Strange Sisters

by Fletcher Flora

  The river was life, and the sea was death, and the river eventually reached the sea, because even the weariest river reaches the sea, but before it did, it touched many places, and one of the places it touched was the campus of Burlington College. The river valley there was wide and flat, and the river was shallow between low banks, and you could see the sun glinting on the water from a window in the office of the dean. You could sit in an uncomfortable chair with a high, hard back in the musty office that had the smell of old books, and you could see a long way through the window and down a gentle slope between wide-spaced oaks and maples and elms to a pale fringe of willows and the glinting water.

  The dean's voice was a dull, meandering thread in the bright fabric of quiet. It disturbed the peace and molested the ear drums, but it was possible to ignore it almost completely because it was, after all, saying nothing that was any particular help in a matter that was past helping. It was possible to ignore it, that is, until it ceased altogether, and then, by its very absence, it demanded some measure of attention, a concession of a sort.

  Reluctantly, Kathy turned her face from the window and said, "I'm sorry. I'm afraid I didn't hear."

  The dean's heavy face betrayed a trace of irritation that was immediately and professionally expunged. She had a quite obvious mustache of fine hairs. There was a mole on her chin with three similar hairs growing from it, and there > was a second mole in the crevice between her right nostril and cheek. No hairs grew from the second mole. She had a wide mouth that compressed thinly in sudden anger and relaxed as suddenly when she remembered in time that it was not appropriate for deans to display anger.

  She said with labored patience, "I was saying that I'm at a loss to understand your miserable showing, Kathryn. With the exception of Dr. Telsa's class, you failed to make a single passing mark. It's incredible."

  "I'm sorry."

  "So am I. Very sorry. But I'm afraid that regret is not sufficient to change the record. Have you anything to say for yourself? Any reasonable explanation at all? Have you been feeling ill? Has anything been troubling you?"

  Kathy looked out the window again, and there were no leaves on the trees, but there was on the branches a thin veneer of shining ice, and there was ice floating in the river beyond the willows. It was a January day with the soiled winter clouds cleared for a while from the low sky, a brief, bright interim that would not last, and it was no time to waste on a dull woman who asked interminable questions that never approached the truth. There was no way to explain, no use in the world of trying to explain that the mind obsessed and absorbed cannot be parceled out to lesser tasks and interests like so much hired help.

  "No," she said. "I've been all right."

  "Are you sure? Sometimes, my dear, we have these difficulties without being fully aware of their nature."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "I don't know that I mean anything definite. I'm merely suggesting that it might be wise for you to see Dr. Sandstrom."

  "The psychiatrist?"

  "Yes."

  "No. I don't want to see her."

  "Is that a reasonable attitude, my dear? Surely you're not afraid of seeing a psychiatrist. Dr. Sandstrom will be your friend. You will have some friendly chats, and perhaps she will be able to make some suggestions that will help you."

  "I don't want to see her."

  Again the swift sequence of irritation, expunction, labored patience. "I'd be doing less than my duty if I didn't urge you very strongly to reconsider. Your initial tests here show you to be a person of superior intelligence. You should be doing superior work. That you are not doing so, that you are, quite the contrary, failing to do even acceptable work, is an indication that you may need professional help. This is no disgrace, my dear, nothing to feel humiliated about. We must simply be realistic enough to take the proper corrective measures. You would find your chats with Dr. Sandstrom to be quite pleasant, very therapeutic. She has worked wonders with many other students here."

  "Thank you, but I don't need to see Dr. Sandstrom. I don't want to talk with her."

  "You're making it very difficult for me, my dear. Indeed, you are leaving me only one alternative. Do you know what that is?"

  "Yes. I'll be dismissed."

  "Temporarily, at least. You will have to miss a semester."

  "All right. I'll move out of the dormitory tomorrow."

  "We don't wish to be harsh. If it is inconvenient for you to leave immediately, you are perfectly welcome to stay on a few days."

  We. The comforting plural. The subtle, strategic retreat to dominant numbers and the incidental renunciation of personal responsibility. We do this, my dear, not I. I am merely an agent.

  For already in her life, in Kathy's life, though the issue was not overt and was given substance only by her own recognition of it, there was They and there was I, the antithetic orthodox and aberrant, and in the recognition of it, the ancient and evil conflict of it, there was a way of thinking and a loneliness and a depression that would come and go and come again so long as she lived.

  "It's no inconvenience," she said. "I'll leave tomorrow."

  "As you wish." The dean stood up behind her desk, a dark, blocky woman with heavy breasts bunched and bound so tightly that they gave to her torso the solid, overdeveloped look of a male physical culturist. She extended a hand in a mannish gesture. "Good-bye, my dear, and believe me when I repeat that we're all most sorry. We hope that you'll come back to us next fall better prepared to meet our requirements."

  Kathy took the hand and found it strangely damp and limp to belong to such an aggressive woman. She dropped it quickly and said, "Thank you," and left the office. Outside, the abbreviated day was in its precipitate descent to darkness. Shadows climbed among the branches of trees in pursuit of the icy light. The glitter was gone from the river. The cold was apparently in inverse ratio to the light, and she turned the plain collar of her coat up around her neck. She wasn't sorry to be leaving Burlington College, but there was in her, nevertheless, an intense sadness. Partly it was because she would be leaving Vera, but mostly it was a sadness she couldn't explain, couldn't associate specifically with anything that had happened. And she felt it, of course, because she had come so definitely to a minor end and a minor beginning between the major beginning and the major end, and she felt but did not recognize that neither the end nor the beginning were good things, things that she would have chosen if she had been free to choose.

  She was going to Vera's. She crossed the campus in the gathering darkness, pooled and thickened beneath the trees, her feet making crisp sounds on the dead grass. Past the building that housed the chemistry lab. Past the Fine Arts building with one window illuminated on the second floor to form a screen for the grotesque, antic shadow of someone sawing a bow across the strings of a fiddle. Past the library and the Museum of Natural History and the gymnasium and so off the campus and up the street to Vera's. She rang the bell, and Vera answered immediately, and there was something wrong between them, a subtle ugliness that was less distortion of reality than the exposure of it.

  Kathy went in and sat down. Not on a pillow this time, but on a chair, assuming the primness that was a kind of automatic defense against any felt threat. Not relaxed in warm and delicious atmosphere of intimacy, but tense and wary, like a rejected child, though there had been as yet no expression of rejection. She didn't understand the atmospheric change, not at first, but after a while she knew that it was fear, Vera's fear, the bitter, corrosive fear of the especially vulnerable.

  "Did you see the dean?" Vera said.

  "Yes."

  "Well?"

  "I'll have to leave school."

  "I'm sorry. I wish there was something I could do for you."

  It was a little too quick, too fervent, the disavowal of capacity to help. Kathy had come only to report and say good-bye, but the vulnerable see shadows behind every innocence, and she was suspected of having come to force intervention, to practice a kind of blackmail.
She was conscious of this at once, and the knowledge stimulated in her a sly and malicious desire to capitalize on it, to fan and feed the ugly fear in this woman, this Dr. Telsa, who had been one thing and was now, almost in an instant, becoming something quite different. She was even changing physically, it seemed, growing thinner and older, all dry skin and projecting bones. The skin was flaky and the pores were large. In her eyes was the reflection of her fear and an incipient hatred for the stupid girl who, by exposing herself to curiosity and inspection, however routine, had become a source of jeopardy. It was perfectly clear that her paramount wish was to have Kathy gone from school as quickly and as quietly as possible.

  "The dean wants me to see Dr. Sandstrom," Kathy said.

  "Dr. Sandstrom! My God, you aren't going to do it, are you?"

  "I don't know. I could probably stay on here if I did."

  She had no intention of seeing the psychiatrist, of course. Nothing on earth, at that time, could have prevailed upon her to do so. But she derived a sadistic pleasure from the flaring fear in Vera Telsa's eyes, and she derived a concurrent pleasure equally intense from the inversion of hatred, the sickness within herself that came from the cruel exposure of ugliness where she had thought there was beauty. She sat quietly, looking up at Vera with a demure expression, and across the room on a spindle, trapped in a black disk, Chopin was silent.

  "You little fool!" Vera said. "Do you want to ruin yourself? Do you have any idea of what that woman may do to you, may make you say?"

  Kathy sat quietly for another moment, her head held a little to one side and the faint demure smile on her lips, as if she were listening for a small sound that might come to her from a great distance, and then she stood up and said, "You're very frightened, aren't you? It makes you hate me very much. You're afraid that I may ruin you, not myself. But you needn't worry. I won't hurt you. I wish you no harm now. I only wish that you'd died before I met you."

  Then she turned and let herself out of the house and went back up across the campus past the administration building and down the long slope among the trees to the bank of the river. She had been remembering the river as she had seen it through the dean's window all the time she had been in Vera's house, and she had thought that she would return to it as soon as she was free. It was very cold. The wind crossed the water and knifed through her thin, plain coat. She could feel over all her body a roughening of skin, and her blood seemed to sing in her veins a strange, sad song. Later she would have regrets, very grievous ones, but she had none now, and the predominant quality of her temper was the great sadness that was somewhat like the emotional equivalent of the sound of the river whispering past her in the night between narrow margins of ice.

  And the river had continued to flow through time as well as space, from then to now, and morning became afternoon, and the afternoon passed, and it was evening of the last day.

  She was by that time slightly drunk again, having stopped several places in her prowling of the streets, and she was standing on the sidewalk looking into the window of a drug store. It seemed to her that drug stores had recently been playing an unusually important role in her life, and this drug store was no exception. This drug store was, as a matter of fact, undoubtedly the most important single thing that had ever happened to her.

  Because it had given her, after so many false starts, the real solution to her problem. And she had almost missed it. By the sheerest luck, in passing, she had caught it in the corner of her eye. And it was so simple, so absurdly simple, that it was just positively incredible that she hadn't thought-of it before. She felt faint with relief. Her body began to shake, the sidewalk tilted under her feet, and she took a step forward and leaned her forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the window. The blonde, the brunette, and the redhead smiled at her from inside.

  Oh, the reasoning was logical. A child could follow it. It was like a syllogism. You could state it very clearly in a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. She stated it, leaning her head against the glass, thinking each statement through carefully in advance, putting it in exactly the right words. Trouble is the color of the hair. The color of the hair can be changed. Therefore, it is possible to change the color of the hair from the wrong color to the right color and thus end trouble. The end of trouble in a bottle, price one dollar, special offer. Very easy to apply. Using the brush which was provided, you started at the roots and brushed outward with long, even strokes.

  The bus fare had been three dollars and fourteen cents. The price of peace kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

  She smiled back at the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead. Her eyes lingering last and longest on the redhead, she was reminded of the calendar on the wall of the bare little room at police headquarters, of the small boy with the rooster. The boy had such red hair, the reddest hair she had ever seen. That was the color of hair to have, all right, because it left no question in anyone's mind and was obviously just what it was. There was about its bold, bright honesty nothing nameless and abominable.

  Grasping the purse which she had remembered to bring with her from police headquarters while forgetting entirely the small bag, she pushed herself back from the glass and went into the store. Identical twins of the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead were sitting on a glass counter. She went back and stood under their smiles and awaited the arrival of a tall woman who came toward her on the other side of the counter. The woman had shining yellow hair that was set in an elaborate coiffure and was obviously supposed to be an example of what anyone could do with one of the special dollar bottles with directions attached. Her mouth was scarlet and moist, extended carefully beyond the natural lines of her lips, and her lashes were impossibly long and thick and looked as if they were about to start dripping. Flesh surrounding mouth and eyes had a lacquered finish, bright and brittle. If the woman were to smile like the three on glass, Kathy thought, her face would surely crack and check like a cheap china plate.

  "How do you do," the woman said. "May I help you?"

  "Yes. I want a bottle of the hair dye. Red, please."

  The woman jeopardized her face by permitting plucked eyebrows to climb the brittle skin. "Red? Are you quite sure, honey? Or is it for someone else? Your natural coloring..."

  "I'm quite sure. I want the red. Nothing will do but the red."

  The woman shrugged. Wrapping the bottle of dye, she handed it across the counter. "One dollar, two cents tax, one dollar and two cents, please."

  Kathy lay a bill and two pennies on the glass and took the package. Now that she had the simple stuff of a miracle in her possession, she was driven to set it working at once. With a sense of being under pressure of time, she hurried out of the store and turned on the street in the direction of her apartment. Lights were coming on now, incandescents and fluorescents and colored neon tubing twisted into countless spellings, the frail foes of darkness. The earth moved, and time moved, and she must hurry, hurry, hurry. She didn't know why. She only knew that after killing the day she was now imperiled by the passing of time and that it was urgent to do quickly whatever was to be done at all.

  In the apartment, she stood with her shoulders against the door behind her and drew her breath in deep, ragged gasps. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed, became shallow, the pressure of time and peril relaxing. With the door closed between her and whatever had pursued her through the streets, she was somewhat reassured. Carrying the bottle of dye, she went into the bedroom and, placing the bottle flat on a chest of drawers so that there was no possibility of its tipping over and breaking, removed her clothing down to her slip. Then she took the bottle and went into the bathroom.

  Standing before the little mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet, she unwrapped the package and laid the bottle and the little brush in the lavatory. Retaining the sheet of directions, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub to read. It was really the most simple thing imaginable to work so great a miracle. One had only to brush the dye onto the hair with the
little brush, just as it had said in the window, starting at the roots and brushing outward with long strokes to insure even application. The directions said to pour the contents of the bottle into a shallow bowl or pan or any kind of ordinary open container, and so she got up and went back out through the bedroom and living room into the kitchen for a bowl. In the bathroom again, she set the bowl in the sink, first removing the bottle and brush, and then she poured the contents of the bottle into the bowl. It was certainly red, all right. It was as red as fresh blood. It was as red as Paul's Scarlet roses nodding in a June night. Oh, it was a glorious, shining, trouble-free red so wonderfully clear that she could see in it, looking down, the softly distorted reflection of her own face.

  The little brush looked a lot like the kind of brush which one used with shoe polish, only it was much softer, of course. Proceeding with great care in exact accordance with directions, leaning forward to follow in the little mirror the progress and effect of her effort, she began to apply the dye. She took into her fingers only a few strands of hair at a time, holding them apart from the rest of her hair and pulling them taut under the stroke of the brush. The dye had a rather unpleasant odor, somewhat like some kind of disinfectant, she thought, and it burned her scalp. At first the dyed strands of hair looked merely a little darker than the rest, as if they were wet with plain water, but after a while, as they began to dry a little, she saw that they assumed an unmistakable red-orange hue, and this filled her with an exorbitant feeling of accomplishment.

  It required a long time to do all the hair, and when she was finished at last, the bowl in the sink was almost empty. Inspecting the final effect of her work in the mirror, she was forced to laugh at herself. She was forced to admit that she looked very funny. The hair, unequally dried, was still of various shades, and it was, moreover, quite sticky. It stuck out stiffly in all directions from her head, and it looked even more ludicrous than it might have otherwise because her face below it was so thin and sad. She was like one of these sad-faced clowns who make comedy of misfortune. She laughed and laughed at herself because she was funny and because the miracle had really worked and her hair was another color, or other colors, and she was therefore very happy. The directions had warned her about the stickiness. After the dye had set, you washed the hair in luke warm water and the stickiness disappeared.