Excerpt From Chapter 1 - "The Long Loneliness"
I first noticed Father Infanzi in the way that matters during his second year at St. Brendan’s. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed him
before. It was impossible not to. He was thirty—four years older than me— tall and lean with brown hair parted to the side and said
beautiful things like “God loved us into existence.” But it wasn’t until my sister Jianna introduced him to my family after Easter
Sunday Mass that he really got my attention. It was a cool, sunny day with the fragrance of daffodils in the air as we waited on a long
line to greet Father outside the front doors. When it was our turn we all smiled and said hello, and my step-dad Lou complimented
his homily. Father said, “Thank you,” and then, shaking our hands and blushing, he said nervously to my sisters and me, “Wow, four
girls. You all have the same blue eyes,” but when he got to me he paused, then held my hand and eyes a beat longer than he did
theirs. He was even more handsome close up, and I felt a sharp pulse of attraction. After we walked away, my sister Julia said,
without a hint of irony, “He’d be perfect for Maria.” Annie, the youngest, rolled her eyes, and my mother shot back, “Julia!” but with a
smirk. I nearly gasped. He was perfect—smart and handsome and personable but also a touch shy and awkward to make him
sweet. He made me feel more special in that one moment than the men I dated, sometimes slept with, just so I didn’t have to be
alone. After that, whenever he said Mass I thought good, but I walked out the side door and didn’t greet him. He was a priest.
Besides, the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was celibacy. It’s what I’d been running from ever since I was eight and sitting in
St. Bernadette’s one night, I felt God calling me to become a nun.
It was after five o’clock Mass on a Saturday, and I was headed out the door when a burst of cold air rushed into the vestibule and
I felt pulled to pick up The Tablet’s Special Vocations Issue and stay a while. Nestled into hewn rock high above the altar was the
Blessed Mother in a beautiful white dress and powder blue sash with fourteen-year-old Bernadette kneeling beside her, the words I
Am The Immaculate Conception painted on the high art deco ceiling. It looked like a giant invisible circle of love surrounded them,
but not one that made me feel left out like I had ever since my mother brought my baby sister Annie home from the hospital. I walked
a few feet down the long aisle, sat down in a pew and opened The Tablet. There in the centerfold in big bold letters was GIVE YOUR
LIFE TO GOD. I knew from school that Mary and Bernadette gave their lives to God, but Bernadette was a saint and Mary was the
Mother of God. I wasn’t sure why God would want jealous eight year old me to give my life to him or what that even meant until I
turned the page and saw picture after picture of smiling nuns and priests. God was telling me to become a nun. Why else had I
picked up the paper that week and not another? Why weren’t there any pictures of regular people? Why did it say Give and not you
Can give? I knew nuns and priests marry God, and I felt a tug on my heart, but I was embarrassed and afraid. When I got older I
wanted a husband I could see and feel, who would talk to me with a real voice. I wanted to feel special and beautiful, the way I did
when James Gardini touched my hair in school, not plain and invisible the way I did during Princess Hour when my mother and older
sisters transformed the kitchen table into a pink baby spa and took turns bathing Annie’s cherubic, glistening body. It felt like there
wasn’t enough love like Baby Jesus had promised me the previous Christmas Eve when He whispered it to my heart.
I brought The Tablet home that night but didn’t say a word. I was afraid if I talked about it, I’d make it real and God wouldn’t leave
me alone. My mother always prayed with me before bed and meals, but we didn’t talk about Jesus or God’s will. I filled out some of
the return cards for more information, but I never mailed them, and one day The Tablet got thrown out with The Daily News. I still
went to Mass every week even when my mother couldn’t take me, but I wouldn’t stay afterwards anymore, and as the months went
by, the calling dimmed, though not my hunger. One day when my mother was kissing Annie’s wet skin and calling her Gioia, joy,
what she used to call me, I couldn’t take it anymore and cried out, “What about me?” My sisters looked at me with mouths wide
open, but my mother narrowed her eyes at me like I was a mean girl. She didn’t yell, but I was so devastated it felt as if she had. If
my father had been there for us, I don’t think I would have been as needy or sensitive, but he was always working. The only time I
had with him was a few minutes on his lap in the morning, but he’d see the clock, jump up and nearly drop me. He believed it was
the woman’s job to raise children and wouldn’t help my mother with anything even though she worked nearly the same grueling
hours in the bakery as he did. She didn’t mind the hard work or the serving. She was an Italian woman of her time; serving made her
feel fulfilled. What she couldn’t tolerate was that he was never home for me and my sisters. After seventeen years of second
chances, a year after Annie was born when I was nine, she divorced him. When she told us, I stormed out of the kitchen and
demanded, “Who’s going to be my father now?” What I really wanted to say but didn’t dare was, Bad enough you dropped me for
Annie, now you’re sending away the man who kissed my hair and called me Bella?
Looking back, I can understand why my mother spoiled Annie. For the first time she wasn’t working or taking orders from my
father and could actually enjoy being a mother. From the moment she saw Annie, she saw herself, the insecure youngest daughter
in her own family. Annie was so gorgeous with those golden locks and that fungita, lips that always looked pursed, I couldn’t keep my
hands off her. And her looks were only half of it. By the age of two, she was saying it like it was. Once when Julia had a friend over
who had an enormous pimple on the tip of his nose, Annie said, “What’s that ding on your nose?” Even my mother hid a chuckle.
There was no way that I could compete with that. Even when Annie misbehaved, she seemed to win. My mother would scream and
punish her and cancel our plans, but then they’d snuggle and make up like I wasn’t there. The fact that I’d gotten chubby and
awkward, and that my Dorothy Hammill haircut made my thick, cow-licked hair look like I’d sprouted wings on the side of my head,
made me feel more insecure. My mother did everything for me, but I felt I couldn’t say how I felt without making her angry and that I
always had to be perfect, so I made sure I was—in front of her. In fourth grade, I passed a note to my friend Leslie that said I wanted
to “do it” with a boy whose name I don’t remember, but I used the nasty word Frankie LaVerde taught everyone in school. In sixth
grade, when I was far enough from home in case my mother happened to be looking out the window—which she never was—I
started rolling up my skirt. In seventh, I hid in the Brooklyn Public Library to read the dirty parts of Judy Blume’s Forever and Wifey.
One summer, I even bullied two sweet, overweight kids in the neighborhood, coercing one of them into the “weight game.” I dragged
the bathroom scale out of our house and onto the sidewalk and told her to hop on, knowing that I, who was starting to lose my baby
weight, would win.
When my teachers took us to Church, I looked forward to it, paid careful attention, loved the clean way my soul felt after receiving
Penance and Holy Communion. I still didn’t want to become a nun, but when I was fourteen and miserable in high school, I started
searching for Jesus. Initially I’d chosen a large communication arts school, but I was intimidated by big crowds, so it was hard for me
to make friends. I couldn’t sleep and lost ten pounds in a month. I wandered the noisy, crowded hallways alone until I got to the quiet
library carrel where I listened to You’ve Got A Friend and imagined Jesus singing to me. When I transferred to a Catholic girls
school the following semester, I still felt lost, because everyone had already made friends. I started wearing the cross I received at
baptism and showing up at Prayer Group every Tuesday morning where a Sister of St. Joseph led a faith sharing. There’d be a
candle burning and a song like Here I am Lord or Be Not Afraid, and I’d cry. The following summer, when I turned fifteen and James
Gardini asked me out, I told Julia, “If I don’t marry James, I’m becoming a nun.” We were standing at the foot of our beds, she with
long, flipped, dirty blond hair and me with short, feathered, dark hair, when the words came out of my mouth. I was trying to keep my
hopes low, so I wouldn’t get hurt, but I also had a gut feeling that I wasn’t meant to get married, that it wasn’t what God wanted or
what I was born to do. I don’t know if I remembered that night in St. Bernadette’s. I just felt more peace in prayer than I did with
James, and I sensed that would be the case with every boy, but I wanted someone all my own to love only me. I didn’t trust that
Jesus would be enough. When James kissed me on my front stoop, I started dreaming of taffeta wedding dresses. When he broke
up with me two months later, I was crushed.
At the end of sophomore year, I threw out the poem my mother had written for me about how she hoped the world would never
steal my innocence. After reading Ronald and Nancy Wilkins’ Man and Woman in Sister St. Paul’s religion class, the only book from
high school that I saved, I wanted to stay pure, but it made me feel more invisible. A lot of the girls in my school wore diamond ankle
bracelets their boyfriends bought them, teased their hair, and hiked up their skirts higher than I did. Except for the occasional
awkward boy I met at a dance, I felt that no one ever saw me, like God had thrown a sheet over me to keep me for Himself. In spring
of senior year, when my friend Leslie found The Nautical, a bar that let us use fake i.d., I fell for Gary who I made out with even
though he didn’t take me out on dates and who cancelled on me less than a week before the prom. It only got worse in college
where I fell for more Garys who let me buy my own drinks. I even fooled around with one who had a girlfriend. I told my mother I had
sorority meetings that went late and that I’d be staying over in one of my sister’s rooms, but sometimes I’d wind up in a guy’s room,
and though I didn’t lose my virginity, I came close.
Then a year after college graduation, there was Dave, six foot and athletic with a slight overbite that made him good-looking in a
sweet way, who drove a hundred ten miles round trip to see me. I finally had a lover, someone who made me feel beautiful and
desirable, who made me an even number. I knew he wasn’t the one, but I was in love, having fun. I was petrified if I broke up with
him, God would use my heartache to get me for Himself once and for all. There were also the voices of my southern Italian
ancestors in my head: All your cousins your age and older are married or getting married. What about you? You’re next in line, not
just on one side of the family but on both. And my own voice. What about me? Why can’t I just want this? Why can’t Dave be
enough? I held on for two and a half years. Five months before we broke up, when my mother found out that we’d been sleeping
together, she was livid. “What you’ve pulled is absolutely unacceptable under my roof” she reprimanded, her light blue eyes piercing
mine as I stood as far across from her as I could, my bed in between us, my heart pounding. I apologized, but I only meant I was
sorry she had found out. Now that I knew how good sex could be, I didn’t want to give it up. If I didn’t get married, the only life my
mother and the Church would deem worthy was a nun’s. Three months later I moved into the apartment in Julia and her husband
Nick’s house. I wanted to have something to show for myself in place of marriage, an initiation into adulthood, so I wouldn’t feel like a
failure and embarrassment. I had to get away from my mother and Annie’s fighting, which had become impossible since my mother
married Lou. I was rebelling.
On the night I left, my mother and I were standing at the top of her landing while Lou brought the last of my things to the car. Her
anger had cooled months earlier. Now I was the angry one. I didn’t want to have to leave knowing that I’d been breaking up with
Dave soon, that I’d be alone. I wanted her to march to the front door, spread her arms across it and tell me not to go, that she’d get
her and Annie some therapy, that I should wait for another year or two when I wasn’t so afraid to move out, that it was okay if I never
got married, that she’d love me no matter what, but she couldn’t. All I’d told her was that I didn’t want to marry Dave, which she
sensed I faulted her for and I denied, but it was true. I subconsciously blamed my mother for my calling: maybe if she hadn’t named
me after the Blessed Mother or nicknamed me Jesus when I was baby…I was jealous that all she’d ever wanted was to marry and
have a family. It didn’t matter that I saw how dearly she was paying for it again. I was certain I’d do better. I had no idea how
wounded I was. Except for Dave, I attracted emotionally unavailable men who used me but who I used back, so I could take out on
them the hurt and anger I couldn’t bring myself to feel for my father. I told myself that Papa hadn’t know any better, that he loved us,
which was true but not enough. All I’d ever had were some fleeting moments when I’d feel a rush of his attention and affection. It was
my mother’s love that always carried me, but it was him I was excusing and protecting. On the surface I romanticized marriage,
making it an eternal honeymoon in my mind, but deep down I distrusted men and commitment. I wanted some human prince to
come and save me, to fill the deepest desires of my heart. What I needed wasn’t a husband but a Savior.
before. It was impossible not to. He was thirty—four years older than me— tall and lean with brown hair parted to the side and said
beautiful things like “God loved us into existence.” But it wasn’t until my sister Jianna introduced him to my family after Easter
Sunday Mass that he really got my attention. It was a cool, sunny day with the fragrance of daffodils in the air as we waited on a long
line to greet Father outside the front doors. When it was our turn we all smiled and said hello, and my step-dad Lou complimented
his homily. Father said, “Thank you,” and then, shaking our hands and blushing, he said nervously to my sisters and me, “Wow, four
girls. You all have the same blue eyes,” but when he got to me he paused, then held my hand and eyes a beat longer than he did
theirs. He was even more handsome close up, and I felt a sharp pulse of attraction. After we walked away, my sister Julia said,
without a hint of irony, “He’d be perfect for Maria.” Annie, the youngest, rolled her eyes, and my mother shot back, “Julia!” but with a
smirk. I nearly gasped. He was perfect—smart and handsome and personable but also a touch shy and awkward to make him
sweet. He made me feel more special in that one moment than the men I dated, sometimes slept with, just so I didn’t have to be
alone. After that, whenever he said Mass I thought good, but I walked out the side door and didn’t greet him. He was a priest.
Besides, the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was celibacy. It’s what I’d been running from ever since I was eight and sitting in
St. Bernadette’s one night, I felt God calling me to become a nun.
It was after five o’clock Mass on a Saturday, and I was headed out the door when a burst of cold air rushed into the vestibule and
I felt pulled to pick up The Tablet’s Special Vocations Issue and stay a while. Nestled into hewn rock high above the altar was the
Blessed Mother in a beautiful white dress and powder blue sash with fourteen-year-old Bernadette kneeling beside her, the words I
Am The Immaculate Conception painted on the high art deco ceiling. It looked like a giant invisible circle of love surrounded them,
but not one that made me feel left out like I had ever since my mother brought my baby sister Annie home from the hospital. I walked
a few feet down the long aisle, sat down in a pew and opened The Tablet. There in the centerfold in big bold letters was GIVE YOUR
LIFE TO GOD. I knew from school that Mary and Bernadette gave their lives to God, but Bernadette was a saint and Mary was the
Mother of God. I wasn’t sure why God would want jealous eight year old me to give my life to him or what that even meant until I
turned the page and saw picture after picture of smiling nuns and priests. God was telling me to become a nun. Why else had I
picked up the paper that week and not another? Why weren’t there any pictures of regular people? Why did it say Give and not you
Can give? I knew nuns and priests marry God, and I felt a tug on my heart, but I was embarrassed and afraid. When I got older I
wanted a husband I could see and feel, who would talk to me with a real voice. I wanted to feel special and beautiful, the way I did
when James Gardini touched my hair in school, not plain and invisible the way I did during Princess Hour when my mother and older
sisters transformed the kitchen table into a pink baby spa and took turns bathing Annie’s cherubic, glistening body. It felt like there
wasn’t enough love like Baby Jesus had promised me the previous Christmas Eve when He whispered it to my heart.
I brought The Tablet home that night but didn’t say a word. I was afraid if I talked about it, I’d make it real and God wouldn’t leave
me alone. My mother always prayed with me before bed and meals, but we didn’t talk about Jesus or God’s will. I filled out some of
the return cards for more information, but I never mailed them, and one day The Tablet got thrown out with The Daily News. I still
went to Mass every week even when my mother couldn’t take me, but I wouldn’t stay afterwards anymore, and as the months went
by, the calling dimmed, though not my hunger. One day when my mother was kissing Annie’s wet skin and calling her Gioia, joy,
what she used to call me, I couldn’t take it anymore and cried out, “What about me?” My sisters looked at me with mouths wide
open, but my mother narrowed her eyes at me like I was a mean girl. She didn’t yell, but I was so devastated it felt as if she had. If
my father had been there for us, I don’t think I would have been as needy or sensitive, but he was always working. The only time I
had with him was a few minutes on his lap in the morning, but he’d see the clock, jump up and nearly drop me. He believed it was
the woman’s job to raise children and wouldn’t help my mother with anything even though she worked nearly the same grueling
hours in the bakery as he did. She didn’t mind the hard work or the serving. She was an Italian woman of her time; serving made her
feel fulfilled. What she couldn’t tolerate was that he was never home for me and my sisters. After seventeen years of second
chances, a year after Annie was born when I was nine, she divorced him. When she told us, I stormed out of the kitchen and
demanded, “Who’s going to be my father now?” What I really wanted to say but didn’t dare was, Bad enough you dropped me for
Annie, now you’re sending away the man who kissed my hair and called me Bella?
Looking back, I can understand why my mother spoiled Annie. For the first time she wasn’t working or taking orders from my
father and could actually enjoy being a mother. From the moment she saw Annie, she saw herself, the insecure youngest daughter
in her own family. Annie was so gorgeous with those golden locks and that fungita, lips that always looked pursed, I couldn’t keep my
hands off her. And her looks were only half of it. By the age of two, she was saying it like it was. Once when Julia had a friend over
who had an enormous pimple on the tip of his nose, Annie said, “What’s that ding on your nose?” Even my mother hid a chuckle.
There was no way that I could compete with that. Even when Annie misbehaved, she seemed to win. My mother would scream and
punish her and cancel our plans, but then they’d snuggle and make up like I wasn’t there. The fact that I’d gotten chubby and
awkward, and that my Dorothy Hammill haircut made my thick, cow-licked hair look like I’d sprouted wings on the side of my head,
made me feel more insecure. My mother did everything for me, but I felt I couldn’t say how I felt without making her angry and that I
always had to be perfect, so I made sure I was—in front of her. In fourth grade, I passed a note to my friend Leslie that said I wanted
to “do it” with a boy whose name I don’t remember, but I used the nasty word Frankie LaVerde taught everyone in school. In sixth
grade, when I was far enough from home in case my mother happened to be looking out the window—which she never was—I
started rolling up my skirt. In seventh, I hid in the Brooklyn Public Library to read the dirty parts of Judy Blume’s Forever and Wifey.
One summer, I even bullied two sweet, overweight kids in the neighborhood, coercing one of them into the “weight game.” I dragged
the bathroom scale out of our house and onto the sidewalk and told her to hop on, knowing that I, who was starting to lose my baby
weight, would win.
When my teachers took us to Church, I looked forward to it, paid careful attention, loved the clean way my soul felt after receiving
Penance and Holy Communion. I still didn’t want to become a nun, but when I was fourteen and miserable in high school, I started
searching for Jesus. Initially I’d chosen a large communication arts school, but I was intimidated by big crowds, so it was hard for me
to make friends. I couldn’t sleep and lost ten pounds in a month. I wandered the noisy, crowded hallways alone until I got to the quiet
library carrel where I listened to You’ve Got A Friend and imagined Jesus singing to me. When I transferred to a Catholic girls
school the following semester, I still felt lost, because everyone had already made friends. I started wearing the cross I received at
baptism and showing up at Prayer Group every Tuesday morning where a Sister of St. Joseph led a faith sharing. There’d be a
candle burning and a song like Here I am Lord or Be Not Afraid, and I’d cry. The following summer, when I turned fifteen and James
Gardini asked me out, I told Julia, “If I don’t marry James, I’m becoming a nun.” We were standing at the foot of our beds, she with
long, flipped, dirty blond hair and me with short, feathered, dark hair, when the words came out of my mouth. I was trying to keep my
hopes low, so I wouldn’t get hurt, but I also had a gut feeling that I wasn’t meant to get married, that it wasn’t what God wanted or
what I was born to do. I don’t know if I remembered that night in St. Bernadette’s. I just felt more peace in prayer than I did with
James, and I sensed that would be the case with every boy, but I wanted someone all my own to love only me. I didn’t trust that
Jesus would be enough. When James kissed me on my front stoop, I started dreaming of taffeta wedding dresses. When he broke
up with me two months later, I was crushed.
At the end of sophomore year, I threw out the poem my mother had written for me about how she hoped the world would never
steal my innocence. After reading Ronald and Nancy Wilkins’ Man and Woman in Sister St. Paul’s religion class, the only book from
high school that I saved, I wanted to stay pure, but it made me feel more invisible. A lot of the girls in my school wore diamond ankle
bracelets their boyfriends bought them, teased their hair, and hiked up their skirts higher than I did. Except for the occasional
awkward boy I met at a dance, I felt that no one ever saw me, like God had thrown a sheet over me to keep me for Himself. In spring
of senior year, when my friend Leslie found The Nautical, a bar that let us use fake i.d., I fell for Gary who I made out with even
though he didn’t take me out on dates and who cancelled on me less than a week before the prom. It only got worse in college
where I fell for more Garys who let me buy my own drinks. I even fooled around with one who had a girlfriend. I told my mother I had
sorority meetings that went late and that I’d be staying over in one of my sister’s rooms, but sometimes I’d wind up in a guy’s room,
and though I didn’t lose my virginity, I came close.
Then a year after college graduation, there was Dave, six foot and athletic with a slight overbite that made him good-looking in a
sweet way, who drove a hundred ten miles round trip to see me. I finally had a lover, someone who made me feel beautiful and
desirable, who made me an even number. I knew he wasn’t the one, but I was in love, having fun. I was petrified if I broke up with
him, God would use my heartache to get me for Himself once and for all. There were also the voices of my southern Italian
ancestors in my head: All your cousins your age and older are married or getting married. What about you? You’re next in line, not
just on one side of the family but on both. And my own voice. What about me? Why can’t I just want this? Why can’t Dave be
enough? I held on for two and a half years. Five months before we broke up, when my mother found out that we’d been sleeping
together, she was livid. “What you’ve pulled is absolutely unacceptable under my roof” she reprimanded, her light blue eyes piercing
mine as I stood as far across from her as I could, my bed in between us, my heart pounding. I apologized, but I only meant I was
sorry she had found out. Now that I knew how good sex could be, I didn’t want to give it up. If I didn’t get married, the only life my
mother and the Church would deem worthy was a nun’s. Three months later I moved into the apartment in Julia and her husband
Nick’s house. I wanted to have something to show for myself in place of marriage, an initiation into adulthood, so I wouldn’t feel like a
failure and embarrassment. I had to get away from my mother and Annie’s fighting, which had become impossible since my mother
married Lou. I was rebelling.
On the night I left, my mother and I were standing at the top of her landing while Lou brought the last of my things to the car. Her
anger had cooled months earlier. Now I was the angry one. I didn’t want to have to leave knowing that I’d been breaking up with
Dave soon, that I’d be alone. I wanted her to march to the front door, spread her arms across it and tell me not to go, that she’d get
her and Annie some therapy, that I should wait for another year or two when I wasn’t so afraid to move out, that it was okay if I never
got married, that she’d love me no matter what, but she couldn’t. All I’d told her was that I didn’t want to marry Dave, which she
sensed I faulted her for and I denied, but it was true. I subconsciously blamed my mother for my calling: maybe if she hadn’t named
me after the Blessed Mother or nicknamed me Jesus when I was baby…I was jealous that all she’d ever wanted was to marry and
have a family. It didn’t matter that I saw how dearly she was paying for it again. I was certain I’d do better. I had no idea how
wounded I was. Except for Dave, I attracted emotionally unavailable men who used me but who I used back, so I could take out on
them the hurt and anger I couldn’t bring myself to feel for my father. I told myself that Papa hadn’t know any better, that he loved us,
which was true but not enough. All I’d ever had were some fleeting moments when I’d feel a rush of his attention and affection. It was
my mother’s love that always carried me, but it was him I was excusing and protecting. On the surface I romanticized marriage,
making it an eternal honeymoon in my mind, but deep down I distrusted men and commitment. I wanted some human prince to
come and save me, to fill the deepest desires of my heart. What I needed wasn’t a husband but a Savior.
© 2015 Maria Giura All Rights Reserved
