“Not long after my sister and I were told that my mother was pregnant, it was determined that my mother was having a boy. The news brought my parents great happiness. They immediately began work on setting up the nursery, but my mother suffered a miscarriage and went into a deep depression. She took too many sleeping pills one day, and we lost her.”
Of course, I didn’t tell Ellie about the things Cassie had done to cause all of this. Only my father, my uncle Perry, and I knew the truth.
Ellie, like everyone else, looked devastated for me and nearly broke into tears.
“Less than two years later,” I continued, “my sister, Cassie, tripped and fell down a stairway in our house and broke her neck. She died instantly.”
When I added that, some people would just sit with their mouths wide open, and some would shake their heads and say, “You poor girl and your poor, poor father.”
I would bear their sympathy like someone who had been beaten beyond pain and thank them.
Ellie didn’t linger after I explained the candle. She nodded, backed out of the bathroom, and closed the door. She either fled from or ignored sad news and stories of family tragedies. It was one of the reasons I could get along so well with her.
I continued with my private birthday ritual and blew out the candle. Ellie never asked me anything else about it again, and, of course, I never mentioned it to her. I didn’t like lying to her. I never liked lying to anyone, in fact, even though my sister, Cassie, had thought that was a weakness.
“There are very few people, Semantha, whom you can trust with the truth. The truth is naked, unprotected. Once it’s out there, it’s alone. Lying,” she had said with that Cassie smirk I had grown used to seeing, “is simply another layer of protective skin.”
I knew the other girls at Collier thought I was unusual in many ways, but my brutal honesty did the most to keep me from becoming very friendly with anyone else but Ellie. Despite what Cassie had told me about the value of lying, she had rarely bothered to do so even when it came to holding on to a friend. I had her way of simply telling other girls and boys whatever I really thought, no matter what the consequences. My quiet manner and my revelation about a potential nervous breakdown already had done much to create a deep, wide valley between me and the others at Collier. This characteristic of being coldly and factually honest at times was the icing on the cake. Even when I sat with them in the cafeteria or walked alongside them in the corridors, most avoided looking at me, and when anyone did, she usually turned away quickly. It was as if she was looking at something forbidden.
From the way the others whispered and sometimes hovered with Ellie in corners, I knew they were peppering her with questions about me. They surely wondered what it was like sleeping in the same room with someone as weird as I was. I never asked Ellie about it, but occasionally, she would reveal some of their questions—mostly, I think, because she was curious about the answers herself.
Naturally, they wanted to know what interested someone as offbeat as I was. What does she like? Does she have a boyfriend? Did she ever have one? Is she gay? What makes her so quiet most of the time? What does she really think of the rest of us? Is she just a rich snob? Does she do anything strange, anything at all that frightens you?
Most of all, they wondered why Ellie didn’t ask to be transferred to another room. Of course, I wondered about that myself, but it wasn’t long before I thought I knew the answer. I never did anything to make her feel uncomfortable. I didn’t take up more room than I should. I didn’t dominate our closets or dressers or bathroom cabinets the way some of the other girls did to their roommates. I was willing to share anything of mine with her. I certainly didn’t keep her up at night talking in my sleep or complaining about the school and the other girls, which was what many of the girls suspected.
“After all, she’s mental,” I actually overheard a girl named Pamela Dorfman tell Ellie. “She confessed that she had and probably still has deep-seated psychological problems, didn’t she? She’s scary. Maybe she’ll smother you in your sleep one night. I’d be afraid to room with her.”
Natalie Roberts went so far as to nickname me Norma Bates, a play on the name Norman Bates from the movie Psycho. To her credit, Ellie always came to my defense, but not so strongly as to alienate herself from the other girls on my behalf. There was a limit to loyalty, especially loyalty to someone she had only met here and probably would never see again after graduation, which was now only a few months away.
There were other reasons she didn’t desert me. Ellie was the youngest in a family with three other children, another girl and two boys. From the way she described her siblings, I understood that they usually overwhelmed her. “Trampled me,” was the way she put it. She had had to fight to get a word in at dinner, had often been teased and criticized, and had always been the recipient of hand-me-downs.
“My sister would get new things, and I always got what she no longer wanted or what no longer fit her perfectly,” she told me with bitterness. “‘Nothing should be wasted’ meant I got the used stuff.”
Ellie came right out and confessed to me that she saw herself as Cinderella without the pumpkin and especially the glass slipper. “How would you like growing up in a family like mine?”
She claimed her parents always favored her older sister, Laura, and her two brothers, Jack and Ray.
“I was at the bottom of the totem pole when it came to anyone in my family caring about what made me happy,” she said. “Sometimes I felt invisible. You know what I mean? I’d talk, but no one would pay attention. Actually,” she added in a whisper, “I think I was the only one of us who was not planned, and you know what happens then.”
“What?” I asked, interested in the answer for obvious reasons.
“The man blames the woman, and the woman resents it and the child as well.”
I didn’t openly disagree with her, but I didn’t believe that was always the case.
Because I talked so little about my family and because she thought asking too many questions would only stir up my sorrow, Ellie talked for hours about herself and her family. In a few short months, I knew whom she’d had crushes on as far back as grade school, including teachers; what her first sexual experiences had been like; and a list of her favorites from ice cream to movie stars and singers. I quickly understood that I had become her longed-for audience. In our room, she did not have to fight to get a word in or dominate a conversation. In fact, she soon felt very comfortable spewing out her anger at and her unhappiness with her parents and her brothers and sister. We hadn’t been together a full week before she revealed her secret, the reason her parents wanted her in a well-supervised school.
Ellie had been a kleptomaniac and had been arrested a number of times, but her secret mental diagnosis concluded that her compulsive behavior was not because of some uncontrollable obsession with stealing but because of her deep-seated need for attention.
“My parents were told they were lucky I hadn’t turned to nymphomania instead,” she said with that thin, evil little laugh she sometimes used to punctuate the ends of sentences. “Little do they know.”
“I’m glad you don’t live in Kentucky and frequent the Heaven-stone Department Stores,” I told her. “We’d be bankrupt.” She loved that. I hadn’t ever thought I was good at dry, sarcastic humor, but Cassie was at my ear prompting me. It was as if she had gotten into my head somehow and, like some traffic cop for thoughts, could direct and redirect ideas. Why I was so good at it didn’t matter. I simply was, and Ellie enjoyed my biting remarks, especially when directed at some of the other girls.
So, with my unselfish manner, my willingness to be her audience and her sounding board, and my occasional witty remarks, Ellie was quite comfortable. As it turned out, that was fortunate for me in another, bigger way, too. She would point me at the first boy who sparked any romantic interest in me since my tragedies, but that wasn’t to come without cost. Nothing came to me without cost, despite what everyone thought abo
ut my being from such a wealthy, powerful, and famous Kentucky family. In this case, the price was the end of my relatively close relationship with Ellie, the only person other than my uncle Perry and my father with whom I had become in any way close. I should have anticipated it. Cassie had warned me.
Feminine Gunslingers
ONE OF THE many lessons my sister, Cassie, had taught me related to what she called feminine gunslingers.
“Don’t believe in this myth about your best girlfriend, Semantha. I’m your best girlfriend, because I’m not in any competition with you for any man and never will be. I’ll never be jealous of your beauty, but every girl you meet will see you as a threat. When you walk into a room, they’ll eye you up and down just the way gunslingers eyed their competition.”
“Why?” I asked. “I won’t try to steal away their boyfriends. I would never do that.”
Cassie laughed. She loved to laugh and raise her arms as if we were having these conversations in front of a big audience, and she could turn to them and say, “Do you all see this? See how much she needs me?”
“You don’t have to want to steal away their boyfriends, Semantha, but that won’t stop their boyfriends from looking at you with more interest and excitement than they look at their girlfriends. You’re beautiful. But more important, the girls won’t believe you’re not trying to steal their boyfriends away. They’ll watch every move you make, and I mean every move—the roll of your eyes, the swing of your hips, and the softness in your voice. They’ll compare themselves to how you wear your makeup, what outfit you have on, shoes, jewelry, everything!”
“Well, what should I do?” I asked her.
“Nothing. There’s nothing to do. I’m telling you all this so you won’t expect any real favors from any so-called best friend, Semantha. Just don’t be naive, and above all, never trust any other girl but me.”
I had swallowed what she told me and reluctantly digested it because I didn’t want to believe these things. Surely, there was someone out there, maybe a number of girls, who would be like a sister to me someday, a girlfriend I could trust and who really cared about me. The world Cassie was describing was far too lonely for me. She was comfortable in it, but I knew I would never be.
However, in my private high school, Cassie’s warnings seemed justified. I did seem to be threatening to some girls, and not only because of any psychological history. I’d really never had a best friend in the public high school I’d attended. I suppose I could easily explain my low level of popularity now by saying I was still fresh from all the tragedy and still quite emotionally wounded. Dr. Ryan said I was simply and clearly terrified of any relationships. Cassie’s betrayals had wounded me too deeply and left large scars. A friendly word, a soft touch or smile, actually frightened me. I fled from friendships and especially avoided relationships with boys.
“None of this will ever completely go away, Semantha,” Dr. Ryan said. “What we have to work on with you are ways to help you live with it so that you can assume a somewhat normal life.”
I always wondered what he meant by “somewhat.” How far from normal would I be? And who would want to be with someone who could never be completely normal? Who would put up with my introverted ways, my fears, my unexpected and unexplainable cloudbursts of tears? What man would want someone who never held his hand as tightly as he held hers or returned a kiss without some skepticism? I would surely grow old wearing the invisible banner that read: Teddy Heaven-stone’s Emotionally Crippled Daughter. If you know what’s good for you, stay away.
Despite Cassie’s warnings, I had been roommates and close friends with Ellie Patton during all of my time at Collier, and I had yet to feel that she viewed me as any sort of feminine threat. She was quite attractive, with her tall, slim, fashion-model figure, her thick and rich licorice-black hair and stunning pearl-black eyes. Her facial features were as diminutive as mine. If I had anything over her, it was my higher cheekbones and more shapely bosom, but to my way of thinking, that would hardly tip the scales in my favor when it came to competing for boys. Not that I ever did.
In fact, it was only at her insistence that I attended any social functions at all. Whenever I did, I looked for the warning signals Cassie had taught me, but none of the young men who showed interest in Ellie showed any interest in me. I knew a few of them actually felt uncomfortable in my presence, and one of them, according to Ellie, stopped calling her because of me.
“In other words,” she said, “you spooked him. I told him that was just too damn bad. We were roommates, and if he didn’t like it, he knew what he could do.” She shrugged. “I guess he did. He stopped talking to me.”
I started to apologize, but she wasn’t upset about it. She wasn’t particularly fond of him. In fact, Ellie was as flighty about her male relationships as I was indifferent. Her problem was quite unlike mine, though. She was always worried that she was settling too soon or too low, and consequently, she was always looking over their shoulders at the next possibility or someone else’s boyfriend. I couldn’t imagine Ellie thinking of me in Cassie’s feminine gunslinger terms, but that was about to change.
About two weeks after she had walked in on my secret birthday ceremony in the bathroom, which was about a week after we had returned from spring break, Ellie told me I had to do her a big favor.
“And don’t pull a Norma Bates on me,” she said before she got specific. “Don’t come up with any of your weird excuses this time, Semantha.”
She had come back from a late tutoring session with Mr. Schooner, our math teacher. Ellie rarely got better than a C or C-plus, whereas I rarely got a grade below B-plus. I thought for sure she was going to ask me to do one of her final research papers or some extra math assignments Mr. Schooner had given her. From time to time, I did help her understand things, but there was no secret about her lack of interest in education. In fact, she thought most men disliked very intelligent women. She based her opinion on her own father and her brothers and how they thought of women. She would say, “I don’t know why you care so damn much about your grades. You’re rich, and your father will get you anything you want anyway. And it might stop someone wonderful from falling in love with you.”
Maybe she was right, but I didn’t really care, not that I was hung up on being a very good student. Most of the time, I was just going through the motions. I even walked to and from my classes like a zombie, or at least that was what Ellie had been told and told me in the hope that I would change. She was always trying to get me to change. She never gave up on me during our years together. It wasn’t that she felt sorry for me so much as that she wanted to take credit and get more recognition. I was positive that I was a topic of conversation at her family dinners now. At least, I had given her something, a way to be heard, I thought.
“What is it?” I asked timidly.
“What’s that face you’re putting on? Don’t act like I’m asking you to contribute a kidney or something, Semantha.”
“Okay, what?”
“Remember Ethan Hunter?”
I thought for a moment and shook my head. She sighed deeply and then plopped onto her bed.
“I did speak about him so much before we left for spring break that I thought you would puke, Semantha. I remember telling you about all the times he called me to beg me to go out with him and those supposed coincidences when he appeared at the shopping mall when I was there. You have to remember me talking about that.”
I nodded, even though it was quite obvious that I still didn’t recall. That wasn’t her fault, but she could surely tell now that I often listened to her with what my father would say was half an ear. She babbled so much about one boy or another that I didn’t pay too much attention to their names. There were times when she talked after we had gone to bed and I was sure she was still talking long after I had fallen asleep. I could hear Cassie complaining inside my dreams.
“Oh, forget it, already. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll tell you about him again. Ethan’
s a senior attending SUNY Albany. I met him at that fraternity mixer you wouldn’t attend.”
“We weren’t supposed to go,” I reminded her. “It was a school night, and Mrs. Hathaway specifically forbade us to go to college social events without specific parental permission.”
To violate that rule was almost serious enough to justify expulsion. We were on our honor when we went shopping or to a movie at the mall, but Mrs. Hathaway had her ways of finding out things. Some of the girls thought she even had undercover detectives, and others always talked about the so-called plant, a girl who was older but pretended to be one of us.
“It’s how they break terrorist groups,” Emerald Fitzgerald declared. “They infiltrate them.” She was successful enough to spread rampant paranoia. Sometimes I thought they believed I was that girl and that my sessions with Mrs. Hathaway were reports about them. I became a logical suspect, but Ellie went out on a limb reassuring them all about me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken the risks she took.
Ellie and two other girls from Collier had snuck off campus to go to the forbidden college fraternity party. Although the dormitory doors were locked to prevent anyone from coming in after hours, they couldn’t be locked to prevent anyone from going out. There were fire regulations. To get back into the dorm later that night, they crawled through an unlocked window. I knew she would talk my head off, so I pretended not to hear her enter. She made as much noise as she could without alerting Mrs. Hingle, our dorm mother, and then gave up and went to sleep, but she began describing the adventure the moment my eyes opened and didn’t stop until we entered English lit class.
“Oh, right,” I said, pretending to remember now. “Ethan Hunter. Yes.”
Whether she believed me or not didn’t matter. She was on a roll, and nothing except a call to evacuate the building would stop her, and even then she would talk all the way out.
“I didn’t have a particularly fabulous time with him that night, but he was persistent, and as you might recall if you strain your brain a little, I’ve seen him and spoken with him a number of times since. He’s very good-looking, and I can tell he really likes me. His father is a very successful accountant in Buffalo and . . .”
Secret Whispers Page 2
