The Affliction

by Beth Gutcheon

  Ellie was cool. Ellie was bad. Ellie was totally in. Alison handed her another piece of ice and they went at it again

  When she arrived at prayers the next morning, instantly the center of whispered fuss, Ellie didn’t know which was better, saying “No, it really didn’t hurt much” or “Alison gave them to me for Christmas, aren’t they pretty?” or “Oh, Alison did it. No biggie.”

  Of course, the business with her mother was a good deal less gratifying. Kate Curtin had stared when she got home from the Wooly Bear and encountered Ellie in the kitchen, a sullen surprised anger settling into her expression behind the cat’s-eye glasses. Mrs. Curtin didn’t fight with her daughter. She didn’t feel she could afford to. Nor, really, did she need to. A long cold stare said more to Ellie than any flood of words could have, and hit deeper, since it couldn’t be contradicted. It was a bad moment for both of them.

  “I thought we said when you were eighteen,” Kate said finally.

  “They’re a Christmas present,” said Ellie, knowing that it didn’t sound like much of an excuse.

  “From Alison Casey?”

  Ellie nodded. Her mother looked at her steadily for another long minute, then turned and wordlessly began unpacking groceries. The quickness of her movements expressed how hurt and disappointed she was, but she never said another word about it.

  And when school had resumed after the New Year, and Gussie Spoonmaker appeared in class with cheap gilt hoops in her ears and one swollen lobe bright red and badly infected, Alison Casey was beside herself with amusement.

  * * *

  Sloane House was not a house, as some of the student residences once had been, but a brick dormitory built in a vaguely Georgian style in the early years of the last century. In plan it was shaped like a long shoe box with a corridor running down the middle, like an alimentary canal through a body, with student rooms aligned along both sides. There were two of these residential corridors stacked one on top of the other, known as Sloane I and II. The ground fell away from the back of the building where the campus sloped down toward the weeping birches and the sports fields, so that the classrooms in the basement of Sloane House, though institutional, were light and bright, or at least had windows, except the two rooms immediately beneath the front door, which were used for storage.

  Maggie Detweiler was accustomed to architecture that made use of hillsides, and was charmed by it, since the town she’d grown up in was dug into the steep bank of the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh. When she was young the steel mills along the river had belched flames and smoke of gray black, red and yellow, very beautiful against the evening sky, however poisonous. It pleased Maggie to know that Charles Dickens had described the area as looking like Hell with the top taken off.

  The air in her hometown had been cleaned up and the plants were mostly closed now. Every civic benefit seems to bring with it necessary evil. Maggie thought of that as she walked silently down the long institutional corridor of this quiet dorm high on quite another riverbank in midafternoon. Most of the bedroom doors were closed. Within, girls might have been typing on soundless keyboards, or listening to music in their earphones, but no noise seeping from beneath the doors gave such occupations away. Most students were out at sports, or in the library, or down in the village on afternoon passes.

  When the dorm was built the bedroom doors had been fitted with slots for the inmates’ calling cards, but young ladies no longer paid that kind of call or possessed such cards and most were too young for business cards. Though not all. One door sported a card printed in turquoise that identified the owner as the publisher of a webzine called NotYourDoormat, with Internet addresses and a cell phone number. Most of the doors bore signs created by the girls, with their names written in imaginative scripts and adorned with stars and rainbows. One added the title Bardolatrix. A sign on another door identified the inhabitants by way of speech balloons in a four-panel comic strip, skillfully drawn in the style of Alison Bechdel.

  At the end of the corridor and past the fire stairs, a central door in style more like the front door of a house than the bedroom doors of the girls’ rooms announced the apartment of the “dorm parent.” Maggie tapped on the door, and a voice called, “Come in, it’s open.”

  The door gave into a living room or parlor, square and bright with large windows looking toward the sports fields and the river, amply equipped with cozy sofas and chairs to accommodate gatherings large or small. Pam Moldower was in the galley kitchen that was tucked into one corner of her domain. A door on the other side led, Maggie guessed, to the bedroom. Pam appeared from the kitchen with a tray carrying cookies on a plate and a pitcher of iced tea.

  “Sit ye down.” She gestured with her head toward the sofa with the coffee table in front of it. “Welcome to my little all.”

  “Thank you. You’ve made this really very homey.”

  “Since it is my home,” said Pamela. “Did your school give you housing, or did you have your own apartment?”

  “The latter,” said Maggie.

  “Well, you played that card right. Are you okay in that chair?”

  “I’m fine for now, but I may need to be hauled back out of it. How long have you been here?”

  “Eight years. The school provides furniture if you want it but I brought my own. For a while, after the explosion, I kept a houseful of stuff in storage too but—what’s the point? I sold it all last year. Didn’t even go back to empty drawers or check for change under the seat cushions. And with my luck, there was probably a fortune in stocks or diamonds in there somewhere. But what the hell. It’s a relief to stop pretending, to myself if nobody else, that this is temporary.”

  “Do you mean literally an explosion?”

  “Oh thank god,” said Pam. “Someone who literally knows the meaning of literally. No, no actual boom. Or I wouldn’t even have the couch you’re sitting on.” She took a cookie and ate it.

  “What happened? Do you mind talking about it?”

  There was a silence. “No, I have to talk about it every once in a while,” Pam said at last. But she didn’t begin.

  “You were a student here.”

  “I was a student here during the last ice age. I grew up in a country club suburb of Pittsburgh. Sweetwater. Do you know it?”

  “I do,” said Maggie.

  This might have led to surprise, or a diversion into discovering what they had in common, but in this case, did not. “The public high school wasn’t very good,” Pam said, in all likelihood referring to the very high school Maggie had attended, “so everyone went away to school after eighth grade. My mother wanted me to go to Miss Pratt’s but I didn’t want to work that hard. My father thought I’d meet a better class of girl here. He was probably right. They had to press hard to keep up with the Joneses, my parents, so it was important to him.” She gave a laugh. “Oddly enough, I never seem to be able to be here when my fancy classmates come back for reunions. Winding up here, doing this, really was our idea of the worst thing that could happen to us. We thought we’d all—well, never mind. My classmates aren’t all world beaters either and they wouldn’t be unkind, I just don’t want to have that conversation.” After another pause for thought, she went on. “I had way too much fun while I was here,” Pam said, choosing a new tack away from the shoals she’d been heading for. “We broke a lot of rules with a lot of Yalies who weren’t much more studious than we were. I was pregnant at my own deb party.”

  “That must have been complicated.”

  “It was and it wasn’t. My parents never knew. My brother was furious. I got an illegal abortion in Puerto Rico and went on to some preppy junior college that doesn’t exist anymore. Oh, stop me,” she said, picking up the pitcher of iced tea and pouring more into Maggie’s glass. “I didn’t invite you to tea to bore you blind.”

  “If you hadn’t invited me, I’d have asked to come. I’m interested.”

  “People who live alone talk too much,” said Pam. “Which is not a good idea in a small co
mmunity.”

  “But you don’t live alone,” said Maggie. “You have adolescent life boiling in and out of here.”

  “That’s true.” She repeated it, thinking some private thought. “That is true. But it’s not like having real friends. Or family. Unless I’m everyone’s least favorite aunt.” Pam picked up the plate of cookies and thrust it toward Maggie, who took one.

  “Do you still have family in Sweetwater?” Maggie asked.

  “The brother. We had a falling-out when I got married. He called my fiancé an asshole at the rehearsal dinner, and I took it badly.”

  “I don’t wonder.”

  “The thing is, he wasn’t an asshole. My husband. He was a crook, but that’s different.”

  “A crook? Really?”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? We know there are a lot of them in the world. Stands to reason they get married to somebody. You don’t expect it to be you, though. This isn’t a story I ever tell people.”

  “Maybe you should. Might save someone else some trouble.”

  Pam said, “I’m done trying to save other people trouble.”

  There was a silence, into which they could now hear distant noises of girls clattering down the hall outside the door, laughing, yammering, calling to each other. Neither woman needed a clock to know it was the interval between sports periods.

  “How did you get from junior college to marrying a crook?”

  Pam said, “Oh, I can’t skip lightly over that part? I got a job in New York and shared an apartment in Murray Hill with two other girls. After a while they each got married, and two others took their places, but I went on and on. And it wasn’t like I had a career. I had jobs, and help from home. It didn’t occur to anyone, least of all me, that I would do anything but get married and join the Junior League and raise two point five perfect children. Then, just when it was getting embarrassing to be unmarried with no prospects, along came the asshole. Pardon me, the crook. He was fun, at first, and handsome enough, and he wanted the job. You know what I think now?”

  “What?” said Maggie when she perceived that Pam was really waiting for an answer.

  “I think I was out of my mind. I think from the day I got that abortion until the day my daughter was born, I was clinically nuts. People think you get pregnant, it’s inconvenient for you, you have an unpleasant half hour on a table somewhere, and get on with your life. That is not what happens. I don’t care who you are, what kind of a flibbertigibbet, you do not get an illegal abortion and come out without something like PTSD. It’s a terrifying thing to go through, on so many levels. I functioned well enough to hold a job and go through the motions, but that’s not the same thing as being well. It was years before I could speak of it without crying. I was a lot of fun on dates.”

  Maggie sat quietly, listening.

  “So. I married the crook, without somehow noticing what was wrong with him. Our daughter was born, I joined the Junior League. We lived in a nice house, he went to work every day. He did seem to change jobs more than other men we knew, but he always had a story. Finally one day when I was talking about what a hard time my husband had with his current boss, one of my friends”—she made air quotes—“told me that my husband didn’t have a boss, he had been out of work for eight months. I said ‘Don’t be silly, he goes to work every day.’ She said, ‘He gets dressed and leaves the house every day.’ I just stared at her. And then I thought, Jesus Christ, how would I know?”

  “And was she right?”

  “Of course she was right. But I didn’t want to know because I had no idea what I would do next if it was true. I didn’t admit to myself that I knew until the day he was arrested.”

  Maggie sensed that any response would be wrong. They sat in silence for a bit. Finally Maggie asked, “How long ago was this?”

  Pam waved her hand, as if to minimize the enormity of what had happened. “Long time, now. Fifteen years. More. The rest is my fault. I’d gotten used to being a wife, doing what I did, what all the other rich wives did. It took me much too long to admit to myself that no one was going to rescue me and that I could end up a bag lady. Don’t we all have that terror, that when you look closely at some creature sitting on a stoop with all her belongings in a shopping cart, that it will turn out to be someone you knew?”

  Maggie agreed that she did, and thought of one or two she particularly worried about.

  Pam went on, “When my neighbor suggested that living here or at Miss Pratt’s or somewhere would be a solution, I was so offended I stopped speaking to her for a year. But—here we are. I’m a value-added housemother, since I dispense cookies and tampons, and present a cautionary tale, all at once.”

  “Do the girls know what happened to you?”

  Pam rolled her eyes. “All they have to do is Google. I don’t invite the topic, but believe me, they know.”

  There was a knock at the door. Pam stood and brushed a crumb from her skirt, saying, “Well, that’s enough of that.”

  The girl in the hall was Steph Ruhlman. She was about to speak when she looked past Mrs. Moldower and saw Maggie.

  “What can I do you for?” Pam asked her. “You’ve met Mrs. Detweiler, haven’t you?”

  With a nod, Steph agreed that she had.

  “Have a cookie,” said Pam.

  Steph came into the room, and sat down on the edge of a Windsor chair. She accepted a cookie from the plate Pam held out to her. The women waited for her to speak, which she eventually did with the air of one who has rehearsed what she’s come to say.

  “Someone’s posted another awful thing on the message board and there are already six ‘up’ votes. Lily’s crying.”

  “Another awful thing?” Pam asked. “About Lily?”

  “Yes!” said Steph. “And it scares her but she doesn’t want her parents to take her out of school again.”

  “She should tell Ms. Liggett immediately,” said Pam impatiently. “Who is doing it?”

  “We don’t know! Nobody knows, that’s the point,” said Steph angrily. “I didn’t mean to interrupt, but . . .”

  “But we can find out. Danny the tech guy can trace the address . . .”

  “Is this TickTalk?” Maggie asked the girl.

  “Exactly!” cried Steph.

  “It’s a message board where the posts are anonymous,” Maggie said to Pam.

  “But—why would that be allowed? An anonymous bullying board?”

  “It’s not supposed to be available in high schools but it’s nearly impossible to wall out,” Maggie explained. This fresh hell had been a bane of her existence in her last two years at Windsor. “Steph, what do the messages say?”

  Steph showed Maggie her phone. On the screen was an image like a virtual Post-it note, saying The girl who finds dead bodies gets away with everything. Why?

  Maggie scrolled to the next. The girl who finds dead bodies hated the art diva. Just sayin’.

  And then to: Ask the girl who finds dead bodies about her key to the pool.

  “There has to be a way to trace this,” Pam snapped, furious.

  “There is,” said Maggie. “But we’d have to call the police.”

  “Well, let’s do that.”

  “Hold on. Would you e-mail those screenshots to me, Steph?” Maggie said. She gave Steph an address, and Steph tapped with her thumbs. “The first thing we need to do is make sure Lily is safe. Steph, you’re sure she doesn’t want her parents notified?”

  “Totally,” said Steph. “N-O.”

  Maggie, surprised by the vehemence, waited for more. Steph noticed she had a gingersnap in her hand and began to eat it. Maggie had thought Lily’s parents had seemed so nice, but you never knew.

  “Steph—is everything all right at home, for Lily?”

  “This is good, Mrs. Moldower, did you make these?”

  “Steph,” said Maggie.

  “Fine,” said Steph. “You know. Just normal weirdness.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maggie, who could see Steph was lying.r />
  “I really have to go. Study hall.”

  Maggie tried to leap up to match her, eye to eye, but she didn’t make it all the way out of the downy fastness of the chair. Pam took her hand and pulled her up. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

  “Please don’t tell Lily I told,” Steph said to Mrs. Moldower.

  “Of course not,” Pam said.

  With a diffident nod, Steph scuttled out the door.

  Looking after her, Pam said, “TickTalk? As if kids bullying kids on Facebook wasn’t bad enough? What the hell?”

  “You have no idea. You squash one of these things and three more pop up.”

  “Do you really know how to get at this thing without going to the police?”

  “No idea. But I may know people who can figure it out. Thank you for tea, Pam. And thank you for telling me your story.”

  “Thank you for listening.”

  “And those are very good gingersnaps.”

  “Whole Foods. I haven’t baked a cookie since the first Bush administration. That was Florence’s bailiwick. Listen, do you think Lily’s in some danger? I mean, beyond some opportunist mean girl thing?”

  “I’ll put it this way,” said Maggie. “I am not sure she is not in danger.”

  Pam whistled. “Well. I didn’t see that coming.”

  “There was one more thing I was going to ask,” Maggie said, pausing at the door.

  “Fire away.”

  “Where is your husband now?”

  “Oh him. I assume he’s in the slammer. He embezzled a shitload of money. But I don’t know for a fact. I hope never to hear the son of a bitch’s name again.”

  “Fair enough. And please, keep what Steph told us quiet. I know I don’t need to say that.”

  “Four walls,” said Pam.

  * * *

  By Monday evening Hope knew that her new stall-mucking exercise routine had resulted in a painfully overworked something or other in her lower back. She had left a message for Maggie that she was skipping dinner, and had taken to her bed with a hot pad and a bottle of gin when Maggie knocked on her door.