Payback

by Mary Gordon

  And Elsie, sighing, turning her back to Heidi and returning with a mysterious box, with a word she’d never known printed on it, Kotex, and beside it a ballerina, and sighing again, said, “I’ve been expecting this for a long time. Well, you’re in for it now.”

  How soon after that did her father come to her room and say, “I must tell you something that may be hard for you to understand.” Elsie had given her a book called The Facts of Life that had been mildly shocking, but interesting. But that wasn’t it at all. She was told nothing about “the facts of life” from either parent.

  “We didn’t tell you before, sweetheart”—had he ever called her sweetheart before?—“because we felt you weren’t old enough to handle it. But now you’re a woman, and it’s time for you to know.”

  A brother. The shock, as shocking as the blood on her underpants, and a new word she hadn’t heard, although words were what she was good at, better than almost anyone she knew. Certainly better than her parents or Hans or Elsie, who spoke with accents—her mother, too, but hers was less—and her father seemed almost never to speak.

  Autistic. No one knows why. Retarded. He can’t really speak. Sometimes he gets out of control. But we think it’s time you met him.

  Why, she asked herself a million times. Why tell me. Why introduce me. It meant nothing to Jimmy: nothing did. That was what autistic meant. Nothing meant anything to him, except what did: the numbers of bricks in the building, the schedule of trains from Providence to New York.

  They drive to Cape Cod…it’s the only time she’s been alone in a car with her father, and the minute they get in the car, he turns the radio on. “I need to listen to the news.” But he keeps the radio on and listens to some kind of music that people his age listen to.

  At a gate, which is guarded by a man in a uniform in a booth, there is a sign: SHADY GROVE. They drive through an impressive grove of trees.

  “It really is a shady grove,” she says to her father, hoping he’ll be pleased at her observation.

  “Well, at least there’s no false advertising,” he says. “I guess you get what you pay for.”

  Heidi laughs, not thinking what he said was funny, but sensing that a laugh was called for. But perhaps it was not; her father looks at her strangely.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the long drive, really a road, there are a series of small white cabins that look like the houses in the children’s books she was given before she was able to read. Only the colors of the shutters are different: green-blue-red, and then the pattern begins again, green-blue-red, green-blue-red, until Heidi stops counting.

  She has pushed from her mind all images, all expectations of what she might have been driven to see. A brother. Fourteen years older. So he is twenty-eight. A man.

  But nothing she could have imagined could have prepared her for the sight of the creatures…she didn’t want to call them people…walking up and down in front of the storybook cabins.

  Until then, her idea of what the form of a human being might be like had been, she saw instantly, limited. Walking, shuffling, were grown people walking like seals perched on their hind flippers, people walking with their hands held up in the air in front of them, a tall thin man with a head much too small for his body, a woman whose torso was normal but below the waist of elephantine size, barely able to put one foot in front of another, a man standing still except for incessant rocking, someone turning in circles around and around until a nurse led him by the shoulder, made him walk forward.

  Heidi is desperate to run back to the car, why won’t her father see that this is too much, that she is still a child and no one who is his child should be forced to see these things. She puts her hand in his, but he takes it away and rubs the palm of his hand on his trousers. Her mother is right: her hands are always clammy. It’s not my fault, she wants to say, but I’m better than these people. Normal. A normal girl with clammy hands.

  A hideous little smarty-pants.

  But better than these.

  * * *

  —

  They are shown into a room that is almost as bare as a room can be. Four hard-backed chairs, linoleum floor, beige with a faint swirl of darker brown. And nothing else. Absolutely nothing.

  She and her father sit in the two chairs that are next to each other. They say nothing; she knows, and she imagines he does too, that there is nothing possible to say.

  The door opens then. Two people walk in. “A beautiful idiot,” her mother had said, and Heidi is struck by his extraordinary beauty: their mother’s blondness, their father’s high, pale forehead, and the eyes, she has never seen eyes like those, she imagines there have never been eyes like these. Blue-green, the color of the sea, turquoise, but glistening, focused like searchlights on the empty wall ahead of her. His nurse half drags him to one of the empty chairs, and he shuffles to it, feeling for the leg with the back of his heel, sitting uncertainly, with no faith that the chair will hold him.

  “Jimmy, your father and your sister Heidi are here to see you,” the nurse says.

  “Jimmy’s father and Jimmy’s sister Heidi are here to see him. Did Jimmy’s father bring Jimmy Nestlé Crunch?”

  Her father reaches into his briefcase and takes out a bag of miniature Nestlé Crunch bars. He hands them to his son. From this Heidi understands that he has been here before.

  Jimmy rips open the bag and unwraps one of the candy bars, then another, then another.

  “Jimmy likes Crunch bars,” he says, liquid chocolate spilling out of his mouth. But nothing can mar the beautiful high forehead, the brilliant sea-green eyes.

  “Say thank you, Jimmy,” the nurse says. “Say thank you to your father.”

  “Thank you to my father,” he says.

  Jimmy wipes his chocolatey hands on his khaki pants. The nurse hands him a paper towel, a stack of which she has in her pocket.

  “Jimmy, this is your sister Heidi,” her father says.

  Jimmy looks at the wall across from him.

  “Jimmy Stolz has a sister Heidi,” he says, not looking at her.

  Then he stands up and pulls away from his nurse. He begins rocking. Then he walks in circles. The circles become increasingly smaller, his pace more frantic.

  “Jimmy doesn’t like this place, Jimmy doesn’t like this place,” he says. He picks up a chair; he is about to throw it across the room.

  “It’s your home, Jimmy, you’re at Shady Grove, where you live, just in another room, where your father and sister have come to see you,” the nurse says.

  Jimmy lifts the chair over his head and Heidi and her father jump out of their chairs and back toward the wall.

  The nurse, who is much larger than Jimmy, wrestles the chair from him.

  “It’s not a good day for him,” she says. “It’s one of his bad days.”

  “You’d better take him back,” Heidi’s father says. “We’ll come another time.” But Heidi knows they won’t and they drive home in silence, except for the radio, which her father plays too loud.

  A few weeks later, her father says, over breakfast (her mother is still in bed), “You have another brother. He has estranged himself from the family. You will never know him. Lawrence is his name. Lawrence Stolz. But he has cut himself off from us. Entirely cut himself off. We have no idea, even, where he is, or even if he is alive. We think he’s in the Marines. Somewhere, we think, in Asia.”

  And Heidi knows not to ask anything, to nod, to raise her teacup to her lips and drink slowly, as normally as she can.

  Two brothers: one a whirling, a whirring; one blank.

  She does not allow herself to think of them. It is easier with the one called Lawrence, no images come to her mind and she refuses to create them. And when the whirling boy, the beautiful idiot, enters the space behind her eyes, she banishes him. Ensures that he is, as the other b
rother is, entirely cut off.

  Why is she thinking about all this now? Kneeling in front of the toilet, trying, failing to vomit. Because she has been given a gift. And she doesn’t know how to understand it. Miss Vaughan. Agnes Vaughan. Who pretends to understand her. Because she doesn’t know. Finds her interesting. Original. But knows nothing of who she is.

  And if she did?

  I would have to give the boots back, Heidi thinks, and then, clutching the bag to her, as if someone had actually threatened to take it away, she stands up, her full height, and in the closed bathroom stall enacts a posture of heroic resistance. These are mine. No one can take them from me. They were a gift.

  That’s why she was thinking of her family. That’s why all these things came back. Because she was thinking of her mother, the gift she gave her mother last Christmas, and the knowledge: a gift was powerful, a gift could be a weapon, it made a link between giver and gifted and the link could be used.

  * * *

  —

  Her mother had looked at her with hatred when she realized that Heidi understood about her hands. That there was nothing she could do about them. There was no fixing them. They were old. And they would mark her as old, however smooth her face, however perfect the proportions of her youthful body. Her hands would make a mockery of it all.

  Saks Fifth Avenue. The store a voluptuous display of Christmas luxury: smells, music, lights, ribbons, the famous windows with families dressed up to suggest an innocent time of unadulterated joy: the nineteenth century, Dickens, the stalwart father cutting down the perfect fir in the pristine, benevolent, and never-threatening snow, the cool perfumed air, the cool reassuring yet enticing Christmas music.

  She went to the glove department. “My mother is just mad for gloves. She says a lady is known by her gloves. I guess it’s old-fashioned, but it’s the way she is,” Heidi says to the saleslady, hoping to conjure a fragile, genteel mother, horrified by the turn the world has taken, lovely in her ivory tower. “So I want the loveliest gloves you have, one pair for every season.”

  The saleswoman, sleek, coiffed, brushed, bound, buffed, bends down, becomes invisible, then rises, her hands full. She presents the gloves in seasonal order: navy kid, sheepskin-lined tan suede, lemon cotton, a sinister-looking smoky half-transparent lace. Heidi knows she’s meant to show enthusiasm, filial delight in the anticipated pleasure of a loving mother, and so she lifts each of them, strokes them, remarks on the different textures, asks that they all be wrapped together, because she’ll have to carry them in her suitcase. This is true; Christmas will be, as always, at the Aspen “chalet.” She wants them to be in one box because she wants to absorb the fullness of her punishment; if they are in separate boxes her mother might open only one and leave the others unwitnessed.

  If only she had had the red boots then. They would be perfect for walking down Fifth Avenue, zealous, triumphant, ready to render justice. A soldier. A saint.

  Christmas. The most hideous day, Heidi believed, of all days in the year. The day she got her own back. She liked thinking of it that way. She inflicted nothing, she simply claimed her due.

  Her mother had awakened early for a sunrise ski, and had come back glorious: enlivened and nearly benevolent, the cold freshening the perfume on her skin and hair so that for once Heidi wasn’t sickened by what it suggested to her of rot and rut.

  Elsie had baked stollen, their traditional Christmas breakfast. Her father had risen late and came down so freshly shaved, his hair so slicked back wet from the shower, that he looked to Heidi like a rabbit ready to be pulled up by the ears and stuck in a steaming pot.

  She had considered coming down in the dressing gown her parents had given her the last Christmas, a light blue satin quilted affair with a neck-to-ankle zipper that was difficult to navigate and chafed her chin. But she decided against it: she wanted nothing that suggested vulnerability. And it was possible that her mother would throw her out, would banish her not only from the house, but from the family, as the blank brother, Lawrence, had banished himself.

  “I took a long time selecting these, Mother,” she said, and for a moment her mother’s almost natural look gave her a hesitation she hadn’t counted on.

  But soon that was over. Having seen what was in the box, Heidi’s mother’s whole being was covered in a hard, brittle shell, as if someone had dipped her in glycerin and then locked her in a freezer.

  Never had Heidi seen a look so cold, so killing. And she returned the same cold killing look.

  She knew herself to be a killer. With a killer’s pride. She had driven a stake into the heart of any possible goodness there could ever be between them. She had done it gladly, purposefully, and with pride she looked over her handiwork like a general looking over the city he had conquered, after the bodies had been dispatched, and the plaza with its heroic statue hosed of all remaining blood, and the new flag, immovable, aloft, demanding plain acknowledgment, and rendering impossible the prospect that it should ever be ignored.

  But very soon she told herself the terms were too grand. What she had done was pierce the smooth skin of a rotten fruit, releasing into the air the poison juices, sticky, stinking, spent.

  Did her father understand what had happened? She didn’t know. He opened the box she had passed to him. He lifted it out of the box, turned it over, looked at the label, thanked her mildly. She had bought him a dark blue tie.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi hears the bathroom door open; she is no longer alone.

  She stands up, flushes the empty toilet, and walks into the main room.

  Of the people at the Lydia Farnsworth School, the only one she admires, the only one whose regard she genuinely cares for, is Jeanne Larkin. Because Jeanne Larkin needs no one at the Lydia Farnsworth School; perhaps Jeanne Larkin needs no one in the world. She’s the scientific one, Miss Datchett’s prize, she and Miss Walsh…MIZZ Walsh and Miss Vaughan are fast friends; it’s all too predictable and cute: the three pretty young teachers, art, history, science. Heidi has no use for Miss Walsh and her band of earnest peaceniks and weepers over endangered species. But Miss Datchett…

  Heidi would respect her if she had any interest in science because Miss Datchett likes facts, and so she likes Jeanne Larkin. Jeanne Larkin with her short blond curls when everyone else has long hair parted in the middle (except for Heidi, who keeps her hair in a single plait—people think it’s because she wants to be eccentric but it’s because her mother is right, her hair always looks greasy, and the plait disguises that best). It was Edwina who advised her to adopt the plait. She doesn’t want to think of Edwina now.

  But Jeanne Larkin needs to disguise nothing; she keeps her hair short because she’s a dressage rider and so has a helmet that would be a problem with longer hair. Jeanne Larkin does things because they are convenient, and then everyone wants to do them but they can’t; when people try to copy her they look ridiculous.

  She makes no effort to please, and Heidi has tried to understand why, sharing the same desire, she is spurned and Jeanne sought after. And then she realized that other girls hungered after Jeanne’s attention because she was genuinely not interested in them. There was no need for her to be contemptuous of them; she simply didn’t take them in. She told Mrs. Gould, the sappy English teacher (whose eyes tear up when she talks about Keats’s early death), that the only poetry she really likes are limericks. And she produced a series of limericks about animals.

  Upend the kind orangutan

  You may be pleased to find

  Instead of his bland brother’s lot

  A cherry-red behind

  The sloth has forfeited respect

  In favor of a luscious rest

  Despise him, but can you be sure

  His choice is not the best?

  And after that, limericks became the rage at the Lydia Farnsworth School. Everyo
ne was writing or trying to write limericks. Not to be outdone—because despite herself she wanted to be like Jeanne—Heidi wrote one about her parents:

  My father’s a financial whizz

  My mother is voluptuous

  You might think this would make a rhyme

  But no dear readers not this time.

  She handed it in to Mrs. Gould for her extra-credit “creative assignment,” and Mrs. Gould called her in and asked if she wanted to see the school counselor, and said that it was very clever but she couldn’t possibly share it with the other students.

  Which, of course, Heidi must already have known, but she had held a secret hope that she might become admired because of her shocking honesty. It was 1972, after all, and shocking honesty was in vogue.

  But not at the Lydia Farnsworth School.

  No one calls Jeanne Larkin “Jeanie.” If they ever do she says, “I don’t have light brown hair, so it’s Jeanne.”

  There is no nickname for Heidi. Except Hide. And no one ever wanted to be close enough to her to try to seduce her with a nickname. No, that wasn’t true. Edwina’s friends called her Scotty…their little mascot. But Edwina is gone, and hasn’t answered her letters.

  She wants to leave the room before Jeanne Larkin…she doesn’t want to have to try to figure out a stance in relation to Jeanne that won’t leave her abashed.

  She looks at herself in the mirror as Jeanne Larkin enters one of the stalls. And for the first time, she feels no need to be abashed, no need to feel inferior. She picks up her white shopping bag. A gift from Miss Vaughan. Miss Agnes Vaughan, who allowed Jeanne Larkin to do botanical drawings because she said, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body. But I like to get the look of things right.”