’s bloodless lips tucked neatly into wrinkles folded with origami precision. Her head wobbled with a tremor; she smelled like nothing.

“We must be modest, Jennifer. We don’t want to make the boys stumble.” 

And so the lie wriggled into Jennifer’s heart, passing through the nun’s old, creased lips which had spoken so much truth unkissed with grace. That worming lie told Jennifer she was a conduit for the lust of men; Beauty, pleasing to the eye and good to eat- must be feared. She was the forbidden fruit. Two inches above the knee: that was the length that she had to work with; thus far was the male libido able to stretch before it snapped under the tensile force of lust. It was her job to keep their fire from spreading into wild lands.

********************** 

Embellishment is the mating of facts with imagination; the above bears more resemblance to the latter. But the woman is real. She told me this story in response to a question I asked her about modesty. Of all the things she could have said, she remembered this story to me.

It was like handing me a dead sparrow, she said.

Modesty, as the lie informed, is protection for men; beauty’s condom to prevent the transmission of lust from her to him. But is modesty merely a prophylactic for young pups to keep their paws off one another? Or does modesty have a higher charge, and greater responsibility?