The Habit of Heresy

I bought the dress from a costume shop on Canal Street, the kind of place that smells like rubber masks and stale air conditioning. The woman behind the counter didn't blink when I held it up. She just said, “Honey, that’s a hundred and twenty dollars, and you better not be planning to wear it anywhere near a church.”

I wasn’t. I was planning to wear it to my mother’s funeral.

The dress is black, obviously. But the cut is something else. The neckline plunges to a V that stops just above my navel. The fabric is that cheap polyester satin that shines under any light, makes you look like you’re wrapped in oil. There’s a white collar, stiff and plastic, the kind a real nun would wear, but it sits high on my throat like a dog collar, a leash. And the hem. The hem barely covers my ass. I have the legs for it, I guess. That’s what my ex-boyfriend used to say. I have the legs for a lot of things, apparently, just not a relationship.

I stand in front of the full-length mirror in my apartment, the one with the cracked frame I’ve been meaning to fix for three years, and I look at myself. The dress fits like a dare. It fits like a question nobody wants to answer.

My mother would have hated it. That’s the point.

She spent forty years of her life in a real habit, the kind that covers everything, the kind that makes you invisible. Sister Mary Catherine. That was her name before she left the order, before she met my father, before she had me. She used to say the habit was a gift, a way to disappear into God’s work. I used to say it was a uniform for a war she never signed up for. We didn’t agree on much.

The funeral is at St. Agnes, the same church where she was baptized, where she took her first vows, where she came back to after my father died, head bowed, hands folded, asking for forgiveness she didn’t owe anyone. The same church where she sat in the front pew every Sunday for the last twelve years, her back straight, her rosary clicking between her fingers like a metronome counting out the seconds of her life.

I’m going to walk in wearing this dress, and I’m going to sit in the back row, and I’m going to let them all stare.

Let them.

The drive to St. Agnes takes twenty minutes. I take the long way, through the part of town where the houses get smaller and the trees get older, where the sidewalks crack and nobody fixes them because nobody cares enough to complain. My mother used to say that neglect was a form of prayer, a way of accepting the world as it is. I used to say that was bullshit. I still do.

I park two blocks away, behind a rusty Ford that hasn’t moved in months. The engine ticks as it cools. I sit in the driver’s seat, my hands on the wheel, and I watch the church steeple rise above the row houses. It’s a gray day, the kind that hangs low and heavy, the kind that makes everything look like a photograph from a hundred years ago. The sky is the color of old bones.

I get out of the car. The air smells like wet asphalt and someone’s woodsmoke from a chimney a few streets over. I walk. My heels click on the sidewalk, sharp and deliberate. I’m not wearing stockings. My legs are bare. The cold bites into my skin, and I let it.

The church doors are open. I can see the people gathered inside, dark suits and black dresses, heads bowed, shoulders hunched. The organ is playing something slow and mournful, something that sounds like it’s been played a thousand times before. I stop at the threshold. The stone steps are worn smooth by generations of feet. I put my hand on the doorframe, the wood cold and solid, and I step inside.

The smell hits me first. Incense and old wood and the faint, sweet rot of flowers left too long in water. The same smell as every Catholic church I’ve ever been in. The same smell as my childhood. The same smell as my mother’s room in the convent, the one she let me visit once, when I was seven, before she decided that motherhood and God couldn’t share the same house.

Heads turn.

It’s not a dramatic moment. It’s a ripple, a wave of attention that starts at the back and moves forward. A woman in a gray suit, her face pinched and thin, sees me and her mouth drops open. An old man with a hearing aid adjusts it, as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing. A teenage girl, maybe a cousin I haven’t seen in ten years, stares at my legs and then looks away, her cheeks red.

I walk down the aisle. I don’t rush. I don’t slow down. I walk like I have somewhere to be, which I do, and that somewhere is the back pew, on the left, where I can see everyone and no one has to see me unless they turn around.

They turn around.

Father Maloney is at the altar, his vestments crisp and white, his hands resting on the wood. He’s known me since I was a kid. He baptized me. He gave me my first communion. He looked at me with pity when my father died and with something worse when my mother went back to the church. He sees me now, in this dress, and his face doesn’t change. It stays the same placid, practiced calm that he’s spent sixty years perfecting. But his eyes. His eyes narrow, just a fraction. Just enough.

I sit down. The pew creaks. I cross my legs, let one foot swing, the heel of my shoe tapping against the wood. The woman next to me, a stout woman with a crucifix pinned to her lapel, shifts away like I have a disease. I smile at her. She doesn’t smile back.

The service starts. Father Maloney’s voice drones on, the same words they always use, the same promises about eternal rest and perpetual light. I don’t listen. I look at the coffin. It’s a plain wooden box, no frills, no flowers draped across the top. My mother would have wanted it that way. She didn’t believe in ornament. She believed in function, in purpose, in the clean, hard lines of a life lived for something other than yourself.

I think about the last time I saw her. It was six months ago, in the hospital. She was dying then, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. She lay in that bed, her hair thin and white, her hands folded on top of the sheets, and she looked at me like I was a stranger. Like I was someone she’d met once, a long time ago, and couldn’t quite place.

“You’re not wearing that to my funeral,” she said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You don’t even know what I’m wearing.”

“I know you.” She closed her eyes. “I know what you’ll do.”

And she did. She always did. That was the thing about my mother. She saw through everything. She saw through the dress before I bought it, before I even thought of it. She saw through the anger I carried around like a shield, the way I dressed, the way I talked, the way I pushed people away before they could leave me. She saw through all of it, and she loved me anyway, and that was the worst part.

I don’t cry. I don’t cry during the eulogy, when my aunt stands up and talks about my mother’s kindness, her patience, her faith. I don’t cry when they carry the coffin out, the men from the parish, their faces grim and their hands steady. I don’t cry when I stand outside, the cold wind biting at my bare legs, and watch them load the box into the hearse.

I stand there, in my cheap nun’s dress, and I wait.

People file past me. Some of them look at me with disgust. Some of them look at me with pity. One woman, old and bent, stops and takes my hand. Her skin is papery and warm.

“She loved you,” the woman says. “She loved you more than anything.”

I nod. I don’t say anything. The woman squeezes my hand and walks away.

I watch the hearse pull out of the church parking lot. I watch it turn the corner, slow and careful, like it’s carrying something precious. Which it is. Which it was.

I don’t follow. I don’t go to the cemetery. I stand there, in the cold, in the dress my mother knew I’d wear, and I think about the last thing she said to me.

It wasn’t “I love you.” It wasn’t “I forgive you.” It wasn’t anything soft or kind.

She looked at me, her eyes clear and sharp, the same eyes she’d had my whole life, and she said, “You think you’re punishing them. But you’re only punishing yourself.”

Then she closed her eyes, and she didn’t open them again.

I stand there, in the parking lot, and I feel the cold seep into my bones. I feel the weight of the dress, the cheap fabric, the plastic collar. I feel the stares of the people who are still here, the ones who are whispering, the ones who are judging.

And I think, maybe she was right.

Maybe she was right about everything.

I walk back to my car. My heels click on the asphalt. The sky is still gray. The air is still cold. And I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now that she’s gone, now that the person I was trying to hurt is no longer there to be hurt.

I get in the car. I close the door. I sit in the silence, and I wait for something to happen.

Nothing does.

So I start the engine. I put the car in gear. And I drive.

I don’t know where I’m going. But I’m going.