Is That You, Miss Blue?

by M. E. Kerr

  She said—she wailed, “OWWWWL!” She seemed to lunge forward at me as she made this sound, with her mouth forming a large O.

  “That means hello,” said Miss Blue, noticeably rattled by the sound herself.

  “Hi!” I said, speaking very loudly, too, and making an exaggerated hi with my mouth.

  She said, “Lo Leet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you. That means pleased to meet you,” said Miss Blue.

  Again I worked my lips laboriously, answering, “Same here,” and speaking in a loud voice.

  Then Agnes said, “Gite.”

  I frowned when Miss Blue failed to translate for me, and I saw Miss Blue frowning, too.

  “What?” I made my mouth say, my voice shout.

  This time she barked the word at me, leaning closer to my face as though she was going to spit in my eye. “GITE!”

  I just sat there, looking away from her, smoothing the ribbon along my blanket’s edge.

  Miss Blue said, “Well, now that you’ve met…” and her voice trailed off.

  I whispered, “I don’t know what she wants, or what gite means.”

  “It’s all right, dear. You’re both acquainted,” said Miss Blue.

  The next thing, Agnes Thatcher stamped her feet and shook her head and tried to say more forcibly the sound “gite,” but it became a long, wailing, “GIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE!”

  Her eyes were narrowed and she was showing great irritation with both of us for not understanding. She was also carefully watching our lips. It would do no good for me to whisper, and I needn’t have stretched my mouth all out of proportion, for she obviously was an excellent lip-reader.

  I looked at her and shrugged my shoulders, smiling a little. “I just don’t get it,” I said.

  She didn’t smile back. She gave a heavy sigh and shook her head angrily.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re both acquainted.” Miss Blue kept harping on the notion of our acquaintance, as though the mere fact of our meeting had been the primary obstacle to overcome.

  Miss Blue said, “I think we’d better say good night.”

  At this, Agnes Thatcher grabbed her arm, gave it a punch, put one finger up in the air, and shook her head up and down in a “yes” gesture.

  Then she said again, “Gite.”

  Still we didn’t get it.

  “We have to say good night, dear,” Miss Blue told her.

  She shook her head harder, shook her finger at Miss Blue, and repeated, “Gite!”

  “Good night,” I said, “is that it?”

  She came dancing across to my bed with a big grin, and then, leaning down, she socked me in the shoulder. “Gite,” she said.

  I laughed, even though she hit hard and it hurt.

  “Good night, Agnes.”

  “Gite.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Lo leet you.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Gite.” She was backing out of the room with Miss Blue following.

  I gave a little two-fingered salute with my hand. “So long.”

  As she disappeared from view, Miss Blue’s hand still remained in my room, and I heard her shout, “Just a moment, Agnes. I’ll come to tuck you in.”

  Her face and part of her body reappeared in my room.

  “Isn’t that sad, dear?” she said. “Jesus allows our afflictions to test us, but we sometimes forget ‘His will be done’ when we see the stricken.”

  “Is she next door to me?” I said. I knew she was. I could already hear her slamming things around in there, but I didn’t want to go on talking with Miss Blue in that vein, about “the stricken” and “His will be done.” I didn’t take to the idea of God or Jesus treating whoever He felt like treating the same way a vivisectionist might treat a stray dog, testing someone’s faith the way the dog might be tested for the physical side effects of a new drug.

  “She’s in 8, yes, dear. The sad thing is that she has an older sister, just as beautiful, and just like her. Dr. Thatcher sent her to a special school for the deaf, and she met another stricken as she was and married him. The doctor wants more for poor Agnes. He doesn’t want her just to know the world of the handicapped. That’s why he’s doing differently with Agnes. A fine boarding school with high standards and a good reputation, then on to Sweet Briar for college. No special privileges to be granted to her, either. She’s to participate in whatever the others participate in, be judged as they’re judged. It’s very brave of him, isn’t it, Flanders?”

  I said, “Of him?”

  “Oh, she’s brave, too, I’m sure. She seems brave.”

  “Gite,” I moaned sarcastically.

  But Miss Blue mistook my meaning. Her eyes brightened. “Yes,” she bubbled. “She’s stubborn. The way she insisted we understand what she wanted to say, what gite meant!”

  I could hear hangers falling on the closet floor next door, and suitcases thumping against the walls. Since she could not hear herself, I doubted that she would be the quietest neighbor.

  “I’ll go to her now,” said Miss Blue. “Good night, dear.”

  I sat there for a long while in the darkness, staring out at the night, listening to the sounds from the other room, and noticing the reflection of her light on the ivy outside my windowsill.

  Gradually I made myself become oblivious to the chunking of baggage against walls, the slamming of drawers, and the wailing interspersed with Miss Blue’s shouts. They were background noises like the sounds of workers putting up a house next to yours. I thought of other things, verses I had memorized, dates: dull insignificant things, the same way my father made long, detailed lists of things to do around the house, after my mother split—to keep his mind very busy but not with real thoughts.

  Then the noises stopped; the lights went out.

  I sank down under the covers and listened to some crickets.

  About five minutes later I heard what sounded like an angry elephant charging, followed by a sound like air seeping from the tire of a huge trailer truck…angry elephant, air seeping, angry elephant, air seeping.

  Of course. Agnes Thatcher snored.

  Six

  THE FIRST CLANG—DONG DONG of the day sounded at a quarter to seven. You had until seven thirty to dress and get yourself down to Dombey and Son for breakfast. After a nearly sleepless night, thanks to Agnes Thatcher’s snoring, I fell back asleep until seven ten. Then I jerked awake, flew into my clothes, used the bathroom, and ran all the way down to the queue. There had been no sign of Agnes on Little Dorrit. Was she awake; how did she wake herself up in the morning? As the faculty line started to move past the queue, I wondered if it was my responsibility to go back and check on her.

  I needn’t have concerned myself, for in the next moment, Miss Blue appeared, marching in step with Agnes Thatcher, periodically doing a fast shuffle with her feet to stay in step. Miss Blue was also holding her right palm under but not quite touching Agnes’ left elbow, as though she were escorting an elderly lady across the ice and was ready should she fall.

  Agnes had no particular expression on her face; it was as ordinary as her face was extraordinary, perhaps slightly on the exasperated side where Miss Blue was concerned. Agnes seemed to want to walk ahead of Miss Blue, as though to deny they were a pair en route to breakfast. Miss Blue’s expression was a little stranger than usual. There was the usual flush to her face, but the chin was thrust forward in a combative attitude, and there was a certain borrowed agony in her eyes, as though she was undertaking some of what she imagined to be Agnes’ burden simply by walking alongside her.

  Agnes did not join the queue, but continued along with Miss Blue into the dining room.

  I was at the tail end of the queue. Cardmaker and Cute were far ahead of me. When I got inside Dombey and Son, I hurried to get the last chair at Miss Balfour’s table. I didn’t have to look back toward Miss Blue’s to know that Agnes would be there with her.

  Miss Balfour was the school dietician. Cardmaker liked to describe
people by saying things like: “For Sue Crockett, hell will be a place where no one knows her mother drives a Mercedes,” or “For Ditty Hutt, heaven will be a place where you can marry your own brother.” The other night, after Miss Balfour oversaw the first study hall of the year, Cardmaker had remarked, “For Miss Balfour, hell will be a place with no mirrors.” Miss Balfour had spent most of the hour and a half peeking at herself in the mirror of her compact. Cardmaker said she belonged to a club called “The World of Beauty,” and every two months received a huge package containing cosmetic samples. “She’s had her face lifted twice,” Cardmaker told me, “and she’s supposed to be way over sixty.”

  She looked around forty. She was a skinny woman who probably wouldn’t fare well at all in a strong wind. She had very black hair, big round blue eyes made up with mascara and eyeliner, and dabs of rouge on her cheeks like a department-store doll.

  Grace at Miss Balfour’s table was simple to the point of being almost nonexistent. She snapped her napkin to her lap with a flourish and her head bowed, while rattling off “Thank thee for this food.” Then she poured the coffee from the pot with one hand while the other delivered it to her lips, and after this snappy maneuver, her eyes went directly to the large mirror on the opposite wall. She sipped her coffee (she ate no breakfast) and watched her own expressions and poses.

  Behind me I could hear Miss Horton holding forth on John Bob, and I could see Billy, down at APE’s table, carefully spreading apple butter on johnnycake, his little feet dangling above the floor.

  I had never eaten fried apples with bacon before, and I was going at it tentatively, mulling over whether or not it was fair to call this breakfast. At the table, everyone except Miss Balfour and me was a senior. After I introduced myself, I was ignored. They were all busy discussing the dance, which was then two days away.

  I was for no good reason threatening myself with another awful daydream. In this one my date for the dance was a divine number who was being made to payoff some enormous penalty by escorting me. I’d been doing that sort of thing to myself a lot since my mother had left; I’d also been having a lot of little accidents. My father had discussed the accidents with me, asking me if I thought I was acting out the feeling of rejection.

  “Not that I know of,” I’d answer him.

  “Are you sure, honey? Because you know Mom didn’t really reject you. She simply felt she had to find herself. She felt she was being rejected.”

  “She was just horny for Bobby,” I said.

  “There’s more to it than that, Flan.”

  “I don’t care if she did reject me. I reject her back,” I said.

  “She loves you very much, Flan.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  When I came to the point in my daydream when my date was eyeing the stag line, trying to get someone’s, anyone’s, eye, to see if he could unload me on him, I heard someone say, “Little Dorrit.”

  I looked up.

  “I said don’t you live on Little Dorrit?”

  I knew her name and that she was the most everything of the senior class. Cardmaker had told me that about every other year or so there’s a most everything in the senior class: most beautiful, most brilliant, most poised, most sexy, most talented and most you name it. Cardmaker said that so far in our class there was no candidate for most everything, but a lot of the best girls didn’t arrive until junior year.

  The girl speaking to me was France Shipp. She’d been born on Bastille Day, which was how she got the neat first name; how she got all the rest, the dark red hair and fabulous figure and great face and 140 I.Q. and everything, I can’t answer: Fate, God, Good Genes, I don’t know.

  She was also engaged, the only senior who was engaged, with a genuine two-carat diamond. Her fiancé was the son of a senator and a freshman at Yale. Whenever he couldn’t attend the Charles School dances, France Shipp became a “Junior Chaperone,” which was the same thing as a faculty chaperone: She watched over the dance.

  “Yes, I live on Little Dorrit,” I told her. “I have slight asthma.” I added that so she would not imagine worse things—that the full moon grew hair all over my body and made my teeth into fangs, ox that I wandered the school halls nights with a carving knife.

  “Agnes Thatcher arrived, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. She rooms next door to me.”

  France then explained to everyone that Agnes was deaf and dumb.

  “Her sister’s also deaf and dumb, but what a doll!” France said. “I met her husband, who’s deaf and dumb, too, at our cup race last summer. Her husband is a fabulous racer. He won the Miami-Montego Bay Silver Pineapple one year.”

  “He must be rich,” another senior said.

  “Filthy!” France laughed.

  I didn’t have to ask Cardmaker their numbers. They were both Twos, On the Ladder. I was beginning to tell a Two by her conversation.

  “Does your father still race, France?”

  “Not ocean racing any longer. We sold Thetis,” France said. She was no longer including me in the conversation, or bothering to look in my direction. “Incidentally,” she said, “Agnes Thatcher would be a perfect bet for E.L.A.”

  E.L.A. was the secret society at Charles School. (It was also the only one allowed.) No one but members knew what the initials stood for. All the members got special privileges; they even had a room of their own where no one else could go. They were the honored keepers of the library and could study in the library instead of under the supervision of faculty in study hall. Cardmaker called them the Extra Lucky Asses.

  “We’re past due to pledge someone with a handicap,” Loretta Dow spoke up. She was the president of E.L.A. She had rust-colored hair, a space between her front teeth, and the largest wardrobe of anyone at Charles. Cardmaker said she never repeated an outfit over a month’s time. She also went to Richmond overnight every Wednesday to see a shrink.

  “The father is Win Thatcher,” said France Shipp. “My mother says he has so much money it’s gross. Not from being a doctor. Inherited. And Mrs. Thatcher is a Lovecraft.”

  “Is Agnes a freshman?” Loretta Dow asked.

  France Shipp deigned to look in my direction. “Flanders?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just met her last night.”

  “Perhaps we ought to find out if Peter Rider could be talked into being her escort Saturday night at the dance?”

  “We haven’t even laid eyes on her,” another senior said, also E.L.A.

  “Maybe Peter wouldn’t want to be pawned off on her,” another.

  “Peter would be happy to help out if he’s free,” France said. Then, “Flanders? Which one is she?”

  I turned around and looked back at Miss Blue’s table. “She’s the blonde on Miss Blue’s right.”

  France and the others looked.

  France said, “Mon Dieu! I would say that Peter Rider would be très très interested.”

  “Why would he?” said another. “He can’t see.”

  “He likes to be with beautiful girls just the same,” said France. “Peter says they give off the best vibrations.”

  “I think Peter Rider is sex-eeeeeee!” said one of the seniors. “He can try out his Braille on my bod anytime!”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said another, raising her glass of milk in a toast.

  “That turns me on just to think about,” one said.

  Miss Balfour’s eyes suddenly came into a half-focus. “All you think about is boys,” she said. But it was as though she was talking to herself, because she was looking directly at her own reflection.

  After breakfast there was an hour before morning assembly at nine. When I left Dombey and Son, I went directly to Hard Times, to see if I could find Cardmaker. I wanted to complain bitterly about the seniors, and the way they talked about Agnes making a good bet for E.L.A., and fixing up Agnes for the dance, without caring anything about me.

  I found Cardmaker in the Hard Times john, bent over the bathtub. The tub was swimming
with navy blue water, and there was something soaking in it.

  “I’m dyeing my formal again,” Cardmaker said. “I dyed it last year, too. It was white when I wore it in our church Christmas pageant. I was Mary. It was pale green last year…. How do you like her? I saw her at breakfast.”

  “I don’t know yet, but the seniors are already talking about making her an E.L.A.”

  I told Cardmaker the whole story while she swished the gown around in the navy blue water.

  “That’s just like them to lump together the blind and the deaf,” Cardmaker said. “This is a net gown and it’s practically in pieces from these dye jobs and from my putting my foot through the skirt. Does she use sign language?”

  “I haven’t seen her use it yet,” I said. I explained about owl and lo leet you and gite.

  “She isn’t dumb if she talks,” Cardmaker said.

  “It’s not really talking.”

  “Dumb means mute. She’s not mute.”

  “She’s rich,” I said.

  “I guessed that. If the Extra Lucky Asses want her, she’d have to be. They’d never take a Four who wasn’t.”

  “Loretta Dow said they were past due to pledge someone with a handicap,” I said.

  Cardmaker snickered. “She doesn’t see the space between her own front teeth as a handicap?” Cardmaker wiped her hands off on her slip, leaving dye prints down the side. “Miss Blue was walking around with Agnes Thatcher at breakfast as though she’d won her knocking over bottles with a ball at a carnival.”

  I had to get back to Little Dorrit to make my bed and clean my room before the next CLANG—DONG DONG.

  When I got there, I saw Agnes standing in the doorway of the bathroom. I smiled and waved, and noticed she was carrying a picture and some Scotch tape.

  She beckoned me to her with her finger and then indicated that I should step inside. She pointed at the picture of Jesus, and clamped her nose with her finger.

  I said, “It’s not mine. It’s Miss Blue’s.”