Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “At Catherine.”

  I stared at the ceiling.

  Was I supposed to be happy?

  “I know it can be hard for you kids,” she said as she touched me, “to be so isolated from your friends and family and everything you’ve ever known. But don’t worry. You’re going to have so much fun here, soon you’ll forget to even think about the past.” She patted my knee. “All right, let’s get you in the stirrups.”

  I put my feet up.

  “Scoot up.”

  I scooted.

  One of the supply cabinets had been left ajar. The bottom and middle shelves were lined with canisters of cotton balls, tongue depressors, Band-Aids, and gauze. But the top shelf was empty except for a tray fitted with a series of slender metal rods standing on end. The rods were of various sizes, each topped with a plastic digital reader, like thermometers.

  “What are those?” I said.

  “What’s what?”

  “On the top shelf of the cabinet.”

  She deposited the sample in a bottle, then followed my gaze. “The plasm pins? We use them for plasm repair. You’ve never seen plasm pins before?”

  I’d heard of plasm pins, of course, but I’d never seen one in person. I craned my neck to get a better look. The shelf was too high up.

  “Do you use them here?” I said.

  The doctor’s lips were set in a firm line. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I thought that the pins and everything—I thought it was all a hoax. And Catherine was supposed to stop experimenting.”

  She snapped off her gloves. “You can sit up.”

  I kept staring at the plasm pins as I sat up.

  The doctor jotted down notes in her pad. “Anything else? How are your cramps?”

  “I need thicker pads,” I said. “The supply ones are too thin.”

  “Change them more often.”

  “I have a very heavy flow.”

  “The pads are fine. You’ll get used to them. Get dressed.”

  I shimmied back into my underwear and skirt. I grabbed cough drops and condoms from the jars on the counter as I left.

  *

  I stepped off the path to walk across the yard. The sky was weak gray today and fat clouds hung low on the horizon. My whole body felt heavy. I walked for a long time over wide stretches of wild grass before I reached the trees. Blackberry brambles clustered around trunks that were dark and sticky with sap. As I moved on, I crouched to pick up a maple leaf. It smelled like sweet decay. Pine needles crunched beneath my feet and masses of gray weeds snagged at my legs.

  I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine I was in the fairy garden, the one from the picture book I’d had as a little girl. I tried to smell the wisteria bower; I tried to see the crystal dew beading on peonies and roses.

  I opened my eyes. A spider was creeping toward my feet.

  Had I ever been able to imagine it right? Had I ever really believed the world so lovely and full of magic?

  I wormed my way through the brambles and around the trunks, feet unsteady, until I found the gate. I ran my fingers over the iron bars. I clasped one, as if to test its weight. I peered through.

  Past the gate, the woods grew deeper and denser. For a moment I thought I saw something dart between the tree trunks. Then a beam of sunlight flashed and I couldn’t see anything at all.

  I still remembered who I was and where I had come from. I was someone before Catherine, of course. I’d had a neighborhood, one with clean, bright houses and clean, bright lawns. I had friends—though I realized now they weren’t exactly the kind of kids who kept you out of trouble. I had a home, a white apartment with white leather furniture and violent art on the walls. I even had family, a mother. When I thought of her now, I usually remembered her hand dangling from the arm of her favorite chair, the ugly Prouvé fauteuil she’d brought all this way. Her fingernails dragon-red, her cigarette trailing blue smoke, her voice murmuring into the phone, Maman, we are never going back to him. We are happy here. We are so very, very happy.

  But the only part of my life I had really liked back then was my chemistry teacher. Mr. González had long, beautiful eyelashes, a diamond stud in his right ear, and he always laughed at my stupid jokes. And he could always tell when I didn’t want to go home from school. He let me hang out with him in the teachers’ lounge and shared his macadamia nut chocolates with me. As I ate, he would tell me stories about his adventures hiking in Peru or clubbing in London. I imagined he danced with men who were all gorgeous, exciting, and smart, just like him.

  Mr. González was the only person I had ever loved. So when he told me—my hand clasped in his—that I should apply to Catherine, I did it. I filled out the forms, submitted the project essays, and eventually attended the interviews. I wouldn’t have gone through all that for anyone else. But he asked, so I did it. I was pretty good, back then—good at school, good at friends, good at everything. I used to be pretty nice.

  The application process took months. By the time all my materials were in, it was the winter of my senior year. I was spending very little time in school and hadn’t spoken to my mother in months. I’d swung loose from all that. I was staying out late, swallowing magic pills, and laughing so hard I threw up. I was following teachers down hallways and slipping notes into strangers’ pockets. I was still good sometimes. But mostly, I was bad. And it wasn’t long before neon highs lurched into gruesome black lows.

  As I lay there under the blackberry bushes at Catherine, the smell of the earth became something else—the smell of starchy bedsheets, vomit, and strawberry ice cream—and my throat ached with a scream. I remembered everything.

  Mr. González was the only person I spoke to after that night in the hotel room. I found his address in the school directory and showed up at his condo a few days later. I was sure he’d read the news and figured I was involved; he knew the terrible people I was tangled up with then. But when I appeared at his door, he didn’t ask any questions. He just reheated me a bowl of lasagna, turned on an I Love Lucy rerun, and let me sleep on his couch.

  And then he let me disappear.

  When I heard I had been accepted to Catherine, I’d been running for weeks. I got the admissions office call in a brassy motel lobby, heart beating fast as I cradled the reception desk phone against my ear. I didn’t know how they had tracked me down; I hadn’t been in contact with anyone besides Mr. González. I didn’t even know if I’d actually graduated from high school; I’d left a month before commencement. I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t care. I got the call and I went to Catherine because that’s what I was doing then: I was going. I was a going person. That’s the only thing I was.

  Catherine promised its students a golden future, if we gave up a few things in return. Three years of no mothers, fathers, brothers, or sisters. No newspapers, no new music, no television. No football games or mascots, no vending machines, no weekend trips to Philadelphia to see plays or ballets. No world except Catherine.

  That’s what everyone else gave up. But I didn’t give up anything. I was already a ghost.

  *

  Baby and I ate breakfast together in the morning room every day. We never talked much, usually because neither of us had slept the night before. We drank our seltzer, sucked on hard-boiled eggs, and slurped up porridge in sleepy silence. Baby had a funny way of peeling her eggs. She would pull the shell apart with ruthless precision, and then pile the shards as if they were bits of gems. I liked watching her do it.

  Baby had just finished this process and was beginning the surgery of pinching off the egg’s membrane when a girl dropped a card onto our table.

  I picked up the card. It was notebook paper, the kind we were all supplied with, cut into a handsome oval. It read, in loving script, “You are cordially invited to the birthday party of Yaya Osmond.”

  “Gifts,” said Yaya Osmond, “are highly encouraged.”

  I looked up. I knew her, Yaya. Her room was down the hall from Baby’s and mine. She swanne
d around the Molina hallways in costume jewelry and, most recently, a shabby faux-mink coat, which meant she must be sleeping with an upperclassman with enough points to buy things from the commissary. Today she was barefoot in pajamas, hair swept up into a samurai bun and ears weighted with plastic gold hoops. Her skin shone dark bronze.

  “You can’t have a party,” Baby said in her vicious little voice. “It is the middle of finals period.”

  Yaya folded her arms and leaned back on her heels. She eyed Baby up and down.

  Baby looked down at her egg.

  “Is it really your birthday?” I said. We weren’t supposed to be celebrating birthdays. Birthdays were part of our lives before Catherine.

  Yaya shrugged. “It’s something.”

  I put down the card. “Happy something.”

  Yaya’s smile flashed on me.

  She said, “See you at the party.”

  That night, I sat in my bed drinking wine out of a teacup as I watched the moon’s slow, quiet rise. Everything in the house was slow and quiet.

  I set my teacup down on my desk, wiped my mouth, and stood up.

  “What are you doing?” Baby said.

  “I’m going to Yaya’s birthday party.”

  “But—what about finals?” Baby tapped her flash cards on her desk. She had been going through them for hours, fervently muttering to herself.

  “What about them?”

  “Aren’t you worried about failing?” She shifted in her seat. “You—you don’t do any work. You stay out all night and sleep through class. And now you have a final in two days. Aren’t you worried about your grades?”

  Baby was right; I did skip a lot of my classes, and I didn’t study. And the class program at Catherine was confusing enough. According to the “syncretic curriculum,” as our professors called it, even the survey courses were meant to be wildly interdisciplinary. I hadn’t expected that in First-Order Logic we would be mapping out the fundamental relationships between objects and their names, truths and their consequences. Introduction to Philosophy had tasked itself with an overview of art, science, and the history of the world. Units leapt backward and forward across centuries according to some radical pattern I couldn’t identify or follow.

  The classes were hard. But I might have done better if I had paid attention. Instead, all my classes were scrambled with one another. Philosophical theorems warped into logic proofs, calculus into religious origin stories. Nothing made sense. And now it was finals reading week, and the whole house was tense with primitive panic. When students weren’t crouched over textbooks in the library or taking tests in cold, silent classrooms, they were wild, dancing in the hallways and fucking on the stairs, crying in the bathrooms and sleeping in the halls. But I wasn’t panicked. I wasn’t worried at all.

  “It’s not like you’re that smart.” Baby’s voice was saying. “No offense. But you’re not—you’re not one of those girls who don’t study and can still get A’s. I mean, if you don’t study, you’re going to fail.”

  I poured more wine into my teacup.

  “You really aren’t scared,” she whispered.

  I sipped.

  “How did you even get in here?” she said. “If you don’t care?”

  I shrugged. “I used to care,” I said. “A long time ago. It only ever made things worse.”

  Baby stared at me in that big-eyed way of hers. Like she was watching me perform some wild, deadly magic trick, wondering how I could possibly pull it off.

  I wasn’t pulling it off. I’d already received a warning from Kimmy. She had appeared in my room one Thursday afternoon with a bright bag of chocolate macaroons—“Just a mid-semester treat!”—and a singsong description of what it meant to be on academic probation.

  I knew I should care. Of course I understood that I was supposed to be studying, doing my homework, paying attention in class, and worrying about finals. But I couldn’t work up the energy. In some abstract way I knew that if I failed my finals, I would have to leave Catherine, but leaving Catherine didn’t seem quite possible. I had to stay at Catherine because I had nowhere else to go. There was no other future for me.

  “You don’t need to go to another party,” Baby mumbled. “You’re always going to parties.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. You always—leave.”

  Her voice had grown small.

  “Do you want me to stay?” I said. “You don’t like me very much.”

  That was true. But maybe Baby was used to me now, the way I was used to her. We spent hours together, nights, mornings, meals. I knew what she smelled like when she needed a bath, and she pushed me awake when I snored too loudly. She’d memorized my clothing sizes so she could separate our laundry, and I’d memorized her noises: her toothbrush shushing against her teeth, her throat clearing as she read, her snuffling as she dreamed.

  “I think best friends go to parties together,” I said. “Come with me. It’ll be fun.”

  “I can’t have fun,” she said. “I have to study.” She tapped the flash cards again. “And I heard they might do a room inspection tonight. I want everything—good.”

  “They’re not going to do a room inspection in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes, they will. That’s how they do it.”

  “But everything here is perfect.”

  She gave Billie Jean’s tank a pointed look. He was munching on a bit of banana with one tentacle out, jauntily akimbo.

  “Just leave him,” I said. “Or hide the tank in the closet. They won’t care. Come with me.”

  She said again, “I can’t.”

  There was a little bit of food stuck at the corner of her mouth.

  I grasped her shoulders and kissed her cool, stiff cheek.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You do not,” she said. “Stop saying things you don’t mean.”

  I petted her neck.

  Before I left, I grabbed the bowl of blackberries I had left on the windowsill. I cradled the bowl against my stomach as I walked down the hall.

  Parties had a way of echoing through the house. Floorboards creaked as students scampered across upper floors, stairwells resounded with their shouts—“Should I bring cards? Did you? Oh, I don’t know! Okay! I’ll bring them, I’ll bring them”—and bathrooms clanked with the clamor of girls crowding in, gossiping, giggling, playing with their faces. Slinky synth-pop, years out of date, pounded from the cassette players we rented from the commissary. And the next day, scraps of conversation slipped across dining hall tables: “Man, someone threw up in our bathtub.” “Oh my God, I think I fucked Richie last night.” “Fuck, I need some Chinese food. If I call up Hunan Express, do you think they’ll deliver to rural Pennsylvania? Like, if I give them a really, really big tip?”

  But as I walked down the hall to Yaya’s room that night, I didn’t hear any music or noise. And when I pushed open her door, I saw the party was over. The dim room was littered with teacups and empty bottles, and only two people were there: Yaya, perched cross-legged on her desk, and a fuzzy-haired boy lounging on her bed. The boy was watching Yaya with gleaming eyes; she was busy examining the ends of her ponytail as she brushed it with long, languid, disinterested strokes. She wasn’t wearing pants. Her underwear was pink.

  Yaya looked up at me as I came in. Moonlight moved over her features.

  She said, “You’re late.”

  “I have a present for you,” I said.

  The boy’s eyes followed Yaya as she took the bowl from me.

  “Blackberries,” I said. “The last ones of the season.”

  Yaya stared at me as she tapped a finger against the bowl. Her fingernail clicked against the porcelain.

  “Ines, right?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She turned to the boy. “Hey,” she said. “I’m going to bed. You should probably go, too.”

  “Ha ha,” he said.

  Yaya didn’t laugh.

  “Really?” He sat up. “Just like th
at?

  “Uh-huh,” Yaya said. “Just like that.”

  The boy huffed, but loped out of the room.

  Yaya’s room was the most decorated one I’d seen at Catherine. Cheap Chinese beaded necklaces dangled from pins by the window, gaudy satin scarves swathed her bedposts, and a tiny photograph of Mariah Carey stood framed on her desk. A plate of half-eaten strawberry tarts lay forgotten on the floor.

  Yaya uncrossed her legs as she undid her ponytail. Her hair was long, stiff, and royal black, her eyes as dark as an Egyptian god’s.

  “What,” she said, “should we do with these?”

  The blackberries glimmered.

  “I know,” she said.

  She took out two teacups and filled each one with a handful of blackberries. Then she splashed something from a wine bottle over them. It wasn’t wine, though; the liquid was clear.

  “Grain,” she said, seeing my confusion. “Some Harrington third-years brew it.”

  She muddled the blackberries into the corn liquor. As she mushed, she said, “You’re down the hall, aren’t you? We must have met during orientation. I thought you were gorgeous. Except for your teeth.”

  She poured grain over the muddled berries.

  “Is that why you’re so quiet?” she said. “Your teeth?”

  “I’m not quiet.”

  She laughed. “God.”

  We clinked cups. We drank.

  I nodded at the photograph framed on her desk. “How’d you get Mariah in here?” I said. “I thought we weren’t supposed to have personal photographs.”

  Yaya reached into the bottom of her cup to pick at a blackberry. “I can’t be sharing all my secrets, now, can I?”

  I swirled my glass. “Did you have a good birthday party?”

  “Sure. It was fine. Everything here is fine.”

  Yaya wiped the side of her mouth with her fingernail.

  “You don’t like it here,” I said. “In the house.”

  “No,” she said. “I hate it. It makes me sick.”

  I could imagine her somewhere else. Spain, maybe, and wild, dangling off the arm of a baron, on a yacht cruising over a hot blue sea, smoking a cigar in a long white dress.

  She was staring down at her drink.