by M. E. Kerr
She stuck out her tongue and shook her head back and forth.
I said, “I’m not crazy about it, either. It’s depressing.”
She frowned.
“De-pressing!” I said.
Agnes nodded. Then she held up a finger for attention.
She walked across to the wall, and beside the picture of Christ’s head she placed the picture she was carrying. It looked like it had been torn from a book. She Scotchtaped it to the wall.
When she was done, she turned and nodded positively, smiling.
It was a photograph of a man with a beard, a head-and-shoulders shot.
I said, “Who is it?”
“Dee Day Door Den.” She managed the sounds with considerable effort.
I said, “I’m sorry, Agnes. I don’t understand you.”
That same look of impatience came across her face that I had seen there last night
“DEEDAYDOORDEN!” She said it fast and loud.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
She made some disgruntled sound and sighed and went across the hall to her room. I was going to follow, and then I couldn’t see what good it would do if I did. For what? To apologize because I couldn’t translate her noises into words? Why did she get so angry because I couldn’t? Why was she so impatient?
I went into my room and began throwing my bed together, realizing that I was a little irritated myself. Why me? Why me with Miss Blue to contend with and now Agnes Thatcher?
I was bending over to tuck in my sheets when I felt this punch in my ribs.
I let out a yelp of pain, stood up, and faced Agnes.
“Don’t punch me!” I said. “It hurts!”
She ignored this and thrust a piece of paper at me.
She had written across it: “D.H. Lawrence is my favorite writer.”
I looked down at her and tried to force a smile, even though my ribs still stung from her punch. I said, “That’s neat, Agnes.”
She nodded and pointed back toward the bathroom.
Then she made those noises again. “Dee Day Door Den.”
Seven
ON THE SATURDAY NIGHT of the big dance, after dinner, I was standing in Mail Queue when Cute Dibblee tapped me on the shoulder.
“Flanders, you want to have dinner with my pappy and me and Cardmaker after church tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said. “When did your father come to Wales?”
“He’ll be here tonight. He’s bringing a cousin of mine to be my date for the dance.”
“Neat!”
“Would you want to go with your cousin?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Pappy always brings some relative to be my date. He don’t trust other boys,” she said. “We’ll all go out to the Stonewall Jackson for Sunday dinner.”
“Thanks, Cute.”
“Get permission from your faculty chum tonight,” she said.
There was actually mail in my box, my first letter from my father, and a letter from Carol MacLean who lived next door to us when we were in Rochester, New York.
I read my father’s letter immediately.
Dear Flan-Tan,
So far we have sixty seekers enrolled and we are planning marathon sessions for the first weekend they are in residence. I think there is a good chance of my being interviewed on Controversy. If so, they’ll be moving in with their cameras in a week to ten days.
I don’t think you should plan a visit until sometime in late October. I’m disappointed, too, Flan, but there just isn’t time to get everything done properly.
I paused long enough to remember Cardmaker’s statement that most Number Threes were more Number Three than they thought they were.
Your mother has written several times asking about you. While I am not legally obligated to give her any information concerning your whereabouts, I wish you would reconsider. I am the last person to sing your mother’s praises at this point; still, I think it is wrong for you to cut her out of your life.
She is living in New York City at 58 West 9th Street. You might drop her a line.
Flanny, I miss you so. Don’t get too lonely and mistake seductive rituals for solutions to life’s problems. Prayer is only talking to yourself. It’s good to do that. But don’t be fooled into thinking some higher power hears you…much less cares a damn about what you have to say. In this life, Flan, it’s all up to you. With a little help from your friends, as the Beatles would say.
Write often, honey.
Love,
Dad
I decided to open Carol’s letter in my room. I wasn’t ready for more flak. My mother had waited until we’d moved from Auburn to run off with Bobby, but by then word must have drifted back.
My father’s letter had put me in a mood for anything but a dance. I understood that he was busy—it wasn’t that. It was the fact he’d actually written out my mother’s address that way. I didn’t want her address or any proof at all that she existed.
I really don’t think I would have minded so much if it had been my father who had run off with someone younger. I might have hated it because he was my favorite parent and I would have missed him, but it wouldn’t have been shameful or humiliating, I don’t think. Men did that sort of thing all the time.
What made me really furious at her was that it just wasn’t like her. She wasn’t this original thinker, this big Individual. She was just an ordinary woman, except for a few bright ideas she’d picked up from my father. I could remember hearing my father say something at the dinner table one night, and a few weeks later hearing my mother mouth it word-for-word when she was talking with my Aunt Helen.
Sometimes when she helped my father out with his various projects she tried to learn everything she could about the subject, but mostly she just took up time with dumb questions and impossible suggestions.
If she’d been this great free spirit, this troubled intellect, I could easily explain her skipping off the way she did; but to my way of thinking it was exactly the way it appeared to be: middle-aged woman gets the hots for young boy.
I just hoped that when he dumped her, she didn’t show up on our doorstep. My next thought struck me with a large stab of loneliness: I didn’t even know what “our doorstep” looked like; when I thought of going home, I couldn’t even picture home. I’d never been there.
I was walking down Little Dorrit when I heard Miss Blue call out, “Dear? We’re having a little chum chat.”
Agnes Thatcher was standing just outside the bathroom, wearing a long red silk robe with a gold dragon on the back. When she saw me she made a face, the sort one makes to commiserate with another when both are sharing the same sorry fate.
“I know you girls are anxious to get ready for the dance,” Miss Blue said, “and I’m not going to take a lot of your time.” She was shouting again, making her lips form each syllable. She walked into the bathroom, beckoning at us to follow.
“The wall,” she said with a flourish of her hand as she waved it toward the two pictures next to the mirror, “is not a photograph gallery. When I acknowledged His presence with a small token, I was not suggesting that we all start a pinup collection.”
Miss Blue was addressing me, not Agnes, though the shouting and facial contortions were for Agnes’ benefit. It was clear that Miss Blue believed I was the culprit.
“Just who is this positioned next to our Lord Jesus, Flanders?”
“It’s D.H. Lawrence, Miss Blue.”
“Are you intending a joke of some sort? Because it’s in very bad taste.”
At this point Agnes thumped her chest like Tarzan and pointed to the picture, then thumped her chest again.
“You did this, Agnes?”
Agnes nodded yes.
“But why?”
Agnes’ mouth opened to answer but Miss Blue held up a finger to silence her. “No,” she said, “never mind. You can write me a note about it. There isn’t time now. The point is, Agnes, it has to come down!”
Agnes shoo
k her head no.
“It does, dear. We can’t just paste up anything we want on the walls.” Miss Blue was shouting again.
When I left them, Agnes was still firmly shaking her head no and Miss Blue’s pink flush was spreading to a scarlet one.
On my bed there was a florist’s box, which had been delivered by the porter during the dinner hour. Inside were the promised red roses and a card written in a sprawling hand.
It said, DON’T EVER CHANGE. Sumner Thomas.
How could someone who had never laid eyes on me tell me not to change?
There was probably something wrong with him mentally.
I began to feel really upset; my father’s term for the feeling was “severe angst.” I sat down on the bed and held my head with my hands. One of the Attitudes, Inc., exercises for anxiety was to stretch out with your feet raised above your head. Then you were to shut your eyes and remember a difficult period from which you thought you’d never recover. You were to try and think how you recovered and why. You were to ask yourself how much credit you deserved for recovering. The idea was supposed to be that in reflection a person usually saw that he had come through things on his own power, and that often the things were less threatening than he had thought at the time.
I put my feet up on the headboard of the bed. I closed my eyes. (This could have nothing to do with my mother since she had never existed.)
The difficult period was when I had cheated on a composition for History. We were studying systems of government. I favored anarchy, like my father; I had copied a lot about anarchists from the encyclopedia. My teacher recognized the text; the school principal wrote my father a letter. Because he was out of town, I spent three wretched days waiting for him to deal with me. When he finally came home and read the letter, he came into my bedroom for a talk. He said I would be a lousy anarchist because obviously I was a follower. I had to copy other people’s ideas and words. He said I was more fit for fascism, where someone ruled me totally, my thoughts, my actions, my prejudices, everything. He said in a democracy I’d be one of those who’d vote Republican because my family always had, that I’d never go out on my own and investigate the issues. He went on and on that way, bawling me out and at the same time giving me his own version of systems of government, which didn’t always agree with my schoolbooks.
I couldn’t see where I deserved any credit for recovering from that anxiety attack; my father deserved it all.
Somehow this made me all the more depressed, and I decided to make everything even worse by reading Carol MacLean’s letter.
It was filled with gossip about people I would never see again. Then at the very end, there was this paragraph:
I know you must feel down about what your mother did, but in a way it was supercourageous. I mean, I hope when I am practically forty years old I still want to make out, enough to leave home and security, too! I don’t even want to make out that badly now, and I am getting ancient, sixteen next month. Don’t get me wrong, Flan, because I know it’s not easy for you, but do you know what I mean? My mother is okay but she has no sex life (except my father), which is bound to be boring by now, so she doesn’t have the nerve to do things that are original.
I had been expecting her to make fun of my mother, or at least write that people were shocked. “Supercourageous” wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for an adjective that would suit my mother.
I put the letter under my desk blotter and stared across at my formal, which was hanging on the back of my door. It was very simple, black, silk, sleeveless and backless, with a low-cut front. My father had helped me pick it out in New York at Lord & Taylor. It was the first formal I’d ever owned.
As soon as I was undressed, I realized I was going to look awful. There were two huge black-and-blue marks on my body, one on my shoulder and one lower near my rib cage. These were the results of Agnes Thatcher’s demanding my attention with her punches.
I decided that I had been tolerant long enough…tolerant of the fact that her snoring kept me awake nights; that her normal way of closing a drawer or a closet door was to slam it shut so hard my walls shook; that her little jokes to herself early in the morning, or late at night, made all the monstrous rasping asthma attacks of my entire life, by comparison, seem to have occurred underneath thirty pillows.
I put on my robe and went out into the hall. The bathroom was empty. The picture of D.H. Lawrence was down. I knocked on Agnes’ door long enough to realize she couldn’t know I was doing it. I opened the door slowly and poked my head inside.
There was an open suitcase on the bed. Agnes was angrily tossing things into it: pajamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, slippers.
A white taffeta formal was spread out on the bed. Agnes was wearing jeans.
She felt my presence and turned around.
I said, “Are you mad because Miss Blue made you take down the picture?”
There was a notebook on the small desk beside her bed. Agnes wrote in it.
I just found out my date is blind!
“He’s a blind date.” I smiled. I was in a snide mood.
She made a fist and brought it up close to my face. She wrote: Not funny! I am not going to look like a carny act, like the sideshow of the dance.
“He’s supposed to be very good-looking,” I said. “You want my date instead? He wrote ‘Don’t ever change’ on the card with the flowers, and he’s never met me, doesn’t know anything about me. He’s probably backward.”
Agnes made a gesture as though she were brushing away flies.
Anyway, she wrote, I’m going to the infirmary. Miss Blue says anyone not at the dance must be in the infirmary.
“Just because your date is blind?” I said.
We’d create a spectacle together!
“Have you told anyone you’re not keeping the date with him?”
“Ma Boo,” she said.
“What did Miss Blue say?”
She said she couldn’t force me to go to the dance.
“France Shipp’s going to be mad at you,” I said.
This time when she held her nose with her fingers, she used the other hand to reach up high in the gesture of someone pulling a chain. Then she went back to packing.
I went away without showing her my black-and-blue marks. I took a shower and washed my hair. While it was drying I watched myself in the mirror the way Miss Balfour did.
Then I got my answers ready.
It was my father who taught me about having my answers ready. He told me that instead of dreading questions that might arise, situations, subject matters, et cetera, it was always good to anticipate as much as I could and have my answers ready.
I came up with two.
1. I’m not feeling suicidal tonight … in case I was offered a cigarette. Cardmaker said it happened all the time because the cadets could smoke. If we were caught at it, we’d be expelled.
2. I’m sorry but I have a bad hangover from last night … in case I was offered anything out of a flask, which Cardmaker said happened all the time, too.
There was supposed to be a 3, but I couldn’t think of it. My experience where sex was concerned was zero. I’d known kids who’d made out by fourteen, and I hadn’t even French kissed or done a damn thing below the waist. Since I was twelve, we’d never lived anyplace long enough for me to get very well acquainted with boys, and right after my mother ran off with Bobby, I went through a man-hating stage. I didn’t care if I ever had sex.
I knew I was past that stage when Cardmaker showed me her pornography collection. It had been listed in the Senior Will as “Valuable Pictures” and left to her by a Hard Times resident who’d graduated. Cardmaker had never made it either, but she had done more things than I had, and she’d made up her mind to do everything by the time she graduated. She kept a checklist in the back of a book of Diane Wakoski poems.
According to Cardmaker you couldn’t get away with much at a formal dance unless you were an E.L.A. member. (They had keys to a lot of the doors, but
they were not supposed to be the types who wanted to get away with much; that was why their honor system worked.) All the action took place in stairwells and during dark numbers on the dance floor. If it was possible to position yourself near an area chaperoned by Miss Able and Miss Mitchell together (which sometimes happened) you could go fairly far, since they were too taken with each other to excel as lookouts.
The gym doors were locked so no one could go outside to the bushes.
By the time CLANG—DONG DONG announced that the dance was ready to begin, that the cadets from Wales were arriving, I was dressed and pinned with the corsage. I had covered my black-and-blue marks with makeup and sneaked on some faint eyeliner, although we were not supposed to wear anything but pancake, powder, light lipstick, and light mascara.
When I went into the bathroom to check my makeup in the bright light there, instead of seeing my reflection in the mirror, I saw a piece of notebook paper. It was as familiar as the writing across it.
TO ALL CONCERNED.
NOTICE FROM YOURS TRULY.
“I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross….”
D.H. Lawrence, 1912
Eight
BEFORE I WENT DOWN to the reception room to meet my date, I had to ask Miss Blue for permission to eat Sunday dinner with Cute Dibblee and her father. She was sitting in her favorite chair on David Copperfield, under the huge painting of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the top of the stairs.
“Don’t you have a little black handkerchief, Flanders?” she asked me once she had consented to my Sunday outing. She was dressed in a black gown with a high neck and long sleeves, and she was wearing her cross.
“No one carries handkerchiefs anymore,” I said. I noticed for the first time the printing on the plaque under the painting. It said: DEATH-CELL PRAYER OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS before she placed her head on the executioner’s block. At the decree of her own cousin, also a woman. There was more printing at the bottom of the painting itself, but it was too small for me to read.