by Ellie Eaton
I put my head down.
Kept on walking.
Never looking them in the eye.
They were townies. I was Divine.
52
Lena is in the garden with my mother. From the window in the attic I can see the two of them ambling up and down the lawn in deep philosophic discussion, their hands knotted behind their backs. Next time I look out they are standing at the base of the apple tree gazing up; then before I know it they are outside the toolshed. Moving like a flick book. I hear the grating sound of a ladder being dragged across gravel, Lena’s end skimming the floor, and when I come outside to join them, my daughter is standing at the base of the ladder, catching the apples as they fall. Nesting them delicately in a basket.
When she sees me coming, she points a finger at me and wags it.
“Go away, Mama.”
She doesn’t want me interrupting their little game. Or am I still not forgiven for refusing to give her the hairpin? Horrible Mummy. A baddy. A thief.
I take an apple from the basket, rub it on my thigh, and sit down in the grass.
“Hello, darling,” my mother says from the top of the tree. She makes a point of not commenting on the notebook by my side. My old leavers book, the pages yellowed and speckled with mold, the messages barely legible. Despite Rod’s constant probing about the school reunion, the guilt trips and dropping of hints, I still haven’t given her an answer.
“Taking a break from work?” Rod asks.
“Yes,” I say.
That morning I carved a desk space for myself in my mother’s attic, amongst the boxes of old reports, art projects, and address books. I sat at her writing bureau with its enormous PC that my mother uses for the sole task of corresponding with fellow DOGs. I read and reread Gerry’s message in my leavers book, rubbing it like braille, picking at the layer of Tipp-Ex. At the bottom of my school trunk were pages of old newspapers with their glaring headlines: teenager, 16, plummets from window. boarding school girl, left in coma. Underneath the pile was the bead necklace that Lauren gave me. I worked it through my fingers like a rosary, rubbing each letter in turn. Then, on a whim, I called her number, two decades too late, barely looking at my old address book, reciting the number by heart. The voice at the end of the line suspicious sounding, brusque.
“Lauren?” I asked.
“Who? No. Wrong number.”
“Lauren McKibbin,” I said, before the woman could put the phone down. “The McKibbins.”
“Who’s asking?”
“We were friends,” I said. “At school.”
I heard the woman snort with contempt and knew instantly. Kerry. She and Stuart must have stuck it out, against all odds. Good for them.
“School friends?” Kerry repeated, incredulous.
“Yes. I mean, no. We just used to hang out together. Has she moved?”
There was a moment of silence. I pictured Kerry, her small, beaklike nose, eyes narrowed, a smirk on her lips, enjoying this brief moment of power.
“Please,” I said. “I’d really like to get in touch with her.”
“Yeah, well, Lauren hasn’t lived here for years. Not since Joan passed.”
So Joan had died. I thought of her cane, hanging on the back of her kitchen chair, the tubes of pills turning on the lazy Susan. And of Lauren, curled in her mother’s lap on the floor that day, naked, sobbing.
“Do you have her address or a number?”
An angry tut at the end of the line.
“Who do you think I am, her bleeding secretary?”
“Did she go to Bournemouth?” I tried, remembering something Lauren once said.
But Kerry hadn’t changed. She was still catty sounding, spiteful.
“She fucked off after the funeral, didn’t she. Good riddance.”
I saw Lauren packing her bags, still dressed in black, stuffing clothes into one of Stuart’s old sports bags, slamming the door behind her, shoes clicking away up the street, free.
“Maybe Stuart knows?”
Kerry sighed dramatically, was quiet for a moment, then at last she said, “Who did you say you were again? An ex?”
“A friend,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, well, last I heard she’s a hairdresser. At some salon in Brighton.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Can I leave my number?” I asked.
“Suit yourself.”
I recited my mother’s number, but for all I knew Kerry was checking her split ends, examining her fingernails, writing the digits in the air.
Afterwards I sat for a long time at Rod’s desk; the lettered beads rolled through my fingers, clicking against one another. I thought about the fact that Kerry and Stuart were still together, twenty years on, probably even married. I imagined my own husband, thousands of miles away, working on his bike in the garage or slumped on our sofa with the dog, eating from a tub of peanut butter. I had never missed him so much. In twenty years’ time, I wondered, would we still be together? I pictured coming home to an empty house, one without Jürgen, and felt a jolt of panic, shook my head. Through the window I watched Lena. How she took a bite of an apple like it was a hunk of meat, savage looking, juice dribbling down her chin. Her father’s daughter. Wild, wickedly funny. Though she has the propensity in certain situations—at birthday parties or playdates—to seem unfriendly. Her head tilted to the side, just like mine, arms crossed, a deadpan face, while other girls skip and prance. Der Gevatter Tod, Jürgen teases, our little Grim Reaper. Watching Lena from the attic window, inspecting her apple core intently, I yearned to lift my daughter in my arms, feel the weight of her small, muscular body, her legs wrapping around me. Quickly I picked up the leavers book and rushed out into the garden, only to be greeted by her disapproving scowl, the wagging finger.
Rod has taken off her gloves now and is sitting on the top step of the ladder, looking down at me. I know she’s going to bring up the reunion again. I scratch my arm, avoiding her stare.
“How’s poor Jürgen getting on without you?” she asks, as if she can read my mind.
“Fine,” I say. “I think.”
This is the longest we have ever gone without speaking. Several times a day I turn to the map on my phone that shows a small orange bubble where Jürgen is sleeping. Floating above our house. When it is time for my husband to cycle to his studio, I see this same orange balloon gliding south along the L.A. River, then ten hours or so later, checking at two or three in the morning when I can’t sleep, it makes the same journey in reverse. I feel a certain kind of calmness, watching over him like this, a Zeus-like omnipotence, noticing the clockwork precision of my husband’s day, the predictability of his routine, the tidal ebb and flow of his journey across the city. Although when Jürgen falls off the grid—Location Not Available—when his phone has run out of battery power or when he makes an unusual journey, to a downtown bar, say, or a cinema or an unknown restaurant on the other side of town, anything out of the norm, an excruciating sense of panic comes over me. I find myself refreshing my phone every thirty seconds or so, my heart thumping, unable to sleep, holding it above my head like a candle in the early hours to test my connectivity.
Rod studies me from the top of her ladder, scratching my arm.
“You sure you’re all right, darling?”
“Yes.”
She points her pair of secateurs at my leavers book.
“You’re not still worrying about that silly article you sent me ages ago, are you? Boarding school what-not?”
“Syndrome,” I say.
My fingernail digs into my skin.
I shake my head.
“Utter drivel,” she says and starts picking again. “And do stop clawing your arm, you’ll make yourself bleed.”
Later we carry the basket of apples between us into the kitchen. My mother sees me staring down at my telephone for the umpteenth time and wrinkles her brow. She still has a somewhat Divine view of modern technology. She takes ou
t one apple at a time, inspecting them for blemishes.
Lena, with her magpie eye, grabs the phone from my hand.
“Dada,” she screeches.
“No phones at the table,” my mother tuts.
“It’s my daddy.”
“Just Daddy,” I say. “You don’t have to say ‘my.’”
“I want to call Dada.”
It is a Saturday, around nine in the morning in Los Angeles. The bubble is floating above the dog park.
“Okay.” I start the video call for her. “Take it into the sitting room.”
Lena cradles the phone in both hands and skips out of the room.
“Dada, Dada, Dada,” she sings.
My mother frowns at me again, an apple in her hand, then turns to the sink and carries on peeling. I wonder how long we can go on without discussing what I’m doing here on my own. Why my husband hasn’t called me, why I’m spending my days hiding away in the attic.
I sit in the kitchen, watching my mother peeling fruit over the sink and squinting through the window at her garden where a squirrel is ambushing a bird feeder. Each mottled apple skin unfurls from her palm in a long, continuous spiral. She passes one of these golden curls back for me to chew as she used to when I was a child, then carries on peeling.
“Your father once rather took a shine to one of the girls from his office,” she tells me out of nowhere, her back still turned to me.
“What? When?”
“I forget. Donkey’s years ago. Hong Kong, I think. Or maybe Singapore.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing, darling. It was just one of his silly ideas.”
She thumps on the window to scare away the squirrel.
“And your grandfather’s commanding officer wrote a stern letter to my mother, after the war, saying your grandfather was about to make a fool out of himself with some major’s wife, so she hopped on a train to Nuremberg—this was during the trials—with three babies. And that put a stop to that.”
Whatever domestic problem she thinks I’m having, it’s clear that she assumes I am the wronged party. The cheated on, not the cheater. I should be offended but when one looks at Jürgen—golden haired, blue eyed—I can see that this makes sense. The truth is I was the one with the secrets. The incriminating photos. The other women.
My mother puts her paring knife down and wipes her hands on her cooking apron. She turns around to look at me. I stop myself scratching my scar.
“Darling,” she says, “chin up, these things happen. You just have to tough it out.”
When I say nothing, she begins searching around the paperwork in her kitchen, rifling through the various baskets of seed catalogs and Home & Garden. She lays down an invitation in front of me, heavy and embossed, identical to my own.
“I know you’re rather sniffy about school these days, but at my age I really do dread driving on my own at night. I know you don’t want to go, darling, but, well . . .”
Rod looks flustered, folding and unfolding a tea towel. She hates to ask me for anything.
“Memor amici,” I say.
“Exactly.”
53
Our dorms were empty, stripped of hangings and mementos. Our trunks were packed. Instead of sleeping in our own beds we decided to spend the last evening together. One by one we dragged our horsehair mattresses from our dorm rooms and along the corridor to the rec room, thumping them down the stairs like dead bodies.
Our deputy housemistress opened her door a crack, watched for a while—utterly indifferent—and closed the door.
The twins and George played a game of lacrosse along the corridor with broken sticks and a pair of socks rolled into a ball. We grazed on whatever we found in our tuck lockers. Some girls were crying, I remember; others—the exchange students—were already asleep. Skipper pushed up the rec room window and sat on the sill staring out at the Circle. A few figures, maintenance men, stood smoking by the school gate talking to some townies. Skipper let out a loud self-pitying sigh. Her plans to be head girl forever thwarted. She curled a finger in her hair.
“C’est ça,” she said. “La fin.”
I came up behind her.
Did I already know that I’d never speak to her again? Or any Divine. That their letters and calls that summer would go unanswered. That the following term I’d persuade my parents to let me go to an international school in Hong Kong, make new friends, though none I was ever particularly close to. That I’d call myself Sephine. Lose my accent, flattening my vowels to sound less pretentious. Never ask a single question about Gerry. Never search for her obituary in the papers. Refuse to read my mother’s round robin letters, ignoring the Old Girls’ gossip. Never attend a single wedding, christening, or reunion. That—until my honeymoon, fourteen years later—I’d pretend I was never Divine.
Quietly, I moved in close to Skipper, palms flat, as if I was going to push.
“Don’t do a Gerry.”
Skipper’s eyes widened, and she squealed and grabbed the window frame.
“Oh my god,” she said, grabbing her chest. “Oh my god. Bloody hell . . .”
She held her hand to her heart, openmouthed, hyperventilating. She looked around the room to see who’d noticed.
A smirk twitched across my lips.
“Oh ha, ha.” Skipper let out a fake laugh. “Very amusing.”
I could tell that she was furious with me. She swung her legs back inside, barged past me to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and when we all went to bed she and the twins took a mattress on the floor as far away from me as possible. There was no arm tickling, no reminiscing, no final whispered words. The sisterhood was over.
I sat for a long time, propped upright with my head close to the window. I watched as sleeping bags rose and fell, listened to the sighs and snores, the slow grinding of teeth.
When I drifted off, I dreamt of Gerry. Standing in the center of the rink, smiling for the judges. Her chin held high, long swan neck, perfect white feathers, neat and unruffled. Gerry looked at me. A dark stain slowly spread across her costume. I screamed for an ambulance. I ran from judge to judge yelling, She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding. They continued their deliberations, nodding and whispering, making notes. I bellowed at the audience, her coach, the fellow skaters, hitting them, showering them with punches. Please, I shouted, can’t you see? She’s bleeding.
I jerked awake.
“Get up.” Someone shook me. “Something’s happening.”
Dazed, I saw that Skipper and the twins had crawled out of their sleeping bags and were peering under the curtain.
“Oh my god,” they hissed. “Quick, look.”
I went over to see for myself.
The townies were back.
First a group of boys jammed open a prep room window and climbed out, lugging a large television between then. They returned a few minutes later for the VHS.
A few figures came up the driveway and rattled the sports hall doors, waiting for security to stop them. No one did. There was, at most, one maintenance man on night duty. He came out of his shed and shook hands with a townie. They laughed and patted each other on the back. We watched as they pointed at the top branches of the shoe tree, then they kicked the base a few times, as if testing its strength.
Boys ran back and forth with objects under their arms. Typewriters, projectors, a bronze bust of our founder. A team of three pushed a harp. It played a disjointed tune as it rattled over cobbles.
“Plebs,” Skipper said, returning to her mattress.
Any one of us could have sounded the alarm but, by then, what did it matter? When there was a dull thud and a crash and the icy scrape of something very heavy being slid across concrete, we lay back down, closed our eyes, waiting for it to be over.
54
At the reunion we stand side by side, Rod and I, sipping from plastic goblets, our respective years, ’96 and ’73, pinned to our chests. I have no idea what I’m doing here, why I let Rod bully me into coming or arrangin
g the sitter. Jürgen was right all along: the past should stay where it is, dead and buried. I want to rip off my name badge and run for the door. Beg my husband to forgive me.
“Lawks, darling,” my mother says, looking down at her lapel, practically giddy. “I’m vintage. Chateau Margaux.”
I chew on my empty glass, watching trays of homemade sandwiches circulate. A hundred or more DOGs are crammed into the place we once called the Egg—now the communal entrance hall of twenty or so split-level maisonettes. The occupants, members of a shared ownership scheme, have been bribed into letting us poke around their abodes in carefully escorted groups, no more than five or six at a time.
My mother has forgotten her reading glasses. While we wait for our turn, she peers unashamedly at the breasts of the women who pass. First name, pseudonym, surname.
“I don’t recognize anyone,” Rod says, frowning.
Her enthusiasm wanes, and she nervously puts her hand to her throat, swallowing. Back-to-school jitters.
“I’m sure they’ll be here soon, Mummy.”
She redirects the conversation. “It’s rather a poor show from your lot, isn’t it? I suppose things had rather gone to pot by the end. Your year never did quite gel in the way we did.”
This is, I think, one of her greatest understatements.
I glance around the room, playing with the hairpin in my pocket. The Egg is eerily unchanged, the original tiled fireplace is framed by four matching wingback chairs, remarkably like the leather thrones our gargantuan housemistresses once inhabited. The mahogany chest where we collected our mail each morning has been replaced by a long sleek glass table, similarly used as a dumping ground for junk mail, takeaway menus, and oversized parcels that won’t fit through the small pigeonholes assigned to residents.
I think of the morning after the dares and am overcome by a feeling of dread that I haven’t felt in two decades or more. I hear the bell ringing, Divines streaming in one long blue river to chapel, arms knotted together, flicking their hair. I sweat uncontrollably, fear knotting my stomach, and gnaw deeper on my plastic cup.
