by Rachel Klein
When she returned, everything was familiar: the wide porches that encircled the hotel, the red tiled roofs, the downstairs sitting rooms, the dining room, the grand staircase, the ballroom. Had she stayed in the same room, overlooking the back courtyard? She had taken a picnic out to the Hut, near the woods, and sat on a blanket on the side of the hill. She had taken afternoon tea on the porches and gone for a pony ride on the Upper Field. Were the weeping cherries planted along the drive then? They would have been small, their branches hanging down like spindly arms. Her mother recovered, but she never did. Her mother found a new husband. She composed her face, but inside her thoughts bumped up against each other. She filled the long tub with warm water. It was less painful underwater. The dark curlicues of color floated around her. By the time all the water had turned red, she could no longer see.
Dinner bells. Something always interrupts me.
After dinner
The heavy brass lock hung open against the trunk. It was so easy to unfasten the two clasps on either side of the lock and push up the lid. I let out the smell of the woods the day after it has rained: damp, mushroomy, rotten. Crumbs of black earth still clung to everything. Stones, sticks, scraps of leaves, pieces of decaying wood, mounds of moss, lichens, husks, straw, grasses, flowers, winged maple seeds, birch catkins, horse chestnuts, tattered moths, dried spiders, gray wasps’ nests, clumps of matted feathers, tufts of fur, yellowing bones, a snake’s jaw, snail shells, animal droppings. The matter had been scooped up from the ground in armfuls and tossed into the trunk in a heap. In the middle was a hollow that marked her body, a body that was weightless and a burden at the same time. For a pillow, there was a thick notebook. I lifted it out of the trunk and carried it over to the window to read. It must have had hundreds of pages of stiff blue-lined paper. Every line was filled on both sides of the page. There was an entry for each day: a time, a place, a brief description of the weather, never more than two or three words, not even filling an entire line. The days ran into one another. Snow. Rain. Sunshine. Frigid. Westerly winds. Sleet. Hot. Cooling. Boring and meaningless. I looked and looked. Seventy years without a pause. There were no secrets to her existence.
Ernessa was passing through time, quickly, searching for others like her. She was here, now, where she had begun.
I turned to the most recent entries, near the end of the book. May 1, Brangwyn, warming. That was all there was to it. The weather is the only thing that affects her. She’s sensitive to sun, rain, snow, wind. No mention of Lucy’s stiff hair in the moonlight or the silver leaves on the weeping cherries. “I believe in eternity; I don’t believe in spirits.”
I tore the pages out of her journal and scattered them over the trunk. The white paper floated down like huge fluttering moths.
She had only a few pages left. She managed to cram so many years into one book.
I’m running out of room, too. The words are spilling off the page, into the top and side margins, between the straight lines. My handwriting is tiny, impossible to read.
May 6
Lunch hour
I cut Math today. I got to the practice room at exactly 10:45 and waited there until she came out. She came down the corridor at 10:53. That gives her seven minutes to walk down to the Schoolhouse and get to her class on time.
After dinner
As soon as class was over, I went up to my room. I cut softball practice, which starts at 3:15. I put on my raincoat, to hide my uniform, and walked up past the train station into town. I stopped at the first gas station I came to. It was next to the supermarket where Lucy and I always went to buy the frozen honey buns that we used to eat on weekends. I told the attendant that my mother had run out of gas a few blocks away. He sold me a gallon of gasoline and lent me a plastic container to carry it in and a funnel to pour it into the gas tank. I promised him that I would return everything. I gave him two quarters. Then, before I left the gas station, I carefully wiped the container with paper towels so that I wouldn’t get the smell of gas on me. The container is behind the bushes along the far side of the Residence. No one ever goes there. It was easier than I thought it would be. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to ask the attendant for the gas, but I had no trouble.
Midnight
The days are false. The nights are true.
During the day, I drive them away, but at night they return. They slip under my doorway and into my dreams. I see Lucy again, and I sigh with relief to discover it is all a dream. Nothing really happened. Then we reach out to embrace one another, only to discover that each of us is clutching at nothing. Lucy wants me to save her. I can tell from the way she stretches out her arms and refuses to give up. She sucks in the air noisily, as if she’s not used to breathing the strange atmosphere where she is now. Ernessa always appears, her eyes dark, with thick circles around them. She stands off to the side, observing, amused. Each night Lucy grows dimmer. Soon even in my dreams, I won’t be able to convince myself that nothing has really happened.
May 7
Friday, the end of the week
Miss Norris wasn’t the least bit surprised to find me standing at her door with my notebook and pen under my arm. I have been carrying them around in my book bag all day. She’s been here all morning long. She’s probably the only one who didn’t leave when the alarms went off. She ignored them and the trucks.
“I didn’t see you outside with everyone else,” I said.
“I knew I would be safe up here,” she said. “I didn’t want to abandon my birds. If I needed to, I could always open the window and let them fly away.”
I am sitting at the table where we translate Greek together. There are no books or notebooks or pencils. There is only a cup of tea on the table, with a silver spoon lying on the saucer. She has left me alone. She is in the other room reading. Even the birds are quiet. I told her I needed to write in my journal for a while today.
After they put out the fire, we weren’t allowed back into the Residence. All the girls, standing outside in solemn groups of blue and gray, were herded back into the Schoolhouse. I slipped into the Science Building and walked through it to the Passageway and from there past the Playroom and up into the Residence. It was absolutely silent. I looked for Miss Olivo, her head shaking on her skinny neck, humming tonelessly to herself, but her chair was empty.
She should have been in her trunk in the basement this morning, the way she is every morning until 10:53. I should have opened the lid to make sure she was lying in there, neither dead nor alive, vulnerable and weak, and I should have thrust something into her heart or severed her head, the way they do in books. I didn’t want to look at her.
The force of the explosion took me by surprise when the match touched the gasoline. The flames encircled Ernessa’s trunk with a flash. The heat was sudden and everywhere, and the flames sucked the air out of my lungs. I wanted to see the fire consume it, but I panicked. I didn’t want to go with her.
Outside I joined the other girls on the driveway, and they backed away from me. I smelled bad. The fumes clung to my clothes. I tried just now in Miss Norris’s bathroom to wash the smell off my hands, but I couldn’t. I washed and washed, but the smell has seeped into my skin. They could see from my smudged face and my singed hair that I was the one who had started the fire. My eyes were stinging and full of tears. My throat was burning. I couldn’t have spoken a word if someone had spoken to me. They let me pass. Only Sofia looked directly at me. I stood off to the side, my arms folded and watched them watching me. Who can judge me?
The fire engines arrived. There were four of them. Everyone turned to look at the men in their black suits and helmets. They unwound the thick hoses, smashed the basement windows with their axes, sprayed the flames that leaped out the windows. There was a huge gasp from the girls as the water came out with a whoosh. The firemen put out the fire quickly. It didn’t spread past the basement. I didn’t care about burning down the Residence. Let it stay there forever. I destroyed the basement and the practice rooms on
the ground floor. I accomplished what I wanted. I was sorry about my piano, though.
There was only smoke after the fire was put out, grainy, dense, black smoke wafting out of the broken windows. She was mingled with it, her not-quite-real self dissolved into the forever insubstantial, struggling to retrieve her solid state.
I wanted to save Lucy’s soul. But I also wanted to punish Ernessa. To drive her into a horrible nonexistence, like an amphibian caught between land and water.
I walked a ways down the drive to get away from those girls. Behind the windows of the Passageway, a shadow passed along the corridor. I glimpsed it in each pane of glass, like a movie in slow motion, and as it moved, the shape clarified itself. When it had become a body, she stopped by the last window and pressed her face to the glass. No one else saw her looking out at us.
She came out the door of the Science Building, walking in that strange way of hers that doesn’t seem to disturb the ground. She stood back from the other girls, as she always does, farther down the driveway. It was just before noon. The sun was bright and high in the sky. May 7, Brangwyn, bright sun. Another eventless day in eternity. Behind each girl, like a dark fingerprint on the asphalt, was a little shadow. Their souls. Something that can be fixed with a hammer and nail and snatched away if you’re not careful. Only Ernessa did not have a shadow. She stood in a circle of yellow light, as if the sun were a lightbulb dangling directly above her and she could reach up and click it off at any time.
If I hadn’t fought back, maybe Ernessa wouldn’t have had to kill Lucy. There was enough blood in Lucy’s body to nourish both of them. To keep them both here. Lucy could have lingered in that weakened state, waxing and waning like the moon. She could have remained pure.
No, Ernessa needed that orgasm with eyes wide open.
Every day she would have looked at Lucy and thought: Do it. Don’t do it. Do it. The way I take that thin piece of steel out of my desk, hold it in the palm of my hand, and study it as if I’m seeing and feeling it for the first time. Don’t do it. Do it. This morning I put it between the pages of my journal.
I looked out the window of Miss Norris’s apartment, and I could see, four floors below me, that the pavement was still wet and dark pools of water had collected in the depressions. The firemen had roped off an area littered with broken glass and charred pieces of wood. Ernessa walked down the main steps from the Residence to the drive, climbed into the green car waiting for her, and drove off. She wasn’t carrying anything. No one stopped her from leaving. They are only thinking about me.
I have less to write about than I thought I would. That’s just as well. There are no pages left. I’m writing these words on the back end paper, a blank white page, without lines to keep my sentences in order. I can hear the sound of footsteps outside Miss Norris’s door. I know that sound so well – the hollow tapping of a grownup’s heels as she walks down the empty corridor. That’s all I’ve heard for the last three years. Mrs. Halton is in the middle of a knot of gray-haired ladies. There are voices too. Miss Norris just came out of the other room.
They are at the door. I have to put my pen and my journal away.
AFTERWORD
I’m not sure what Dr. Wolff expects from this afterword, and I’m not even sure it was a good idea. It’s a bit like offering a reformed alcoholic a drink to test her willpower. Anyway, I can only talk about myself now. I couldn’t begin to sort out what I wrote thirty years ago. The whole experience of rereading this journal, which I did in one sitting, has been like gazing at a star so distant that by the time its light reaches us, it has long since ceased to exist.
I got married. I didn’t get divorced, as most of the people I know did. I watched my two daughters grow up like specimens in a lab. I kept hoping that by watching them, I would be able to understand something about my own childhood. But we seem to belong to different species. Sometimes I’ve caught them preening in front of the mirror or agonizing over a piece of clothing, and I’ve thought, ah, finally the narcissism is beginning to surface. I was always wrong. It was just a momentary slip on their part. At Brangwyn, it was different. Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened. Even when it came to ideas and books, we were only interested in what reflected us. It would be easy to put all the blame on the hermetic atmosphere of school or on the fact that most of us had unhappy childhoods, but that can’t explain everything.
I look at my daughters and marvel at their self-assurance, their sensibleness, their serenity. And yet, they’ve missed out on something in all their happiness. They don’t know they’ve missed it, but they have. They’ve always been at home in the world. They don’t know the pain and surprise of coming into it.
I still receive the school bulletin, even though I left in disgrace at the end of my junior year. I’m still invited to class reunions every five years. I’d be much too embarrassed to go. Charley (I should call her Charlotte, but I can’t bring myself to, since Charlotte is a woman who attends AA meetings and lost ten pounds to get ready for the reunion) tried to talk me into the last reunion. She’s become the class secretary even though she was kicked out. I thought about it. I was curious to see the school and all the girls. Actually, I was more curious what it would feel like to see them. My class was the last class of boarders that graduated. I know that most of the Residence has been converted into classrooms. It must have become a pretty boring place with only day students.
I knew all along I would never go, even though I let Charley try to talk me into it. She tried to convince me that no one cared about what happened when we were sixteen. We were all neurotic. I just went a little farther than anyone else. Besides, she said, when I spent my senior year in a mental hospital, everyone turned me into a tragic figure and wanted to be like me. They forgot they had looked away whenever I sat down at the table with them. They forgot they blamed me for everything that happened.
In the end, I was glad that I didn’t go. Charley reported it all back to me, even though I never asked.
At the reunion, the boarders stayed together in a motel near school and stayed up all night talking. I wouldn’t have had a thing to say to them, but Charley said they asked about me. One thing made an impression on me, though. A group of them went up to the fourth floor of the Residence to look at their old rooms, which aren’t used anymore. The bathrooms were still intact, including the claw-foot bathtubs with separate taps for hot and cold. “It’s so primitive,” said Charley. “They’d be sued for that today.We always scalded ourselves.”
But I wasn’t listening to Charley anymore. I was thinking about stretching out in one of those big tubs in the deep, scalding water with the steam rising to the ceiling. I was thinking about hair streaming out in the water like golden seaweed. The drowning Ophelia, with hard pink breasts. She closed her eyes and let her head slip underwater. The bubbles of her breath rose to the surface and remained for an instant before bursting. I wasn’t at all embarrassed. We were both so happy.
When I received the next copy of The Brangwyn Echoes, I flipped to the back of the magazine where they always have the photographs of the class reunions. The photograph was exactly what I expected: They were born with strands of pearls around their necks and cheerful smiles in place to meet the relentless passage of time. I didn’t really expect to recognize any of the faces.
In a way, I’m glad she died and I didn’t have to see her face next to theirs.
When I look closely in the mirror, my face is unfamiliar. I’m not used to the lines around my eyes and my mouth, as if I’d brushed the threads of a spider’s web that will trap me in the end. But that’s what recovery was all about, about agreeing to grow older, become a woman, have children, dye my hair, have hot flashes and night sweats. Let my childhood go. Let my father go. Not blame him for his despair.
Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back to that year. This journal can’t resurrect it. There’s a mist hanging over it. I can blow the m
ist away with the softest sigh, but then it drifts back a moment later to shroud everything.
It was hard to give up the person who wrote so compulsively in her crimson notebook, to watch her be sucked into the black hole of the past. That girl was self-absorbed, but she was also excruciatingly alive, as if she had been born without a skin. Everyone secretly wanted her pain. It consumed her, until there was nothing else. I had affection for her, and I have much less for the person who has replaced her. She had a father, and I don’t have one.
But I had to do it in order to exist. Just as my mother had to marry another man. I never held it against her.
And then one day, I was older than my father was when he died. I never thought that could happen. I suddenly felt so old. I knew he wasn’t waiting for me. He was gone forever.
Did he go where those girls went, into that endless succession of days?
