I Have the Answer

by Kelly Fordon

  The Exorcist was shown on television the first year of my parents’ new living arrangement. My father was home that evening, and we watched it together in our small wood-paneled study with my father’s solitary Duraflame log blazing in the fireplace.

  I’d grown up with a Catholic fear of the Devil, but I had no idea that he could just decide to lodge inside a person against her will. It sounds melodramatic to say it, but nevertheless it’s true: that movie changed the trajectory of my life. Midway through, as Regan projectile vomited, I attempted a joke to relieve my escalating anxiety.

  “I’m so glad the Devil hasn’t gotten to any of my friends yet,” I said.

  “Me too,” my father said. “But it does happen. This is based on a true story. I went to Georgetown University with the guy who wrote the book.”

  According to my father, Bill Blatty had learned about the exorcism in a religion class at Georgetown. In the movie, the possessed girl was just a sweet, happy-go-lucky kid, but in real life, my father said that the demon had taken hold of a troubled boy. The priest who performed the real exorcism had lived through the experience. He had not ended up at the bottom of a steep staircase like the one who performed the exorcism in the movie.

  “Still, how do you know it’s really true?” I asked.

  “The guy who performed the exorcism was the same one teaching our class,” he said without looking away from the TV.

  “No way!” I said, then sat silently staring at the fire. The Duraflame glowed red and yellow and I imagined seeing the Devil pop out from behind it without warning.

  He glanced at me, possibly alarmed by my silence. “It happened, but no need to worry,” he said. “I believe it’s very rare.”

  He said this with a small smile that to me looked like sadness more than anything. It was the we will survive smile, and I had seen it many times since the separation was announced.

  “Thanks a lot, Dad. I will never get over this.”

  “No need to worry,” he said, as he harrumphed his way up out of his chair. “Just don’t give the Devil an opening. Stay away from Ouija Boards.”

  The Exorcist had been filmed in Georgetown, where I lived. I had been jogging up the infamous steps numerous times during tennis practice. One reviewer dubbed it “the scariest movie ever made,” and that person couldn’t see the Gothic spires of Healy Hall from their bedroom window. It was like learning Freddy Krueger was based on the serial killer who grew up two doors down and had never been caught.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t sleep.

  Like my father, my mother told me not to worry. “If you go to confession every week, the Devil will never gain purchase, Marie,” she said. The following Saturday, she took me to confession at Holy Trinity Church. I went on my own for several Saturdays after that.

  In the mornings on the way to school, I stopped strolling leisurely down P Street, past Neam’s Market and Thomas Sweet Ice Cream Parlor. Instead, I ran at top speed, tripping repeatedly over the bulging, uneven cobblestones. I regularly fell asleep in class because I’d taken up all-night surveillance on the floor in front of my bedroom door beside my Jack Russell Terrier, Mavis.

  I remained in this state for several weeks until one day, when we were walking into English class, my friend Sue said, “I’m sick of you moping around with those dark circles under your eyes. Have you seen your hair? You look like a total basket case.”

  I sat down in my seat and turned toward the front of the room. Sister Veronica started running on about Chaucer. I was annoyed. Didn’t Sue realize that I would have given anything to toss my fear in the trash like used Kleenex? It was not that simple.

  Several minutes later, Sue passed me a note. It said she was bored and we should skip out after math, head down to Healy Pub. In those days, the drinking age was eighteen. Though we were fifteen, no one ever carded us. Healy Pub was in the basement of Georgetown University, and we were frequent visitors.

  Sue’s life revolved around locating the next party. Her parents didn’t figure into the equation. She might have occupied the same house as her timid mother, but it was like sharing space with a mouse. As for her father—he had once put Sue’s head through a wall. There was still a big hole above the couch in the living room to prove it. She had absorbed his rage and seemed lit from within with animosity. She was tall and thin. She wore her long blonde hair in a tight ponytail. Her light blue eyes were piercing, and though I don’t think she realized she was doing it, people sometimes asked her why she was glaring at them.

  As Sister Veronica droned on, Sue passed me another note: Before we head to the Pub, we’re going to the steps, and we’re going to Linda Blair’s house. You’re going to look your demons in the eye.

  The best way to ditch school was to leave the academic building by the back door and slip into the Senior Lodge. The Lodge was a redbrick cabin located behind the cloisters next to the area where the contemplative nuns resided. It was rumored to have sheltered runaway slaves during the Civil War. The leaded glass windows still sported names and dates (the earliest: 1802) etched into the panes with former students’ diamond engagement rings.

  Once we were in the Lodge, we checked to make sure that no nuns were strolling through the courtyard or sitting on the garden benches fumbling with their beads. When the coast was clear, we crossed to the back door, ran alongside the high stone cloister wall, and then leapt over the chain-link fence that separated our campus from Georgetown University. As we ran, we listened for the sound of the high-pitched yaps that would mean Rolf had sensed a breach and alerted Gollum. Whenever an escapee was apprehended by Gollum and Rolf, she had to spend several weekends scrubbing the wood floors with a toothbrush or washing dishes for the nuns in the refectory.

  Sue had enlisted another friend, Connie, to come with us. Connie’s mother was suffering from breast cancer and would die of it later that year, but Connie never brought it up. If someone asked her, she always said that her mother was doing really well. But inevitably, at some point during any given night she would weep. Connie wore thick Coke-bottle glasses at school but never when she might encounter a boy. At parties she could never tell who was approaching until the person was right in her face.

  That day, Sue, Connie, and I made it to the fence without incident. We shed our uniforms and donned our microminis behind the magnolia tree at the far end of the Georgetown University campus. Connie took off her glasses and put them in her backpack. Then—instead of hightailing it down to Healy Pub like we usually did—we sauntered across the main quad simulating what we imagined to be the coed strut. By the time we reached Prospect Street, it had started to sleet. The sky had been gray all day, but now the clouds were racing like cyclists across the sky. The wind’s icy fingers reached up our miniskirts. I followed Sue to the top of the steps. She and Connie were standing in the spot where the police examiners had looked down on Burke’s twisted head. In the movie, when Regan flings her babysitter Burke Dennings out of the window and down the steps, it had scared me more than the final fall of Father Karras. Father Karras was strong; he had conquered the Devil. But poor Burke was drunk. He was an innocent victim who everyone immediately assumed was careless and responsible for his own death.

  Peering down the steps, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Suddenly there was a loud noise behind us. Feet. Running.

  “AAAhhh!” someone yelled.

  I crouched into a ball, my hands over my head.

  When I peeked out, I saw that three boys were running at us across Prospect Street with their arms stretched out, monster-like, over their heads.

  “Vat are you doing at ze steps?” one of them yelled.

  “You want I should push you?” another shouted.

  “Stop it!” Sue yelled.

  I poked my head out. She was pointing frantically at me.

  The boys came over and formed a semicircle around me.

  One of them looked like Peter Brady, the cute middle brother in The Brady Bunch. He
held out a hand, and I took hold of it to steady myself as I stood up.

  “Her father went to school with Bill Blatty,” Connie said.

  “No shit!” Peter Brady said. “He lived in my dorm.”

  “She saw The Exorcist, and now she’s obsessed with the Devil.”

  “The Devil doesn’t exist,” the blond boy said.

  “Untrue!” Peter Brady said. “Remember the Devil’s proof.”

  “What’s that?” the redhead asked.

  “Well, we have some evidence that he exists—like demons and exorcisms and whatnot—but we have no evidence that proves he doesn’t exist. It would be impossible to prove that. People call something that’s impossible to prove the Devil’s proof.”

  “Huh,” the redhead said.

  “Don’t hurt your brain, lug head.” Peter Brady smacked the redhead on the arm and then turned to me. “So, do you want to see Bill Blatty’s room?”

  Before I could answer, Sue said, “Yes, she does! This girl has got to face her demons!”

  Peter Brady lived in Copen Hall. I don’t remember his real name, if I ever knew it. The other two boys lived in the same dorm. The redhead was a basketball player and knew Patrick Ewing, which impressed us.

  The dormitory was located on the east end of campus overlooking the Potomac River.

  Sue, Connie, and I followed the guys up the stairs. Peter led us up to room number sixty-six.

  “No fucking way,” Sue said. “You are totally shitting us. He lived in room sixty-six?”

  The blond laughed. “You guys look like babies. How old are you?”

  “We’re freshmen at Mount Vernon,” Connie said, winking at me. Mount Vernon, a women’s college off Foxhall Road, was right across the street from Connie’s house.

  We continued down the hall to the common room, where six or seven kids were sitting around a television watching Guiding Light. All the furnishings were brown. The room smelled like alcohol and dirty socks. Half-eaten pizza, crumpled paper napkins, and beer cans littered every surface.

  Before the separation, my mother never let me watch any television. She used to make me read for an hour every day after school. Now that she was traveling, all her cautious parenting had come to a full stop. I knew exactly what was going on in Guiding Light because I taped every episode on our VCR. At that moment, I longed to be home watching it on my basement couch rather than standing in a damp room with a bunch of drunk older boys. Though they were only freshmen, they seemed far more grown-up and intimidating than the high school boys we usually hung out with.

  “Is this thing still tapped?” Peter walked over to the keg next to the pool table.

  Sue and I sat down at a card table. Peter brought us beer, and we started playing quarters.

  “We can’t stay long,” Connie said to Sue. “I have field hockey.”

  Sue glanced down at her watch. “We’ll stay until three.”

  I looked down at my watch. It was 1:30 p.m.

  Connie followed the blond over to the pool table. Peter asked me if I wanted to see his room so that I could get an idea of where Bill Blatty lived.

  Sue raised her eyebrows, and when Peter turned away, she gave me the thumbs up.

  It was a typical dorm room: two desks, two chairs, a bunk bed, two chests of drawers. From the window I could just see the corner of Key Bridge. The river was starting to ice over, but the current was fighting it.

  Peter said his roommate was out studying.

  “He’s always studying,” he added, lighting a cigarette. “Doesn’t know how to have fun.”

  This reminded me of something my father had once said. One night after he’d had a long, drawn-out argument with my mother, he’d come into my room. When he saw me studying, he said I should try to balance all the work with fun, because later on, when I was an adult, things were going to go south.

  Peter sat down at one desk, and I sat down at another. We smoked. At one point he went out to get more beer, and I watched ice chunks bobbing down the river.

  I was proud of myself for being brave and hanging out with an eighteen-year-old, but instead of growing accustomed to the arrangement, by 2:15 p.m. I was so nervous I’d drained two and a half beers. I started to feel like I was a part of the chair. A nap sounded good, but I couldn’t imagine crossing the room to get to the bed. I remember noticing with astonishment that the sun had broken through the clouds. It felt like someone had injected my head with foam.

  We talked for a long time, but the only thing I recall about our conversation (probably because I now think this pertinent) was that his mother was an alcoholic. Once he had come home from school to find her passed out naked in the kitchen.

  “An avocado in her hand,” he said. “Lettuce all over the floor.”

  “That must have been weird,” I said.

  “More than weird. I had a couple of guys with me. It was pretty embarrassing.”

  He came over and pulled me up out of the chair.

  “You look like you’re about to nod off.” He led me over to the bottom bunk and then sat down beside me. He leaned over to kiss me, but every time we shifted, he hit his head on the upper bunk’s metal bed frame. After a few minutes, he used that as an excuse to push me down to a horizontal position. I had only kissed one boy up until that point, and that had been just a brief peck outside an ice-skating rink.

  As his tongue flicked across my teeth, I had no idea how to respond, so I simply opened my mouth and let my tongue dart in and out. After two or three minutes I sat back up.

  “I’m feeling bad about this.”

  “About what?”

  “Lying down on your bed and all . . .”

  “What? What do you want to do . . . stand?” He laughed, but I could tell he wasn’t happy.

  I noticed that he was looking toward me, not at me. His gaze rested on the wall behind my head. I turned and saw the framed eight-by-ten black-and-white picture of Jesus looking sad and pointing to his heart.

  I turned back toward him and he pushed me down again.

  I tried to get up.

  “I’ll tell you what: I can understand if you don’t want to do more. That’s fine. Why don’t we just pretend?”

  He pushed me down and climbed on top of me fully clothed. I could feel the point of his penis as he ground it into me. He started slowly, but soon he was banging away so violently I felt like one of those squishy bathtub whales, all the beer I’d consumed that afternoon threatening to fountain out of my mouth. My mother had told me that boys can’t control themselves and that if I got myself into a bad situation, it was my fault. In light of that, I couldn’t think of anything to do but wait for it to end. After a little while, he shuddered and stopped. Then he disembarked and left the room. He did not look back. He didn’t say goodbye or thank you or I’ll see you later. It felt like the bed was still moving, so I got up. I was still fully clothed, but my miniskirt and shirt were askew. I adjusted them before leaving the room.

  The hall was clear. I hurried down to the bathroom and made it to the stall just in time. After I was done puking, I washed my face and hands and returned to the common room to look for Sue and Connie.

  When I got there, Connie was sitting on the floor by the back wall smoking a cigarette. A tear was running down the right side of her face. I walked past her and took a seat at the card table. Sue was playing pool, but after a few minutes, she came over and sat down next to me.

  “How’re you holding up?” she asked.

  I told her I wanted to go home, but she said she just needed a minute to sober up. I asked her for a smoke. The room was spinning, and I thought it might help. She tossed her pack to me and returned to the pool table.

  “Is that you, Marie?” Connie squinted up at me. For fun, Sue sometimes refused to respond to Connie’s myopic inquiries. This time I let her off the hook.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  There were more kids in the room now—most of them on the couch watching General Hospital. Everyone had a beer in
hand. One guy was sitting at a lone desk and appeared to be studying. Red wandered over and offered me another beer. Someone brought in a boom box and started playing the Grateful Dead. Someone else yelled that they couldn’t hear the TV, and the guy with the boom box told him to fuck off. Connie asked me how it was going with Peter.

  I told her I’d gone to his room and we’d made out.

  “Score,” she said. “High five!”

  I high-fived her. The long ash on her cigarette broke off and fell to the ground, but she didn’t see it.

  Eventually the guy at the desk stood up and announced that he was heading to class. No one reacted, but it created a domino effect. A couple of guys who’d been glued to the couch got up and left the room. Peter came in and started playing pool with the redhead. Connie held her watch up to her nose.

  “Shit,” she said. “School’s out. I’m supposed to be at field hockey.”

  “Looks like we’ve got a couple of hours to kill,” Sue said. “You can’t play hockey in the state you’re in.”

  Sue, of course, had nothing to do and no reason to be anywhere else. I didn’t either. Between her crazy parents and mine, if we were pushed down The Exorcist stairs, it might take days for anyone to even notice we were missing.

  “Field hockey ends at 5:30,” Connie said. “We have to be back by then, at least. My mom’s picking me up.”

  Peter walked over and sat down next to Connie. The redhead brought us more drinks. Connie started crying about her mother, and the redhead wiped her tears away. I had fixed my gaze intently on the television, but I could see Peter staring at me out of the corner of my eye.