The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  She unpeeled his onesie from his sticky body and took off his diaper, too. He sat with pleasure in the warm water and splashed it with fat hands. Madeline gave him her washcloth to play with and hoped Kate wouldn’t ask when the last time was Madeline had actually cleaned the tub.

  But that was too much to hope for. Kate was standing behind her, drinking a glass of water. She actually had one for Madeline in her other hand. Just when you were ready to write Kate off altogether, she’d do something that made you not quite hate her anymore. “Thanks,” she said now, “but when was the last time you cleaned that tub?”

  “This morning, with my toothbrush,” Madeline said. “He’s happy, Kate. Let him be.” That was new, she thought. I never talk back to Kate. Perhaps death and harassment were firming up her inner strength. To her surprise, her sister didn’t come up with a retort. Instead, she flipped the lid down on the toilet and sank onto it. Tadeo noticed her, said, “clom,” and kept splashing happily when he wasn’t sucking on Madeline’s washcloth. “You’re so good with him,” Kate said. “You get him.” To Madeline’s horror, Kate was crying.

  “Kate?” she asked, propping the baby up a little more firmly.

  She was having a hard time, she said, but even when she cried, Kate’s complexion didn’t become mottled and her mascara didn’t run. She wanted to apply for a tenure-track job in New York, but Nick didn’t want to leave Boston. The baby couldn’t sleep through the night. Nick was working a lot, and even with the nanny, she was just tired all the time. This was the worst of it: he wanted lots of kids. She didn’t think she wanted any more. It was too hard. She was desperate to get back to a job. Work was so much easier than parenting. “Madeline, it’s just so hard.” She started to sob. This time, her mascara really did run. And Tadeo started to scream in earnest.

  I’m getting good at this, Madeline thought, this being graceful under pressure. She scooped the baby up and bundled him in a towel. One arm around Tadeo, she used her other hand to pull Kate up from the toilet and to wrap her close. Her sister was shaking and crying so hard, she couldn’t speak. This was worse than Madeline had realized. Somehow, she maneuvered everyone out to the living room, settled Kate on the futon, got Tadeo diapered, and from Kate’s handsome bag fished out a bottle that she microwaved. Between hiccups, Kate said, “You’re not supposed to do that,” and Madeline said, “Shut up, Kate,” and did it anyway, because what the baby needed was food and reassurance and the chance to sleep. He conked out in a couple of minutes, and she laid him on a towel on her futon and turned a fan on low so he wouldn’t get sweaty and hot again. Then she refilled Kate’s water glass and said, “What’s going on? You’re a basket case,” thinking this was the first time she had ever had reason to use that word in relation to her sister.

  “I want to leave Nick,” Kate sniffled. It was the job issue and the kid issue and maybe they’d just been too young and they’d outgrown each other. The baby sighed in his sleep and kicked out a leg. Madeline took in the dumpiness of her environment. The old throw pillows, the inch of ancient coffee in the percolator. The piles of final papers she needed to correct by Monday and the battered copy of Norton’s anthology of American poetry. Her sneakers smelled, and frankly, so did she. Most days, a list like this was enough to give Kate a strong advantage. But Madeline felt something welling up in her, something powerful enough to sweep away her sister’s cosmetic superiority.

  “No,” said Madeline firmly. “No. You have to try harder. You said you would do this. And if you can’t, you can’t just walk away like it never happened, as if Tadeo wasn’t there. You have to do better than that. You have to do it for the baby. And you know what? You have to do it for Nick. Kate, he’s a great guy. You’re lucky to have him.” Madeline had always liked her brother-in-law. Despite being handsome, smart, and rich, he was also a nice man. Despite every opportunity not to, he’d resisted self-importance. “I’ll help you, Kate. I’ll be around all summer. I’ll give you time. You can get counseling. You can work it out.”

  Kate blinked at her. She took a deep breath. She was returning to her usual state. “I don’t know what I want,” she said, and her voice wavered. The baby stirred. He would be awake soon. Madeline fetched a clean suit from the diaper bag.

  “How did you get on campus?” she asked her sister. “And why are you here?” Now that Kate had stopped weeping, Madeline could ask what had brought her sister out from Boston.

  “I told the police I had to meet Porter, and then he happened to be walking by the gate with his dog,” she said. “I said I wanted to check on you. He owes Nick a favor; one of his twins has an internship at Nick’s firm this summer.”

  “How does Nick know Porter?” Madeline asked. Nick hadn’t gone to Armitage, which at first had seemed to count against him during his courtship of Kate. Slipping Tadeo’s leg through a hole in a fresh onesie made Madeline reflect that it was a lot easier to dress a sleeping baby than one who was wide awake.

  “We saw him last summer up in Castine, where he has this little house. He was there with his kids. Nick sailed with them a few times. That’s when I met that girl who was killed. She was up there, too.”

  Tadeo turned over in his new suit, stuck his bum in the air, and sighed again. “Glarr,” he added sleepily.

  “You met Claire?” Madeline asked.

  Kate said, “Yes, in August. It was one of the things I wanted to tell you, but you kept not returning my calls.” She glared at her sister. “Or e-mails. She was a beautiful girl. She looked just like her mother.” Flora, Kate explained, had come to Maine to get her, supposedly, though Claire had obviously been taking care of herself for years. Kate thought there was another agenda at work. One night, they’d all had dinner at Porter’s house, but Lucinda wasn’t there. “I think Flora and Porter were old flames,” Kate said, wiping away all traces of her tears, more herself now that there was some gossip to distract her. “They seemed comfortable together. I got the sense that, if Lucinda had been around, it wouldn’t have happened at all.”

  Then Tadeo woke and Kate looked at her watch and said she guessed she should get back. Madeline, still thinking of what Kate had said, helped her sister gather her things. At the threshold, Kate said, “I know I told you about it. That’s when I found out Porter was going to hire you. After you’d gotten rejected everywhere else.”

  Madeline remembered now. She’d been struck by the casualness with which her sister mentioned eating a meal with the headmaster. Probably Kate had mentioned Claire and Flora, too, but what had registered was the ease with which she spoke of Porter, the way she had waltzed into his house.

  Tadeo was in that blissful post-nap mood where he was neither hungry nor sleepy. He was being, simply, a sweet and loving baby. “You’re so lucky, Kate,” Madeline said. She meant it mostly about Tadeo, but the remark encompassed everything: Kate’s confidence, her degrees, the potential of her career, her marriage. “Work it out with Nick,” she said as she held the door open.

  Looking slightly less disconsolate, Kate sniffed. “I’ll try. Please don’t tell Mom or Dad about this.”

  “Why would I do that?” Madeline asked, truly curious. She never told her parents anything of consequence. Isabelle and David had each called once since Claire’s death, to make sure she wasn’t going to be arrested imminently, as David put it. “In need of legal counsel?” he’d asked, and she’d reassured him that no, indeed, she had all her bases covered. She even held herself back from saying, And if I did, you’d be the last person I’d ask.

  “I don’t know.” Kate shrugged. “Just in case.”

  “Wait a minute, Kate. There’s something else.” Madeline had no desire to tell her sister about what had been going on, but Kate would certainly know about the Reign, and perhaps she’d have some useful information. Kate was ready to go but waited impatiently just outside the door, jiggling Tadeo on her hip. Madeline asked, “When you were here, did they have this Reign of Terror thing? Complete with Robespierre and all this silliness abo
ut who could sit where?”

  To Madeline’s concern, Kate’s face grew closed and haughty. She shifted Tadeo protectively to her other side and said, “I’m afraid I can’t talk about that.”

  “Oh, God,” Madeline cried, “you were one of them. Of course! I should have known! Kate, how could you? They’re dreadful, these girls. Do you know what they do to each other?” Madeline was going to bluster on, but Kate said, coolly, “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” and started to walk away.

  “Kate, how could you have been a part of it?” Madeline called after her. But all her sister said was “Phone me when you’ve pulled yourself together,” in her usual, infuriating manner that implied she had cornered the entire market on composure. Madeline was left standing on her doorstep staring at the slim, retreating figure of her sister. Kate slipped across the Quad and past Greaves to where she’d parked with her usual irreverence for rules in the faculty lot. It seemed a miracle or some dark joke that she and Kate were related, Madeline mused, anger still ticking through her at her sister’s lack of total disclosure, her invocation of thorny silence, a pact that apparently trumped family loyalty. Madeline was glad Kate was gone, despite the fact she had taken Tadeo with her. She went to take a shower and was letting her frustration with Kate sluice off under the flow of water when, abruptly, she began to sputter. Spinning the taps shut, she lurched for a towel. What Kate had said struck her the moment she’d rinsed the shampoo from her hair: Claire had been with Porter and his family in August and the girl had returned to school in mid-September, most likely already pregnant.

  Just then there was a knock on the door, and Madeline jumped and nearly fell she was so jittery. Pulling on some clothes that at least looked clean, she got to the door and saw Sarah Talmadge standing there, arms folded across her chest. “Sarah,” Madeline said, “I’m so sorry. I just got out of the shower.”

  “Don’t worry, Madeline. I’m the one who should be apologizing to you, for not getting back to you and then barging in like this.” She looked even more wan than she had when Madeline had seen her earlier in the week. “Could I come in for a moment?”

  Madeline offered Sarah water or coffee, and the assistant head gratefully accepted water. “Well, there’s a lot to talk about, but why don’t you start?” She sat on an armchair and settled in to listen.

  Madeline flopped on her futon and leaned in to describe what she had learned about the Reign of Terror, Claire, Sally, and Rosalie. Sarah listened with some of the same concentrated intensity as the police officer, and she shared as well his apparent lack of surprise.

  But before she spoke, she took a long sip of water. “We’ve been wanting to get rid of this Reign business for years. Porter and I and a few others have been looking into it for a long time. Unfortunately, as you discovered with your sister, it is something that alumnae hold dear. And in the beginning, it was, apparently, almost benign.” Sarah explained that it had started when the first female students enrolled, at the end of the 1970s. “The name was meant to be a joke of sorts. Something that showed how smart and serious they were that they could use a reference connected to the French Revolution. To them, it was obvious that the real Reign of Terror existed among the boys and the male teachers, with their traditions of hazing. The girls looked after each other those first few years, and the group was supposed to support solidarity among the young women and, ironically, prevent them from losing their heads.”

  Sarah sighed. “But it changed. There were a few Robespierres who had different ideas about the position, and they begin imitating the boys rather than avoiding their bad habits.” They even tried to sponsor a scholarship, to become an alumnae group, though that effort got squashed, fortunately. And then, one year, Sarah said, in the mid-eighties, a new girl was driven to a suicide attempt that did not succeed, and at that point, the head took on the task of trying to banish all traditions. Sarah looked at Madeline and said, “It might be hard to believe, but the backlash came not only from alumni but from faculty, who saw the traditions as holding together something sacred at the school. The kids were smart about it. In the middle of all the brouhaha, they just went underground. The last couple of years, Porter and I have been gathering evidence about what’s really going on. But we had no idea that Claire was a voice of reason on this front.”

  Madeline asked her, “Did you know about Rosalie? About how she’d been harassed?”

  Sarah’s face grew more pinched. “I suspected it, yes, and pressed both her and her parents about it, but they would have nothing to do with the school. We failed that child. We failed her utterly.” Sarah looked tired enough to collapse on Madeline’s shabby armchair. She was taking all of this personally. She saw it as her duty to admit where Armitage had gone wrong. “And Rich Girls?” She repeated the website’s name as if she’d discovered a morsel of rotten food in her mouth. “That one we didn’t or at least I didn’t know about. There are lots of others, Madeline. Lots of them. And we keep tabs on them, to protect the kids, to try and block what they have access to. But there’s a lot of leakage nonetheless.” Sometimes, Sarah said, she wished it was fifty years ago, when it was hard to take airplanes, make phone calls, do any of the million things kids took for granted now. Technology was supposed to be this fantastic boon, and then its abuse showed you it was just another way to draw out the darkness in people.

  Madeline said then, “I looked at it, Sarah. It was blocked on my school computer, but not on my laptop, for some reason. But I wanted to see if Rosalie was telling the truth.” Madeline almost had to close her eyes as she told Sarah this part of the story. “I felt ashamed even typing in the name of the site,” she said, stumbling over herself. The images of the girls’ lush curves had been both horrifying and erotic at the same time, and she had experienced a thrill of recognition when she saw the bodies of the four girls who had slept like children on the floor of her living room. Rosalie had been right. If you knew who they were, you could recognize them from the curl of a lip, the angle of an arm. They hadn’t entirely disguised themselves. They were mostly nude, and in poses with one another, arms wrapped around one another, legs lifted high. There was a crudeness about the entire series of images and shadowed expressions that was utterly at odds with how they presented themselves at the academy, but as Rosalie said, they had even used their school’s name for the titles of the pictures: Armitage Babes, they called themselves. The shot that purported to be of Rosalie revealed nothing but a girl’s naked body, up to her mouth and chin. The eyes were absent, and it might have been any barely developed child. For some reason, they had yet to terrorize Maggie by posting a similar image. Madeline had felt an intense wave of nausea pass through her, and she had turned off the computer with a rough snap. “But it’s real,” she said now to Sarah. “They’re there. And almost proudly, barely disguised. Anyone could find them there. Why would they do it? What could possess them?”

  Sarah was looking out the window as she spoke. “It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, Madeline. Why did Claire have her baby here? Why did Lee Hastings post pornographic pictures of herself on the Web? Why did any of these children do such damage to themselves? And I know I don’t have a definite answer, and the one I’ve come up with might be woefully partial.” Her hands locked together, she looked at Madeline again and said, “I have to keep reminding myself that they are children. They don’t talk like kids, dress like them, want to be treated like them, but they are. Don’t think I’m saying that they’re naïve or should be condescended to simply because they’re young. What I mean is that they are inexperienced. Impulsive. Unable to foresee consequences with brains that aren’t in any sense fully developed. What I mean is that it is understandable that they make mistakes, sometimes ones that change their lives.”

  Madeline thought about what Sarah was saying. She remembered with shame some of her own teenage missteps. Crawling through the window of a boy she liked only to discover she was in his parents’ bedroom. Intemperate e-mails that had gone
astray. “Maybe,” she told the assistant head, “maybe that’s a part of it. But I wondered if it was more cynical than that. Sometimes I think they just don’t care what people think. Not us, their parents, no one but their peers. There’s some bravado and disdain in what they do that makes me wonder who they are. And it’s so unfathomable to me. They sit there in front of you all excited to read Milton, for God’s sakes, and then they do things like this.”

  “You might be right, too,” Sarah said sadly. “But even so, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the chance to learn from serious errors in judgment. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the capacity to change. Thanks for telling me, Madeline.”

  “What happens now?” Madeline asked. “Do you tell the parents?”

  Sarah said, yes, they had to, come what may. And there were usually disciplinary actions taken, as discreetly as possible but still pursued. Last year, a boy had been kicked out. Others were suspended and required to seek therapy. Parents always went berserk. “Every time it’s the same. Lawyers, threats to sue, all the rest. But yes, we tell the parents, even if it reflects badly on us. This year, given everything that’s happened, it’s harder to say what the consequences will be.” She paused then, clearly gathering herself for something else. Sarah, a small woman, took a deep breath and seemed to straighten her spine in an effort to appear taller. “All of which makes what I’m about to ask you now seem almost farcical. But I would like to offer you a full-time faculty position for next year. As a rule,” Sarah continued, “we don’t offer positions to interns, no matter how good. But I think you’re a real teacher. I think you’ve got tremendous potential. Everyone’s seen it, and we’d like to ask you to stay.”

  “Really?” Even with my messy hair and being late to chapel? Madeline wanted to ask. Even though I don’t entirely believe in what’s on offer here? Even though I’ve been quite vocal about that? She couldn’t help herself then and said, “But Sarah, I’m, well, very un-Armitage. And that’s a polite way of putting it.”