“What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” an overfriendly and too-affectionate Birdie says to Sister Margaret Mary after she stuffed the bottom half of a windmill cookie in her mouth. (Please, God, please, I’m begging You, don’t let my sister suddenly go old-timey or juicy smooch our principal’s cheek or . . . or do anything else really weird, because as You know, this prickly employee of Yours has the power to keep her in the third grade forever.) “We been lookin’ for you all day, isn’t that right, Tessie?”
I’m still standing next to Charlie in the doorway of the shack, because I’m so shocked to see our principal that I’m opening and closing my mouth like Charlie McCarthy before Mr. Edgar Bergen supplies him with words. I know what should be coming out of my mouth is That’s right, Birdie, we have been looking for Sister Margaret Mary all day, good remembering, but that’s what a really great Gotcha! can do to a kid. Turn them into a dummy.
Charlie has developed a case of lockjaw, too, but Birdie is having no problem gabbing away with the gal who I barely recognize. She still looks like she swallowed a yardstick, but she isn’t dressed in her nun’s clothes. She’s wearing one of Mr. McGinty’s white Sunday shirts and a pair of the gray pants he puts on when he’s working in the cemetery, and her feet are in floppy mukluks and not in those squishy black shoes she wears when she sneaks around the halls at school trying to catch kids skipping out. And the answer to the playground question “Do nuns have hair and boobies?” is yes. Sister M & M’s hair is styled in a pixie cut and it’s a color that’s close to the same as Mr. McGinty’s chestnut brown, and if she had a job at Lonnigan’s serving schnapps to customers, believe me, this nun would make a ton of tips.
Because Sister doesn’t have any ropes or chains keeping her in the folding chair she’s sitting so straight-backed in, it doesn’t look like she’s a prisoner being held for ransom, so what in the heck is this nun doing here running her hand down Pyewacket’s back and looking at Mr. McGinty with so much love beaming out of her windows to the soul?
Uh-oh.
Was I right when I wondered if the reason her initials of M. M. are etched on the back of the expensive St. Christopher medal along with J. M. is because they really are doing the “horizontal polka”? Are the two of them sitting here planning a secret honeymoon trip to Wisconsin Dells? Was that what Sister Margaret Mary was doing when Birdie and one of Kitten’s snitches spotted her near the weeping willow tree earlier? Practicing her running away?
Sweating bullets but sick of beating the bushes for her all day, I screw up my courage and ask from the shack doorway, “Why were you running around the willow tree today, Sister?”
“Tessie, please join us. I’ll bring you and Charlie your cookies and soda,” Mr. McGinty says with little nudges that get us going in that direction, “and we’ll answer all your questions.”
I don’t want to stare at Sister Margaret Mary when I pull out the folding chair on the other side of Birdie, but I can’t help myself, and neither can Charlie when he sits on the other side of me.
After Mr. McGinty brings down the venetian blinds on the windows, which is a little suspicious, if you ask me, he sets the plates of cookies and glasses of root beer down in front of my fiancé and me, places his hands on our principal’s shoulders, and says, “Children, I’d like you to meet my sister, Martha.”
“Your . . . your . . . WHAT?!” I holler.
Charlie spews out, “Sister Margaret Mary is your sister?!” because this life-changing information has caught him off guard, too.
After our principal uses her napkin to dab at the mess Charlie made on the table when the soda came shooting out of his nose, she nods and tells him, “That’s correct, Jasper. Jimmy and I are twins.”
This is not a case of mistaken identity on her part.
Jasper is Charlie’s baptized name. I don’t call him that because before his mother suicided herself, he was so outgoing that his neighborhood nickname was Jasper “The Friendly Ghost” Garfield, and I don’t think he wants to be reminded of those good old days any more than I want anyone reminding me of when everything was good with my world.
The gal born Martha McGinty smiles down at my cat purring in her lap, the little Siamese traitor, then turns toward me and says, “And in answer to your question, Theresa, I was running around the weeping willow earlier today because I was attempting to catch Pye in order to remove a large burr she had embedded in her fur.”
I saw Pye streak out from under the willow when I was looking for Charlie on top of the cemetery hill earlier, and I also noticed that horrible burr she had matted in her fur when she and Charlie were sitting on his back porch looking for feathered friends together after Birdie and me made our leap of faith into his backyard, so she’s not making that up.
“Twins are a statistical miracle!” my fiancé says, like a pig rolling in you-know-what.
Sister Margaret Mary looks at her brother across the table and says with a dazzling smile that I have never seen before, “Indeed they are.”