Payback

by Mary Gordon

  They both knew that wasn’t true; he was the worrier, the fearful one. Her chief inheritance from him. The legacy that worked and worked to muffle her from all the world’s harsh lines, to keep, as he would say, her two feet on the ground. Her feet that would not wear those boots, now. In order that she would not be ridiculous.

  * * *

  IT WAS always tricky when you were singling one student out—for favor or for censure—but Heidi Stolz’s personality made it even trickier. Agnes would have liked to ask Miss Barnes for advice—or Christina or Jo, for that matter—but she knew that none of them liked Heidi or approved of Agnes’s taking her under her wing.

  The more they warned and spoke against Heidi, the more determined Agnes was to prove them wrong, to trust her instincts (You’re a new teacher, Miss Barnes had said. Remember that you’re not that much older than they are and they can be very clever at manipulation), to do something unusual for her: not to listen to her elders and betters, but to go her own way.

  Giving Heidi the boots was an extravagant gesture, with an exciting tincture of excess. How would she manage to present Heidi with the large box without anyone noticing it? Although Heidi’s proud nature and her isolation from the other students made it possible that the others would be afraid to ask her what she was carrying. She only hoped that Heidi’s desire to one-up the others wouldn’t make a braggart of her, displaying the boots, “They’re from Miss Vaughan,” for all to see. She believed, though, in Heidi’s appetite for secrecy, her belief that her greatest power over those who despised her was to keep them in the dark.

  She asked if Heidi could come to her classroom when the girls on the field hockey team were practicing…which was the same time the glee club met, and the newspaper. These were the activities of the popular girls. Heidi belonged to the debate club, which met—Agnes double-checked—at a different time.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi knocked on the door and, at Agnes’s “Come in,” entered the room, with that slinking motion that Agnes found regrettable, that she hoped someday to counsel her against. “You wanted to see me, Miss Vaughan.”

  Always, when called to see a teacher, students expected the worst. But what could Heidi Stolz have to fear from her? Agnes had given her nothing but praise, encouragement that might even be named extravagant. The thing that she most disliked about her job was the idea that she might instill fear.

  “Come in, Heidi. I have something for you.”

  Still the wary look, the raised shoulder, the torso that corkscrewed around itself as if it were trying to make itself invisible.

  Agnes reaches under the desk where she had kept the shiny white bag with the words in script “I. Miller.”

  “This is a little strange, I know, and I’m going to have to ask you to keep it between us.”

  She could hear Miss Barnes’s words, “Don’t create any divisions among students, there are enough already, God knows. And don’t ever make any of them feel you’re on their side against the others.”

  Heidi would always be the exception, the one who called for exceptional responses. And if teaching were just a matter of a one-size-fits-all set of responses…well, she was sure that wasn’t what it was meant to be, what she wanted it to be.

  Agnes tries to make herself look like someone in a 1930s screwball comedy: daffy Miss Vaughan, you never know what will come out of her mouth. Which was, she knew, never the way anyone would have thought of her, not for one moment since her birth. And since her birth, she had had very little practice in lying. It had so rarely seemed to be something that was needed, something that might be of use.

  “Well, it is strange. A friend of my parents gave me these…they thought I’d like them, and I do…but, what is it that you said about me and pop art…it’s just not my thing. But I thought they might be your thing…I thought of you when I saw them, and I hope you like them, I hope they’ll be fun for you.”

  Suspicious, Heidi looks into the bag as if she were afraid it might explode on her: a joke or a sickening surprise. She opens the box, giving Agnes a suspicious look that narrows her narrowed eyes even further.

  “You’re giving these to me,” she says, an accusation.

  “Only if you’d like them.”

  For a moment, Heidi almost looks her age, a girl, capable of a girl’s responses. She’s beaming, Agnes says to herself. But then another look replaces it and, unable to read it, Agnes feels herself stepping back, as if a jet of something unnamable were being sprayed at her, unnamable and not for her good. The glimpse of innocence that she had seen on Heidi’s face is gone. What is there now…something not innocent, something quick and cunning, as if a prisoner had found a chink in the wall and were enlisting the help of a hapless guard.

  “May I try them on?”

  “Of course,” Agnes says But she felt, in the seconds that Heidi’s expression had changed, that giving her the boots had been a mistake.

  Heidi turns her back to Agnes, takes off her loafers, puts on first the left boot, then the right, and zips them slowly. She turns and takes three, four, five steps toward Agnes.

  Heidi has lovely long legs. But the boots, a joke against the blue serge of her uniform, give her the look of a child dressing up in its mother’s clothes…or a refugee taking what was offered from the bin of discards. It would be better when she was wearing something else, the kind of short skirt the man in I. Miller’s had suggested. No, Agnes should not, but on Heidi…well, it would be interesting to see.

  “I think this is the best thing I’ve ever had from anyone,” Heidi says, her eyes softening, her slight, not unappealing overbite (had braces been tried, and only partially succeeded?) giving her smile a vulnerable look. So maybe it would be possible to think of her as a rabbit rather than a coyote. Rabbits had small eyes, but that made them look hyperalert rather than predatory. Little rabbit. In French: petit lapin. Although it wouldn’t be possible to think of her as hopping. But that made her even more vulnerable: that she could not ever be imagined to have hopped.

  “Off with you, then,” Agnes says, deliberately choosing the archaic diction. “And it’s between us.”

  Heidi pretends to lock her lips with an invisible key, and Agnes is pleased to see the childish gesture.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi stops in the bathroom down the hall from Miss Vaughan’s classroom. She hates that bathroom, the smell of shit that should have been completely nonexistent but was not; she always imagined filthy sanitary napkins susurrating in the garbage cans, as she imagined mold growing invisibly in the grout between the snot-green tiles. There is a window made of crushed glass (insuring insulation from prying eyes, which, she imagined, the founders had thought of as potentially everywhere), but it was never opened.

  She feels sick to her stomach. She wishes she could vomit…the smell as she kneels makes her retch, but the relief of vomiting would not come.

  Miss Vaughan’s gift had made her sick. Agnes Vaughan. What had she meant by it? What did she want in return?

  For it was one thing Heidi Stolz knew as surely as she knew anything: if someone gave you something they wanted something back. And if the gift was extraordinary, they would want something extraordinary in return. Her job would be to discover what that was, and then refuse to give it.

  She thinks of the last gift she had given her mother and how she had gotten what she wanted: she had exposed her mother, let her know that what she thought was hidden was out there for everyone to see.

  Did they really believe, her mother and her father (who was her mother’s accomplice in it), that nobody knew where they went every spring, to her mother’s home in Switzerland, they always said, family business. But Heidi knew it wasn’t family business; her mother had cut herself off completely from her family—it was why they went to Aspen to ski every winter instead of to Switzerland. “They told me neve
r to darken their door again, and I’ve taken them at their word,” her mother said. More information had not been given; her mother’s sin, or transgression, because none of them was in the slightest bit religious, remained in darkness.

  When everyone remarked, again and again, how young and lovely her mother always looked, didn’t they know (they must) that every spring she disappeared for two or three months (leaving Heidi with Hans and Elsie) so that she could have her face torn up and put back together again? Heidi had been fourteen—two years ago, it was—when she’d figured it out, when she saw the prescriptions in French from the Swiss pharmacy, lined up like squat soldiers on the bathroom counter. But it was only last year that she noticed her mother’s hands.

  It was one of those moments that could have seemed supernatural—classes in comparative religion were required at the Lydia Farnsworth School, and she had felt like the blind man cured by Jesus, the sudden removal of scales from her eyes—when she looked at her mother’s hands, lying slack beside her white plate on the white tablecloth.

  Her mother’s hands were old. They were mottled with brownish spots, some larger, some smaller, some nearly black, some—was it the newer ones—only a shade or two darker than the color of her ordinary skin. They had nothing to do with her mother’s face.

  Her mother saw Heidi staring at her hands—how she wished she had been quicker so her mother wouldn’t have seen that she knew, or she wished it at the time, but later she was glad of it—and she quickly hid her hands in her lap. But they both knew: there was nothing that could be done with Liesel Stolz’s hands; she could disappear for six months or six years and she would still come home with the hands of an old woman.

  And her mother looked at her, and it was clear, so they both knew it, so clear, that Heidi heard her own voice, clear as clear, saying in her mind, “My mother hates me.”

  And she didn’t mind. Because it was something to hold on to, a sharp stone that would never lose itself, never dissolve. Precious. Valuable. As valuable, more valuable, than the ordinary talisman most children held: “My mother loves me.” Both were a sure way of knowing who you were. But Heidi’s was more valuable because it was more rare.

  And hatred implied a relationship of equals, whereas—what was its opposite—contempt, revulsion…suggested power on only one side. She had known, as long as she was capable of knowing anything, that her mother found her revolting. That was why she liked looking up the roots of words: revolting, to turn away from. Her mother turned from her daughter every time her eye fell on her. Unless the impulse to look was too strong, the impulse to look away not strong enough.

  Once Heidi had been sitting at her mother’s feet. Her mother was on the yellow satin couch where Heidi was not allowed, reading a magazine. Heidi took her mother’s hand, and her mother dropped it, and her face showed disgust. “Why are your hands always so clammy?” And then the time—she should have known to stay away from her mother, because her mother was in one of her rages, and it wasn’t like Heidi not to be careful of her mother in that state—but perhaps there was something she needed in the room where her mother was, or perhaps she was just attracted to a natural disaster, like watching a storm or an accident on the highway. Her mother was in one of her silky negligees, a word whose roots she liked because they were connected to neglect. Her mother walked, not stormed, over to her, and said, “Why is your hair always greasy…it always looks filthy…it’s disgusting…,” and she picked up scissors that were on her husband’s desk, pulled Heidi by the hair, and chopped her hair off in clumps until it fell on the cream-colored carpet, and Heidi could see that it was not lovely, the way her hair lay on the carpet like thick dead snakes. Silently, afraid of her mother’s wrath, she felt the tears course down her cheeks, fall onto her shirt…she tried to dry them with her hands, but she couldn’t keep up with the tears that would not stop. “My hair, my hair” was all she could say.

  “Oh, Liesel, oh Liesel,” her father said, wringing his hands. Her mother looked over his head, both their heads, and lit a cigarette. “Blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo,” she said—her only response to Heidi’s tears. “She’s better off.”

  Liesel rang the bell for Elsie to come and take Heidi away. Then she sat on the couch, placed the scissors on the table, reached into the ceramic box for a cigarette, and snapped her fingers for her husband to light her up. Elsie did nothing to comfort Heidi, only took another pair of scissors and tried to repair the butchered hack job.

  No one said a word to suggest that what her mother had done was in the slightest way a cruelty. Everyone around Heidi was afraid of her mother. Everyone around her was weak, particularly her father, who cowered before her mother’s blazing rage or simmering unhappiness. But it was more than that: her mother was physically the strongest. An athlete. A competitive skier: all around the house, her medals, her trophies, pictures of her holding something aloft, her blond hair gleaming against a clear winter sky, her shapely body, alluringly female even in the bulky ski outfits, her hand being shaken by some grand gentleman with a moustache or a crown of snow-white hair. Heidi couldn’t imagine how it had happened, that her father—her father, who could make nothing happen (except with money, where he was called a wizard, a magician)—could have, as her mother said, “forced me to give it all up to come to this godforsaken part of the world.” And so they traveled, looking for enough snow so she could do what she was “born to do” (not born to be anyone’s wife or mother, this was the clear implication). Originally, they had lived in Vermont, but, now (was it her father’s business?) they were in Rhode Island, where there were only minor hills. They had to travel: to Aspen in the winter, to the Southern Hemisphere in summer (a house in Chile, opened for only two months). “A great athlete,” her father always said, abashed, apologetic, and Heidi had no reason not to believe him.

  She tried to discern if she hated her mother as her mother hated her. She liked to think that her hate was different from her mother’s; her mother’s hate was hot; hot hate could cause you to make errors, and she liked to think of herself as cold, cold and dry as a polished steel figure standing above everything, impermeable, invulnerable to natural shocks or the careless or malignant assaults of anyone or everyone. Certainly, she did not love her mother. How could anyone? Oh, but her father did. Her father did because she was beautiful. Heidi had not been very old before she learned that everything followed from that. If you were beautiful, you were beloved, and if you were not…and she was young, very young, when she knew that she was not…well, everything followed from that. She heard her mother saying it…saying, not only that she was not beautiful, it was much worse than that.

  Who was she talking to? It was probably Simon Randolph—he was always around then. Even now, Heidi can’t figure out if he was her mother’s lover or if he was homosexual. It didn’t matter; he was taking her father’s place, he was the one her mother wanted to be with, not her husband, certainly not her daughter.

  They were drinking…those wonderful-looking drinks—they would first shake them up in the special shining metal vessel, then pour them out, rich, amber colored, into special glasses, and then put in a cherry—how Heidi wanted those cherries, once she ate a whole bottle of them and was sick and Elsie said, “It serves you right, they were not for you, they are special for your mother.” Even Elsie worshipped her mother, because she was beautiful, and “a real blonde, a perfect blonde,” she had heard Elsie say.

  Simon and her mother would lean back on the sofa, covered in yellow satin, that Heidi was told she must never sit on—Why do you always seem so dirty, her mother would say, lifting Heidi’s hands, which she had scrubbed and scrubbed but never seemed to her mother clean enough—they would sip their beautiful drinks in their beautiful glasses and they would talk quietly, but Heidi always managed to place herself somewhere where they couldn’t see her but she could hear them.

  “Will you tell me what perverse god placed himself at
my cradle so that I got exactly the opposite of what I wanted. What I wanted was a girl child, a beautiful idiot—because believe me there is no sense being born female, there’s nothing in it but heartache, unless you’re a beautiful idiot—and then a fine, strong, brilliant son who would care for me in my old age. And what have I got? A son who is a beautiful idiot and a daughter who’s just a hideous little smarty-pants. I can’t bear to lay my eyes on her. It’s wrong…don’t you think, darling…wrong and monstrously unfair.”

  So Heidi knew. She was a smarty-pants. As if her intelligence, which she valued in herself, and her teachers valued, was just a kind of joke garment, something to be mocked and despised. And then there was her brother. The beautiful idiot. Jimmy. James.

  She wouldn’t have known what to say if anyone had asked her, “Do you love your brother? Did you ever?” She refused to allow the question to inhabit her mind, and no one else would ask the question because no one she knew had any idea that he existed. The hidden brother. Given away. Bought off.

  How could she have loved him? She had only met him once. She was never sure whether she was glad that she had met him or wished she hadn’t. For years, she hadn’t known she had a brother. And then in one of her mother’s rages, an insistence: It shouldn’t be hidden from her. She has to know it’s in her blood…should anyone ever choose to have a child by her she has to know. She’s getting of an age.

  Blood. It was all about blood. Her mother had insisted on her meeting her brother when she found out Heidi had gotten her period. Late, later than other girls in her class; she was nearly fourteen. Strange to think it was only two years ago, strange to think that one of the ordinary facts of life…my period, my friend, the curse, my time of the month…why didn’t anyone just say menstruation…I’m menstruating…she couldn’t stand the coyness around it. Her mother had, of course, been away. Her mother had, of course, told her nothing of what to expect, and, as she had no friends, the information had not come to her. So one day she thought she was dying and—she was proud of this—calmly she went to Elsie and spoke about blood on her underpants. And Elsie said, “Did you soil your clothes or only your underwear?” The word soil…as if she had done something filthy.