When I defeated Julie Ann McCarthy for May Queen in eighth grade, I knew I’d won the election fair and square. But I began to question the soundness of my victory during May Procession practice a few weeks later when Julie Ann, whom I scarcely knew, and the other members of the May court—three of my seventh-grade friends who, that year, felt as estranged from me as I from them—flaunted their resentment by huddling together to whisper among themselves. 

I don’t remember aspiring to the honor of May Queen: the eighth-grade girl dressed like a bride who, at the commencement of the May Procession, while the organ blared and everyone sang “Immaculate Mary,” crowned the Virgin’s statue with a rose-decked wreath. Until the annual festivity loomed on the horizon, I’m not sure an hour in the spotlight on a Sunday in May, involving neither talent nor skill, would have roused the ambition of many of us girls. 

Furthermore, in Catholic grade school in the 1960s, aside from spelling bees, contests were rare—no gym classes, girls’ sports, student council, or honor roll—so I doubt I even knew how May Queens were chosen. Since we believed pride incurred punishment and humility favor, it went without saying one didn’t set out to earn a devoutness award or dare to profess her interest in it, any more than Mary would have sought to convince God she was worthy to be Jesus’ mother. Everyone was eligible. And for all we knew, the winner’s name got picked from a hat. 

If anyone had fancied herself as May Queen, it would have been Julie Ann or one of the other runners-up who, since first grade, belonged to an elite group of girls seemingly destined for that role. Julie Ann, a model student, her intelligence and desire to please so fine-tuned she almost quivered, was also a veteran teacher’s pet who took piano lessons at the convent every year, sang solos in choir and glee club in her cathedral high soprano voice, and even on the playground comported herself like a “perfect soldier of Christ.” The embodiment of what we considered virtue, with her solemn brown eyes and long, neatly parted, glossy dark hair—and a hint of Mediterranean blood flowing through her Irish veins—she fit our collective image of the young Mary of Nazareth.

As a B+ student with a talent for giving oral presentations, reading aloud, and reciting poetry, I never hoped to match the likes of Julie Ann academically. In the fourth marking period of seventh grade, my mother’s heart had sunk before my eyes when I brought home a C (in history) on my report card. An unconscious act of rebellion, I suspect, against her ill-defined expectations of me. Nevertheless, she’d called me a hard worker, and ever since she died the previous summer, I’d been escaping into my homework and catching up. It elated me to discover not only that I could excel but, by doing so, also vanquish the heartache of loss.

In terms of beauty, while Julie Ann had simply grown into a taller version of her little-girl self, I personified the awkward phase of development we were all passing through. The pixie haircut I’d been growing out had begun to wave and, in damp weather, frizz, reducing the smooth, brown curtain of bangs that framed my face and balanced my garden-variety features to an unruly fringe. By exposing my high forehead—a distinction my mother had alleged should be hidden from view—and my prominent brow line, the fringe gave me a startled look, like that of someone not so much haunted by a memory as frozen in time. 

The friendly smile and budding sense of humor that had, a year ago, won the affection of Robert Perricone (a prince who dubbed me “Chatty Patty”), bumped me into the popular group, and got me elected captain of my Girl Scout patrol, had also vanished, leaving a recluse in its place. My distress over my abrupt and curious personality change—obliging me to make order and beauty from the shambles of my inner world—outweighed my self-consciousness over the physical changes puberty had wrought. It clouded the reflection I saw in the mirror, affording the prospect of outer beauty a chance to thrive.

***

One day in mid-April the mystery of how May Queens were selected was solved when the eighth-grade boys were dismissed to the playground and the girls herded into a single classroom. Sister Maria Virginia—Julie Ann’s and my teacher and the school’s choir and glee club leader—settled us down by standing motionless and donning her poker face before announcing we would be voting for May Queen. After she distributed the slips of paper she referred to as “ballots” and led us in prayer to the Holy Ghost to inspire us to choose the girl whose character most exemplified Mary’s, I found myself overcome not with inspiration but a desperation to win.

While Sister tallied the ballots, I made a quick sign-of-the-cross, then, pressing my folded hands to my lips, began reciting Hail Marys inside my head, pleading with the “Holy Mother of God” to pray for me, a sinner, and ask God, her son, to let me to win. Just as, ever since my mother died, I’d been reciting the Rosary a few times per day, beseeching Mary to help me be good and to ask her son to grant me A’s on all my assignments and tests.

After Julie Ann and I tied and a second vote was cast, my prayers dispersed, my lips began to tremble, and my hands, now sweating, shook so violently I could barely pen the letters of Julie Ann’s name (in the eyes of the Church, voting for myself would have been considered a sin). Despite how bent I’d been on winning, I was stunned when, without ado, Sister Maria said, “Congratulations, Patricia, you’re our new May Queen.” While Sister and the girls applauded, I basked in the euphoria of success that, throughout the school year, had stemmed the tide of chaos raging inside me, reinforcing the illusion I could avoid deprivation and, with willpower alone, determine my fate.

***

As the baby of the family, I spent my early years keeping my mother company while my six older siblings attended school, went to work, or ventured off to marry or live on their own. After my mother walked me to St. Kevin’s on my first day of school, while she tapped on the window of my classroom door to get Sister Mary Rose’s attention, I cowered at the sight of the other first-graders sitting expectantly at their desks. I assume our tardiness owed both to my mother’s preoccupations and her reluctance, for the first time in twenty-five years, to spend the bulk of her weekdays alone. Although I never cried, like many of my classmates those initial days and weeks, once I knew my way, I’d run home to her at lunchtime whenever something had upset me that morning. 

Before she got sick and died of a brain tumor the summer before I started eighth grade, my mother and I would, occasionally, still cuddle up on the sofa to watch Queen for a Day, a game show featuring married women contestants who took turns sharing their stories of hardship. At the end of each interview, when the host asked a contestant what she needed most to lighten her load, she would name one or two items, such as medical care or therapeutic equipment for a sick or handicapped child, a hearing-aid for her husband, or a dishwasher to spare her time and enhance the quality of her and her family’s lives.

When the pity party ended, the contestant whose plight had garnered the most sympathy from the studio audience, measured by the Applause Meter, would be pronounced Queen for a Day. To the accompaniment of “Pomp and Circumstance”—my favorite part of the show—the host’s young female assistants would drape the queen in a red-velvet robe, place a crown of jewels on her head, and lead her to a velvet-upholstered throne, where they gave her a dozen red roses to hold while a Wizard-of-Oz voice announced her prizes. 

Whatever help she had requested always came first, followed by extra big-ticket items, such as a vacation trip with her husband, a set of silver-plated flatware, household appliances, and fashionable apparel from the Spiegel Catalog, modeled by the same assistants who, to the host’s opening question, “Would you like to be queen for a day?” never would have answered “Yes.” Awarding similar prizes to the losing contestants was the show’s only redeeming factor. 

I’m sure my mother, who had lived a difficult life, identified with these women, who presented themselves as victims, often dissolving in tears as they recounted their stories. Her father, a drinker and a horse thief who served a ten-year sentence in the state penitentiary, deserted the family when my mother, the youngest of his three children, was six. She never saw him again until she was a young wife and mother of four little boys, when he appeared on her doorstep, homeless, and she offered him a bed in the basement. 

Two years after graduating from high school, she married my father, a man who’d purportedly skipped a grade before quitting school at age eleven to work in a mill to help support his family. An ambitious young man who, while standing in a soup line after the stock market crashed, swore he’d never go hungry again. During the next nineteen years, they produced five sons and two daughters whom my mother struggled to raise while my father worked long hours and held tight to the money he earned as an oil-rig driver and, later, by investing in rental properties and opening a beer and beverage business.

In her final year on earth, if my mother had ever dreamed of appearing on Queen for a Day, I imagine she would have listed her tribulations, beginning with her husband of thirty-some years who, lately, had been stopping by the bar on his way home from work, often stumbling through the front door long after she had cleaned up dinner. Last Christmas Eve, arriving home tree-less, blaming the tree-stands for closing so early. Her eyes might have welled up and her voice caught as she complained about her older children, who had either dropped out of high school or eloped—or both—conceived a child out of wedlock, or, in one way or another, had let her down.

Her youngest son, my closest-in-age sibling—spared a stint in reform school after her tearful pleas to the officers who, one evening, showed up at our door—was eking his way through senior year thanks to her reading his assigned books and writing his essays for English class. Her story might have ended with her fear that her thirteen-year-old, her last-born and most studious child, was following suit, slamming her bedroom door after sassing her from time to time, lying to her, and getting a C on one of her recent report cards. 

If only she had a bigger house and decent furniture, a set of unchipped dishes and good pots and pans. A trip with her husband (who had often promised her one but never delivered) and a few pieces of fine jewelry and some stylish new clothes. Not to mention wall-to-wall carpeting that stood up to the heedless traffic of men, kitchen appliances to replace the mismatched ones my father had purchased at a closeout sale, fooling himself into thinking it would make her happy, and a linoleum floor that looked clean and shiny after she scrubbed it. Then she would be better able to cope with her problems. Privy to her anguish, I would have agreed while bemoaning her failure to mention a car, along with some driving lessons.

***

For me, the allure of May Queen had much to do with the dress, which had become a symbol of my identification with my mother that only intensified after her death. As a little girl I craved doll clothes and reveled in playing dress-up, especially bride. Once I’d made my First Communion and my mother stuffed my white dress and veil in a drawer of the dining room buffet, on warm school-less mornings in second grade, I’d don the ensemble and meet Steven Landers—my seatmate on that first day of school—for our wedding ceremony in his backyard. 

Every few months, after playing with a neighborhood girl a year ahead of me in public school, whose adopted mother ensured she wanted for nothing, I’d strut home with a fistful of hand-me-downs slung over my shoulder. Dresses with embroidered yokes, pinafores, smocking, and pintucks that my mother, on the modest allowance my father allotted her, could never afford. I could hardly wait to show them off at birthday parties and Sunday Mass and at the beginning of the school year while our drab, green uniforms were being tailored. 

When I got a little older and began playing with Barbie, I pined for the Mattel sports car rather than the imitation one my mother had bought me. And when the dream house came out, I fantasied about it day and night. But what I coveted most were Barbie’s outfits, with their dainty high heels, clutch bags, and wide-brimmed hats, displayed in pink cardboard boxes with cellophane windows. As my Barbie-doll play was nearing its end, I hankered for her wedding gown. White satin, overlaid with glitter and tulle and finished with a sumptuous train, it boded my escape from a lackluster childhood into a happy-ever-after future of sparkle and ease.

My mother, a reserved but fun-loving woman who, despite her petiteness, possessed a regal bearing, also relished any chance to dress up for a party. Throughout my growing up, without my having asked, she often promised me that when I graduated from high school, she would buy me a beautiful dress. One day, after repeating the promise, as she was traipsing upstairs to finish her chores, wearing one of her faded housecoats, she sighed and said dreamily, “If I’m still here then.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her utter those words, but, like voodoo pins, they pierced my heart, and I wondered why my mother would say such a thing.

Not long afterward, on the morning the hospital phoned to inform my father his wife’s condition was grave, I froze in my closet, in a quandary over what I should wear. What could I conjure from my meager wardrobe that would lift the fog from my mother’s eyes and allow her to recognize me once and for all? I wasn’t just the daughter she had loved for thirteen years, but one who longed to feel precious, soon to be a woman, with hopes and dreams of her own. I was the daughter who, a few years earlier, she never seemed to notice, singing and dancing on the back porch to the applause of an invisible audience. And I was also the daughter she’d chided for being “too sensitive,” the one who, all along, had been sensitive to her disillusionment and desire to flee, eager to make up for however I might have failed her or caused her to die. 

No manner of clothing could have resolved my dilemma: how to appeal to my mother as both her innocent little girl and the young woman that her demise, I sheepishly anticipated, would leave in its wake. In the end I’d only managed to distract myself. When we arrived at the hospital and were hurrying down the corridor to my mother’s room, a nurse intercepted us to tell us she was already gone. After we filed in, my father and I and the rest of our family encircled her deathbed while my uncle led us in praying the Rosary, the cadence of our voices lulling me into a trance.

***

Although we had never spent much time together, I’d always liked my father, an excitable man who could tell a good story and never tired of arguing about politics and religion, and I feasted on every scrap of attention he gave me. Once my mother died and my brother joined the army, leaving the two of us alone in the house, I looked forward to our getting to know each other, when I imagined he would morph into the relaxed and playful parent I’d often glimpsed he could be.

After the funeral, however, when his grief sucked the air from every room in the house and his keening for her at night kept me awake, I came to despise him for minimizing my sorrow and regarding me as less important than her. Since, to preserve my attachment to my mother as ambivalent-free, I’d painted a halo around her head (and, in turn, a set of horns over mine), I was only aware of how much I missed her. I couldn’t have borne the truth: that it was she who had disappointed me, rather than vice versa. That I was livid with her for abandoning me to the care of a man who cried, even to the seamstress at the uniform store. Or that I also felt jealous. 

Late that fall, months before the May Procession, my rivalry with my mother broke through in displaced form when my father invited my married 22-year-old sister, a dark-haired beauty like our mother had been, to accompany him to a gala at the Knights of Columbus. And, subsequently, when he asked her to go shopping with him for a living-room sofa and wall-to-wall carpeting to replace the frayed and soiled ones my mother had lamented for years.

My ability to understand why my father asked my sister, rather than me, to be his date at a dress-up affair for adults did nothing to unravel the knot of misery into which I’d contorted myself. But that galled me less than having to concede my sister’s superiority at furnishing a house, tantamount to admitting I lacked what it would take to fill my mother’s shoes. A humiliating prospect that, unconsciously, I dreaded was true, I defended against it by resolving to show my father and my sister—and, above all, my mother—that I could outdo her.

Forbidden—and, therefore, dangerous—my wish and how I’d bring it to fruition bided their time outside my awareness, fueling my quest for perfection in everything the Sisters of St. Joseph expected of me—how I’d been dealing with orphanhood all along. This might explain at least some of my desperation to win when the opportunity to be elected May Queen presented itself; my uneasiness with my victory; and why, in thinking about myself, the word “competitive” never occurred to me.

***

In their giddiness on the day of the May Procession, the girls in the May court greeted me politely and admired my dress. For modesty’s sake it had to cover my knees, yet its lace bodice and poofy taffeta skirt made me feel like a princess all the same. My sister-in-law managed to discipline my hair, and though the nuns forbade it, applied a layer of mascara to my lashes and a splash of pink to my lips and cheeks. My extended family, led by my father, looking proud and handsome in his dark-gray suit, occupied two rows of chairs on the lawn in front of the convent. And the sun shone bright in her mantle of blue, signifying that my mother, queen of my heart—who, surely, didn’t feel outdone—was smiling down on me from her throne in heaven, affirming me as the rightful May Queen.

***

A few years ago I happened upon the black-and-white photos my uncle took on the day of the May Procession. As always, I leaped at the reminder that my ugly-duckling phase was simply that, an unfortunate rung on the ladder of human development. But since I couldn’t bring myself to share them, even with my husband, after deciding posterity wouldn’t miss them, I threw them away.

In truth, those mementos of the most disturbing year of my life reignited the shame I’d tried to disown back then by locking that girl in the dungeon of my psyche, buried beneath the edifice of her overnight success. The girl who, within days of her mother’s funeral, started eighth grade, cheered by the scent of fresh school supplies wafting from her desk, only to realize she’d lost her recipe for how to be in the world. Who, as the weeks passed, after coming home from school to an empty house and searching for her mother from room to room, began doing things she knew weren’t normal but couldn’t control. If she found her way out, she would betray the assured, well-put-together persona I present to the world today. 

These abnormal doings that consumed my time and caused me to question my sanity were compulsive rituals, symptoms of what, nowadays, some refer to as posttraumatic OCD. A tyrannical affliction, it took to extremes my worrisome nature and the perfectionistic tendencies I’d exhibited as a child, such as mothering my dolls on clock time rather than pretend, and rope-jumping, ice skating, singing, and reciting as smoothly and seamlessly as I could. 

Consequently, tasks were to be executed in a certain order and done precisely right. Shortcuts were prohibited. And any lapse of attention or empty space—perhaps also the one to be filled by this year’s May Queen—signaled a missed opportunity to avert some catastrophe, resonant of being burned at the stake. The real danger was the inrush of feelings, such as rage and hate, followed by guilt and shame, fear of punishment, grief, and despair, that would upend the internal order the symptoms served to maintain.

Mostly these were religious rituals that often involved counting. For example, once I began attending daily Mass with my guilt and grief-stricken father, even during an ice storm that winter, I started to pray the Rosary on my knees in my bedroom two or three times per day. Although every bead represented a prayer, meaning that each of the five decades required ten Hail Marys, I would add a few extra for fear I’d missed one. If my uncertainty persisted, I’d start the decade and, sometimes, the entire Rosary over again.

Likewise, in preparing for tests, I’d recite even memorable things, such as c²=a²=b² or Congress passed the Stamp Act in 1765, numbering them on my fingers at least ten times. Once again I would add a few extra, just in case. And, come rain or shine, I’d ride my bike to church every Saturday afternoon to confess the peccadillos I mistook for mortal sins.

The nights when a surge of anxiety that felt like guilt interrupted my sleep, I’d creep downstairs to tidy up the living room, exactly as my mother had taught me, including washing the ashtrays reeking of pipe-tobacco, before scrubbing the kitchen floor. And, as the nuns suggested was a form of prayer, I’d inscribe the initials J.M.J. (for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) and a cross (for the crucifix) at the top of each test page. If these page incantations failed to appease me, I’d place them over every question and answer, oftentimes littering the margins with them. 

This latter ritual must have alarmed Sister Maria, a tall, angular nun reputed for being stern and mercurial, because every now and then when the weather was fair, Father Ruhl, our pastor, would stop by our classroom, ostensibly to say hello and give us his blessing, before inviting me on a walk. I appreciated the free pass and came to enjoy the company of this older man, whose kind face and mischievous streak reminded me of my father, as we strolled through lush and wooded areas of the schoolgrounds I had never seen. 

Wise enough to perceive and tread lightly around my invisible fence, Father made it his mission to simply befriend me, asking nonthreatening questions and letting me do most of the talking. I thought he enjoyed my company too. Having grown up in a family of adults, conversing with them was second nature to me, and I often struck them as more mature than I was. Plus I’d learned to be a companion at my mother’s knee.

While Sister Maria had never expressed sympathy for my loss or attempted to mother me in any way, besides enlisting Father Ruhl’s support, she would reassure me whenever she observed me coming undone. For instance, I’d bolt to her desk after she collected our tests to confess I might have cheated the one time I glanced up at the clock. In a casual voice, barely making eye contact while she went about sorting our papers, she would say, “Don’t worry, Patricia, you didn’t cheat.” Then she would send me back to my desk where, my doubts erased, I’d breathe a deep sigh of relief.

***

Why half the thirty girls in my eighth-grade class chose me May Queen, rather than Julie Ann, perplexes me still. Though it wasn’t a beauty pageant or personality contest, even in a school run by nuns, one would expect such qualities to play a role, especially when voters are of the age where girls can be cruel and for whom looks and popularity mean practically everything. 

Did they simply vote for the girl they deemed holiest or most devoted to Mary? While few of them would have seen me at morning Mass, and not even my father knew of my praying the Rosary, I’d been singled out by the pastor, and my soldierly adherence to the straight-and-narrow might have likened me to Julie Ann. 

Or could my motherless-ness, marked by my sudden introversion and academic success, have lent me an aura of mystery that both frightened and impressed them, thereby capturing their imaginations? Or, finally, while we were casting our votes, was my desperation so obvious, it compelled enough of them to do “the right thing,” regardless of how else they felt about me, sending their Applause Meters soaring, pronouncing me their “Queen for a Day”? 

Since I tried to expunge the stigma of mother-loss by making light of it whenever the subject came up and by distinguishing myself in more admirable ways, I would have cringed at the thought that these classmates felt sorry for me for not having a mother. But though I lacked the word for it, I did want empathy, for someone to see past my oddness into the heart of a girl turned inside out and help her find her way out of hell. But there was no prospective confidante stamped with a guarantee not to look at me crooked, validating my fear that I’d committed a deadly sin or simply gone crazy. I was treading on a minefield, unaware that the explosive was me.

As for my devotion to Mary? Driven by a sense of helplessness over the death of my mother, I clung to my religion as I would to a tree if a storm surge threatened to sweep me away, numb to the unconscious forces motivating me. Thus, while I was kneeling on my bedroom floor, meticulously counting those Hail Marys, unwittingly fixed on remaining intact like the string of beads in my hand, I didn’t know that I was also seeking the protection of my own now-perfect heavenly mother. 

By extolling my mother, in the name of Mary, as “blessed among women,” I didn’t know that I, a sinner for not only hating her but also dedicating my faculties to showing her up, was groveling for permission to become a woman like her—one who might, someday, even surpass her. Nor did I know that I was imploring her to forgive me for the exhilarating sense of freedom that sometimes infused me and for what I construed as profiting from her loss by realizing my potential after death had rendered her the ultimate loser.

Finally, since I’d prayed to the Blessed Mother all year, more often and fervently than any other girl in my class could have possibly done, and like the game-show contestants (with whom my mother identified), I’d suffered so much, I can’t help but wonder if, at some level, I felt entitled to win. If I insisted that God or the Fates owed me for all they had taken from me.

Whatever my classmates’ motives, I’d like to believe, despite how, in my self-consciousness, I felt transparent, that I succeeded in concealing the disorganized state of my mind. That my sudden transformation, if confusing, didn’t entirely alter their internal image of me, built up throughout seven prior schoolyears together. That they held in mind the butterfly unfolding before their eyes, the year before with the girl quaking in her cocoon, while we voted that day, oblivious to what for her was at stake. Why her viability in the world seemed to hinge on winning.

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Patricia Heim is a retired psychotherapist who lives with her husband and golden retriever on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her essays have appeared in R.KV.R.Y Quarterly Literary Journal (nominated for the Pushcart Prize), Evening Street Review, Portland Review, Moon City Review, North Dakota Quarterly, SN Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Dunes Review, Paperplates, Circle Show, Mary: A Journal of New Writing (Winner of the Editor’s Prize), and elsewhere.

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