by Ellie Eaton
By the time he had finished making Gerry’s bed Mr. Lake was sweating in his suit, I remember, red all over, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Again, Skipper nudged me with her foot. Mr. Lake, suddenly aware he was being scrutinized, glanced sideways, caught sight of our naked thighs, and turned an even deeper-colored purple.
A bell sounded. Lights-out. Skipper spun her legs ninety degrees, rocked forward and back, and jumped off my bed. Likewise Mr. Lake scrambled down the ladder just as his daughter came back, dressed now in her pajamas. He rolled down his sleeves and put his suit jacket back on, flustered, as if he’d been caught in the act. Gerry looked from her father to Skipper.
Outside girls were darting from room to room, trying to say their final good nights before the headmistress began her rounds. Skipper held the door open so that Mr. Lake could pass through, wheeling Gerry’s empty bag behind him.
“Au revoir,” Skipper said to me. “See you in the morning.”
“Brill,” I answered automatically, trying not to show how miserable I was to be left alone with Gerry. “À tout à l’heure.”
That was the way Divines spoke to one another, always truncating our language or speaking in French. Merde, we said when something went wrong. C’est la vie.
Skipper caught arms with Dickie Balfour, who was walking back along the corridor from the shower. I pictured the whispered conversations Skipper would have at night with the twins, the dorm room gossip, the private jokes I wasn’t party to and felt sick with anxiety. All my worst fears seemed to be coming true. I felt again how unfair it was that I was stuck with Gerry, in this term of all terms. Our last few weeks as juniors before we crossed to the Other Side. Or so we believed.
Skipper turned to Mr. Lake.
“Marvelous to see you again, Mr. Lake. Send our love to Daphne,” she said, emphasizing the word Daphne to a comical extent, a name so categorically unlike our own mothers’—Cecelias, Camillas, Charlottes.
Dickie snorted out loud. I held my breath, waiting to see what Gerry’s father would say. Skipper sounded so insincere, so astonishingly fake, I couldn’t believe she could get away with it.
“Oh, right,” said Mr. Lake, unaware he was the subject of a joke. “Yes, will do.”
Gerry, however, was clearly livid. She stood completely still, one hand on her waist, her hip thrust out, a foot on pointe, the stance of a skater postroutine when they come to an abrupt stop on the ice, her back arching, head tilting back, staring at Skipper.
“I’ll leave you girls to it,” Mr. Lake said. “Bye, love. Have fun.”
He hugged his daughter briefly and was off down the corridor, dragging her empty bag behind him like a sled.
Skipper turned and grinned at Gerry and me.
Her arm curled snugly beneath Dickie Balfour’s elbow, their hips pressed together. I felt a knife slipping between my ribs.
“Bonne nuit, Geraldine,” Dickie said, wiggling her fingers.
Gerry’s face reddened.
“Go fuck ya mum.”
Skipper let out a snort of delight.
“Fuck your mum,” she repeated slowly. Impressed.
Within days the catchphrase caught on like wildfire. The trick, I remember, was to pronounce it just like Gerry.
“Fuck ya mum.”
10
In our first year of marriage Jürgen and I grow increasingly nomadic. First London, then Amsterdam, then Brighton and briefly Berlin, rooming with people we know, or subletting underheated industrial buildings, which double as Jürgen’s studio. Unsurprising, given that when we first met for the magazine interview he was still living in a tent. We move so often we never buy any furniture, our clothes and my laptop spread across the floor. I adapt to this kind of low-level sparseness with surprising ease. While Jürgen sketches, I work on my knees or I type up my stories on my belly, squirming around on dusty wood. The nights we spend at home, which are rare since, despite three years of compulsory home economics lessons at St. John’s, I can’t cook, we sit in bed and eat cereal from two steel bowls Jürgen found in a Chinese supermarket in Charlottenburg. I’ve never been happier. Come laundry day I hang my damp knickers along the handles of his various bikes. Subletting as we do, our bills are always in someone else’s name, we are up and out at the drop of a hat, switching homes, it occurs to me, as frequently as I once moved dorms. Our newlywed tiff has been reduced to a joke, a silly anecdote we bring up at supper parties to amuse our friends. How a crazy woman spat in my face on our honeymoon and called me a cunt.
In America a bellhop wheels our life’s possessions into our hotel room on a brass trolley. We sit on the windowsill, robed, feeding each other grapes like Romans. Far down at street level cars reshuffle themselves along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Work is going surprisingly well for both of us. Jürgen, out of nowhere, has an impressive new commission, a large installation in a public garden, and I have been offered a feature by a Sunday supplement—an interview with a gymnast, one of several victims who have recently spoken out about their coach—a story that could make the cover.
In the morning Jürgen consults a doorman wearing white gloves and a cap who points us in the direction of Millennium Park.
“What’s at the park?” I ask Jürgen.
“Wait and see,” he says.
We crunch through the snow holding hands and staring up at the high-rises. We feel golden, laughing loudly at the yellow signs that announce the Damoclean possibility of falling ice shards. We stroll along the banks of Lake Michigan with the dog walkers and joggers with their foggy breath. Jürgen, standing sideways to the shoreline, tosses a handful of stones across the semifrozen water, the arctic surface creaking and groaning, pebbles skittering across the crusty snow and plopping into the dark polynya beyond. His cheeks are red from cold.
He is so handsome that my cunt aches with desire for him; it actually throbs.
I tug him back in the direction of our hotel bed but Jürgen is insistent.
“Cover your eyes,” he says.
He leads me across the park towards fairground music, my eyes blinkered.
“Surprise.”
He peels back his gloved fingers from my eyes.
Jürgen looks delighted.
“Oh,” I say.
An ice rink.
We drink gluhwein from matching porcelain boots and watch the skaters. Couples in rented boots shuffle on stiff legs, clinging to the edge. Hockey boys bump shoulders, trying to bowl their frat brothers over. Fathers tow long chains of children in padded ski suits and mittens. The pros cruise effortlessly in between, twisting and leaping. In the center a girl in a purple leotard spins on one foot.
I wave as Jürgen steps onto the ice.
He beckons me over to the side.
“Come on, this is your day. I’ll teach you,” he yodels, “you’ll love it.”
I shake my head. I won’t do it, not even for him.
He tries to take my hand and tug me onto the ice.
“No.”
I go rigid.
I tell myself that this has nothing to do with Gerry Lake, that I have never liked the sensation of the earth slipping underfoot. I have a vision of falling and the skate blade slicing like a cheese knife through my fingers.
Jürgen pretends to be downcast.
“Go,” I say, trying to make light of my nerves, “have fun. Go, go, go.”
He waits for a chink in the crowd and pushes off seamlessly, his hands behind his back, rocking smoothly from foot to foot, one boot crossing the other, leaning into the curve. He is a natural of course. His blond hair smoothed to one side, a gentlemanly gait, sweeping gracefully around the more nervous skaters. When the young girl in a purple leotard falls, he holds out his hand and, skating backwards, tows her out of harm’s way. She blushes. He bows and swims back into the shoal.
I watch the purple leotard make her way to the gate and stomp unhappily across the rubber carpet to where I am sitting. She unlaces her boots and slides a guard across each blade, zipping them i
nto a padded case. Her hips are speckled with rhinestones. She must be twelve or thirteen, I guess, only a few years younger than Gerry Lake had been at the time of the scandal.
“You’re very talented,” I say.
The girl shrugs. She slides one arm then the next into her padded winter jacket. Sniffing.
“I fell.”
“I saw. I’m sorry. Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head. Jürgen sweeps past, clowning, waving at me, blowing kisses. The girl goes red. I know exactly how she feels; I can’t believe he’s mine. She wipes her nose with her sleeve, pushes her tiny feet into fleece boots.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Husband.”
Her eyes follow Jürgen as he glides easily through the mass of skaters.
“He’s good.”
“Yes.” I nod, hugging myself to keep warm.
“You don’t want to skate?” she asks.
“No.”
The girl shrugs, pulls a pair of gloves out of her pocket, red welts on her fingers like Gerry Lake, from years of tying bootlaces.
“I went to school with an ice skater,” I say, as an afterthought.
“Cool.”
“She was in competitions. She won trophies.”
Why am I telling her this?
“I came sixth at Skate the Lake. But you don’t get a trophy for that. Maybe I’ve heard of your friend. Is she famous?”
“No,” I say.
“It’s hard to make it to the top,” the girl lets me know.
“She had an accident.”
“Oh.” The girl stares sadly at the rink. “That sucks.”
“She fell,” I say.
I picture Gerry on the ground. Her knee bent backwards, one arm raised, like a mannequin. Her dark hair pulled back in a bun.
The lake wind whips around us, making my eyes water.
“I’m really sorry,” the girl says.
She is chewing on her lip, looking at me intently, as if she’s about to ask me a question.
I rub my eyes, stand up quickly, scanning the crowd for my husband.
On the ice Jürgen circles and circles. He glides on one leg, arms spread, like Anteros.
11
Two weeks later the townie was waiting for me outside St. Gertrude’s, leaning against the brick wall where her classmates had recently snuck over the fence and spray-painted the word CUCUMBERS in large green bubble letters. This was a new one, cucumbers. It took a while for us to catch on. She was twisting the elastic on her school necktie around her wrist so that it left sharp red indentations on her skin like oven burns. Her hair, tied back in a thick plait, was even longer than I had remembered, skimming her waist.
“Surprise,” Lauren said. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see me again.”
She was right.
“Well, are you going to invite me in or what?”
I looked at the door of my boarding house, horrified. She was a KE. A townie. Guests had to have written permission and be introduced to our housemistress on arrival. If I got caught with a townie in my room, boy or girl, I could be in serious trouble, hauled in front of Fat Fran, or gated. I could see that she wasn’t going to move and, frightened one of my friends would catch me talking to a King Edmund, I ushered her into St. Gertrude’s and up to my bedroom before anyone could see. I was lucky that the house was unusually quiet; the tennis team had an away game that afternoon, and Gerry was training. Lauren shook out a fag from a pack of twenty and held it out for me to take.
“Here.” She gave me two. “Call it interest.”
I didn’t really need her cigarettes but there wasn’t any other option but to take them.
“Okay, thanks.”
“That your mum and dad?”
She was examining the silver picture frames I had on my desk, first picking up the snap of the three of us on holiday in France, then pointing at the one of me jumping a pony.
“You’re into riding, yeah?”
I made a noncommittal gesture of some kind when, in fact, growing up I had been horse obsessed. I was one of those girls who could recite all the points of a pony, fetlock to poll, and the endless pieces of tack it took to ride them, the bridles and bits, the numnahs and martingales.
Lauren put down the picture of the horse and smiled lewdly, flashing her eyebrows.
“Had any more special deliveries?”
I looked at her blankly.
“You know.” She made a gesture in the air, curling her fingers and thumb into a penis-sized tunnel and shaking it back and forward.
I cringed, but I told her the truth.
“Yes, actually.”
Unbeknown to our housemistress, several more Polaroids had been deposited on school property since the first. Divines were manic, close to hysterical; this was the most interesting thing to happen to us all year. Eventually, after news of the third or fourth discovery, I slid the original photo out from behind the postcard where it was still hidden and carried it into Skipper’s dorm, presenting it to my friends on an open palm. The twins screamed with horror and wouldn’t touch it. George snatched the photo from my hand and marched over to the dorm window, tilting it forward and back in the light as if panning for gold. Skipper, sitting at her desk, crossed her arms, watching me. She could tell that I was lying about something but didn’t know what.
“Where did you say you found it?” she checked.
“The smoking den,” I said.
I described the camera flash, the footsteps on the tarmac. Almost, but not entirely truthful.
“Oh my god,” Henry Peck squealed. “That’s rank. He was literally just out there.”
Skipper twisted the lid on her fountain pen, tapping it against her cheek.
“I thought you’d run out of cigarettes,” she said.
Why was she looking at me so coldly? It could have been that Skipper was annoyed it was me who’d found a photo, that, for once, I was the center of attention, or maybe she’d long suspected me of keeping secrets. I fumbled for an excuse, my face starting to burn. Before I could answer, Dickie Balfour had barged into the dorm room, followed soon after by a gaggle of Divines, hands over their mouths, stifling screams, passing the penis from person to person, giddy with excitement.
Lauren, however, seemed unimpressed.
“So, do you know who it is then?” she asked, studying the posters on my wall.
“No,” I had to admit.
The penises, or peni, or whatever their multiple is, seemed to exist in jaunty independence of the body they were a part of, or rather they were one and the same, synecdochical you might say, so we never really thought much of the man himself. Always erect, they appeared in places where we were likely to discover them before one of our teachers: in our smoking den, posted through a boarding house window, or on the bench in the orchard. It stood to reason the perpetrator was a man who knew his way around the school, a gardener perhaps, or one of the electricians. Perhaps we should have been scared of a predator lurking in the shadows but, deprived of male attention, if anything we felt flattered.
“It’s probably my brother. He’s a right perv,” Lauren said, “or one of those dirty old men he works with. You should hear the way they talk about you lot.”
She thumbed through the window where an elderly maintenance man in blue overalls was stacking broken school chairs onto the back of a trailer. I didn’t like to think about it.
Listening to make sure no one was walking along the corridor, I climbed up on my bunk bed with its desk beneath and plucked out the original photo I’d hidden beneath my postcard, plus the additional photos we’d found since, which I’d somehow become guardian of. There were maybe four or five we’d stumbled across by then, including the first.
“Here you go,” I said.
“Fuckin’ hell,” she yelled, “look at the state of that.”
I winced and put a finger to my lips, hushing her. I couldn’t think of anything worse than someone catching me with a King Edmund, showing her
these photos.
“So,” I whispered, “what do you think?”
Lauren’s smile dropped.
“What? I don’t go ’round staring at my brother’s knob, if that’s what you’re asking?”
She squinted at me, her white lashes flickering with annoyance. I felt heat rushing up my neck. She seemed to grow in height and angrily tossed the photos onto my desk. Her arms were rigid at her sides. One fist was balled up. I felt sick. Was she going to fight me? She was a KE, after all. But the next moment her shoulders sagged and she burst out laughing.
“Kidding,” she said with a grin.
She gave me a shove.
“Fuck me, you should see your face.”
“Very funny,” I said, “ha ha.”
But I could see my face, our reflections suspended in the tiny mirror on the back of the door. We were around the same height and age, but in all other regards I felt we couldn’t have been more different. Lauren’s plait swayed when she laughed; she seemed to be always moving, rocking from one foot to another, chewing on the side of her thumbnail, fluttering her long spidery eyelashes. When she laughed her whole face changed like a weather front; her cheeks lifted, her eyes gleamed, then in a snap the sun was chased to shadow, lightning flashed. She was meteoric. I was a corpse. My face seemed blank to me at that moment, utterly nondescript. I had flicked my hair so my head was tilted a little to the side, as per usual, most of my face tented so that I was looking at her with one eye, a symptom of the Divine. There was a pallor to my skin that made me look waxy and consumptive. My pubescent body, I remember, was a perpetual source of embarrassment to me—the pus and sweat and blood—something to be plugged with cotton, covered up, barely mentioned. At that age I had no understanding of what womanhood meant, the Hera-like power it could hold, the life-giving force. Even though Divines menstruated at the same time, our bathroom bins overflowing with sanitary towels, globules of blood left floating in the bottom of unflushed loos, I carried my tampons up my sleeve like a switchblade so that none of my peers would know where I was going. I wedged tissue into my underwear before double geography in case my period came early. We called it the Red Wave, Bloody Mary, the Curse. Worst of all, I had been told by Skipper that my face, when I daydreamt or watched television, looked particularly plain. A gormless openmouthed stare, my zombie face as she called it, something I never forgot. I began pinching my fingernail into my thumb to stop myself from drifting off in lessons, tightening my cheeks, trying not to let my face droop. Morning chapel was particularly painful. All the way through the tedious sequence of prayers and readings I kept my eyes open, peering at my contemporaries slumped over pews, their cheeks flattened against hymnals, mouths slack. Even now, after all this time, I’ve seen people meditating in yoga classes—serene, beatific looking—and wonder how they do it.