Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  Then Callie opened her storm door to Cassandra, motioned for her to come inside.

  EVOLUTION

  THERE WERE SEVERAL ODDITIES ABOUT the Baltimore City public schools in the mid-seventies. The first was the district’s open enrollment policy, which allowed students to attend any school they desired, although the matter of transportation then fell to the family. Most people chose the neighborhood schools, and given how segregated the city was, this led to de facto segregation in the schools. By the time I started high school in 1972, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the system was challenged and dismantled. White flight, which had begun even before the ’68 riots, stepped up.

  To further complicate things, the city used a junior high school system, with high school beginning in the tenth grade. Unless one qualified for the “A” course, which meant—this must seem odder still to non-Baltimoreans—that one could attend ninth grade at one of the public, same-sex high schools.

  This system, too, was rumored to be on the verge of change. In fact, Polytechnic, the all-boy school, would admit its first female student before I graduated. The all-girl school, Western, to this day has not accepted a male student. Allegedly, this is because no boy has ever expressed a desire to attend. It seems suspicious—thirty years, and not a single cheeky boy has come forward, flush with the odds, eager to be the one male in a school of girls. But even in my day, before Poly had enrolled its first female student, my classmates were vehement about keeping Western all-girl. They actually marched on the board of education, protesting coed education in the city’s two most prestigious public schools. I didn’t join the march, but then, by the time my old friends took up that cause, I had transferred to the Gordon School. I attended Western for only a year before my parents decided I wasn’t safe there.

  The problem, as ever, was that I couldn’t shut up. For eight years, I had been the smartest girl in my class; now I was in the A course, which was filled with similar girls from all over the city. Those who had known me—and I was happily reunited with Tisha, Fatima, and Donna, among others—had no problem letting me occupy the top rung in the classroom. Others appreciated the challenge, reveled in the competition as much as I did.

  But my class at Western was full of girls from all over Baltimore, including many from parochial schools. These girls, for the most part, could not keep up in any class that required thinking. They could memorize anything, ace any set of true-false questions, soar when presented with multiple choices. But asked to apply their knowledge, they balked. My particular nemesis was a tall, unhealthy-looking girl, her no-color hair worn in pigtails that managed the trick of being tight and messy at the same time. Martha, poor thing. She harangued the teachers who challenged her, practically begged for her education to be as boring as possible. Asked, for example, to write a poem in a chosen meter, she demanded to know why she had to write a poem, why she couldn’t recite one from memory. She had a ferocious memory.

  Nothing enraged her more than ninth-grade social studies, where we were taught about Darwin and natural selection. It wasn’t true, she railed. She wasn’t offended by evolution, per se. The problem was that Martha believed we respond to challenges in our environment within a single generation. Giraffes needed long necks to reach food, and their necks grew. No, Martha, the teacher said again and again, there was a gene that favored the development of long necks and giraffes that didn’t have it were weeded out of the gene pool over time. Martha was not foolhardy enough to call the teacher a liar, but she demanded proof and refused to be satisfied by the answers provided.

  We quickly came to hate each other. And it was not enough for me to earn the highest marks, to say the smartest things, to charm the teachers that Martha alienated. I had to run her down as well. I hate remembering this about myself, but I will not dissemble about my young cruelty. I not only mocked her ideas but her hair and her complexion, aflame with acne. My friends encouraged me in this, enjoying the skirmishes between the two of us. We were cheap entertainment for the entitled. Tisha, Donna, and Fatima were among them, coolly regarding our antics from a great height, gods pitting the poor mortals against one another for their own amusement.

  For that was the sad and strange reality of ninth grade—the girls from whom I had been separated in seventh and eighth grade were no longer my friends. We were friendly—we rode the same public bus home every day and talked easily among ourselves. But a gulf had opened. At the time, I thought it was about boys. By ninth grade, they all had boyfriends, and I didn’t. I didn’t even have a clue how to get one. After all, it wasn’t something written down in a book, and I certainly couldn’t ask my father about it. A pity, as he was an expert in what men liked.

  He took me to school every day that year, out of his way though it was, and early, too; he didn’t need to be on campus until ten o’clock. Still, he drove over every morning from the apartment he and Annie had rented a few miles away. I think my mother made him do this, intending it to be a kind of penance. But the result was that I had twenty, twenty-five minutes alone with my father every morning, and I considered that time precious. If I couldn’t tell him about boys, or my yearnings toward them, I could at least tell him everything else. I regaled him with stories about Martha—her narrow-mindedness, her obstinacy, her possible racism.

  “This girl, Martha,” he said. “Is she from one of the parish schools? Saint Bob of the Foundering Flock? Our Lady of Perpetual Motion?”

  I snorted. The joke was new to me. “Something like that. She’s from the Northeast Side.”

  “Well, you know what that’s about.”

  I wanted to nod knowingly, in sync with my father. But I also wanted to understand what he meant. Reluctantly, I exposed my ignorance and asked him to explain.

  “With all this talk of integration and busing in the air, the parochial school students are terrified that they’re going to get caught up in some system-wide change. So they enroll in the A course rather than risk getting sent across town next year. But some of them got in because their teachers wrote them recommendations. It cheapens the entire system.”

  To this day, I don’t know if my father was speaking factually or if this was his own version of a conspiracy theory. We all have them, don’t we? Hard-core beliefs that, when examined, turn out to be nothing more than a set of prejudices strung together. My father had a low opinion of religion and an even lower opinion of Baltimore’s white working-class neighborhoods, places where he and Annie literally had to fear for their lives. You’d never catch them, for example, at Haussner’s. I forget, at times, how much my father had to pay for his love, how bold and even brave he was in his determination to be with Annie.

  My battles against Martha and the contests with her became an odd bright spot in those days. I grew reckless, crueler. I mocked her religion. In English, assigned to write fiction, I turned in a story that was transparently about Martha, a girl who ends up in a small social hell because she has failed to absorb the Bible’s teachings about kindness and charity. I read it aloud, never looking her way. It was the second most popular of all the presentations. The class favorite, I have to admit, was Fatima’s, an utterly incoherent story about street violence that transcended its crude plotting and Fatima’s less than keen writing on the basis of her performance, in which she danced part of the story.

  But Martha had her backers, more loyal friends than I had. A few days after the short story incident, we were in gym class. It was spring and we were playing softball and I was lost in brooding, as PE constantly threatened my precious straight-A average. To improve my grade, I often volunteered to do small tasks for extra credit. On this particular day, I agreed to bring in the equipment and was roaming the field, in search of stray balls, when Martha and her friends approached me.

  “Another stellar day for you in phys ed,” Martha said. “You dropped a fly ball, struck out, and dribbled that one little hit down the first-base line, getting on base only because their pitcher overthrew it.”

  �
��Yes, well, I guess if I need to become a great softball player, I’ll evolve that way in my lifetime. Isn’t that how your belief system sees it? Perhaps that’s why your complexion is so pitted—it doesn’t need to evolve. But trust me, Martha, natural selection is going to make sure that your genes never get back in the pool.”

  I turned my back to continue gathering balls. Martha—I assume it was Martha—kicked me from behind with a force unlike anything I had known. I had been paddled a few times as a child, and there was the awful night my mother slapped me. But I had never been in an actual fight. Martha’s kick knocked me off my feet. I curled up like a potato bug, trying to shield myself, and now all three began to kick and hit me and pull my hair. I struggled to my feet, only to be knocked down again. But in that brief moment I was up, I saw Tisha, Donna, and Fatima standing at the far end of the field, watching with mild interest. No, I couldn’t see their faces or their expressions—at that distance, they were recognizable to me by their heights and shapes, especially Fatima’s—but their posture, the very casualness of their stances, made it clear how little it concerned them. It was all of a piece for them, I realized, no different from what happened in the classroom. There, Martha and I fought with words. Here, it was fists. Cool.

  It’s three on one, I wanted to yell to them. It’s unfair. Still, no one came to my aid, until a teacher finally realized what was going on and raced across the field to save me.

  Fighting was a serious offense, but Martha and her friends were given detention, with no discussion of suspension or expulsion. And no talk of an apology, either. No one said, in so many words, that I had brought this on myself, but that implicit accusation hung in the air: I deserved the beat-down. Scared to return to Western, I finished up the year with tutors, who came to the house after school for two hours of lessons. When the school year ended in June, my mother announced that her employer, the Gordon School, was willing to give me a scholarship. I never saw Tisha, Donna, or Fatima again.

  What happened to us? How did we go from being friends to strangers? Why did they stand at the end of the field and watch three other girls beat me? All I know is that I was no longer one of them; they considered my beat-down fair, retribution for the humiliation I had heaped on Martha all year. Martha and I were like the wrestlers who appeared on channel 45, and while I had been Gorgeous George, it was time for me to be defeated. My father, the classics professor, could have explained it to me. No one gets to be the hero forever, no one escapes her destiny.

  AND AGAMEMNON DEAD

  March 29–31

  CHAPTER

  31

  CASSANDRA SAT IN CALLIE’S KITCHEN, a cup of Lipton tea cooling in front of her. There was a plainness to the surroundings that was novel to Cassandra. She was accustomed to homes such as hers, stage settings of a sort, decorated and arranged to give instant teasing insights into their owners. Callie’s house was as sterile as a builder’s model. It didn’t appear to be an aesthetic, but a lack of one, a complete absence of choices. Things were white—walls, mug, appliances—unless they weren’t. The beige linoleum floor, the blue-and-white platter that Callie had insisted on filling with cookies, despite Cassandra’s protestations that she wasn’t hungry.

  “I made these this morning,” she said.

  “They’re so perfect, so uniform,” Cassandra marveled, breaking off a piece. She wasn’t being polite. It was a soft ginger cookie with a crescent of white frosting, dark moons in partial eclipse. “Are they difficult? It must be a project, dipping them into the icing.”

  Callie didn’t say anything, not right away. Cassandra was beginning to catch her rhythms, her conversational style, if one could call it that. Callie was like a nervous driver waiting to merge onto a highway. She needed lots of space and time to make her move.

  Cassandra glanced around, trying to find anything in the room that was personal or idiosyncratic. There was a wall calendar from a local insurance agent, the month of March illustrated by what Cassandra guessed was an Eastern Shore landscape. Small pencil jottings had been made on some of the squares, but she couldn’t read them from where she sat. Her eyes came to rest on a set of white ceramic canisters.

  “I keep the tea bags in the coffee bin,” Callie said, following Cassandra’s gaze.

  “What?”

  Callie flinched, but she didn’t need quite as long to reenter the conversation this time. “Those canisters. I ordered them from QVC, from that woman, you know, with the big cloud of silver hair. Sort of like yours.”

  Cassandra nodded, although she didn’t have a clue what Callie was talking about.

  “And, you know, flour and sugar, I put flour and sugar in them. But I don’t drink coffee, so I keep my tea bags in the one that says ‘coffee.’ Do you think that’s okay?”

  Cassandra—feeling mocked, toyed with—almost snapped, I don’t care if you keep heroin in there. Then she realized Callie was in dead earnest. This was a woman so cowed that she required permission to keep tea bags in a canister marked COFFEE. From where Callie sat, across this plain oak table, the world was full of rules that no one would share with her. Perhaps that’s why she kept her surroundings plain. She didn’t know what was allowed, didn’t trust her own choices. Cassandra imagined Callie sitting in front of the television, rehearsing her call to QVC, fearful that she wouldn’t know how to do it.

  “Fatima told me that your mother, Myra, was very strict with you.”

  Callie started to nod, then lifted her chin as if to take it back. “She meant well.”

  “Does she live with you?”

  “In a nursing home, in Denton.”

  “At your expense?”

  Another aborted nod. Another long silence. Cassandra flashed back to the one real memory she had of Callie as a girl, preserved in her own book: Callie sitting on a high kitchen stool and swinging her legs, utterly unperturbed by the sight of a mother slapping her child.

  “I can’t keep her there all by myself,” Callie said. “Couldn’t begin to.”

  Cassandra started to ask, Who helps you, then? But questions, the slightest rise of a voice, with its implicit demands and obligations, didn’t work with Callie. Teena had warned that nothing worked with Callie. Yet she had responded to the statement about her mother, acknowledged that she was receiving financial help that she couldn’t afford to lose. Perhaps Myra Tippet’s nursing home expenses were buried in Julius Howard’s campaign finance reports as well.

  “You feel obligated to her.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “Even though she was…strict with you.”

  “She did her best.”

  “Abuse is never—”

  “I didn’t say abuse.” These words came swiftly, only to be followed by another long silence, as if Callie had surprised herself with her own vehemence. How many words did Callie say in a week? Probably not as many as Cassandra used in a day. Sometimes, on long drives, Cassandra put in her earpiece, so people would think she was on a Bluetooth device, and chattered away to keep herself company. Did Callie even think in words, or were her thoughts more imagistic, visual?

  Callie cocked her head as if listening, amazed, for the echo of her own sharp words. “No, I didn’t say abuse. That’s a big word. People said that about me, and it wasn’t true. I never abused anyone. I’m not going to say that about someone else.”

  Then what—but no, no questions. Maybe no words at all. Cassandra sipped her tea, thinking, trying to be still. Perhaps silence was a kind of language, too; perhaps not talking could be a form of communication. She willed herself to be patient, to block the words fighting to escape. The moment stretched into a minute, then another. She began to wonder if Callie meant to communicate with her telepathically.

  “I’m not very good at this,” Callie offered.

  Cassandra didn’t even nod this time, just blinked and sipped her tea.

  “People thought I was strong, all those years. But I’m not much good at telling things. I get mixed up.”

&nb
sp; Sip, blink.

  “You say Donna has a child. A girl. Does she look like her mother?”

  Cassandra all but held her breath, not sure she should answer, worried that her voice would break the spell.

  Callie answered her own question: “I bet she does.” Then she started to cry. In this, she was not silent at all, but loud and raucous. Guttural, animalistic noises seemed to claw their way out of Callie’s throat. Her nose ran, her eyes streamed. Cassandra got up and, finding nothing else, brought Callie a paper towel from the dispenser mounted on the wall. Why did the fact of Reg’s daughter disturb Callie? That was a question Cassandra had no desire to ask out loud, much less have answered.

  “Callie, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But you’re here, you…know things. You’re going to tell people what you know. Maybe you have to, because of the law or something. But then what happens? It’s not just me. It’s my mother, too. I have to take care of her.”

  “You have to take care of yourself first, Callie.”

  She looked at Cassandra as if the idea were completely foreign to her, then inhaled deeply several times, as if preparing for a physical task, a race or a dive from a high board. Something that required not only energy but courage as well.

  CALLIE TOOK A DEEP BREATH. She was thinking about a hill near the school, a hill that had seemed impossibly large when they were children. There had been a beautiful tree at the foot of the hill—a willow, that was what it was called—and the hill was thick with clover, waiting for patient children to find the four-leaf varieties hidden there. Callie had been one of the patient ones. The hill was a block from school property and she couldn’t play there after school; she had a bus to catch. But on fair days toward the end of the school year, teachers sometimes led them there as a treat. Once, someone—Fatima, most likely—had started a game in which they raced down the hill by rolling on their sides. Giggling, colliding, they had tumbled down that hill over and over. When Callie arrived home that afternoon, she presented her mother with a bouquet of dandelions, violets, and three four-leaf clovers. Three, and no one else had found even one. Callie’s mother had spanked her with a hairbrush for getting grass stains on her school dress.