Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “Tell me a story,” I said.

  She wiped the side of her mouth. “Once upon a time there were two lovely princesses. Named Ines and Yaya.”

  “What nice names.”

  “Yes. Princess Ines and Princess Yaya were the prettiest, kindest princesses in all the land. But they were trapped in an evil castle under an evil spell. The palace was full of trials and dangers and traps and terrible mysteries. But the princesses were smart. And best friends.”

  “And sisters.”

  “And sisters.”

  Yaya took a sip of the soda.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Do the princesses escape the castle?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”

  I grabbed the soda.

  Yaya leaned back on her hands. She was smiling.

  “Yaya?” I said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Do you know what plasm is?”

  “What do you mean? Plasm, the new material?”

  “Yes. Plasm. I mean, do you really understand what it is—exactly? Do you really get it?”

  Yaya narrowed her eyes.

  The truck beeped as it backed into the dock. Yaya smoothed her skirt over her knees.

  “I don’t think anyone really gets it,” she said. “Except new materials scholars, I guess.”

  I wiped my nose. I might have been getting a cold.

  I said, “That’s why I’m going to seduce Theo.”

  Yaya almost choked on the soda. “What?”

  “I want to understand plasm,” I said. “Really get it. But I’m not cut out for the concentration the way Theo is. But maybe … you know. I can get him to spill some secrets to me.”

  Yaya laughed without sound. “I mean, girl, he’d definitely sleep with you. And he’s not so, like, pretentious, like the other concentrators. But he’s not going to spill any secrets. Not to you, anyway.”

  “Why not?” I gestured for the soda.

  She passed it to me. “He’ll fuck anything, obviously. But he’s into, like, little darling girls. You know? The nice ones. Remember Andrea? And Marina, that girl who never stopped giggling?” She shook her head. “He’s not gonna crush on you because you’d never even let him. To do that, you’d have to be open and real. Be nice to him and let him be nice to you. And that’s not going to happen.”

  I put my chin in my hand.

  Yaya yawned.

  “I can pretend,” I said. “I can be nice. I have friends now. Haven’t you seen? We study together.”

  “Ines, child,” she said, “why do you even care? Don’t fuck with Theo, and don’t fuck with plasm. Don’t let this house eat you up. If you keep messing with shit you don’t understand, you’re going to get stuck. Just let it go.”

  I picked at the label on the soda bottle.

  Of course Yaya would say I should let it go. She didn’t care about plasm because she cared about other things—her family, her beauty, her friends. She had a life outside of Catherine. But what did I have?

  What if I wanted to get stuck?

  Bunny was tramping up the steps. “Truck’s here,” he called to Yaya.

  Out back, the truck was already opened and a stout little woman bent over the boxes, ticking off numbers from a bag of papers. Her skin was wrinkled and dark, her wiry gray hair twisted up with a pencil.

  “Hey, Glo,” Yaya called to her as we climbed into the truck.

  “You’ve got to help me here,” the woman mumbled without looking up. “I think I lost my glasses.”

  I stepped farther into the truck as Yaya went to help find Glo’s glasses. It was damp and warmer in here than out on the dock. Like the inside of a bear’s winter den. I ran my hand along the wall.

  A memory flashed: Green lights on the windshield as I drove past a gas station like I was blasting through the cosmos. Mucus clogging my throat. Fast-food wrappers crumpled on the dashboard. The smell of grease and sweat.

  It had been such a long time since I was on the road.

  “There are definitely too many combs,” Glo was saying.

  “No,” Yaya said. “These are good. We use them at the salon.”

  “Let me go back to my list.” Glo tramped into the room with an exhausted limp, clipboard in hand.

  I walked farther into the truck. Through the window in the back, I could see the driver’s cabin and the windshield.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Yaya said.

  She stood behind me, tapping a pencil against the truck wall. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring ahead.

  “If we went straight down that road,” she said, “for a long time—we could be somewhere real. Like Philadelphia. Or New York.”

  Glo grunted as she tried to lift a box. Yaya ran to help her.

  “I don’t know how you girls stay here,” Glo said as Yaya took the box from her. “Three years without TV? Without my little magazines?” She rubbed at the knee that seemed to be the source of her limp. “I’d go crazy, I really would.”

  “We are,” Yaya said, grunting.

  “Are what?” Glo said.

  Yaya set down the box. “Going crazy.”

  *

  That winter, I was taking a seminar on landscapes. It was one of those classic Catherine surveys that whirled back and forth, up and down, through centuries, objects, and personalities with no concept of narrative. The class met Thursday evenings in the basement of the Ashley tower, in a narrow windowless room with an overactive radiator. There, cramped together in the clammy dark, we watched the projector click through vision after vision of faraway dreamlands: mountain crags whitened by sea foam and wind; cities limned by red and blue grid lines; hellscapes so bloody and grimy and crowded with sex they made my heart beat faster.

  Watteau’s garden fêtes were my favorite. His bouquets of women shimmered in pink taffeta and lace as they romped over flowering meadows and gazed over rosy white skies. Their giggling faces were as pretty as cupcakes.

  We visited the Ashley gallery in January. The professor shuffled us from panel to panel as he delivered anxious, rambling lectures on how space approached and receded from the picture plane, the order and disorder of the subjects in space. When he finished, he shooed us away to take notes for our essays.

  Most of the other students hung around the main galleries, but I went alone to the third room. My footsteps echoed as I entered through the doorway and sat. The room was almost empty except for my painting, the one I had chosen for my essay. It was a good enough landscape. A nice calm view of verdant fields, pale windmills, and blue skies.

  I tapped my pencil against my notepad. I had nothing to say about it.

  “You’re not looking very closely, are you?”

  I turned. Viktória was standing by the door. Viktória, wearing a green satin dress and three silver bracelets.

  “Sorry,” I breathed.

  She took two steps closer, bracelets tinkling and heels clicking against the floor. She gestured to the painting. “Look closer,” she said. “Pay attention.”

  I tried to turn away from her.

  “It’s not just a simple pastoral scene, is it?” she said. “See the field workers in the background? Look how their forms mirror the forms of the windmills, and how the windmills mirror those of the clouds. It’s not just a landscape. It is a story, a story of man working in harmony with nature. Humanity in rhythm with grass and soil and atmosphere. Every particular in concert, in control. How strange. Don’t you think?”

  She sat down next to me on the bench.

  “I should come here more often,” she murmured, so low it could have been to herself. “I always feel better when I do.”

  For a moment I felt as if I were intruding in one of Viktória’s private spaces. The thought made my stomach flutter.

  I heard myself say, “But what about the sparrow?”

  Viktória blinked, as if coming out of a reverie. “The sparrow?”

  I pointed at the bird in the foregr
ound. There, a little brown sparrow splashed in a puddle, wings blurred with movement.

  “You say everything is in harmony, in control,” I said. “But the sparrow isn’t in control. It just … flew here, in smears of paint. It’s wild.”

  Viktória stared at the sparrow for a while.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “The precious bird with its smears of paint.” She was smiling a little. “Weissenbruch couldn’t capture its fluttering by design, could he? Not like the workers and the windmill and the farm. The bird, so alive—it escapes painting’s architecture. It escapes design and description and discipline. Weissenbruch could only capture it as a moment, here, on the real painting surface.” She reached out a hand as if to touch it, that place where the sparrow’s oil paint encrusted the canvas. “Because, like the painting, the bird is present. It is real. And the only real thing is matter.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was about to cry.

  “So real and alive,” she said, “so beautifully alive, forever.”

  She turned to me.

  “I know these past months have been hard for you,” she whispered. “But I see you. You’re doing so much better than you were, Ines. You’re working hard. And you’re doing well. You really are.”

  She touched my shoulder.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  *

  Where was I going?

  The nights darkened and twisted.

  I was woken up by a knock at my door.

  I wriggled in bed. I wasn’t alone; a first-year was splayed naked on my floor, his back glowing like sharkskin in the moonlight. I didn’t remember bringing him home. I didn’t remember a lot of things from the night. The room lurched.

  The knock sounded again. The boy on the floor didn’t move. I stepped over him as I went to crack open the door.

  Theo’s eye peered back at me. “Ines,” he said. “Sorry, I know it’s late—” He looked me up and down. “Are you naked?”

  “Why,” I whispered, voice rasping, “are you awake?”

  He met my eye again. “Man, you’ve gotta see what I’ve found,” he said. “I was, I don’t know, wandering around—I went down to the second basement—wait, let me just show you.” He shifted from one excited foot to the other. “Come on. It’ll be a nice walk. You’re gonna love it.”

  I rubbed my face. “Give me a second,” I mumbled.

  I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, then dragged the blanket from Baby’s bed and draped it over the boy on the floor. He didn’t move.

  The house, as Theo and I wandered through it, was quiet and still, like it had slumped into a drunken languor. Theo didn’t talk much, but his pace was excited. As we walked by the windows that looked out onto the black yard, our reflections drifted like spirits over the glass.

  We went down into a basement hallway lined with yellow wallpaper that led to a slim white door. Theo pushed it open.

  The room was tiny, and crammed full with a wreckage of cardboard boxes, office chairs, rolltop desks, and squashy vinyl couches. I could barely see to the opposite wall. The overhead light buzzed with electricity.

  I reached into an open cardboard box. It was filled with leather albums. I flipped open the first one to see a photo of a blond woman and two grinning kids on a snowy mountain, the kids clutching skis in their eager, mittened hands. In the next one, the same woman lay on a bed, curled beside a black poodle. She was pretending to be asleep, but her mouth was quirked into a smile. She knew the photographer was watching her, and she liked him watching her.

  “I think it’s all stuff left over from when they moved the professors’ offices,” Theo said, voice muffled. He had moved deeper into the maze of boxes and furniture. “Storage that they never sent out. Isn’t it amazing?”

  I closed the album.

  The next box was filled with old physics syllabi typed on a word processor. The next, hand-thrown pottery—misshapen bowls and ugly vases—cushioned by yellowing newspapers. I unwrapped the newspaper to read one of the headlines: “Hurricane Hugo’s Path of Devastation.”

  “You still haven’t noticed the best part,” Theo said.

  He was watching me now, grinning as he tossed a red yo-yo back and forth between his hands.

  He looked pointedly in the corner.

  There, propped up on a crooked stack of Yellow Pages, was a television.

  I walked over to it. The TV was covered in a fine layer of dust. It looked like it might still work. A tangle of cords ran from it to the wall and a VCR.

  I ran a hand over the TV’s plastic body. I pressed power.

  The TV popped to life. Its screen crackled with static electricity.

  “It works,” Theo said. His face was near mine, illuminated by the TV’s blue light. “Doesn’t get any channels, of course. But look.” He kicked a milk crate beside the TV stand.

  The crate was filled with videotapes. I recognized some of the titles—Back to the Future, The Thing, four tapes of M.A.S.H.—and others I didn’t. Placed on top were The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, and Hello, Dolly!

  “You said you liked musicals,” Theo said.

  I picked up The Sound of Music. The case showed Julie Andrews twirling, arms open wide as the sky.

  “Are you happy?” Theo said. “You don’t seem happy.”

  I set down the tape.

  “Which one should we watch first?” I said.

  We decided on Bye Bye Birdie. We pushed one of the vinyl couches in front of the TV and popped in the tape. We turned off the lights.

  I had never seen Bye Bye Birdie before. It was a wonderful movie, colorful and big. I hadn’t realized how much I missed being entertained without working, without having to read or write or talk. It felt good to watch giddy teenagers cheer and sing and dance with cotton-candy-colored Princess phones and swoon into each other’s loving arms. Theo hadn’t seen the movie before, either, but that didn’t stop him from singing along. He made up lyrics as he went, belting so loudly the room echoed.

  “You have a beautiful voice,” I said. We were lying lengthwise on the couch, legs entwined.

  “Do you really think so?” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “So beautiful. Really, really nice.”

  He was laughing. “You’re such a fucking bitch.”

  I kicked him. He kicked me back.

  “Do you know,” I said, “you’re the only one who thinks I’m funny?”

  “You are funny.”

  “I know. But no one else thinks I am. Everyone else takes me so seriously.”

  Theo rubbed at his hair. He was concentrating on the movie again. He looked at everything with such focus.

  I shifted closer to him on the couch. I touched his neck.

  He turned to me. His mouth was still relaxed from laughing. He looked me up and down and smiled. But he didn’t move any closer.

  “What?” I said. There was a laugh in my throat, too.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” he said.

  “Don’t remember what?”

  “We’ve already, um, slept together.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “Sure did.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Our first night at Catherine. After the party.”

  I tried to think back to that first night. I remembered lying in the bathtub, meeting Baby and Billie Jean, and being sick. Before that—yes, I had left the party with a boy. It could have been Theo, I guessed. It could have been anyone.

  I sat back. “I didn’t realize that was you.”

  Ann-Margret was singing her last song against the blue screen. The credits rolled.

  I crawled over to the VCR to hit stop, then rewind. The tape whirred.

  “Man, I wish we had some Twizzlers,” he mumbled. “Or, what are those little things called … Raisinets. What do you want?”

  “What?”

  “What’s your candy? You know, in a theater?”

  �
��Oh,” I said.

  I sat up.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Theo ran a hand over my shoulder.

  “Did you like the movie?” he said. “Do you want to watch another one?”

  His voice was kind and sweet.

  I got up.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I just,” I said, “I don’t know. I need to go.”

  As soon as I left the room, I realized I didn’t know how to get back to Molina. It didn’t matter. I just started walking.

  Gerald

  “Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune?” I said.

  M. Owens stirred his tea. “Must we keep at this game?”

  “What else are we going to do?”

  He sank in the armchair, placing his teacup on the side table. “Well,” he finally said. “Jeopardy! then, of course. Wheel of Fortune is imbecilic.” He tapped his lip. “We used to watch Jeopardy! every Thursday at my in-laws’ after dinner. Cheesecake, coffee, and Alex Trebek.”

  He sipped his tea. His eyes, watching the morning light shift over the bookcases, were rheumy and pink.

  Our advisors had been invited to the Molina music room for our spring orientation, a supposedly casual get-together that did not feel casual at all. Most of the advisors roved the room with self-satisfied smiles, wandering up to unsuspecting students to quiz them on planned study courses or reading schedules, tutorial designs or project proposals. Some students rambled on for anyone who would listen. Others huddled by the tea service and tried not to meet their advisor’s eyes as they shoved biscotti into their pockets.

  For the first time in my academic career, I was actually ahead of schedule. I had decided to write my tutorial on the paintings of Agnes Martin. One of her works had been hanging in the gallery for a few weeks now. It was a simple painting of almost nothing: a square of white and off-white stripes. It made me feel calm.

  When I had met with M. Owens earlier to confirm the topic, he didn’t ask any follow-up questions. He simply nodded and ran through the requirements, which included two classes on mid-century abstract expressionism and minimalism, along with regular meetings before I even started writing the actual tutorial. That would be next fall and winter. Then he handed me the updated course catalogue and waited for me to leave his office.