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"Whose hand?" Ginny had said. Win elbowed her.
"Yes, Sister," Gwen said. "A hand of benediction."
"It's settled," Sister Fran said. She turned toward Ginny. "It's a hand of blessing. That's what this"—and here she paused to wave in the general direction of our float—"will be announced as in the parade." She made some markings on a clipboard. "You'll need to add the papal ring," she'd said without looking up. "You can't very well have a hand of benediction without the papal ring."
To complete our Hand of Benediction, we cut out an oval from poster board and painted it. We didn't have any gold paint, so we mixed brown and white together to form a color closer to beige, but it looked okay. Finally, we glued the oblong ring to the float, somewhere near where the knuckle would be. It wasn't perfect, but Sister Fran agreed to let it march in the parade. She did like to reward hard work, she had said.
Of course, The Guineveres would not pop out of our Hand of Benediction. No party awaited; no dazzled lover's eyes would gaze upon us. We knew that once the floats were paraded up the long driveway of the convent and, farther, into the courtyard of the church, they'd be left there until Sunday mass to help commemorate the Assumption. They'd be left alone. Overnight. Unguarded.
In the empty quiet of the church courtyard, once the sun had sunk and the sky turned to shadow, we planned to unfurl ourselves from our hiding spots. We'd stand on firm ground again and stretch our limbs, free to set about our lives that didn't involve the Sisters or their rules. Lives that didn't involve rising early every morning to Sister Fran's whistle and dressing in our monochrome uniforms—gray skirt, white blouse, white knee socks, black loafers. Lives that didn't involve single-filing to the kitchen, where we were served oatmeal and a piece of peaked fruit for breakfast. "We must be modest in our wants," Sister Fran would say when we asked for something more substantive, like eggs or waffles or a cream cheese Danish, the things we'd been accustomed to at home. We had little awe for the routine of convent life. After breakfast, we endured an hour of silent prayer, three hours of Morning Instruction, a break for lunch, chapel, more Instruction, and then Rec Time after dinner.
We simply wanted to be ordinary girls.
During the two blissfully unstructured festival days, under a canopy of tents, we could at least pretend we were ordinary girls, like before our parents left us here. When we weren't working the booths or cleaning the trash from the courtyard, where the garbage cans overflowed with grilled corn husks and sticky paper cups, we ate sugary foods, played tear-offs with names like Bars and Bells, and watched as the local parishioners aimed for the target on the dunking booth where Father James sat beneath a handmade sign that read DUNK-A-PRIEST. We placed bets at Turtle Downs, a booth run by Sister Tabitha, Sister Fran's second in command. She gripped a microphone and held it close to her reedy lips as the creatures ambled across the track in a leisurely race to the finish. Sister Tabitha had a stutter that she bore proudly, perhaps to demonstrate how God loves us despite our flaws.
"Sc-c-c-scales of Justice takes the lead," she called out, rattling off the names of the creatures as she called the race. "The Holy Sn-n-n-snail is close on his tail. Though Sh-sh-sh-sh-Shell Fire is making a si-si-significant comeback from behind."
For these two short days, the Sisters possessed a sense of, if not lightness, then at least not their usual costume of pressed lips and tight faces. They dressed in pink skirts and white cotton shirts, a drastic departure from their usual black habits, but they still covered their heads with veils. Without their tunics, they looked gaunt; their thin frames resembled a prairie animal we'd seen in a National Geographic in the library. It was our favorite magazine, and we turned those pages especially slowly when they featured photos of naked men and women.
Excerpted from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Domet. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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