By Way of Maria

By Carole Vasta Folley

/ Second Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /

The year I turn 21 . . .

I moved to Poughkeepsie to be with an older man. Might as well been the Yangtze or the deep sea, I’d have followed him anywhere. My lot was cast. My internal navigation system set on dead-reckoning for the worst possible choice. Eventually, I’d come to realize I simply traded in one soul-sucking liar for another.

Fresh from quitting college and in need of cash, I met him when he hired me to sell shoes. Perfect for a girl who was raised to kneel before men. When he’s promoted to a store in New York, it’s inevitable I’ll bring up the rear and join him. Besides, I wanted a home. As if someone else could make that for me.

The day I unpack and move into his dank apartment, it doesn’t feel like choice. I’m a zombie girlfriend, mindless and slow moving. Having sold my green-ivy Mustang, I’m stuck here. Every single day life has a good laugh at my expense. Less than five miles from Vassar College, I’m ashamed to live such a meager existence irredeemably close to their renowned theater program. Instead, I settle. A numb concubine for a bum master. 

He begrudgingly slogs to work. I drag a pilled polyester bedspread out past the parking lot to a weedy patch of berm, spread it out and lie in the sun. My pasty-self tans, eyes clamped shut, as I mull over his kitchen calendar, some crappy free one from a bank. This one has Bic-blue-ink hearts drawn by another woman’s hand on days I was not here. An indelible message of infidelity I ignore while UV rays penetrate my pores.

A week later, my entire body is inflamed in fever and burning blisters. The doctor diagnoses genital herpes with a judgement that never washes off. I call my sister crying; she tells me not to touch my eyes or I’ll go blind. Still, I stay. Neither of us can see my despair.

Finally I tell him, “I’m going away - just for the summer.” I move back into my childhood home with my mother who’s been alone ever since my abusive father left her for a younger woman. Decades of his insufferable sins and he left her? I’m disgusted by her “stay-no-matter-what” survival strategy. The irony is invisible. 

My mother is in her 50s but looks older. She’s afraid, poor and has never been on her own. If only she’d look under the hood of fear, she’d see that she’s always been afraid, poor and on her own - especially in her marriage.

I try to ignore the gloom, the worn-carpeted kitchen, the fake-wood panelling and the feeling that life will never get better. This old house, built in 1875, is in desperate need of attention, just like everyone who’s ever lived there. Mom says she’s “up shit-creek without a paddle.” I wonder why she refused to learn how to swim. 

I do the only thing I know. As if a homing pigeon, I fly to the end of our street called Prospect to the opera house and return to the theater, the love of my life. As if Moirai, the goddess of fate herself had manifested a 1910 Georgian Revival playhouse just 42 steps away from my front door. It has saved me before. It can again. 

I’m cast as Ado Annie in Oklahoma! The original “can’t say no girl,” so how can I resist my onstage beau? A beautiful-bucking young man with edible joie de vivre. We are two smitten rosy-cheeked, alive-eyed thespians and I long to have youth in my youth. But I keep my hands to myself along with a misguided obligation to the older guy. As if he owns me. Accustomed to predatory men, I cling to the familiarity of instability.  

But I don’t return to New York. Not yet. Instead, I leave Oklahoma for Austria, diving into a dream when I’m cast in the role of Maria in The Sound of Music. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a governess in the Alps. Or strum a guitar while singing with children dressed in curtains. It wasn’t even to fall in love with a Captain, though I did. The dream was staying in the theater. The only place that was safe.

* * *

Oklahoma! was the first musical written by the incomparable Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. The Sound of Music was their last. 

Rodgers, the composer, said, “It may be that we can sing what we often cannot say.” Hammerstein said, “I just can’t write anything without hope in it.”

Sadly, nine months after The Sound of Music opened on Broadway, Hammerstein died. Rodgers, devastated, later also succumbed to cancer. But not before he wrote, “There is a traditional trick that theater people have played as long as I can remember. A veteran member of a company will order a gullible newcomer to find the key to the curtain. Naturally, the joke is that there is no such thing. I have been in the theater over 50 years, and I don’t think anyone would consider me naïve, but all my life I’ve been searching for that key.”

The year I turn 22 . . .

I marry the older man. In real life. Not for love. But to visit St. Martin, a Leeward Island of the Lesser Antilles. He won the trip through the shoe company where now we both worked. Our regional boss, a short, sharply dressed man named Joe, declared I could not go on the trip because we weren’t married. A ploy, I later understood when Joe took me out to a fancy dinner and told me to dump “the old guy” adding, “You’ve got more going on in life than to be with that bum!” 

Indignant, I  pushed away that life-preserver of advice, albeit dressed in an expensive three-piece suit, and paddled out even deeper by agreeing to marry my “bum.” All to offend Joe and vacation in the Caribbean.

My groom-to-be promised we’d get an annulment once back home. I bought a bogus solitaire ring to wear. A mere five dollars to seal the faux-deal. 

But first, what to wear to this fake wedding of ours? He selected what he wore to work that day, a suit jacket that hung much longer in the front due to his gangly stoop. My white high heels clicked up the steps of the Dutchess County Courthouse. This is stupid, I think. I’m afraid, I feel. But he’s so at ease with lying, I follow his lead. 

Inside the courtroom, it’s us with a bunch of teenagers. We’re all waiting to get married. Some are pregnant. I see one in stretchy jeans and a stained pullover. Is it legal for a 15-year-old girl to marry? I want to hold hands with her and run. Surely, we are both too young for the bonds of wedlock. Though I have seven more years, she looks wiser.

She catches my eye, I look down. I’m unmistakably overdressed in a lavender pencil-skirt with tucked-in pastel blouse. I count floor tiles until it’s our turn to step up to the judge. The deed is done in less than five minutes. We go back to work at the mall. 

In St. Martin, I am by far the youngest on the company trip. My new husband’s colleagues ogle as if they’ve never seen a bikini and their wives treat me like a floozy. I’m alone most of the time, lying on the beach baking until my burn turns into sun poisoning so inflamed I hide feverishly in our hotel room, marinating in a tub of water and vinegar. I wonder what fresh hell is this.

The last day of the trip, I’m able to attend the final party and wear a flirty strapless white eyelet dress my mother sewed for me. My chest violently red against the virginal fabric, I feel the other women’s eyes sear a scarlet letter on me for lying and daring to come at all.

When my new sister-in-law gets wind of our pretend marriage, all bets are on. She’s adamant, clapping her hands, we must wed for real. In a blink, I’m buying a Gunne-Sax wedding dress that looks like Pa will give me away behind our little house on the prairie. It has a high-stiff neck that nearly chokes. It’s obvious I have no idea what I’m doing when I pick out Pepto Bismol-pink satin puffy-sleeve numbers for my four sisters to wear. They, like me, go through the nuptial planning as if this slavish script has been etched on our genetic code.

Bad Catholic that I am, we wed in the Protestant church with a groovy pastor named Frank. I’d rather say “I do” to him. He plays guitar and told me that God was a kind dude. A far stretch from the vengeful one I was taught. Frank made me feel less alone.

After the reception, we newlyweds spend the night at a hotel. It’s a dump even though we’re in a resort town with luxury options. I shouldn’t have left it up to him. But does it matter? He’s so drunk he passes out. I sob and search the dark for nonexistent light. I might hate him, but I hate myself more.

After a while, I wipe my face and contemplate what’s next. There’ll be no honeymoon. Later, I will pay for the wedding photos. I can see one now. Me, wearing a veil with a wreath of flowers in my hair. My pedophile father walking me down the aisle. I was a 22-year-old given away to a 32-year-old-man who looked 47.

* * *

Maria marries the older man. In real life. Captain von Trapp. 

An orphan who entered the convent. Maria dearly wanted to be a nun and she’s happy until widowed Georg von Trapp visits the abbey seeking a tutor for one of his children. Perhaps the Mother Abbess couldn’t say no to a highly decorated WWI submarine commander. 

In 1926, Maria was sent to the von Trapp family. A year later, they are married. Not for romance. Maria wrote, “I really and truly was not in love. I liked him but didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children.” 

At their wedding in Nonnberg Abbey Church, Maria wore a veil with a wreath of flowers in her hair. She was 22-years-old and Georg was 47. 

The year I turn 23 . . .

We move into my husband’s childhood home in New Jersey. With his parents. We cannot afford anything else. It is a neatly-kept ranch amidst suburban sprawl. I feel an unexpected belonging in the Garden State. Perhaps because my mother was born and raised here, maybe I’m a Jersey girl too.

My husband and I share a small bedroom. As I grow to like the area, he grows more sullen by the day. I should’ve seen this coming. He’s a depressed, ungrateful and sullen teenager. What grown man wants to live with his mother and stepfather? (His biological father abandoned him in his youth. Another bellwether I did not hear.)

Meanwhile, I’m never quite sure my mother-in-law likes me, eerily reminiscent of my own mother’s ambivalence. This woman though is a striking diva, star on stage and local screen,  effervescent and a tad bossy. Founder of the local theater company, she exhorts, “Audition for their next show!” I do so with disastrous results by winning the lead role. Worse, I get the part over a fantastic blonde who, apropos of the role, sumptuously sang lyric soprano. I am a mezzo at best, alto at heart. I’m also in over my head all over the place. Of course, I have to take the part; I’ve yet to memorize the lines “no thank you” and  “you’ve got to be kidding me!” 

I give my first-ever lame performance. I know what I can accomplish on stage. I’ve got the goods, but now, this fleeting family of mine will never know. They think me a poser as they sit in the audience watching my confidence combust as I strain to reach beyond my range. Luckily I contract laryngitis and I think I’m off the hook. But the director makes me lip sync the entire performance while the blonde sings my part flawlessly. How can it be that my theater safe-place has become so humiliating?

On the Fresnel-bright side, I fall in love with a fellow actor. He is lively, adorable and funny. Man, do I love a man who can make me laugh. His rose-colored charms obscure my dismal situation. We’re two married people who misbehave in the worst way. Tearing off clothes in steamy parked cars, cavorting until cops interrupt. It’s so bodily and mind-blowingly revelatory that I consider this one thought: maybe I am not broken. This is worth the price of admission and moral transgression alone. 

When the theater group flies me home to play Maria for another two-week run of The Sound of Music, I nail the role of the virginal wanna-be nun. But in my heart, I want to tell Maria, “Girl, don’t be like me, there are options! You don’t have to marry God OR the Captain!”  

* * *

For over 20 years there was another man in Maria’s life. The Roman Catholic Priest Franz Wasner. He was their music director who accompanied Maria on all concert tours. 

It’s known that the real Maria von Trapp was not as Julie Andrews portrayed. The real Maria had a formidable temper. A strong woman who was not afraid to express herself. 

This real Maria attended some of my performances. It’s unsettling singing as Maria to Maria while we’re both dressed in dirndls - her in the audience, me onstage. 

At curtain call, I’d watch from the wings with satisfaction as she took the stage, instead of me, for Maria’s due applause.

The year I turn 24 . . .

Pregnant. How can a body unconsciously decide to make another body? Especially with a man I never wanted inside (or outside) of me? There was no intention. There was birth control. Although those little pills, nauseating to swallow, were sometimes easily forgotten. Not because of lamebrain laziness, but due to the fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone which cause side-effects doctors label “mild.” As if nausea, bloating, weight gain and depression were another burden women should carry and shut-up about. 

Before this, I had actually managed to separate from my husband - for a while. His reaction was a terrifying rage that only gave me reason to run. But I didn’t. Instead, I vacillated, anchor-less, weighing staying vs. leaving until this verdict arrived: no one else would ever want me. It’s practically hopeless to harvest self-worth when it was never planted to begin with. So I returned to him and the first time we had terrible sex, I’m pregnant. 

It’s three months before my 25th birthday and I’m expecting. What, I’m not sure. Of course, a baby. But other than that, all I know is, as usual, there’s zero choice and I will handle it. Responsibility, not so much my mantle of pride, but a yoke of expectation. If I can not have more, I’ll make sure this child does. Life literally goes on.

* * *

This year as I play Maria, I’m 11 weeks with child. Costumes are tight. Nuns giggle, winking at me, as they sing about Maria and her unruly behavior.

I act happy. For acting is my forte and protection. Oscar-winning stage-wide smiles portray the beatific mother. Not yet heavy with child, but oh so heavy of heart. Regret over my choices and this baby’s father boil down to nothing. Like Maria explaining to the Mother Abbess, I try hard.

The year I turn 25 . . .

On a ridiculously hot April day, I birth a baby. An entirely new level of pain is gained. Labor is labor, after all. In an instant of intimacy, a nurse named Lisa becomes my person. A great boon since the dad-to-be is helpless, leaving frequently for cigarette breaks, though he tells me with ashtray-hot breath he quit smoking. 

But, Lisa? She stays and holds my hand. Walks me around and round the room. Lisa coaches me to squat, recounting the centuries of expectant women who leverage gravity, assuring me that I can too. Sliding a hand-mirror on the floor between my legs, she steadies me with her whole body and says, “Look At Life.” I do. I see my baby’s head crowning. Sometimes called “the ring of fire,” now I know why as I burn in the ancestral tradition of women becoming mothers. But Lisa is stalwart. Lisa knows her shit. Lisa is taking care of me. White knuckling through the insistent tides of pain, my bones beg to bring her home with the new baby instead of the new father. 

When the obstetrician arrives, he speeds things up and makes an unnecessary two-inch incision in my vagina and perineum. An episiotomy, often without choice, then performed on 64 percent of birthing women. (Today, it’s less than five percent.) But I am not one to complain to the man in scrubs. Instead, while being stitched together, I behold the flustered babe placed on my belly and wait for the Disney-esque feelings that never come. All I can think is, “Hello, little person, who are you?” I know no one can tell me, but her. 

They take my girl and roll me to a gray cinder-block hallway. I’m there for hours. No room for me in this 54-bed hospital that’s in the midst of renovations, days away from opening a beautiful new birthing center I will never see. Finally, I’m moved into a closet-room with more concrete. 

As the sun rises, a non-Lisa nurse officiously tells me it’s time to go home. I know they need the bed as much as I know I’m not ready. My genitals are a war zone. Breastfeeding is a game of who’s crying more. And even though my husband and I will take the baby home together, once there, I still will feel alone. Wheelchair-ed out to an old rusty-yellow Subaru, I can’t believe they’re letting us go. My baby and I. From this moment on, it’s as clear as the spring sky, it will be the two of us who make our ends meet.

* * *

                                                                                                                              The seven children who portray the von Trapp family love me. Each year, I adore the new brood. I’ve watched many of them grow. Who used to be Kurt now plays Fredrick. A Brigitta finally is Liesl and turning seventeen.

The secret to playing a beloved governess is that the kid actors must like not just Maria, but you. So I create relationships with all seven. A number not lost on me. There were seven kids in my family too. Inexplicably, I administer to my past by singing with these seven bright souls. In harmony. I truly fall in love with them before I even consider the Captain. Ah, life imitates art.

The year I turn 26 . . .

My stranger-husband cannot walk. He is paralyzed by an autocratic autoimmune disease. The doctor hands me pamphlets on how to have sex with a paralytic man through “stuffing.” It is my job. Pointing at black and white illustrations that reek of a 70s sex manual, he tells me, “Get in the ‘on top’ position and push his flaccid penis into your vagina.” I am ashamed. I try not to cry, work up a good-girl smile and nod. His disability beats any sort of feelings I have. My shame burns because I do not want him at all, soft or hard. 

A previously miserable man, my husband is now in an excruciating situation. A previously comfortless marriage is complicated by extensive caregiving. I feed him. I change him. I wait on him. I wipe him. All this alone. His family doesn’t come to help. Mine neither, but I understand that. His, not so much. I thought at least they acted like family. 

The weeks he is hospitalized I strap our baby into the carseat and drive an hour each way to spend the day helping him. I cannot make it better. It is the saddest year of what has become my life. The future is bleak. Now, not only the sole breadwinner, I’m a single parent and a nurse to my husband. Life is so meager, we’re given food stamps, which I cannot bear to use. We move into government subsidized housing. It’s actually nicer than the apartment we had. But it’s coated in grief and guilt and veiled with corroded chains.

January had begun with going to a therapist to plot my escape. By bitter-cold December, I can never leave. 

* * *

The von Trapps fled Austria right before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the German Reich. Georg von Trapp declines a naval command in the Nazi regime and refuses to fly the Nazi flag on his home, a villa later confiscated by the Nazi Party. It becomes the home of Heinrich Himmler, the murderous architect of the Holocaust.

The year I turn 27. . .

I had to leave him. His disease in remission, he is angrier than ever. Meaner too. He says, “You probably enjoyed your father’s incest.” 

He could walk now. So I could walk too. Out the door, over the divide between what was not my life into what could be my life.

I remember nothing of this time. The volatile how or even where I landed and laid my head to sleep. All that remains is the contamination of consequence. The greasy guilt of a child who paid a price. For the life of me, why didn’t I leave him before I had her? After all, I always would have had her. She didn’t deserve being away from her mother, her soft place, the one who was always there. 

Three days a week, I abandoned my baby because I thought I had to let her stay with him - the very man who wasn’t safe. Three nights a week, I bled; my heart repeatedly excised anew with a rusty dull box-cutter. A jagged self-inflicted wound that never heals because it’s picked at and repetitively bruised. This is why I cannot retrieve the memory. A cleft of pain I’m still repairing while it continues to bleed.   

* * *

                                                                                                                              A season before I play Maria again, I high-kicked the lead role in Anything Goes, a charismatic nightclub singer named Reno. Gone are the nun-black and chaste dirndl. Instead, I dripped in sequins and Cole-Porter-ed the hell out of it.

One month later, I’m Maria again, but scrappier this time. Less subservient. The audience loves her plucky wholeheartedness. I do too. 

The year I turn 28 . . .

Plus and minuses fill my days. As I tally the total, I use the math to assuage the impacts of divorce. All the minuses come in sums of pain my daughter absorbs. A vein-popping enraged ex who bullies, threatens and shoves his way through shared custody, adds to the plus column daily. 

Yes, I think, I was right to leave him as I duck grenades of blame for his sad life. I swallow my fear, no longer having to suffer “til death do we part.” No more living full-time under a male thumb of domination, whether a father’s or a husband’s, that requires me to soothe a man’s dysfunction. 

Jane Austen should have written, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that single parenthood is f-ing hard.” Working over-full time when you have to drop your kid off at a crappy daycare is simply impossible. But my friend gave me an apartment to live in. That is, until I get my feet under me. I don’t think they’d ever been there before, so I looked forward to the feeling. The place is sparsely furnished, but feels like a palace even though it’s a converted garage. It becomes my nest, providing shelter and insulation.

After work, I pick up my girl at daycare and we go to our birdhouse. She sits in a hook-on highchair while I serve her a mixing bowl of spaghetti. We laugh as she eats hands-full, the red sauce staining her lips ruby. When she flips the entire bowl onto her head, bliss enters the room. Our mutual joy sparks hope, we just might be okay after all. 

On nights I’m alone, it’s a crave new world. Hello, desire, nice to meet you. Night after night I twirl and whirl to Whitney Houston belting out her desire to dance with someone. Me too, Whitney, me too! Turns out that someone was me.

* * *

                                                                                                                              The year begins with buzzy aliveness as I romp onstage playing Winifred the Woebegone in Once Upon A Mattress, written by Mary Rodgers, daughter of The Sound of Music Richard Rodgers. 

When the leaves turn gold and copper, I become Maria again, kerchief tied around my hair. As usual, I await my first entrance hiding outside the theatre. Onstage a convent of nuns sing a hymn in four-part harmony. A Pavlovian prompt for my runaway heartbeat. My cue. An invitation to run into the theatre, down the center aisle, onto the stage singing. For me, it is a perennial deep breath followed by a plunge. I want this courage for my entire life. Not solely for two lousy weeks a year.

The year I turn 29 . . .

After two years of trying to convince (translation: beg, beseech and battle) my ex to peacefully co-parent (and/or parent at all), he persists in punishing me and our child. I go back to court and win full custody. 

That summer my toddler and I spend a lot of time at the theater while I play the Incomparable Rosalie in Carnival. Now there will be two of us who love it there. 

* * *

This is my last time playing the role of Maria. Twenty-one when I first stepped into her sensible shoes. Now, years later, entering stage right into the imagined Nonnberg Abbey, it is different. I am different. Maria still beseeches the Mother Abbess for help, but this time, I do too. 

The Holy Mother fervently counsels with guidance I’ve heard in postulant garb on bended knee a 100 times and more. Words woven through my years of fear, depression, loss and loneliness. But now, I, too, desperately want to know. Please, Mother Abbess-Yoda, bless, advise and confirm. And she delivers. Imploring me to seek purpose, an invocation to live life, not as I find it, but as I create it. 

At the height of the final soaring note, Maria (and I) stand, our feet grounded, and remove the postulant’s veil. We, she and I, are determined to find the life we were born to live.