Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  I rooted around until I felt something plastic. I pulled it out.

  It was a Discman. A set of tangled earphones, too. I turned the Discman over in my hands. Its weight, color—submarine-gray—and alien shape were familiar, though I hadn’t held one in a long time. I ran my fingers against the buttons. There was a disc inside, paused. I could feel it. The Discman still hummed with energy.

  The commissary would rent boom boxes and tapes to us for parties, but the Discman felt different somehow. It wasn’t just any Discman; it was Theo’s. His artifact from a different world.

  “You okay?” Theo said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Man, how did you know that I had it?” he said. “Did you hear me?”

  I touched the wall behind me on the bed. “You were here, weren’t you, leaning against the wall? I could hear it bleeding through. Your headphones aren’t very good.”

  “Oh.”

  “What were you listening to?”

  He held it out to me. “See for yourself.”

  I slipped on the headphones and pressed play.

  A chorus of sha la las echoed over a menacing guitar. Then a sad, hysterical voice sang: Life goes on here—day after day. I don’t know if I’m living—or if I’m supposed to be …

  I pulled off the headphones.

  “Like it?” he said.

  I cradled the Discman to my lap. “Have you had this the whole time? You snuck it in?”

  He nodded.

  “Aren’t you worried about getting caught?” I said. “You could go to the tower for this. Or worse.”

  He shrugged. “Music saved my life,” he said. “More than once. I would give up a lot for Catherine. But not music.”

  I held out a hand for the wine. He passed it to me.

  “I thought you were happy,” I said after I drank. “You and Nick—you’re always laughing. I thought you were so happy.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?” he said after a long time.

  “This isn’t a happy room.”

  His eyes drifted over the empty walls and floor before settling on the empty desk. He stared.

  “I’m … not so good sometimes,” he said. “But I’m working on it. Being happy. I’m trying really hard. We’ve been adjusting my prescriptions since my annual. The doctors here are really good. And I’m okay in the day. When I’m outside, with friends—and since the coming in. I’ve been better, since then.”

  His eyes flashed on me. It was the first time I had heard anyone mention the coming in.

  “I’m still sad,” he said. “But I think I’m going to be better.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m trying.”

  I ran a finger around the lip of the wine bottle.

  “Is that your only CD?” I said.

  He hesitated.

  “You’re not going to rat me out?” he finally said.

  “No.”

  He got up and reached behind me, under the bed. I watched as he lifted the sheet, dug his hand into a slit in the mattress, and pulled out a CD booklet.

  I flipped through them one by one. Seventies prog rock, R&B, psychedelic jazz.

  “What’s this one?” I said, pointing to a burned CD with a heart drawn on it in permanent marker.

  “Just a mix.”

  “Did a girl give it to you?”

  He grinned.

  I popped it into the Discman.

  The first track was a sixties girl group song. I could see them: a trio of girls in matching black dresses singing with perfect, pretty charm. How gentle is the rain that falls softly on the meadow!

  What was it like to be so sweet?

  “Do you like it?” Theo said as the song finished.

  “One second. I’m listening to it again.”

  I skipped back.

  Afterward, I slipped the headphones off and said, “Do you think anyone in the world is really that nice?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “So sweet and happy. So in love.”

  “Maybe. I’m in love.”

  “With Andie?”

  Andie was the second-year he was currently dating. She was a pale, pretty girl, taller than him, with big teeth and thick, horsey blond hair. They liked making out in the stairwell before dinner.

  “Andie, yeah. And other girls. Everyone. It ain’t good.” He laughed. “Aren’t you the same?”

  “No. I don’t fall in love.”

  He laughed again.

  “What?”

  “You fuck, like, everyone.”

  “That’s not love.”

  He shook his head. “Shameless.”

  I hugged my knees.

  “Don’t you want it?” he said. “Love and butterflies, all that? Most girls do.”

  “I don’t think so. No, not really.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Fuck around.”

  I had never wondered that before.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said. “It feels good. To be touched in such a … silly way. To be so close, surrounded by all that skin and squeaking. You can’t see anything and can’t hear anything … it’s like the rest of the world is muffled. I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It’s something to do.”

  I handed the Discman back to him. “Thanks.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Can I come back and listen to it?”

  “Sure. Whenever.”

  I took another glug from the wine.

  “How about right now?” I said.

  He passed me the Discman.

  I lay back on his bed. I clapped the headphones over my ears.

  *

  After leaving Theo’s, I returned to my room. I crept over to Baby’s bed and pushed at her warm body. She shifted, then continued snoring. I let her sounds soothe me.

  What do you want? M. Owens had asked during our meeting last semester.

  I tried to imagine the crystal vases, the yellow buds and curling pink petals. I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to imagine full, beautiful things.

  I mostly just felt tired.

  We weren’t supposed to remember anything of our past lives here at Catherine. But I remembered everything about that night and that room—the room where everything twisted. I remembered the girl’s warm hands in mine as we jumped on the hotel bed, laughing and posing for the man’s camera, click-click-click; I remembered his necklace, glinting in the greenish light, as he turned to close the curtains; I remembered her giggles as she begged, pretty please, for more. I remembered slumping down in the bed, staring at the room service tray. I remembered dirty napkins, half a tuna club sandwich, and three silver bowls of melting strawberry ice cream.

  That was the last thing I remembered—those ice cream bowls. And when I woke up the next afternoon, he was gone, and she was there, staring into me. Vomit pooled beside her on the bed.

  I’d touched her cheek. It wasn’t warm anymore.

  I curled up closer to Baby.

  It wasn’t your fault, I tried to tell myself. You barely even knew her name.

  But why hadn’t I called for help? Why hadn’t I screamed? Why had I run away?

  I didn’t know. But I wished I had stayed. Maybe then I wouldn’t see her face now, drifting behind my closed lids like a pale balloon. Her eyes, dead and staring. Her graying skin. Her whitish mouth.

  I rubbed Baby’s shoulder.

  What do you want to do?

  I’d already done everything I wanted to do. I’d swum naked at night in heated pools. I’d kissed the most beautiful boys. I’d lounged for hours in squeaky restaurant booths eating plate after plate of buttery spaghetti, laughing as men felt me up under the table. And it all turned me toward that face.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of Baby’s neck. Her hair cream smelled like almond blossoms.

  *

  Beginner’s German met on the top floor of the Ashley tower. The room was so high up that during class I
watched the flat blue sky through the window and wondered if we had drifted away from the rest of the house.

  I couldn’t daydream too much, though; German was hard. Every day we had new vocabulary to memorize, essays to write, and skits to practice and perform. But I liked it more than my other classes that semester. The modern art history survey, Literature of War, Black Visual Culture, and Electricities, with its cryptic syllabus, were all impenetrable, whereas German could be translated. German had rules. And in the merry, cartoon-colored world of our textbook, everything was simple. There was a family with a mother, father, son, daughter, and cat. The family lived in a big house. The parents loved the children. The children loved the cat. The cat said miau.

  Anna and Nick and I sat together at the back of the table, as far away from M. Amsel’s glare as possible. Anna was the perfect student, sharp, energetic, and always on time. Nick and I were usually late and hungover. As we slouched into the room, M. Amsel would tch tch tch, slap the table, and cry out, Nehmen Sie sich selbst ernst! I didn’t know what that meant. She never stayed mad at Nick, though; in his effortless, indolent way, he was acing the class. I was not.

  One day Anna came in late. Nick and I were already practicing our dialogue—my name was Hilde, his was Günther, and we were looking to rent a student apartment in Berlin—when she opened the classroom door.

  Anna handed a note to M. Amsel, who barely glanced at it before nodding and gesturing to our table.

  “What was that?” Nick whispered as she sat down with us. “Can we just show up whenever we want now?”

  “You already show up whenever you want.” Anna slipped out of her jacket and leaned back in her chair. Her cheeks were flushed fresh apple red from the cold. “I had an evaluation.”

  “An evaluation?” I said. “For what?”

  “For the new materials concentration.”

  I must have looked confused, because she went on: “Acceptance into the concentration isn’t based only on your grades and test scores. You’re also assessed for, like, general fitness for the discipline.”

  Nick wasn’t listening anymore. He was drawing bigger boobs on one of the women in the textbook. He had an imperious way of quickly losing interest in a conversation.

  “What’s it like?” I said. “The evaluation? What are they looking for?”

  Anna shrugged.

  “What kind of questions do they ask?”

  She pulled her hair up into an impatient ponytail without meeting my eye. “I don’t know. It’s like the stuff they asked on our Catherine interview, you know, the third one? Like that, but more, I don’t know. Intense.” She snapped on the hair tie. “Want to make sure you can handle the pressure, I guess.”

  My third Catherine interview had been nine hours long. Nine hours seated at a mahogany dining room table with five middle-aged strangers staring at me. I’d drunk glass after glass of orange juice as I tried to keep up with their endless questions, questions that seemed to have no pattern or significance. Did I bite my nails? When did I get my first period? What was my most embarrassing moment? Who was my third-grade teacher?

  I didn’t remember how I’d answered them all, or if I’d even answered honestly. I couldn’t imagine what Anna meant by calling this evaluation “more intense.”

  Nick rested his golden head on his textbook. He closed his eyes.

  “Can you?” I said.

  “Can I what? Handle the pressure?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. But I have to try.”

  “Auf Deutsch, bitte!” M. Amsel crowed.

  Anna glanced at her before saying, “Das plasm ist … it’s the whole reason I came here. If I don’t get in, I don’t know what I’ll do. I guess concentrate in history or some shit.”

  Nick’s lips parted in his sleep.

  Anna’s face was dark.

  “What did they ask you about?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Friends, family. My brother.”

  “Why would they want to know about your brother?”

  She turned to me. “I don’t know. I have nothing to say about my brother.”

  I’d never seen such a sharp expression in her eyes. But before I could apologize or ask anything further, she’d already turned away and flipped open her textbook.

  I wondered, not for the first time, how Anna had ended up at Catherine. Not that she wasn’t smart. I saw her calm, satisfied expression whenever she received exam results. But she had the kind of simple, amenable intelligence that would have succeeded anywhere. I could easily imagine her at a real college, playing hacky sack on some quad or chugging cheap beer at a tailgate. She was fun. She was friendly. Compared to most of us, Anna was as tanned and open and easy as the sun.

  But sometimes I sensed something else in her—a tension in her fist as she took down notes, a hesitation before she laughed at an insult. Sometimes I felt she had only learned to be herself by pretending.

  Anna’s eyes roved as she read the assignment on the blackboard. She narrowed them in concentration.

  Whoever Anna was before Catherine didn’t matter. She was here now.

  “Herr Townsend!” M. Amsel cried. She threw a piece of chalk at his head. It clattered off the table.

  “I’m up,” Nick said, lifting his head. “I’m up.”

  *

  The pressure of applying for the new materials concentration was getting to Baby. Whenever I came home, no matter the time, Baby would be awake, muttering to herself as she hunched over one project or another. She was taking an advanced mathematics course this semester, one of the classes that broke many of the would-be concentrators. She spent hours staring at lines of intricate code before writing out page after page of solutions. I didn’t know what any of it meant. I just brought her tea and snacks from the dinners she missed. She took the tea, but otherwise ignored me.

  I was lying in bed chewing the remains of a cough drop when, in one great push, Baby shoved all of the notes off her desk. They swooshed to the floor.

  Her face was clammy, her hair undone in a shocked mess. For a moment I thought she might burst into tears, but her eyes stayed stark wide.

  She said, “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, I can’t,” she said. “You don’t understand. We had our midterm—and I was below the curve. We haven’t gotten our grades back. But I know I was.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine, Baby. Look at all this.” I gestured toward the pages. “You’re doing so much. I’m sure it’s all better than you think. You’re not going to fail.”

  “I need to relearn this second theorem—but I don’t have time. I’m trying so hard, but I never have enough time.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’m going to fail.”

  “You, sweet Baby? You’re not going to fail.”

  “Stop saying that. I might. And if I do, I don’t get into the concentration. Don’t you understand?”

  Her body heaved. She closed her eyes.

  “Baby, dear.”

  I slipped off the bed and sat down at her knee. She didn’t look at me. Her lips were twitching.

  “You’ll get into the concentration,” I said. “I know you will. But even if you don’t, it’s fine. You can concentrate in something else. It’ll be fine.”

  “What do you know? You don’t even go to class.”

  “I go to class.”

  “Not really. Not lately.”

  She was right. I had been skipping more and more. Whatever drive I’d had at the beginning of the semester had puttered out. My classes were too broad, too crooked and abstruse, every lesson more incomprehensible than the last.

  Either way, midterms were over, and finals too far away to worry about yet. It was a warm, soft night in April. A floral breeze passed through the window. A group of students were hanging out in the courtyard. Every once in a while they would burst into sudden crazy laughter.

  “You don’t get it,” Baby said with a singsong tone. “You’re someone—”

  She suddenly grasped my
hand.

  “You are going to be okay,” she said. “Do you understand? You are. You’re pretty, and you are—cool. You’re going to have a good life. You’ll meet new people and go new places. You will be glad sometimes and sad sometimes. You will be okay. Most people will be okay. But I’m not.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  She looked down at the pages on the floor. I couldn’t tell if she had heard me.

  “When I was accepted here, to Catherine,” she said, “at first I thought it was a mistake. I’m not special like everyone else. I’m not creative. Not very smart. I’m not good at anything, really. But then I realized. It’s because of how badly I want it—plasm. It’s the only thing I’ve ever cared about. The only thing I’ve ever loved.”

  “Baby,” I said, “you haven’t even worked with plasm yet, have you? How do you know you love it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I do—love it. I always have.” She raised her eyes to me. “I was rejected from every college I applied to—did you know that? Even my safety. Everywhere except Catherine.”

  I rubbed her arm.

  “I couldn’t have gone anywhere else but Catherine, either,” I whispered. “I didn’t come here for any good reason. I was running away.”

  “You say that,” she said, “and maybe you think it’s true. But look at you.” She was almost sneering. “Of course there’s something special about you, some reason you belong here. You could have run anywhere. But you came here.”

  I thought of Mr. González’s face, his smile as he handed me a macadamia nut chocolate. He’d thought I belonged here, too.

  “I have nothing else,” Baby was saying. “Plasm is the only thing. The only thing for me.”

  “Baby.” I rubbed her arm. “You’re eighteen. And you really are smart. Much smarter than me. And you work so hard. How do you know what your life will be like? You can graduate and get a job, like as a chemist or a librarian or something. Live in a nice house, marry someone—maybe Jason. Isn’t he nice?”

  Jason was a mumbling boy with pink cheeks and long eyelashes who shuffled over to our room sometimes to ask Baby for help with a problem set. His crush on her was sweet. She never noticed him.

  “You could marry Jason,” I said, “and live with him in a nice, big yellow house. A yellow house full of babies.”

  Baby was idly examining the tip of her pencil.