“You study just fine. I’m the one who’s having trouble with algebra. You’re the whizz kid who’s going to Stanford.”
He ran his hands down my hips.
“Hey,” I said and he put his hand over my mouth.
“Shhh. Someone’s coming. We’d better go in.”
We waited until the shadow passed and then he looked around before motioning for me to come to the path. Inside, we tromped up the stairs to the room where study hall was about to start and then, just before we split up, he to the library, me to my jail term, I saw that faraway look on his face. I didn’t know what it meant but my imagination and insecurity told me it was about me, about Wes wanting to be free of me.
“So you’re leaving early?” I asked because I wanted to open the subject again in some perverse way to pour vinegar in my own wound.
“We’re going to Sonoma,” he repeated. “It’s up north, wine country. My mom rented a winery for my eighteenth birthday. It’s the day after Thanksgiving. My whole family’s coming. Aunts and uncles and everybody. Big deal.” He raised his hands and placed them on the fat, worn chair arms.
“Your birthday? Why didn’t you say anything? I had no idea.”
“Yeah, well, you haven’t been exactly present lately.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “But we talked about this before. I mean earlier tonight. I thought you didn’t want to break up.”
He just stared at me then. “I don’t.”
“Well then we don’t have a problem. Because I don’t either.”
“Then why did you want to leave the movie?”
“Because . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. It all seemed so complicated. And on another level so simple.
“I hate my mother.” That was the simple level.
“What?”
“Yeah.”
Wes sat up in the chair. All of a sudden that sullen, faraway look was gone.
“Why?”
“Remember earlier, when you wanted to know why my mother was in the hospital?”
“Yeah. But you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I know. I never tell anyone. I mean I feel like what’s the point. Nobody can understand unless they’ve been through it like I have.”
“You said that before. So what’s different now?”
“I want to try to explain it to you. Because how she is affects how I am.”
“Okay. I think I get it.”
“But you have to listen to the whole thing. Because it’s not easy to talk about and even harder to explain.”
“I’ll listen. I want to know.”
NINETEEN
Greenwood’s Confession
“WHEN I SAY I HATE MY MOTHER, YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND that hating someone is not disliking them. I mean, hate and love, they’re entwined. Like on a seesaw. All the weight is on the same end. On the other end is dispassion—just not caring one way or the other. And it’s impossible for me not to care about her. Matter of fact, most times I think I care too much about her. Everyone else does, too. And that makes me angry and makes me hate her. Because there’s no room for me in there. She takes up all the emotional room and leaves nothing for anybody else.
“But not always. That’s the other thing I hate about her. She’s not the same all the time. I can never rely on her—not for anything. Like now. She’s in the hospital again. She’s in and out of the hospital like a bouncing ball. I never know when I go home what I’ll find. If she’s there, she may be in one of her super aggressive moods, yelling and blaming me for things I didn’t even think about doing, telling me all the things that are wrong with me and all the ways I’m wrong. Or she may not be there at all. She may be in the hospital again. Or she might be just lying in a lounge chair in her room in the dark with an ice bag on her head because she has such a bad headache. For hours and hours, just lying there not doing anything. Or maybe she’ll be crying. Or just lying there in the dark. And you can’t go in and you can’t do anything about it.”
“Shit, that’s tough,” Wes said when I stopped to get my breath.
I looked out the window and spoke, not directly to him but it was meant for him of course.
“I’m not looking for sympathy or empathy or for anything like that. I’m just explaining to you what my world is like. I mean my world away from here, away from Foxhall. I think my parents wanted me to go here so I would be in what they thought would be a nice family environment, because my family environment is so far from nice. Also my mother wanted to get me out of the house so she wouldn’t have to take care of me. I was brought up by my nurse, until I was five, and then live-in maids until last year. It may sound glamorous to some people but to me it was lonely. I always felt there must be some reason why my mother didn’t teach me how to cook or sew or keep my room clean or wash my hair or any of those things. I learned about Tampax away at camp. I figured out where to put them by myself one day in the bathroom.”
“I could have helped with that.”
I could hear the grin in his voice even though I was still looking out the window. I turned and expected to see him smiling but he wasn’t. He looked so sad, I almost thought he might cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For telling you all this stuff. It’s sad and gloomy and frustrating and makes me angry every time I think about it. But here’s the thing. The main thing about it all. After I came here and got a little distance on my mother, I realized that she’s broken. She’s a broken person and there’s no fixing her. And all this time, all my childhood, I wanted to find a way to fix her so my life could be better. It was—it still is—painful to see her going off the rails all the time. But the real pain is knowing that she can’t be fixed.”
“What exactly is wrong with her? I mean what happens when she goes to the hospital?”
“That depends. She sometimes gets very—I don’t know what to call it—agitated I guess is the best way to describe it. Like she has so much energy she can’t stop. But she also gets angry and goes into rages during these times. And then other times she gets really depressed like when she’s lying alone in a dark room or when she has a headache. And if that lasts too long then my father takes her to a doctor and she gets sent to a hospital. Sometimes she stays for months at a time. One year she was gone for thirteen months. My whole fourth grade year.
“I remember that as a good year because the house was at least peaceful. No yelling or blaming or hiding or running off to the woods to be alone. And no picking on my friends. That’s another thing she does. Berates my friends, tears them down, tries to make them look bad to me.”
“I hope I measure up if I ever meet her.”
“Oh, she loves guys. She never picks on guys.”
“What about your dad?”
“He never picks on anybody.”
“What happens when your mom’s away for so long?”
“He travels a lot. He has to go to companies and study them and it takes time and then he has to report back to his company about whether they should invest or not. So he’s out of town a lot. And if she’s in the hospital, sometimes she can’t see anyone because of treatments she’s getting or stuff. He’ll be away over Thanksgiving staying near the hospital where they sent her this time. I don’t know where it is but I’m not allowed to see her for a while. At least that’s what my dad told me.”
“Why don’t you come out to California with me?”
“I can’t now.”
“How come?”
“Because I signed up for a work camp in Philadelphia over the weekend. It’s a soup kitchen or something and I’ve already been accepted.”
“Wow, you’re doing one of those?”
“Yeah, well maybe I can help fix someone else’s life. You never know. Anyway, since I’ve been here at Foxhall, I’ve started thinking that my life is pretty shallow and I should really try out some Quaker ideals.”
“Yeah, I know what you m
ean.”
“You do?”
That clouded looked came over his face again and I thought maybe I shouldn’t have told him all this stuff.
“When I turn eighteen in January, I’ll have to register for the draft.”
“Oh, God, that’s right.”
TWENTY
The Car Ride
IT WAS SORT OF LIKE WHAT I EXPECTED AND THEN AGAIN IT wasn’t. Mr. Brownell and his wife drove five of us to Philadelphia in a school van. We were an odd assortment.
There was Dieter, the German exchange student, who’d gotten into a shouting match with Benny Newman, a Jewish boy from Long Island. The shouting turned ugly and caught Wes in the middle.
It happened one day at the track right after Wes had finished his extra laps. I was walking out to meet him so we could talk a little before he had to go shower before supper. Most of the track team had already left and the coach was on his way to the gym. Wes was drinking some water when we both heard shouting coming from near the bleachers. The shouting got uglier, Dieter said that Benny was typical of his race. That sent Benny into a rage and he took a swing at Dieter, hitting him in the nose, which started to bleed. By then Wes dropped the water and ran over to where they were yelling at each other. Benny called Dieter a fucking Nazi bastard and Dieter punched Benny, his knuckles making contact with Benny’s left cheekbone just below the eye. Before Wes could stop them, fists were flying and they fell to the ground pounding each other.
I had never seen a fistfight before and the thing that sickened me, besides seeing blood flying, was the sound the fists made when they hit bone. It was like a crack and a thud at the same time. It made my stomach turn over but Wes started to pull Benny off of Dieter, who was the smaller of the two. A couple of other boys from the track team piled on and finally got them apart. They were both bruised up but it didn’t stop them from screaming at each other while they were restrained by the boys.
“Hey, you guys,” Wes admonished them, “you’re going to get into big trouble if you don’t cool it.” He led Benny away, talking to him in a soothing voice. I heard phrases like, “I know he’s a little prick.” And “Don’t let him get to you, man.” I don’t know what the other boys were saying to Dieter but in the car driving to Philly I thought about that day.
Dieter could come across annoyingly arrogant at times and Benny was pretty hotheaded. It wasn’t a surprise that they’d gotten into it. In those days there were still people, like some of my father’s relatives who wouldn’t buy a German car.
The girl who always talked about her missionary parents at Meeting for Worship sat in the middle row of the van with me. Her name was China Noice, named for her parents’ first missionary posting. We all knew that because she’d slipped it into one of her Meeting soliloquies. In the car she talked about “the poor” as if they were personal friends of hers and she was going to spend the holiday with them. On my other side was Arlene Sanderson, whose family lived in Guam and therefore she hardly ever got to go home and was glad to get away from school for any reason as she told me in a whisper while China prattled on about the poor and needy.
Behind us was Donald Wingart, the tuba player. His father was in the State Department stationed somewhere overseas so Donald couldn’t go home either. He was so small and frail looking that I wondered how he ever managed to hoist that tuba and carry it around. He looked like he was about ten years old. He wore brown leather shoes with non-matching laces, one black and one tan. I could just imagine the original brown laces breaking and Donald searching absent-mindedly for replacements, no matter what color they were. I thought about talking to him about Moll and tucked that thought away for later in the weekend when there might be a lull in soup ladling.
The one bright spot was Faith, also sitting in the back seat with some of the gear we’d brought. She had told her parents this was what she wanted to do to show her thanks for all her blessings and they were one hundred percent behind her, although they told her the whole family would miss seeing her smiling face and cheerful grace. Those were their exact words, Faith told me. I thought it must feel warm and hopeful to be in a family that told their children such things. No wonder Faith was such an easy person to befriend and why she was sought out by the younger girls. I didn’t count myself among the younger girls since I wasn’t a freshman and my main friends were juniors. The pecking order at Foxhall wasn’t all that rigid. There were even instances of a senior girl dating a junior or sophomore boy—if he was hot and cool, which may seem like two qualities that should cancel each other out if you only understood literal definitions for words and weren’t tuned into teen speak, which changes from year to year and generation to generation.
Since these were the days long before seat belts were mandatory, I could turn around freely and talk to Faith while Mrs. Brownell turned to talk with us and Mr. Brownell drove— maddeningly slowly—in the far right lane on the interstate.
“Have any of you children ever been to a work camp weekend before?” Mrs. Brownell smiled benignly at us, looking from one to the other while I was busy whispering to Faith, who leaned over to listen and so Donald couldn’t hear.
“Do you think we’ll have time for any fun?”
“Doubtful,” Faith whispered back. “They keep a pretty close watch all the time.”
“Are we going to be serving food the whole time?”
“Shhh,” she whispered and motioned subtly to Mrs. Brownell.
I turned back to face front. Mrs. Brownell was explaining something to Dieter.
“You see, Dieter, by serving others we express our faith in a tangible way. The rewards of giving come back to the giver and the rewards of receiving multiply the faith.”
“Ya,” he pronounced with his thick accent. “Ya, I see but how then does the receiver express faith? Is he not simply taking what he has not worked to obtain?”
Hearing this I felt a little stab. Who in hell was he to be questioning the very thing he was embarked on doing? He could at least go into it with an open mind. No wonder Benny had punched him in the face. These were not Quakerly thoughts and I mentally admonished myself while at the same time thinking them.
Mrs. Brownell, still turned toward the back, smiled at Dieter.
“We have compassion for those less fortunate, Dieter. Our hearts are large enough to hold love for all humanity. Not everyone is as fortunate as those of us in this car.”
“Ya, but how come then they are strong enough to come to soup kitchen to get handed out food? Can they not work for that? Work is good for them, for everyone. Why should I give hard earned fruits of labor to someone else?”
Mrs. Brownell looked at Mr. Brownell’s profile.
“That is a question societies ask themselves the world over,” Mr. Brownell said. He looked in the rear view mirror to see us in the back seat. I could see his eyes. He looked so calm. I was ready to smack Dieter. But he went on.
“There are always strong ones and weaker ones in any society. Societies that treat the weakest of their members with dignity and respect, with loving kindness and a helping hand, are stronger for it. It’s said that a rising tide lifts all ships. Well the tide can be helped to rise.”
That sounded completely sane to me. Of course, I thought of my father. Of his love for my mother, of helping her no matter how sick she became. Of waiting for her to come back to him. I often marveled at his patience. She was one of the weaker ones, although, when she was in one of her high moods she appeared strong, almost invincible, strong and angry and frightening. But certainly not weak. Her voice and manner had an imperious aspect to it that told you she would suffer no impertinence or defiance. Yet she had those crushing bouts of depression where she could not function. Weak did not begin to describe it. Should we have tossed her out? No matter how much I hated her at times, I also felt a deep sadness for her and, even as a small child, I realized she was fragile in some way that I didn’t understand.
“Ya, but I still say if a man can work he should work. Work makes
for dignity. Being fed by someone else’s work is for women.”
“Arbeit macht frei, huh, Dieter?” I said, not loud, but not under my breath either. Mrs. Brownell turned to look at me, eyebrows raised, which I took to mean I should cut it out.
The car became silent and I wished I’d sat in the back with Faith. I felt like Dieter’s last remark was directed at me and the other girls in the car. So annoying that he could get away with that just because he was an exchange student. At least I’d shut him up. But then China found her Meeting For Worship voice.
“In Ghana, all the people my parents serve have little. But they’re all generous with each other, no matter how little they have. My parents say that’s what makes a strong community. This summer, after school is over, I’m going back there to help with the school. My parents have gotten the whole village together to build it and now they need teachers. I’m going to teach English and geography.”
All I could think was Run, Spot, Run. It kept repeating in a singsong in my brain. At the same time I was having trouble controlling an excruciating urge to giggle. I reached back and motioned for Faith to take my hand. She squeezed it so hard, I knew she understood.
“That’s very nice, China,” said Mrs. Brownell. “I’m sure you’ll be a big help out there.”
I watched the suburbs skim by as we drove. Houses and streets and gas stations with signs screaming low, low prices, old shade trees and parking lots, industrial buildings that looked like warehouses of some sort, traffic lights and railroad tracks. And then we could see the city. Traffic got heavier, buildings packed tightly together and up ahead, in the distance, spires atop a few stone structures taller than the rest, buildings that spoke of an elegant time long ago with multiple layers of windows in elaborately detailed structures. Compared with driving up to New York, this looked small, almost compact, easy to navigate. Mr. Brownell turned off at an exit and headed past buildings that had an air of squalor. Streets with trash blowing around, people sitting on stoops. We passed by and nobody seemed interested in us or any of the other cars. A bus roared by from the other direction, leaving a plume of dirt-gray smoke.
The Other New Girl Page 13