Missing Sisters -SA by Gregory Maguire Page B

food disgusting and plentiful, and nobody else in her cabin came from the Sacred Heart Home for Girls. Some of them were such chatterers they hadn’t even realized yet that Alice couldn’t speak well. So she sat on the bunk at night, making a wallet from prepunched plastic leather stitched with plastic cord for Sister Vincent de Paul, if she ever came back. The cabin leader was a large woman named Sally. She believed in regular bone-crushing hugs, morning, noon, and night, and the girls submitted as a kind of penance. Other than having to satisfy Sally’s need to feel motherly, Alice found camp safe enough. Of the stink-hole bathrooms—no more than toilet seats perched above gaping holes—it was best not to think.

    Alice wasn’t used to being on her own as much as camp allowed. For as long as she could remember, there’d been nuns hovering within a few feet, encouraging, reprimanding, consoling. A mobile forest of women shaped more or less like Christmas trees, though done in black and white instead of jeweled colors. (The nuns at the Sacred Heart Home for Girls had not yet embraced the new stylish habits, with their scandalously shorter skirts and civilian-style blouses.) Nuns were a fact of life, like crucifixes marking their holy quadrants on the walls, or telephone lines crossing the sky in imprecise musical staffs. Nuns persisted. They weren’t so much a motif in Alice’s life as an element of nature, like air or dust or birds.

    So down, down, into the lake the color of liquid Prell, and Alice was like the pearl in the TV commercial that dropped slowly, silently. On its own agenda, as Sister John Boss would say.
    Alice propelled herself like a frog, like an Egyptian doing the bent-arm dance as a swimming stroke. Alice could keep her eyes open underwater. She was as sharp as Flipper. There, for instance, through the gloom: There was Naomi Matthews pretending to swim with little pouncing hand motions hitting the water. Alice could see her feet touch down for nervous assurance every eight seconds or so. The big cheat.

    She butted up into Naomi’s side. Naomi gave a little squeal even Alice could hear. Alice stood up, water streaming down her hair. “Oh, Naomi. Sorry.”

    “Watch where you’re going, clumsy,” said Naomi. She was trying to swim without getting her golden mane wet.

    “Swim tag! You’re it!” screamed Alice, and splashed Naomi in the face with water. She tapped Naomi lightly on the shoulder and darted away with a muscular side-stroke. But Naomi wasn’t biting. “Oh, Alice, grow up ,” she groaned. “I’d like to take a calm swim for a moment if I can.”

    “ Can you swim?” said Alice daringly. “Don’t look like any kind of swimming to me.”

    “Taking a break on your speech lessons for the summer, I guess,” said Naomi deftly. “I can’t quite make out your comment so bye-bye for now.” She fake-dog-paddled away. Even her shoulders rose like little porcelain doorknobs over the water. She couldn’t fool a blind person with that act, thought Alice scornfully. At least there’s one thing I can do better than Naomi.

    Alice had been surprised to see Naomi here, at the jamboree barbecue that opened the two-week camp session. Naomi had triumphed in the Sacred Heart–Saint Mary’s joint production of My Fair Lady . Naomi had gone to glory in her half of the role, as Eliza Doolittle transformed into an articulate lady. Then she had moved out to live with the Harrigans. She’d taken all her things in a gray suitcase with the stitching coming out of the leather reinforcements.
    Alice had watched her leave. Mr. Harrigan had carried the suitcase to the car; he was so short it almost dragged on the sidewalk. Mrs. Harrigan had fluffed and plumped and kissed the air around Naomi, as if terrified yet to come in real contact, in case Naomi would change her mind before the getaway car had a chance to roar into the sunset. It seemed like a living nightmare to Alice, watching from the