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Show Acting Alone Page 295 a slow, unbeautiful, apolitical death while ministering to the random appetites of prissy little woman-contemning chaplains. Something had awakened a discontent inside Polycarpana, needless to say, something that could not be lulled back to sleep by the token beauty of medieval ritual and the theater-politics of a weekend of lobbying. And she was convinced that Dr. Edwine out there had unconsciously had a hand in this awakening. Before her little sister had insanely joined the Army, she had regularly stuffed her Bambi peejays in a Safeway bag and come for sleepovers at the convent. They would sit up all night while Shanny filled her big sister in on the details of her strange, sad, funny dalliance with the anomalous, gentle giant. Though not sure she particularly wanted to, Polycarpana had vicariously lived every moment of that sultry, steamy, naked trip to Mexico, for example. Such tales, such language, piping so sweetly and babyishly from lips made of her own flesh and blood, had caused something to stir inside Polycarpana. The secular impulse began to stretch its jaws and breathe. Critical intellect and a certain hunger for an occasional mild wickedness had started flowing inside of Polycarpana's head and body for the first time since her postulancy so long ago. But, even as she squatted in this mobile restroom and swayed with the motions of the bus and tried to tape the Kotex securely under and around the flowing part of herself, she realized that mere sexuality was just the lesser part of what the redbearded professor had stirred in her. She inspected the ample blood and doomed tissues soaked into the old pad and stowed it away in the white wall receptacle. And Polycarpana not so much realized as heard someone's voice mumbling the following to her ear: |