The Moth Diaries

by Rachel Klein

  Claire was waiting for me out in the hallway. She wanted to hear every word he said to me. I felt like telling her what an ass she’s making of herself. She follows him around like a sheepdog with her wide nose and thick lips and the hair falling in ringlets over her dark blue eyes. I expect her to start panting and to let her pink tongue hang out of her mouth.

  The other day, Sofia came to my room in tears because Claire had told her that the dark hairs growing around her nipples were disgusting and would turn men off. Sofia was ready to pluck them. I told her not to do that. They’ll grow back even thicker and blacker. Then she’ll never get rid of them. Claire knows Sofia’s obsessed about her body. I think it’s an Italian thing, to worry about how you present yourself to men. Sofia’s always talking about cutting una bella figura in bed, even though she’s never been to bed with a man.

  “Have you ever seen Claire’s tits?” I asked. “They’re like sausages.”

  She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled down her bra. “What do you think?” she asked. “Tell me honestly.”

  I stared at her tiny breasts, which she pushed up with her hands. Her nipples were a pale pink that melted into the white skin surrounding it. There were three or four long black hairs around each nipple. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “Your breasts are beautiful,” I said. “Really beautiful. Who cares about a few hairs?”

  Sofia laughed. She always laughs about herself the instant she’s finished crying. She’s always going on bizarre diets, like eating two prunes and a dried fig before every meal. She knows she’s silly. But she can’t help herself. I know that next week she’ll be down at breakfast, eating sticky buns and oatmeal. She can’t lose weight. I don’t know why she tries.

  In a way I like Sofia more than anyone else here, but it bothers me that she’s always so quick to believe stupid things that other people say just because they pretend to know what they’re talking about, whether it’s sex or the meaning of life. Yesterday at breakfast, I heard Sofia at the other end of the table: “So there’s no reason to go on living. Life is meaningless. There’s really no significance to anything. Why do we live if we’re only going to die in the end?”

  She sort of has a point there.

  The whole time she said this, she held a sugar doughnut in her hand, ready to take a bite of it. It’s Dora again. She’s been reading Camus and Sartre and has fed Sofia a bunch of crap about existentialism and the meaning of life. Or rather, the lack of meaning of life. Sofia doesn’t read the books herself. She just listens to what Dora says and becomes even more depressed about her parents’ divorce. That’s what’s depressing her – not some abstract philosophy. Who cares what Nietzsche says if you feel fine? Everyone at the table burst out laughing when Sofia made her statement. I did too.

  I yelled down to her, “Sugar doughnuts are worth living for.”

  A quote from Nietzsche before I give Dora back her book:

  “I wish were wise! I wish I were wise from the heart of me, like my serpent!”

  I’m sick of Dora.

  September 24

  I got back ten minutes late from hockey practice. As I ran up the stairs, I thought that with my luck this will be the one afternoon Mrs. Halton decides to check on us and I’ll get a detention and won’t be able to go to dinner in Chinatown this weekend. I turned the corner onto the corridor and saw someone slip into the doorway opposite my room. Of course, it could have been anyone wearing that long blue skirt and white shirt with the tails hanging out, but I knew it was Lucy. The door to Ernessa’s room was closed when I reached it. It looked like an enormous blank eye.

  I was right. Lucy wasn’t in her room. What do the two of them talk about? I wouldn’t think they would have anything to say to each other.

  September 25

  Yesterday Sofia did something strange. She went to Miss Rood to talk about her feelings of dread and hopelessness. Miss Rood isn’t exactly the kind of person I’d ever confide in. But Sofia really likes Miss Rood, and she talks to her all the time. Miss Rood is nice to Sofia because she comes from a “good” family. It’s almost all right that her father is Italian. That kind of foreignness is acceptable. Italy is Rome and the Renaissance and all that. It’s different for a Jew from Eastern Europe. Western civilization didn’t begin on the border between Poland and Russia. Miss Rood tolerates us. She doesn’t make a secret of it.

  Dora told me Ernessa is Jewish. That makes three of us, sort of. I’m sure Ernessa’s relatives didn’t come from some unpronounceable town that no longer exists. They probably came from Prague or Warsaw or Budapest. Dora likes to think she’s Jewish even though her mother comes from a Waspy Boston banking family and she’s never set foot in a synagogue. Her Jewish father is a psychiatrist, and she thinks it makes her seem more intellectual to be Jewish. At least I am totally Jewish. Both my parents were born Jews and called themselves Jews.

  Miss Rood listened to Sofia for an hour; then she sent her away with a book under her arm. It was Miss Rood’s own copy of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. I know that because when I opened the faded green cover, I saw her name on the endpaper: Hilda Rood. Miss Rood would never give me a book to read. And, of course, she doesn’t realize that Sofia will never read this book.

  Now I understand where she got the name for her dog. It’s like calling your dog Plato. Practically every afternoon during hockey practice I see Miss Rood in her long tan raincoat and brown oxfords walking Pater around the Upper Field. She could wear any kind of shoes, but she wears oxfords to set a good example for us. We couldn’t care less about examples. All we want is to be able to wear loafers to school. Pater’s always pulling on the leash, and she’s always trying to hold him back. His shrill barks echo in the still fall air, muffled as if his mouth were stuffed with wool.

  I sat in the big chair under Sofia’s window and read the last few pages of Pater. Then I read parts out loud to Sofia, so she’ll know what to say when she talks to Miss Rood again. Like the part where he quotes from Victor Hugo: “We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.” I read with a stiff British accent, and we laughed so hard.

  Miss Rood: grizzled white hair, with a few traces of reddish-brown like rust stains left over from her youth, pale watery blue eyes behind thick pink-rimmed glasses, mottled skin. Her large pink hands, whose veins stand out like twisted wires, actually turned these pages and underlined passages. What can someone like her, whose life consists only of keeping hundreds of young women under control, know about art and beauty and hard, glittering ideas? Miss Rood burning with the flame of ecstasy? She’s old and used up. As I read, I had an image of Miss Rood standing very straight and stiff before her lectern at assembly, leading us in the singing of the daily hymn, lifting her arms as her raspy voice started the first few notes, only to be drowned out by our higher, purer voices.

  I couldn’t read to Sofia anymore. I pretended I couldn’t stop laughing.

  September 27

  Last night was our dinner in Chinatown. There were supposed to be ten of us, but Ernessa didn’t come. Sofia, Carol, Betsy, Kiki, Charley, Lucy, Dora, Claire, and me. At first Lucy wasn’t going to come either because she had so much homework, but we made her come, and I promised to help her with her English paper. It’s not much of a Chinatown, and it’s in a kind of rundown part of the city, but it still feels exotic. I love those red and gold beams curved like the roofs of a pagoda and all the neon and huge black Chinese letters. It’s a little island of bright lights surrounded by dark buildings and empty parking lots.We had to drag Charley and Kiki inside the restaurant; they were trying to buy some pot on the street.We headed for the back of the restaurant, where we sat around a big round table with a lazy Susan in the middle. It was lucky that we were off by ourselves because we were noisy, and Charley, Kiki, and Betsy kept making really stupid and rude jokes about the waiters and imitating their accents. Sofia pulled me into the chair next to her. Everyone ordered a different dish, and we shared them. There was s
o much food, and I kept eating and drinking tea and turning the lazy Susan around and around.

  For some reason, during dinner Dora leaned over and said, “Lucy looks so beautiful tonight.”

  Lucy was seated directly across the table. Her face was flushed, her lips were red, and her eyes were glassy, as if she had a fever. The lights were low, and the flame of the candle in front of her flickered, throwing her face into shadow and then suddenly illuminating it. She did look beautiful tonight; there was something unexpected in her expression. She looked back at me, and I could see that she was unhappy.

  I stared at Lucy and blushed as if Dora had paid me a compliment. Tonight Lucy was like a lover, and everyone at the table recognized it. Dora was just saying what the others felt. It made me uncomfortable and pleased at the same time.

  I couldn’t sleep last night. It must have been all the tea I drank. I’m exhausted today.

  Lucy just stuck her head in. I told her I would be there in a minute. She looks exhausted too.

  September 29

  Lucy hasn’t been around at quiet hour for ages. I’m sure she’s across the hall with Ernessa. I don’t know why Lucy takes German and French, except that her father insists that she has to learn German. She’s terrible at it, even worse than at French. It torments her. I’m not going to get upset about her spending time with Ernessa. It’ll give me more time to write in my journal. What I don’t understand is why Ernessa is so interested in Lucy, who is sweet and wonderful but not her type at all. She never reads books unless they are assigned for a class. And she hardly ever manages to finish them. Dora and I are more her type. But if it helps Lucy with her German and she can stand to spend time in that putrid room. … The only other person who sets foot in there is Charley, but the smell of their pot probably smothers everything else. Besides, Charley would do just about anything for a toke. But Lucy is different. She’s very straight.

  It’s such a big room, and Ernessa leaves it as empty as a monk’s cell. She’s like a monk. I mean a nun. She never eats snacks or drinks soda, and she doesn’t seem to miss them. All she does is smoke a lot. Nuns probably don’t smoke. She always rushes down to the Playroom to light up after dinner, without bothering with coffee. If I didn’t drink coffee after dinner, I’d never get any homework done. I always eat so much, and then up in my room the heat is stifling when it gets cold out, even with the window open. I open a book and start to read, and my eyes close and. …

  I don’t think Ernessa ever opens the window in her room. That must be why it stinks so much. I knocked on her door once when I was looking for Lucy. She didn’t just say “come in.” She came to the door and opened it herself. She stood there, filling the doorway, waiting to hear what I could possibly want from her. Meanwhile, I thought I was going to retch when the door swung open. I had trouble saying, “I’m looking for Lucy. Do you know where she is?” I’m sure she’s quite smart and interesting, but she always makes me feel like a pest. I’m not going to knock on her door again.

  September 30

  Is there something wrong with me? I don’t have urges. The other girls have to eat or smoke or take drugs or talk on the phone or buy clothes or go to parties or listen to music or be with boys. I don’t need any of that.

  Last night Sofia came to my room after lights out. She was starving. She wanted to raid the kitchen. Nobody has tried that since last year, when a bunch of girls were caught and got into a lot of trouble. Lucy didn’t want to go. She really doesn’t like to break rules, but I was up for it. We talked Lucy into it, and then Sofia went out along the rain gutter to get Charley from next door.

  Charley discovered the gutters years ago, when we were in ninth grade and up on the top floor. One night I woke up, and she was outside, banging on my window like a huge bat. I opened my window, and she fell into my room. She had crawled along the gutter all the way from her room, which was three doors down the hall. At first I thought she was crazy to do that, up on the fourth floor. If you fell, that was it. But the gutters are copper and about a foot wide, so if you crawl on your hands and knees and don’t look down, it’s not that scary. Before long we were all doing it. That year I only got caught once in Charley’s room after lights out, even though we had Mac as our corridor teacher. She’d stand out in the corridor after lights out, waiting to catch us going into each other’s rooms. I feel sorry for those poor ninth graders. She’s tormenting them the way she tormented me the moment I set foot on the corridor.

  Of course, Charley was up for it. “Now that you mention it,” she said, “I’ve got the fucking munchies.”

  We decided to wait until twelve. That’s when Miss Wells at the switchboard in the main lobby goes to bed. We walked right down the front stairs in our pajamas as if it were the middle of the day. In the dark, the dining room felt empty beyond empty. The round tables were all ringed with chairs, and no one was sitting at any of them. We ran through the room, afraid the silence would reach out and grab at us.

  We saw the night watchman right away, sitting at the back of the kitchen, reading a newspaper and eating crackers. He lowered his newspaper and smiled. We all wanted to run back upstairs as soon as we saw him, but Charley went on ahead and started talking to him. I can’t believe how ballsy she is. The three of us stood back, our arms around each other, and kind of giggled. After a bit, Charley beckoned to us. I had to drag Sofia and Lucy over, they were so scared.

  “This is Bob,” said Charley. “Don’t worry, he’s cool. He’s not going to report us. He wants to play a game with us. If we can guess what his real job is, we can pig out. He’ll let us take as much as we can carry in a pillowcase. Cereal, Pop Tarts, all kinds of goodies. We have three tries. One each night for three nights. Kind of like Rumpelstiltskin. It’s a total goof. What’s our first guess?”

  We stood in a tight little circle. No one would look over at Bob, but Charley wasn’t in the least bit fazed. She was hanging out with seniors when she was in ninth grade, kind of like a mascot. She’s wiry, boyish looking, and absolutely fearless. She doesn’t care if she gets caught doing something wrong. I took the first guess. I was sure I knew the answer. He’s a poet, and this is how he supports his writing. My father worked at a bank during the day and wrote poetry at night, sometimes all night long. Even when he was offered teaching jobs, he stayed at the bank. He liked it.

  Of course I was wrong.

  If I’d thought about it, Bob doesn’t look at all like a poet. He has a receding hairline, wisps of brownish hair, and thick glasses. He looks like a dolt. If he’d been a poet, he would have been reading Keats or Shelley instead of the evening newspaper. Everyone was pissed off at me because I had wasted a guess. We ran upstairs. The cooks come very early in the morning to get started on the rolls for breakfast. Sofia was annoyed. She went to bed starving.

  OCTOBER

  October 1

  The second guess, shoe salesman, was wrong. It was Charley’s stoned idea. I don’t think we’re going to be able to guess this. Not unless we follow him into the woods like Rumpelstiltskin. But it was all we could talk about all day long. Lucy wants to bring Ernessa along tonight. She thinks she’ll have a good idea. I didn’t say a word.

  October 2

  Well, we have our pillowcase full of food. I’m not in the mood to eat it.

  Ernessa appeared in Lucy’s room right after midnight, and we all went down together. When we got to the kitchen, Bob was sitting in his chair, reading the paper, and munching on crackers as usual, as if he hadn’t budged from that spot for the last three days. His gray sweater was covered with crumbs.

  He always pretends not to notice us until we are standing right in front of him.

  Ernessa didn’t say a word; she just stood there, scouring him with her eyes.

  “I see you’ve brought a new friend along tonight,” said Bob, lowering the sports section so that he could peer over the top. “That’s kind of cheating. You think she’ll do any better?”

  “What’s the mystery?” Ernessa said to
us. “He’s a mortician.”

  Bob was floored. He dropped his newspaper in a heap on his lap. “She’s right. I work in my uncle’s funeral parlor during the day. Embalming bodies, putting clothes and makeup and jewelry on dead people, combing their hair. How did you get it?”

  “I smelled it when I walked into the kitchen,” Ernessa said.

  “How do you know what a funeral parlor smells like?” I demanded.

  “I was in one when my father died. It’s the kind of sensation you never forget.”

  She was looking at Bob while she talked, and no one else paid any attention. They were already hurrying to fill the pillowcase. I was the only one who heard what she said. I sniffed the air and detected the greasy smell of London broil, which we’d had for dinner. The food, the game, the night watchman munching on his salty crackers, it was all so stupid.

  Ernessa didn’t want any of the food. Neither did Charley. She’s getting really weird about eating because she’s stoned all the time. I don’t know what the others thought about the end of our adventure. Nobody said anything. Sofia took a box of cereal to bed. Then we stuffed the pillowcase in the back of Lucy’s closet and went straight to bed.

  She hadn’t smelled it at all; she had known it the moment she entered the room.

  October 4

  Sometimes I forget what a strange place the Residence is. I get so used to it that everything starts to seem perfectly normal. Tonight Sofia and I were sitting in the chair next to the reception desk waiting for dinner bells. I was sitting on Sofia’s lap, and my legs were dangling over the arm of the chair. Miss Olivo was behind the desk, where she sits all day long, answering the phone and signing girls in and out. That’s all she does.