The Three Sisters Read Free Page A

full extent of my sexual proclivities, he punished me by keeping me in the house at night. Maybe I couldn’t meet my latest boyfriend at night anymore, but I didn’t become a cheerleader just to shake pompons. Grounded during the week, I was determined not to let his interference ruin my life, and never willing to let a minute of my valuable time be wasted, I took advantage of my forced enclosures to become a voracious reader so I could complement my religious rebellion with intellectual rebellion.
    There were limits to what we were allowed to learn in Catholic School. Every day we had to pursue the moliminous memorization of mariolatrous manuscripts to make the sisters happy. God, that was boring. The Catechism, in addition to forcing dogma down our throats, relied on repetition so much, it seemed like it was written for robots. To really learn something about the world, the real world and not the one created by the Catholic Church, I had to read and learn on my own. I knew their side of the story, but I wanted to learn the truth. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, especially the books the insipient nuns did not want me to look at.
    Naturally, I shared my discoveries with my schoolmates. When the sisters left us alone in the room, I would wait until I knew the coast was clear and get up in front of the class and began teaching the truths I had discovered in a stentorian tone to counter the ones my classmates were being brainwashed with. I had graduated from the days of stories from the easel. I was quite a cut up and was able to make my fellow students laugh as I mocked our teachers to get my classmates’ attention while interjecting words of wisdom .
    Most of the other kids spent each night doing homework, but I could do all my homework during school, which left me plenty of time at home to pursue my own dianoetic digressions. Since I was an equal opportunity intellectual, I read some Catholic authors out of fairness, but they were usually hairsplitting bores who never cared about legsplitting. Just read some of the Church’s favorite authors and you’ll see what I mean. Even academicians today can’t outdo someone like Jerome who took forty-two chapters to explain the Parable of the Prodigal Son. What a waste. And who would have read Augustine if he hadn’t included juicy stories in his memoirs about his own little Lolita? Or Abelard if he hadn’t messed around with Héloïse ?
    I enjoyed reading about the different heretical groups who opposed the Church from century to century. My favorite heretics (in twenty-five words or less) were the Nicolaites who practically promoted sexual intercourse to being a sacrament. One Nicolaite deacon even showed the Christian spirit by offering his wife to the whole church. Of course, some heretics were even more reactionary than the Church itself, so it was up to me to sort out the wheat from the chaff and share my discoveries with my classmates.
    There were parts of the Bible that I found inspirational. Not the preachy part of the New Testament, but the adventuresome Old Testament with its tales of sex, death, and destruction. How many other girls fantasized about going to bed with Goliath? Bet you the Philistine women of a mentulate mentality hated David for murdering the man of their dreams.
    On the other hand, I never liked the Old Testament God because He had no sense of humor. The Hebrews weren’t like the Greeks who had fun with their gods. The Greek gods would disguise themselves, come down and have sex with mortals, battle each other, and have a good old time. The Hebrews just killed people and got martyred. If they had had stand-up comedian contests back in the ancient world, the Hebrews would have come in dead last every time. I would have taken Aristophanes over Isaiah any day of the week.
    The only story in the Bible that revealed the Hebrews might have a sense of humor was the lurid tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham convinces the three angels