Belladonna

by Anbara Salam

  Whoops and cheers echoed from the lake as we approached; village kids were already on the ice, leaping about and scraping pearly foam from the surface and flicking it at each other. My gut twinged—even if the lake was truly frozen, surely it wasn’t a great idea to be jumping on it? But as we reached the harbor I could see the ice was thick and clear, spangled with frozen bubbles fixed in silver. The five of us students stood on the pier, jiggling our weight to keep warm while the sisters tied on their skates. One by one, they launched off onto the ice, smacking and sliding into each other. As Sister Bernard began to effortlessly glide backward with a sweeping stride, Katherine shook her head. “This is nuts. Why didn’t we bring a camera? My mom will never believe me.”

  Sister Teresa was hanging on to Sister Luisa, and they were staggering in sudden jerks to avoid the rubble of twigs and pebbles that had been thrown to test the ice.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” Joan said. “What do you think, Bridge? Shall we go back? I can’t feel my toes.”

  I glanced at Isabella, but when I turned, all the girls were looking at me.

  “Um.” I put my arm through Isabella’s. “Are you bored?”

  Isabella shook her head. Her scarf was covering her mouth, her eyes bright with amusement.

  “Let’s stay for a bit longer, then,” I said. “We don’t get to watch the nun Olympics every day.”

  Everyone laughed, their breath white in the air.

  Joan shivered. “Bridge, you must have a furnace in your belly. I’m freezing.”

  “Oh, come here,” Katherine said, embracing her, and then me and Mary and Isabella. As we stood bundled up together watching the sisters, I felt a strange rush of emotion, like I might be about to start crying.

  Tentatively, I slipped my hand into Isabella’s pocket and squeezed her fingers.

  She looked right into my eyes and smiled.

  24.

  December

  Christmas was a strangely somber affair. Father Gavanto held a long Mass in La Pentola, the church full of wheezing old people I hadn’t seen before. Signora Bassi was wearing a curious black hat and rocking a mewling baby I supposed must be hers, although I didn’t ask after its parentage. Back at the academy, we ate a plain lunch of boiled-chicken-and-dumpling stew followed by strips of candied orange peel. To the sound of jangling bells from the chapel, the five of us gathered in the common room and opened our gifts. Isabella gave me a pair of earrings wrapped in a copy of Il Giorno. They were button-size cloudy amber studs, and I immediately wished I had somewhere nice to keep them, rather than in an Altoids tin with the rest of my jewelry. I had knitted her a red cap, and she put it on and posed in a range of serious stances, as if she were a girl in a pattern magazine. We toasted each other with plum wine and dozed companionably in front of the fire.

  But in the days following Christmas, the academy felt hollow and strange. The sisters appeared often in the upper corridor, sweeping and dusting, changing the bed linen even in the empty rooms. I watched them leaving the chapel, shoveling snow in the courtyard, or Sister Teresa and Sister Luisa sheltering in the orchard to smoke. Occasionally I saw Sister Teresa by herself, walking down toward the spa to light the furnace and keep the pipes from cracking. Isabella, meanwhile, was complaining of a cold and spent most afternoons locked in her room, scribbling lists of people to invite to her wedding. Her notes were extensive, and many of the guests were Ralph’s friends from Yale—men called Badger or Tibbs. She began going down regularly to La Pentola and visiting Signora Bassi at the enoteca to quiz her about different wines and different foods and how they were meant to be paired. I nodded along to her menu conversation about dessert wines and champagnes, but I don’t suppose I was much of an audience, for she quickly gave up trying to get me interested. Katherine and I made a nest in the common room with a blanket and a bag of walnuts. When Isabella came to join us in the evenings she climbed into my armchair and slipped her cold feet under mine and I read out loud to her from one of her Georgette Heyer novels.

  At night I lay in bed listening to the pipes sighing, the floorboards creaking, as wind swelled through the cracks. The falling snow muffled the sounds from outside, so the corridors of the academy felt charged with static. I kept my bedroom door closed now, since the windows overlooking the courtyard were badly fitting in their frames and let through keyholes of icy air that pierced my nightdress. But often I lay awake long into the night, hoping Isabella might grow cold and slip in beside me.

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve was another snowy evening. We gathered in the common room and counted down until midnight, wearing paper hats and eating chocolate cookies that had grown soft in the mail. At the stroke of midnight we cheered and hugged. We exchanged good-luck kisses, and as Isabella’s face came close to mine, a thrill passed through me at the smell of plum wine on her breath, the weight of her hair, cool upon my cheek. Joan began singing “Auld Lang Syne,” but we didn’t know the words, so we hummed the tune with our arms over each other’s shoulders. When we’d drunk the last of the wine, we said good night and “Happy 1958” and went to our beds. Isabella followed as I entered my room, and I deliberately turned off the lamp so it would be darker, more intimate. We stood by the window, watching the dim moonlight catching on flakes of snow. An icy breeze was skirling through the chinks in the window frame, and Isabella shivered. I yanked the blanket off my bed and tucked it over her shoulders. She smiled absently. I was conscious of the join between our bodies, my arm against her shoulder. I thought again of the night when she had climbed in beside me. When I had kissed her pulse, my tongue against the warm beat of her heart. We stood in silence until the silence stretched out and became meaningful. My heart was blinking rapidly. I thought, Maybe, maybe it will happen. If I creep ever so softly. I inched closer to her, tiny, incremental movements, hardly daring to breathe, until the whole of my arm was pressed against hers.

  We stood like that for two minutes, and then Isabella twitched and covered her mouth, yawning.

  “I’m beat,” she said.

  “Want to sleep here?” I looked pointedly out at the snow. “It’ll be warmer.”

  “No, thanks,” she said in a chirpy tone, unwrapping herself from the blanket. “I’m snoring something awful these days with this cold.”

  She folded the blanket over her arm and held the bundle toward me. Stretching, she called, “Good night!” before turning the handle with a wave. I busied myself spreading and straightening the blanket. But as soon as she closed the door I let it fall and leaned forward until I could feel the warmth of her body still lingering on the blanket.

  25.

  January 1958

  The days after New Year’s were long and tiresome. Joan and Katherine quarreled over the atomic power station in Pennsylvania, and I had to spend an hour with Katherine in her room, listening to her complain about Joan’s politics. I was almost jealous of her, that their quarrel was so straightforward. It was like a piece of broken pottery, with real, sharp edges to it.

  Isabella was down in La Pentola, learning about port wine, and I was growing bored and restless from sitting indoors. After a heavy lunch of mutton and carrot stew, and a disorienting nap, I sat in the common room and stared idly out at the thin line of smoke coming from the spa chimney. I leafed again through the magazines in the basket, even though I was sure I’d read them all. Sluggish and irritable, I decided to walk down to the spa and see if it was Sister Teresa stoking the pipes.

  I wrapped myself up in my coat and hat and scarf and two pairs of socks and left the academy. The air was so cold it made me gasp, but it was instantly refreshing, like a shot of peppermint schnapps through my veins. I crunched down the slope toward the spa, quickly growing too warm in my layers. Glazed footprints marked the path where the nuns’ boots had tramped down the ice, then frozen over to leave imprints as slippery as glass. I descended carefully, sticking my tongue out of the corner of my mouth
as I clambered over the rock.

  When I approached the spa garden, I was so bundled up I had to turn myself and squeeze sideways through the gates. The graveyard was quite beautiful in the snow. Sister Teresa had obviously been working on it a great deal. The hedges were trimmed into neat blocks and at the back was a new wooden crate storing stripped foliage for mulch.

  The ramp had frozen into an icy sheet, and so cautiously I put my foot over and yanked open the doors into the ballroom. The white snow light bleached some of the beauty out of the room. I had remembered it as grand, but it was clear where the paper had runched and buckled. Thin crusts of hoary mud were smeared over the wooden floorboards where the sisters had walked to and fro over the threshold. It was much warmer than outside and I pulled off my hat, running my palms over my hair to disperse the static. With the building warmed up, I could smell the sour, grassy smell of the old wood and the sweet stink of a dead mouse.

  “Hello?” I called, and my voice echoed. But I remembered it might not even be Sister Teresa feeding the stove. I went through the double doors and into the downstairs corridor toward John Henry’s room, running my gloves along the wood paneling. Since I’d last been to John Henry’s room, it had featured often in my daydreams, where Rhona had acquired a cozy fireplace and her own TV.

  And as I came up to the door, I heard a cough from inside the room, followed by a murmur and giggle. The sisters were talking! My heart hammered. What a victory this would be to take back to Isabella! I had caught the sisters talking to each other when they thought they were alone! They must come here to whisper, away from the nosy ears of the academy girls. I put my face to the keyhole and my lashes scuffed against the wood, the heat of my own breath reflecting back on my face.

  Through the rotting keyhole I clearly saw two figures lying side by side on a mattress. Isabella and Sister Teresa, touching.

  26.

  January

  There was Isabella’s bare foot, jiggling at the end of the mattress. There was the red hat I had knitted for her under the window. There were the convent-issue boots, the wimple cap and scarf, thrown on the floor, lying in the dust. I realized suddenly that Sister Teresa was uncloaked, and crouched down further to look at her. She was still dressed, but without her cap, she seemed so naked. Her hair was dark and shorn so short it barely covered her ears. Isabella picked up her arm, and Rosaria rested her head on Isabella’s chest. Isabella absently worked at Rosaria’s scalp while they muttered quietly. Rosaria laughed. For Sister Teresa was quite scrubbed away.

  I was standing on a high ledge. My mouth went dry and a sour taste filled it from the back, silty like the dregs in the bottom of a cider glass.

  Isabella stretched out, yawned, and, taking Rosaria’s hand, kissed it lightly upon the inside of the wrist. I pressed my head closer to the keyhole and my eyelashes brushed against the wood. The casualness of it was awful. More awful, maybe, than any other part of it. This was no frantic moment of solace. This was the companionable time wasting of two people already intimate with each other.

  The longer I looked, the more I understood. There on the mattress was an orange coverlet, one from the academy. They must have brought the blanket there deliberately. The mattress itself must have been brought there deliberately. So they could lie upon it.

  I pulled my head away from the keyhole and crouched down in a squat, pressing my face into my knees. Had Isabella ever gone to the enoteca? She must have been meeting with her for weeks. My neck was pinched by the angle, my vision speckled. I put my face back to the keyhole. Rosaria’s head was still on Isabella’s chest, and Isabella’s fingers were still kneading her scalp. Both had their eyes closed, and they were murmuring about something. Isabella’s face broke into a slight smile that fluttered over her eyelids, as if she were dreaming.

  I pulled my head back again, straightening my right leg. It bumped against the wooden door. Panic surged into my throat. I froze. Their murmuring stopped. There was the startled, static charge of silence as they listened. I stood as quickly as I could, my legs stiff, and hobbled down the corridor, back the way I had come. Stumbling through the ballroom, I nearly slipped on the ramp, catching my hand across a nail in the bricks and cutting the heel of my palm through the glove. I crunched down the path, holding the graze to my mouth, hearing distantly the muffled sound of my own wails.

  I trudged through the graveyard, through the railings, scrambled up the rock and along the path as quickly as I could manage. All I could think about was getting back to the academy, to be safe, away from them. I ran through the side door, along the downstairs corridor, praying nobody would see me, that Joan and Katherine wouldn’t appear and ask what was wrong. I ran to my room and, slumping by the bed, pushed my face into the bedding and sobbed, my ears still smarting from the cold.

  I cried into the blanket until my throat was aching and I thought I would be sick. Then I bunched my knees up to my chest, yanking the blanket down and pulling it over me. My face was swollen and tender. I remembered how I had thrown the blanket over Isabella on New Year’s Eve and how she had flinched away from me. How in the moment when I was looking over the snow and thinking of her, she must have been thinking of Rosaria. With a feeble moan I threw the blanket on the floor and climbed onto the bed, kicking off my boots and wriggling under the comforter, still in my outdoor clothes. My coat was damp from drops of melted snow, and the graze across my palm stung. I was far too warm, the scarf chafing at my neck, and the tips of my ears were burning, but it was satisfying, to be so uncomfortable. Another crying jag came over me and I sobbed into the pillow.

  All this time, I’d been so careful, so patient. And for what? The lie I had told Sister Teresa—for what? It was supposed to protect me. And it had been for nothing. And Sister Teresa—what had possessed her? She was a nun! Her vows—her promises. And after what I had told her about Isabella—how had she forgiven her so easily? She was so weak. Weaker even than me. All the efforts I had made. Pointless. Humiliating. Waiting for Isabella. When I kissed her, after our fight, the tension in her lips I had taken for shyness. How gently she had pulled back from me, how subtly she had eased us apart. I cringed and covered my head with my arms, waiting for the surge of shame to pass. I saw her face as she looked at me on New Year’s, and twitched, and moved away from me. It was so awful.

  I thought of the time when Sister Teresa first took us to the spa—was that when it had begun? I pulled a pillow into my stomach and held it there against the hollowness. Had they been selecting the right place for their rendezvous? Absurdly, I thought, it was the room I had chosen for Rhona, and they had sullied it. I cried into my pillow until it grew dark and I fell into something like sleep, then woke up, fretful, overheated, needing the bathroom.

  I waited behind my door with one ear to the wood, listening for any sounds in the corridor. But it was silent, so I pulled the door open, ran down the corridor as quickly as I could, rushed into the bathroom, and peed. When I washed my hands in the basin, my eyes were bloodshot, and the skin around my nose was raw from rubbing it on tissues. I looked awful. I tucked the hair behind my ears. I was glad I looked awful. It was proof of how unhappy I was. What she had done to me.

  I raced down the corridor and into my room, locking the door. I hadn’t drawn the shutters and the night was blue with a scattering of wan stars. A headache began, pulling from behind at the muscles in the back of my neck. I grabbed one of the bottles of plum wine from my trunk, and tugging the comforter around me, I swigged the liquor straight from the bottle. There was a perverse kind of satisfaction in feeling so terrible, in the exhausted bruise in my throat. I swigged and cried again, in little blurts that dried up in seconds.

  I thought over and over of the night when Isabella had come to me, after the festival. How I had kissed her neck, felt the bead of her nipple under my fingers. And as I sat there, I imagined pushing open the door to John Henry’s room, slamming it so hard that dust fell from the roof, and t
hey would’ve looked up at me, mouths open, horrified, humiliated, exposed. I wondered then why I hadn’t just swung open the door. Perhaps because the moment I had witnessed was so intimate, so domestic, it had felt, at the time, that I shouldn’t have been spying. As if I were in the wrong. Maybe I would’ve been bolder if they’d been lying there naked. A wriggle of odd desire squirmed through me and I shook myself to dislodge it. Perhaps—I thought—perhaps I hadn’t opened the door because I wasn’t sure what I had seen. I put the wine bottle down on the tiles and licked the sticky crud from my bottom lip. Maybe I’d overreacted. What had I really seen after all? Maybe I’d let my imagination run away with me.

  Relief bubbled up to the top of my head and popped like a bottle of champagne. What a fool I had been! So what if they were sitting together, lying on each other? It didn’t mean anything at all. Why, half the girls in the academy lay mingled on the sofa, rubbed each other’s shoulders, walked around the grounds arm in arm. And after all, Sister Teresa was a nun. An actual nun.

  I stood up, giddy, close to giggles. How stupid I’d been! I paced up and down the room, inspired almost to skip and jump. Imagine if I had burst into the room, making accusations. How embarrassing! My cheeks grew hot and I congratulated myself for creeping away, for not saying anything. I took another celebratory swig of the plum wine. I could go to Isabella—find her, tell her about it, and laugh. But I touched my face; it was still sensitive, aching. She would know I’d been crying. Better, I thought, to wait until the next day.

  I climbed into bed, smearing cold cream across my face to try to salve the blotchiness. I resolved to concentrate. Isabella and Sister Teresa—their friendship—it was just a blip. A freak of circumstance. I would have to work harder; that was all. Go along with them when they went gardening. Pretend to care about apples. I’d have to be more interesting, more delightful. What was it that Isabella liked about her? Her hair? Her laugh? Her wholesomeness? The other girls already called me St. Bridget. I could be better. I could read more poetry, cultivate an air of wisdom. It was going to be fine. The bed tilted. Strangely, I felt much better for my outburst. As if I’d been trying to gulp down a pill that had finally settled. How could I ever have been worried about it? Isabella and Sister Teresa. Stupid.