“Thank you,” said Susan. “I wasn’t quite sure.”
“They’re sitting in the last row now,” said the Class President.
“Oh really?”
But she couldn’t quite walk to the last row yet. She stood for a while in the doorway of the gymnasium, as if she were someone merely passing by who had paused there and might walk away at any moment. She was looking on with interest, with nothing more than interest.
There was a girl in a tight blue dress on the platform now, droning a speech to the rows of vacant, listening faces. “Our unforgettable years … ” said the loud-speaker, “… and the Alumnae Association … I urge you to join … we wish to thank … our last class meeting … ” The audience awoke and applauded.
The girl on the platform produced a large white box. When she opened it, a piece of white tissue paper drifted to the floor. “Next there’ll be rabbits,” Susan thought, struggling to make herself laugh. But the box was full of orchids. Sunlight had suddenly filled the gymnasium and all the girls were applauding again. For some reason, her hands were clapping too. The wooden floor turned golden and dust glittered in the air. Strange, she could almost smell these orchids—although orchids had no scent. Two weeks ago they had asked each member of the Senior Class to contribute a quarter—“For orchids” they had said—she had never paid her quarter. When she remembered that, she stopped clapping. Luckily her dress had pockets; she hid her hands and tried to become just a person standing in the doorway again.
There were twenty girls whom everyone was supposed to be grateful to. One by one, as their names were called, they rose from their seats and came to the platform to receive one of the orchids she hadn’t paid for. In a moment it would all become ridiculous—twenty orchids pinned crookedly on twenty bosoms. “The orchid is an obscene flower,” Kay had said once. Why couldn’t she laugh? Why had everything become so unbearably significant?—these pastel girls with the sunlight falling on them coming to get their orchids, their perfect, pleased children’s smiles, the engagement rings protecting them. It was miraculous that they existed. The other pastel girls who had been lazier, a little more indifferent, who watched now and applauded, were also miraculous. They too would always graduate; they would be safe. Not me, she thought. She was the one who couldn’t clap, the odd one. Not me. At last the pain of it was alive inside her. Not me. Not me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SOUTHWICK ARMS Hotel was much too quiet, too much a hotel of the imagination. Today the corridors had a deathly smell of disinfectant and all the locked doors with their shiny brown paint looked exactly alike, as if the rooms behind them were exactly alike, too. A pile of tangled, grayish sheets lay at the end of each corridor; it must have been the day they changed the linen. Kay once had said: “They change the linen once a week and that’s how the inmates mark time.” Only today there didn’t seem to be any inmates. Perhaps they had all turned off their lights, their hot plates, and fled, leaving behind them only their castoff sheets and here and there a container of milk on a window sill. Perhaps as always she had arrived a little too late.
But all the way down Broadway she had had the oddest feeling that when she walked into the Southwick Arms Hotel this time, she wouldn’t ever leave; it would really be possible to rent a little room there, find some sort of job—better than going blindly, meaninglessly to Paris. Instead she could enter the Outlaws’ world, Kay’s world, but now hers—she had qualified for it, graduated into it, she thought bitterly. Maybe everything was even part of the same plan—the graduation rehearsal, the predestined walk to the Southwick Arms Hotel because Kay wasn’t in the library. That was a comforting idea. But the hotel should not have been strange today, it should have been the way it always was. Why had they turned off all the radios?
There was a thin bar of light under Kay’s door, but Kay didn’t answer. Susan knocked again. At the library they had said that Kay was sick. If she was sick, wouldn’t she be in her room? Susan put her hand on the doorknob and listened, straining to catch the first stir of Kay getting up from her bed, her chair. “Kay,” she called softly.
It was absolutely silent in the corridor. “Kay!” She almost hated Kay for not being in, for writing, Susan, where are you? and sticking it on her door, summoning her here and now having absconded with the answer. “Kay!” One couldn’t keep calling to an empty room. In a moment she would have to go.
But then there was a cry from Kay’s room. “Who is it?”
She found that she hesitated before she answered, allowing herself a second in which she could have walked away. “Susan.”
“Susan?”
“Yes.”
The door was opened. Kay had the mute, fierce look of someone who had been caught hiding.
“Were you asleep?” Susan asked lamely. Kay was staring at her as if she were a stranger.
“Come in.” As soon as Susan had stepped into her room, Kay closed the door, forcing it shut with the weight of her body. “I thought they’d come for their rent,” she said with a choked laugh.
“Do they do that?” It was the sort of stupid question she always asked when she didn’t know what to say. It meant, “Yes, I heard you,” implied a concern she often didn’t feel, an innocence she’d never had. Part of her style—Susan recognized it now for the first time and realized that it had just become obsolete.
“Yes. If you don’t pay.” Kay attempted another laugh.
“Is something wrong? Are you sick?” She felt as if she were inquiring about a third person whom neither of them knew.
“Am I supposed to be sick?”
“According to the library … ”
“Well, I’m sick of the library. Are you going to stay? Why don’t you sit down?” Kay swept a pile of books and tangled underwear off the armchair. It was odd that Kay was offering her the chair—usually they both sat on the bed cross-legged. “You’re all dressed up,” Kay said.
“I hate this dress.”
“It looks good on you.” Kay sat on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in her mouth, striking one match after another. A silence was settling upon them.
“You put a note on my door,” Susan said.
“You didn’t call.”
She had the uncomfortable feeling that Kay was reproaching her. “I was going to but then I didn’t. I went to sleep.” Kay was frowning absently at her unlit cigarette. “Today I went to the graduation rehearsal.”
“Oh yes,” said Kay. “The graduation scene.” Her voice shook a little. “That’s why you dressed up.” She spoke as if she were pronouncing Susan guilty of that.
“Kay!” Susan cried. “I’m not graduating. I flunked gym.” The fact instantly lost its meaning, became something else—an appeal, something that had once belonged to her that she was trading in for compassion.
“Oh … I’m sorry,” Kay said hastily, as if she hadn’t quite been listening.
“Well,” Susan said, “it doesn’t really matter.” But that was what Kay should have said.
Now Kay was looking at her. “You’re bugged about it.” Her voice was curiously flat. “Let them keep their piece of paper,” Kay said. “That’s all it is, you know, a piece of paper.”
“I know,” Susan said. I’ll go soon, she thought.
Kay got up and walked restlessly around the room. Her hair was uncombed; she kept touching it, pushing it back from her face. “Their rules!” she cried out suddenly. “Their idiot rules!” She turned and faced Susan, her eyes alive again, feverish. “You didn’t even want to go to graduation—now you won’t have to. You know how I was going to spend tomorrow afternoon? I was going to get drunk, all by myself. But now we’ll get drunk together. In the Riverside Café. We’ll have our own celebration. We won’t have to sit through the Dean’s speeches.”
This was what she had come here for—to hear Kay tell her that they were upside down together, out of it toge
ther; to consider the peculiar institution of graduation, put it in its proper perspective, strip it of its importance. “You know,” Kay said, triumphant now, “it’s right that you’re not graduating. It has a kind of symbolic beauty.”
But I want to graduate, Susan thought. Yes, that was what she wanted. She wanted to march in the procession, wanted the cap and gown, her parents smiling in the audience. “I want to graduate, Kay,” she said, not daring to look at her.
“But you have graduated! Does it matter what they put on their records? You can’t be ashamed of flunking something like gym that you shouldn’t have to take at all.”
“But they didn’t do it to me!” Everything was suddenly very clear; there was something she could no longer pretend not to know. “I did it to myself. I cut gym. I knew the rules, and I cut because—”
“Because you didn’t care! Because you didn’t give a damn!” How easily Kay finished the sentence for her.
“But that’s not the way it was for me.” She wondered sadly whether she was going to lose Kay now. “You would have decided not to care.”
“Yes, I hated college, the whole idea of college—listening sheep!”
“But that’s a way of caring. You hated it and so you were really there and knew what it was and felt it. Well, in a way, I never went to college at all. I was just putting in time at a place that was school, because I’d always gone to school. And I was afraid of it ending, I guess. I’m afraid of going to Paris, you know that?”
“Nothing will happen to you in Paris. You can take good care of yourself.”
“But I don’t want to go on taking care of myself. I want to let things happen to me, Kay. I thought today … I thought maybe I won’t go to Paris. I might even take a room in this hotel. I thought of you, the way you lived… . ” She stopped; Kay was laughing bitterly.
“Oh, Susan, don’t make me out to be some kind of—heroine. That’s really a drag, you know. It is! Look.” She began to rummage through the books and papers strewn on the bed. “Here—look at this… . ” She hurled a small sketch pad at Susan; it landed at her feet. Susan stared down at it before she picked it up. She wondered whether Kay really wanted her to see it. “Go on. Look.”
Even then, she opened it reluctantly, afraid that Kay would expect her to say something she wouldn’t be able to. The pad was almost half filled. There were little drawings in it of objects—a chair, a bottle, a lamp—the same things drawn over and over again, darkened and blurred by erasures, their shapes timidly outlined with the same faint pencil, as if Kay were really drawing their disappearance. The sketches made her sad. She didn’t know what to say. She turned the pages as slowly as she could. When she looked up, she saw that Kay was crouched over a book. “When did you do these?” Susan said at last.
“I did the last three today.” Kay hardly lifted her head. “That’s why I didn’t go to the library.”
“Oh.”
“Pretty stupid,” Kay said harshly.
“No … ” Susan faltered. “I just didn’t know you were interested in drawing.”
Kay’s face reddened. “I’m not. I’m interested in—seeing.”
“In seeing?”
“Oh hell!” Kay sighed wearily.
“But what is it you want to see, Kay?” One more day, she remembered again. It was already five o’clock and she and Kay were shouting to each other across space, like people on long-distance phone calls shouting uselessly, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
“Just chairs and things,” Kay said. “Just chairs.”
“But what does that mean? I don’t know what you mean.”
Kay retreated into silence, arms folded, her mouth taut. “I mean chairs,” she said at last, “that’s all. This room”—she gestured awkwardly—“this is my reality. This is the big soup I’m in … I’ve got to see it!”
“But you see so much! I’ve always envied you.”
“Envied me! I don’t see poems. I don’t see paintings. I don’t see people. I don’t see you. But I’m beginning to see chairs. That’s pretty good. Like that one—that’s a very important chair. It’s where I sit most of the time. So I’ve been making drawings of it.”
“Yes, I saw … ”
“Well, doesn’t the last one … ?” Kay began eagerly. “Well, it looks like it a little—I think. I was very happy when I did that.” She stopped and looked hard at Susan. Susan opened the pad again. “You don’t have to look for it. They’re all bad drawings. Forget it!” she cried out. “I don’t want you to look at it!”
Slowly, Susan put the pad face down on the table. “I never think about things like that,” she said carefully, “about ‘seeing’—I mean, not in the same way.”
Kay had picked the pad up from the table; now she closed it and set it down again. “You don’t think about things like that because”—she hesitated—“because you’re not a Mediocre. Oh, I’ve decided, by the way, that I’m a Mediocre. That’s a good word for it.” She gave the “o” in Mediocre a hollow, French pronunciation. “I thought I was going to turn out to be something else. But if you are a Mediocre, you’re lucky if you can find it out as soon as possible. It’s not knowing that fucks everything up.”
She had never heard Kay sound so sure of anything before. It was frightening, like someone very old staring at a white wall. “I don’t understand,” she said sadly. “I wish I knew how to argue with you.”
“That’s right, you never argue.”
“But I think you’re wrong. I do. I … ” It was strange to hear herself objecting, when, yes, she did understand. Wasn’t she perhaps also a Mediocre? “Kay,” she asked, “why did you leave that note for me yesterday?”
Kay wasn’t looking at her any more. “Because I was alone and I couldn’t stand it.” Her voice was so low that Susan could barely hear her. “This is a bad time of year, everyone going away, graduating … you graduating, especially. I got to feeling sorry for myself. I had a really big, disgusting self-pity day planned for tomorrow.”
Susan felt an odd disappointment. She couldn’t quite accept the unfamiliar real Kay who had written Susan, where are you? simply because she had needed her. But what could she have said to Kay yesterday? What could she say to her now?
“I never thought you’d be getting drunk with me,” Kay said with a tight little smile. “You will get drunk tomorrow, too—won’t you, Susan? What time will you come over?”
“What time?” She remembered that she never liked the Riverside Café much in the afternoon. There was something disturbing about sitting in the darkness of one of those green leather booths when you could see through the plate-glass window that outside the sun was shining on Broadway. And there were never enough people—only those few who were always there, like the derelict old man who incessantly cracked his knuckles. Tomorrow, though, there would be a lot of people on Broadway walking past the window to the graduation. “What time?” Why was Kay pressing her, why did they have to make arrangements? She would sleep late tomorrow morning; she would have called her parents by then, would call them tonight, in fact. How strange to be able to think of something that hadn’t happened yet as something already in the past—another form of cowardice!
“What’s the matter?” Kay’s voice deafened her. She didn’t want to answer, couldn’t answer. “You lave a look on your face.”
“Just a look,” she said.
“You were thinking about graduation.”
Can’t I do that? she thought with a guilty anger. “Kay, I wish we could go to another bar—even a bar in another part of the city. You know what I mean?” Kay’s face went rigid, silent. “It’s going to be weird sitting in the Riverside. I don’t think I—”
“You’d rather not meet, then.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” Helplessly, she felt the end of the sentence slip away from her. Other words, half formed, impossible to say, cr
owded her throat. She did know what she meant—that was the trouble. There was no way not to be cruel now, no way at all. “Kay,” she said slowly, “I could march tomorrow, if wanted to, with the October graduates.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?” Kay spoke with cold precision, settling it for her somehow.
With a slight shock she heard herself say, “I think so.” Kay said nothing. “I just feel I have to. Isn’t that stupid?”
Kay walked across the room, away from her, and sat down on the bed. “Well, I know why you’re doing it.”
She had a wild hope for a moment that perhaps Kay did know—she didn’t quite understand it herself.
“You’re making a sacrificial offering to your parents.”
The words rang in her ears a long time. This was the end of something, the end of the Southwick Arms Hotel, the end of Kay—another line drawn across her life. “I’m doing it for myself,” she said, and wondered sadly whether Kay heard her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THERE WERE TOO many people embracing in the lobby and then too many people on the lawn, too many mothers in little white hats, and the girls were all standing in their black gowns, in the sun, blinking, having pictures taken—“Smile,” their fathers were saying, “smile,” and they all smiled very well. “Excuse me,” said Susan, grimly pushing her way through the crowd. She was looking for her parents—they hadn’t waited for her in the lobby. It was difficult to look for people you didn’t want to find. You ran the risk of not seeing them, and yet everybody became them for a moment. She began to feel the panic of a child lost in a department store. Her gown was too long: people kept congratulating her because she was wearing it and she kept tripping over the hem. Perhaps she’d tear it, confront her parents in black rags, clearly an outcast. She was tired already of the conversation they were going to have now that they hadn’t had last night, sickened by the apologies she was going to have to make, the explanations that would not be quite the truth. You had to protect your parents; you always had to lie a little and each time you lied a little piece of you was eaten away. And you lied to protect yourself, too. They had a way of rushing in upon you if you ever let them think they knew what you were feeling. You had to protect yourself from their greed. They wanted all your secrets; they wanted terrible scenes where everyone wept and forgave one another. At the same time, they wanted you to preserve their innocence. They wanted that most of all.
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