Do Tampons Take Your Virginity?: A Catholic Girl's Memoir (5 page)

What a party it was! They cooked the lobsters, we ate the lapas, and our cousin Manuel even played some music on a little guitar. It was a great delicacy to eat the lobster meat, and then pour wine in the tail, which still held all the dregs from the lobster intestines. They let me drink some wine mixed with lobster juice. I guessed that most of that stuff left in the tail was lobster shit, but it tasted great to me.

The lapas we ate raw. We would pry them from their shells using a knife or the shell of another limpet that we had just eaten while their little heads squirmed in agony.

Delicious!

Anyway, throughout the night, the main topic of conversation was what a shithead the magistrate had been. The conversation went on and on—the men attacking his work ethic, the validity of his job, and even his masculinity. Some of the men insinuated that the magistrate was a
paneleiro
, which is the term for “faggot” in Portuguese. They all laughed.

I was puzzled by this unending attack on the poor man, who, to me, just looked like he was doing his job.

So I asked, “Why are you saying bad things about the man when you were stealing illegal fish?”

Silence. The men all stared at me, bug-eyed. I had broken the mood. It was a total buzz kill.

The men looked at my father, who obviously hadn’t raised me right. My father didn’t say anything else. We just left the party. When we were walking home, my father yelled at me, but in a whisper. It was loud, but still under his breath. Very strange.

“I told you to keep your mouth shut! Don’t talk about the lobsters or the lapas to anyone!”

My brother was silent, as always.

I learned an important lesson in male etiquette that day. When men are all in a group attacking some figure of authority, it’s best to just keep your mouth shut.

1985,
AGE
12

Until recently, very few homes in Portugal had running water or toilets. We were forced to use outhouses, chamber pots, or just piss in the grass. One day, I decided to pee near the rainwater collection tank and I discovered a magical patch of clover growing nearby.

This little patch of clover was full of four-leaf, five-leaf, and six-leaf clovers! I couldn’t believe my luck. That day, instead of going down to the sea with my parents, I stayed near the house and picked all the lucky clovers I could find. I even found one that had SEVEN leaves on it—a new world record, I was sure!

No one in my family was impressed. My brother was too young to understand, my father could have cared less, and my mother was too busy cooking and washing my father’s fish-encrusted laundry to give two shits about my incredible discovery.

But I didn’t let their universal disinterest get me down. I picked all the clovers, arranged them by number of “lucky leaves”—all the four-leaf clovers went together, and so on. I had brought multiple books with me to the island and I gently pressed the clovers into my book pages in order to preserve them.

I was so happy, certain that each one of those lucky clovers would entitle me to one wish. I was also certain that, when I got back to the United States, instant fame would be mine! I would contact
The Guinness Book of World Records
about my discovery. I had found the most leaves
ever
in the history of lucky clovers!

That night, I could hardly sleep. I was so excited!

The next day, I proudly announced to my family that I was famous, because I had found a seven-leaf clover, which was surely the world record.

Father laughed. “I found dozens of those when I was a kid,” he snorted. “They’re as common as dirt.”

I didn’t believe him. “No way! Father, I found a seven-leaf clover! It has seven leaves on it! No one in the
world
has ever found so many.”

“I have. Lots of times. They’re everywhere. You just have to look for them,” he said.

My eyes narrowed. I didn’t believe him. I was convinced that he was just being a jerk, as usual.

That night, I pulled out the most powerful clover of all— the seven-leaf clover. I knew that the clover was magical and it would grant me one wish. I had been saving this wish for something special, like a Barbie dollhouse, but I decided instead to teach my father a lesson. That night, I closed my eyes, clutched the magical clover, and wished that God would strike my father with two broken legs.

“I’ll show him!” I thought.

The next day, nothing happened. Father awoke and went down to the ocean to spearfish. His legs seemed to be working fine.

“Maybe it will take a few days for the wish to come true,” I thought.

Days passed, then weeks. Father kept coming home from snorkeling and fishing as usual. His legs were working fine. I was so angry! This was complete
bullshit!

In the end, Father was right. My clovers
were
as common as dirt, and they weren’t magical at all. Nothing ever happened to Father’s legs, although eventually he did step on a sea urchin. Even that wasn’t enough to make me happy.

Disappointed, I shook all of the pressed clovers out of my books and never mentioned them again.

Years later, I opened one of my old paperbacks and found a four-leaf clover that had survived the trip back to the United States. There it was, pressed between the pages, as green as the day I picked it out of the ground. I took it out and placed it on my nightstand, where it stayed for a few years. Eventually, it was lost when I moved out of my house.

I guess I was still hoping that God would come through for me with those two broken legs.

1985,
AGE
12

Growing up, I didn’t know much about my father’s family. My grandfather had one sister named Carolina (my great-aunt). Carolina became a Carmelite nun and went to work in an orphanage on the island of Faial. This caused a huge family rift.

My father’s family never forgave Carolina for entering the convent. Apparently, Carolina had begged her parents (my great-grandparents) for an education, which they provided at considerable expense. Carolina went away to college, which was unusual in those days, and earned a degree. Then, instead of going into politics or government service, which would have been the respectable thing to do, she became a nun. The family therefore considered the college money to have been wasted on someone who was never going to do anything productive with her life.

And by “productive,” I mean lucrative. And by “lucrative,” I mean to say that they were assholes. Honestly, who gets mad when a family member takes a vow of poverty, gives up all worldly goods, and dedicates her life to caring for orphans?

What
pricks
.

I only met Carolina the nun once, when I was twelve. My father took us to visit the orphanage where she worked.

I remember Carolina being very tall, much taller than my father.

All of the children at the orphanage were boys. It was sad. There were dozens of them and only a few nuns to care for them. They looked well-fed, but spent the entire time pummeling each other or standing around my father, desperate for some adult attention.

My father bought six or seven packages of candy to take to the boys. I remember the candy exactly. The package was blue and the candies were wrapped in wax paper. They were square, semisoft taffy with an orange flavor. How could I possibly remember all these details, you ask? Well, dear friends, it’s because I got my ass kicked into next week because of this candy.

I found the candies on the dashboard of my father’s rental car. I went into the car, locked myself in, and started to eat the candy in private. Some of the orphan boys circled the car. I opened the windows and began tossing some candies out for them. The candy would drop to the ground and they would snap it up, fighting over each piece.

Eventually, my father came looking for me. He caught me eating the candy and dropping pieces out the window.

“What the hell are you doing?!” He screamed; yanking open the car door, dragging me out by the neck.

“Owwwww! I didn’t do anything—I didn’t do anything! Please!
Please!
” I became hysterical. I knew I was going to get it.

Carolina was watching, so Father took me behind a building before backhanding me. I felt blood in my mouth. Then he started kicking me. All the orphans stared at me, sobbing on the ground and covered in dirt. My father was still standing over me, hand raised, twisting his tongue in his mouth. He was getting ready to hit me again. I was already curled up on the ground in a ball, which was my favorite protective position. He kicked me so hard he broke my tailbone.

Carolina ran over and grabbed my father’s hand out of the air. “Stop, stop!” she cried. “Just leave the child alone. Let’s just go inside. I’ll make some tea.”

We all walked into the building and the orphans followed. Carolina served us Portuguese sweet bread and milk. I couldn’t sit down because my ass hurt so bad. But I didn’t cry because I knew I would get another punch in the face. My mouth bled inside and I swallowed the blood.

That night, I cried all night long because my tailbone hurt like hell. I couldn’t find a comfortable position. It stopped hurting only when I was sitting on the toilet, so I went downstairs and slept on the toilet. The lady running the hostel gave me two Tylenol the next day because she felt sorry for me. It stopped hurting about a month later. I just dealt with it. My father never took me to the doctor, and I never complained because I was afraid.

Father wouldn’t stop talking about those fucking candies for at least a week. I never said anything back.

In retrospect, I guess it
was
pretty shitty of me to eat the orphans’ candies.

1987,
AGE
14

Mother always wanted to visit Fátima, which is a Catholic pilgrimage site on mainland Portugal. Our Lady of Fátima is a Virgin Mary that appeared to three children in the early 1900s in mainland Portugal. I say “a” Virgin Mary because there are numerous holy pilgrimage sites like this all around the world and, in each case, the Virgin is described differently and the story of the apparition is different. Don’t ask me why —I’m not an expert on Mariology.

Mother finally got her wish and we all flew to mainland Portugal in 1988. It was the first time we had traveled to the “continent,” although we had already made numerous vacation trips back to the Azores, which are the Portuguese islands where my parents were born.

Mother, stricken with brain cancer, was already bald. She lost all of her gorgeous black hair. It never grew back. Instead, a scraggly ring of fine gray hair grew at the bottom of her head, near the base of her skull.

When we went in to renew our passport photos, my mother pinned those scraggly remnants of hair to the top of her head. Passport regulations forbade the wearing of a hat. The scars from her brain surgery were clearly visible—the place where the doctors had tried unsuccessfully to remove her tumor. The guy at the post office saw my mother’s old passport and didn’t believe she was the same person.

“Hey lady, I can’t take this.”

My mother just looked at him and said, “I’m dying.” She took off her hat and showed him her bald head.

The postal clerk stared at her for a moment with his mouth open. Then he looked down and accepted my mother’s passport application. He never looked Mother in the eye again and he processed our remaining applications in silence.

A few months later, we flew into Lisbon. We took a shuttle to Fátima and checked into a tourist trap hotel close to the cathedral.

The Cathedral of Fátima is enormous, even by Catholic standards. There’s a marble walkway that goes right up to the church so people can crawl up to the massive doors on their knees in penance without really hurting themselves. The old diehards crawl on the concrete, just to show they’re really serious about penance.

When we entered the cathedral, the first thing I noticed were all the crutches that lined the walls—evidence of the hundreds of miracles that had been performed here, undoubtedly by the Virgin herself. I really believed.

There’s a fountain of holy water in front of the cathedral. Mother went there every day to wash her head and drink. She poured the holy water into little bottles and tucked them into her purse.