The Three Sisters Read Free

caps.
    Using prayer cards for target practice on the dart board would have been enough to send me to reform school had I not hoodwinked my friends into doing the same deeds with me. Priests knew about our parish for miles around. As I grew up, I began to wonder whether it was more difficult for me to endure the sisters or the sisters me. I know some of the nuns and priests probably prayed each night that my family and I would convert to Protestantism, or at least my parents would take me out of Catholic School and make me a “public,” but alas for them, God did not answer their prayers.
    Sometimes my father seemed more contemptuous of the Catholic Faith than I was. Although father insisted that his children go to Mass every week, he rarely went himself. But then, how could he even find the church when he had gotten too plastered to breathe the night before, drinking beer in remembrance of Him when he visited his own house of worship, O’Malley’s Bar? When he got drunk, he would return home and carry on for hours making fun of the dog collars, pious old ladies, or anything else he had a mind to abuse, but my two sisters and I, who were supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice, were not permitted to blaspheme or be sacrilegious in front of him.
    I always thought there was some purpose to my rebellion. Maybe I wasn’t helping the Pagan Babies in the way the sisters wanted me to, but at least I was trying. Father, on the other hand, was just angry, so after a while, I simply did my best to avoid him. Though my mother would console me, she was too weak-kneed to stand up to him. It was sickening to see her knuckle under to him.
    By the time I was a teenager, father and I were like aliens from different planets. He would try to keep me at home and away from the boys, no doubt because he knew how he had behaved when he was a teenager. The more he admonished me against seeing the boys, the more time I wanted to spend with them. What he failed to realize was that I was smart enough and experienced enough to make sure that I controlled my companions of the opposite sex, and not they me.
    I started going out with boys in the Windy City by staying late at school and enrolling in as many extracurricular activities as I could. And why shouldn’t I have? I already was an illecebrously licentious little Lolita, and the boys were as hot for me as I was for them. I might mention that thanks to my assiduous efforts, I gave up my virginity for Lent one year well before my dad realized the inevitable had occurred. To play it safe, I abjured playing Vatican roulette and used contraceptives to keep myself slim and trim. In case these earthly aids should fail, I prayed to the Virgin who conceived without sinning that I could sin without conceiving. After all, it wasn’t the bull I was afraid of, but the calf.
    If I couldn’t be happy at home, I could enjoy life creating a world of my own for me and my fellow female friends. A lot of them were also cursed with overbearing, overprotective parents, and we all plotted together to discover life on our own. We carefully coordinated our stories and actions with military precision to pursue our extracurricular activities behind the backs of our oblivious parents.
    Though father must have suspected something was up, I was able to keep him thinking I was chased though chaste for some time so I could pursue my coital conations at my discretion. My Mother wasn’t so dumb. She knew what was going on long before my Father did. She tried to convince me of the error of my ways, to reform and to be obedient, but I wasn’t going to become some man’s servant like she was. When she reproached me by quoting St. Paul and told me, “It is better to marry than to burn in Hell,” I replied to her, “Judging from what I’ve seen of married life, mother, I’d rather burn.”
    Unfortunately, vicious rumors about my extracurricular activities made their way to father’s ears, and when he learned the