Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

will of God wants us. We shall never cease wanting and longing until we possess him in fullness and joy. Then we shall have no further wants.’”
    While she reads, Sister Saint-Michel, who is being punished for handsigning in choir, goes up to the professed sisters with a handleless teacup and gives the signs, Please, food . Everyone denies her except for Sisters Monique and Saint-Estèphe, who sullenly turn teaspoons of onion soup into the penitent’s cup, and Mother Saint-Raphaël, who tears off a piece of hot bread. Sister Saint-Michel then curtsies to the prioress and crawls underneath a table to eat. She seems to be near tears.
    And so Mariette is surprised at recreation when Sister Saint-Michel plays badminton in the yard with Sisters Zélie, Aimée, and Saint-Estèphe, jumping and shrieking joyously as she tries to hit a high, fluttering shuttlecock.
     
    Mass of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, Widow.
     
    Ever since one particular extern joined them—God be praised, she is gone now, she makes jellies, she is married to a trapper—Sister Saint-Léon has been humbly required to teach table etiquette to all those who would imitate Our Lady in decorum and délicatesse . Even to ones as perfectly refined as the postulant. She therefore sits Mariette at a collation place setting while pointing out how offensive it is to feast beside or across from a sister whose hands and nails seem not to have been cleaned since birth, who imparts a general stickiness to everything she touches, whose wholesome food shows itself again and again as she changes it by chewing. Mariette is to seat herself quietly, without heaves and sighs and jostling. She is not to tuck her napkin under her chin, nor use it for unseemly purposes that have nothing at all to do with the fastidious dabbing of the cheeks and lips. She is not to put her knife in her mouth, nor pour coffee or tea in her saucer rather than drinking it from the proper utensil. She is not to reach over another sister for flavorings and butter, nor bumptiously stand up to grab something not near at hand. They are not pigs at a trough here, Sister Saint-Léon says. She is to hold her face at least four inches from her food. And if there are fish bones or cherry pits or foreign things that ought not be swallowed, she is not to spit them obstreperously onto her plate, but softly allow them back onto her spoon and subtly deposit them just beside her servings. And henceforth, Mother General has declared, sucking and smacking noises will not be tolerated. Such politesse , Sister Saint-Léon says, can be quite readily acquired, with a firm purpose of amendment, and is really not as difficult as it sounds; it may indeed already be natural to the postulant.
    And if not, Mariette says, I shall practice in secret.
     
    Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
     
    Wide milk cows are tearing up green shocks of grass in the pasture. Each chews earnestly, like a slow machine, until the roots disappear in her mouth and she goes back to the grass again.
     
    Hothouse flowers on a sill in a jar. The green shafts seem to break at the water line and get milkier while angling down. Sister Honoré plucks some pink dahlia petals whose withering edges are tanning with age.
     
    Sister Ange is throned upright on stacked pillows and stares outside from an infirmary bed that Sister Marie-Madeleine has slanted up with wood blocks. She worries over the pleasure she takes in viewing the yard, but she thinks it is like a prayer, seeing so many of God’s favors and blessings on their priory. She sees Sister Véronique sitting in an Adirondack chair in the shade, sternly peering over half-glasses as she sketches pigeons on the dark green lawn. Externs stand in the yellow wheat as an eastern wind crawls over it. Torn clouds are in slow gait to the south, like a straggle of gray and white house dogs hobbling to their beds. Sister Ange smiles while remembering her childhood, and Comtesse, Galette, Bibi, and