by Rachel Klein
My father kept on reading the story, while I shouted at him. “And in the end,” he read, “you were lost in the forest. You sank back against the trunk of a tree, placing yourself in God’s hands, determined to remain there whatever happened.”
November 23
My journal is being ruined by lies. I should go back and cross out everything I wrote about Ernessa last Friday.
After school, Dora, Charley, and I went over to the coffee shop at Brangwyn College. I love to go there. We drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and sit around pretending to be college students. Only we’re wearing uniforms. Charley always wears her gym tunic, which makes her look like she’s about twelve years old. Dora rolls up the top of her gray skirt, which she wears practically all year round, and pulls on black tights underneath and a black sweater on top. She changes from her saddle shoes into little black boots. She puts gold hoops in her ears and a little pink lipstick on her mouth. When she comes out of the bathroom, she looks like she belongs there. The uniform is completely hidden. If someone from school found us, she’d get into trouble for being out of uniform, for wearing makeup, for her gold hoops. It wouldn’t really matter, because we’d all get into so much more trouble for smoking outside of school. They let us smoke in the Playroom but not outside school. It’s totally hypocritical. They realize they can’t stop the boarders from smoking if we have our parents’ permission, but they want us to appear to be proper young ladies when we leave the school grounds. Proper young ladies who think about nothing except sex, drugs, and cigarettes.
For some reason, no one has figured out that we come here.
Dora discovered it, of course. She likes to sit with her coffee and a cigarette and read philosophy. She’s so fake. When Dora first got her wire-rimmed glasses, I was convinced she was only wearing them to look like an intellectual. I was surprised to find out that they have real lenses in them. Sofia has a pair of glasses that basically have plain glass in them, and she’s always forgetting to wear them. She never remembers her glasses and her copy of The Stranger at the same time, but that’s all right because she isn’t really reading it. I have to admit that Dora is beautiful. She has long, thick, brownish-red hair like the mane of a horse and dark green eyes. But when she puts on her glasses, she looks forty years old. It’s all a pose. Like being crazy. Her father’s a shrink, so he assumes everyone is crazy. He encourages her fakeness. She’s been seeing a shrink since she was ten years old. She wouldn’t like it so much if she were really crazy.
Dora wants to be friends with me because my father was so crazy that he killed himself. I should tell her that he was perfectly sane when he decided on the razor. She once told me that all great artists went mad or killed themselves, or both, in the end.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “Shelley swam the Hellespont and drowned. Keats basically committed suicide by nursing his brother who was sick with TB. Kleist, Trakl, Walser, Hölderlin … Ever heard of them?”
I covered my ears.
Before we left school, I told Dora and Charley that we should ask Lucy and Ernessa to come with us. (It feels wrong, putting those two names together, but everyone does it now. It makes no difference that we picked a suite together with my number. I could have gotten one of the best single rooms, like Ernessa’s. I’ve allowed this to happen. I never even tried to stop it. Just as I never tried to stop my father.) We couldn’t find them, and of course after we’d been there for half an hour, they came in together. Ernessa didn’t even look in our direction. Lucy smiled at us, feebly. She was too afraid to come near us, her socalled friends. She followed Ernessa like a sheep to a table on the other side of the room. She walked with her shoulders hunched over. Her skirt hung like a sack. Her hair was matted and uncombed. It always used to be perfect. All of a sudden, she doesn’t care how she looks. She looked like a stranger. And she always used to seem so familiar.
They sat down together. I heard Lucy order a coffee, and they both lit up. When the coffee came, Lucy wrapped her hands around the mug as if she were trying to get warm. It’s not that cold outside. Their cigarettes rested in the black plastic ashtray in the middle of the table. They leaned together as if they were in the middle of an intense conversation, and the smoke rising from the ashtray wreathed their heads. This is exactly the way I imagine the college students who come here in the evenings with their boyfriends. I felt sick, but I couldn’t look away from the two of them.
Ernessa was changed too. All her features were exaggerated and crude. How could I have ever imagined that she and I look alike? Her eyebrows were so thick that they almost met in the center of her forehead. Her upper lip was pulled forward. It couldn’t quite reach over her teeth, which were much larger than I remembered. They were smoker’s teeth, crooked and yellow.
I started to talk, to fill the silence, without thinking about what I was saying.
“Look at Ernessa. I can’t believe I thought she was so beautiful. She looks like an animal. There’s something wrong with her.”
“Maybe she has hair on her palms,” said Charley. “I’ll go check.”
“Shut up,” I said. Charley is perfectly capable of doing that. Then Lucy would never speak to me again. “Don’t you think her interest in Lucy is … sort of not normal?”
“I can dig that,” said Charley. “Maybe she’s a dyke. It wouldn’t exactly be a first for the school. Look at all those fucking gym teachers with their plaid kilts and their short hair. Like can you visualize Miss Bobbie getting it on with –”
“I don’t think Lucy goes in for that kind of thing,” said Dora. “She’s too much of a daddy’s girl. She likes boys.”
“Not Lucy, you idiot, Ernessa,” I said. “She’s pursuing her, the way a boy would. She’s so nice to her, and she’s such a bitch to everyone else.”
This gave Dora a chance to play professor. “I admit she does have an inordinate fascination with Lucy who is, well, we all know, very sweet and pretty, but not terribly compelling. Let’s face it. Lucy is … an airhead, and really, when you look at her carefully, she’s predictably pretty. All that straight blond hair that Daddy won’t let her cut. Please. I thought Ernessa was more interested in discussing philosophy, but I doubt she’s doing much of that with Lucy. So it must be the sweet and pretty that appeals to her. Lucy is her image of what Kant calls the ‘sublime.’ We all have one.” She looked at me.
I knew in that moment that they had been talking about Lucy and me behind my back. They couldn’t possibly understand.
“I adored my father,” I said.
I don’t know why those words came out. I had never admitted that to anyone before, and now everyone would know.
I ran out of the coffee shop without bothering to put my jacket on. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying. Especially Lucy and Ernessa. The others thought I was upset about my father. But he wasn’t in my mind at all. I was furious at Dora for insulting Lucy.
November 24
I know the others don’t like it when I bring up Lucy, but I can’t help it. It doesn’t bother them that the names Ernessa and Lucy have become one word in their minds when they don’t even belong together. The only thing that bothers them is that I’m always trying to pry these names apart.
Just saying her name makes me feel better. It brings her closer to me. I have her, if only for the few seconds while the sounds are on my tongue. I can see that everyone is getting annoyed at me, but I keep on talking. They look away and stop listening to what I’m saying. Suddenly they take great interest in the bowl of oatmeal on the table in front of them. They go to get some more coffee. When they turn away, I lose her. Of course she isn’t at breakfast anymore. Someone always signs her in. She never asks me to.
I know exactly how ordinary she really is. But if I had the chance, I would talk about her endlessly.
November 25
I am home. My mother came to get me for Thanksgiving vacation. I couldn’t stand to be there any longer, with the doors to the bathroom always closed n
ow and us hardly speaking to one another. Each avoids the other.
I was downstairs, sitting in the window seat, watching each car that passed. Of course, my mother was late, and Lucy was the first to be picked up. At least she came over and said good-bye to me. I was afraid she was going to leave without a word, and I was going to have to spend the entire Thanksgiving vacation thinking about that. Pretty soon everyone else had left, and I was all alone. I had a book open on my lap. I kept reading the same words over and over again, even though they made no sense to me: “to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted.”
Ernessa was reading the words on the page over my shoulder. I sensed her there, but I didn’t turn my head. I recognized her breathing before she spoke.
“That’s one of my favorite books too,” she said. “Proust. I read him a long time ago. In French. But I’ve never forgotten it. I envy you starting it. Starting is so much better than remembering.”
How long ago could she have read it? She’s only sixteen, seventeen at the most. I hate it when we share anything. And of course she read it in French. My mother drove up then. I grabbed my bag and ran outside to the car.
Ernessa followed me out the door. She was wearing a black coat with a velvet collar and a beret on her head. I don’t think I could wear such sophisticated clothes. I’d feel too awkward. Somehow Ernessa manages to look like a very chic woman and a little girl at the same time. Her coat was beautiful. I wish I had one like it. I’m wearing my mother’s old ski jacket instead. She says we don’t have any money to buy clothes right now because she hasn’t had a show in ages.
As we drove off, I turned around and saw Ernessa getting into a green car with a man, a handsome man with dark hair. He was about my mother’s age. Her father is dead, so who is this man?
Once I answered the phone on the corridor, and a man with a heavy accent asked to speak to Miss Ernessa Bloch. I knocked on her door and called her. She rushed past me to get to the phone, almost knocking me over. I passed by her again on my way to Sofia’s room, and she was speaking very excitedly in a language that I didn’t recognize. Some words sounded a bit like French, but I couldn’t understand a word.
Another time, I heard her speaking on the phone in English. I just caught the end of the conversation before she hung up the phone. She was saying, “I think that will be quite convenient. … Good day to you.” She sounded like a character in a novel.
November 27
Late at night
I know the smell that seeps under her door like dirty water and runs into the corridor. It’s the smell that came from Milou when he was dying: a rotten smell that mingled with the overly sweet perfume of the blue hyacinths that my mother was growing in the kitchen. The two smells became inseparable.
My mother said that his body was already beginning to decay, even though he hadn’t died yet. His eyes were rheumy, and the lids stuck together. Dried blood and brown mucous dribbled from his mouth and clung to his whiskers. My mother wiped his face with a damp cloth and held him like a baby. She kissed his putrid face and whispered in his ear and cried. I gagged whenever I came near him.
Milou finally died in my mother’s arms. We wrapped him in a white sheet and buried him on a warm winter day when the ground was soft. He was underground, but his smell saturated the room. Whenever I came into the kitchen, I looked over at the corner where he had died, expecting to see him. The hyacinth flowers dried up. Their perfume faded, but his smell was still there, hovering like a spirit above the spot. He wasn’t completely dead while his smell remained.
November 28
At night I wake up with a start and can’t get back to sleep. I lie very still while the emptiness absorbs me. My mother sleeps and sleeps. I don’t dare disturb her. She sleeps all day and all night. As I sleep less, she sleeps more. She’s stealing my sleep from me.
After my father died, I came to Brangwyn.
The first night at school, my eyes opened in the middle of the night. I was lying on a narrow white metal bed, in a cage. My mother wasn’t asleep in the room next to mine. If I pressed my ear to the wall, I could hear the regular breathing of a stranger. My loneliness was complete. But when I raised my head off the pillow, I saw a sliver of yellow light under the door. Out in the hallway, the long expanse of speckled black linoleum was as cold as ice. At one end was the bathroom with its tall white stalls. That was permitted. At the other end, Mrs. McCallum stood guard. Her wrinkled head with its doglike face would pop out of her doorway if I rustled my sheets. Like a troll, she barred my escape down the stairs. I didn’t know the password. She would never let me by.
Inside my room, with the door closed tight, I was safe. The line of light under my door comforted me. I closed my eyes and fell asleep at once.
November 29
I’m the first person back. I asked my mother to bring me early. I said I had a paper due tomorrow and needed to use some books at school. Four days with her were more than I could take. Something has happened to her since I left for school. Now I know why she never calls me. She’s started spending all her time in the studio. She even sleeps on a cot in there. But she won’t let me in the room. I used to sit with her while she worked. I made her tea, cleaned her brushes, helped her stretch canvases. We would chat about nothing for hours while she painted. I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house. She says that she’s finally able to express her grief at what my father did, and she doesn’t want anyone to see it yet. It’s still too raw. Maybe she’ll never show it to anyone. She’s very protective of that grief.
When I decided to stay at school, I had my mother pack up all my books and ship them to me. She didn’t want to, but I made her. Even the children’s books that I had read to death and were falling apart and covered with crayon marks. My room at home feels so empty and cold without the books. It’s not my room anymore. I hate being there.
All weekend, she kept playing the same music, over and over again. The record would finish, and she would just lift up the needle and put it back at the beginning. It drove me crazy. I anticipated where it would skip and she would have to go over and adjust it. I had to leave the house and go for a walk. Finally at breakfast on Saturday I got fed up, and I asked her why she kept playing the same record.
She told me it was Mahler’s Fifth, and my father played it incessantly before everything happened.
“I’m trying to understand exactly how he felt,” she said. “This music fed what ate him up, made it hungrier. I hate this music. But I think it also gave him strength to write, so I have to listen.”
I try not to get upset around her, but I started to cry.
“Don’t be sad,” she said. “I’m not sad anymore. That would be selfish. He was utterly unhappy alive. Every morning he opened his eyes so slowly, and he gazed around the room reluctantly. He was shocked to discover that he was still breathing. I used to think that it was because of me that he left. I blamed myself for it, and for the pain that it caused you. But now I understand that he was just taking the first step away. That’s what Mahler has taught me. He had to break with us first, the two people who bound him to this Earth. He had to go off with another woman. It didn’t matter who. Anyone would do. And she knew it. He was trying to make us hate him. He was betraying us in a little way so that we could accept the ultimate betrayal. After he left, he kept listening to Mahler’s Fifth; that’s what she told me. Incessantly was the word she used. It drove her crazy. She gave me back his record afterward. And now I finally understand everything. I understand how stupid I was not to understand what was happening right in front of me. That was because I was only thinking about myself. I wasn’t thinking about him. About his suffering.”
That’s her theory.
I have my theory. He was so unhappy that he couldn’t feel anything. He hated life. He couldn
’t remember what love was. It was all the same to him.
I remember once going to talk to my father in his study. He was sitting at his desk. There wasn’t even an open notebook or a book in front of him. He was looking at his books – the shelves with books stuck in sideways and the piles all over the floor. He spoke in his deep poetry-reading voice: “I used to say, ‘Books, my food.’ But now all my food has been poisoned.” I laughed at his joke. But it wasn’t a joke.
Last summer at the beach, I thought my mother was getting better, but now I realize how wrong I was. She wants to nurture her grief, until it can live by itself. That’s her child now. I’m just in the way.
School, books, Lucy. I’m going to see if anyone else is back.
No one. They all want to stay away until the last possible moment. It’s so quiet here, quieter than it is in the middle of the night. Then I imagine everyone in bed, breathing, dreaming, turning over. Even Mrs. Halton is gone. Time has been put to sleep.
Do ghosts have to be frightening? Maybe they are comforting, like the touch of a familiar hand.
The last time I saw my father alive, we went for a walk together in the Botanic Garden. We loved to walk there, our arms linked, wrapped in silence. The air was misty, and I was shivering. All the leaves had fallen from the trees. The trunks were dark with the wet. “At one time I liked to come here in the spring,” said my father, “when it was all colors and perfumes. Impressions. But now I like this time of year best. Between fall and winter, when everything appears without a show. As it is. It’s harder to identify trees from their bark and buds and shape, but it’s essential.”
