The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  The question was soft, hushed, and Iris seemed quite disinterested in what choice Helen made, but the words angered the girl. Iris was supposed to help her, not mock her or get her mixed up. Iris was supposed to understand.

  Helen rarely felt anger towards adults. Even more rarely did she show it. Where did it ever get you but in a worse spot? But Iris was in a different category. Could a spirit really be adult or child? In any case, in some strange but definite way, Iris was hers, and that freed Helen to feel and express anything in her presence.

  “Yes, all right, deaf and blind, if that’s how you want to look at it!”

  Helen thought she saw the tiniest lift of Iris’s shoulders.

  “I continue, but I will keep away, if that is what you wish,” Iris told her. “There are many ways to make the same journey.”

  “You’ll fix it so I won’t see or hear things anymore?”

  “I continue, and it is always happening. Beside you, behind you, before you. You will have to post a guard. Not against me. Against yourself.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “When they come, look away. When they speak, hide your ears. Don’t carry their messages. Don’t be ruled by tenderness. Don’t dream.”

  Helen wondered how all that would work in reality, if it would work at all, but before she could form another question, Iris was gone. As a first step toward becoming “regular,” Helen did not call her back.

  CHAPTER 13

  JULY 1938

  Helen and Rosie lay on their backs in the shade in Helen’s backyard. Racketing cicadas made the heavy afternoon seem even more sweltering. Rosie was plucking blades of grass and pressing them between her index fingers to use as whistles.

  “Wanna go to the river?” she said, crooking her elbow and propping her head on her hand.

  “What for?”

  “Dunno.” Rosie picked the flower head from a stalk of clover and ate it. “My brother and his buddies went over to Peck Park for a ball game,” she said hopefully.

  “They won’t all be at Peck Park.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Hunter’s River marked the town’s north border. Afternoons spent floating on inner tubes in its slow-moving waters or sorting through stones on pebbly Oratam Beach were as definitive of summer as ice cream cones and lightning bugs. Other years, the girls had spent part of nearly every sunny day there, as small children in tow with Rosie’s big sisters, and after the age of ten, on their own.

  Oratam Beach used to be merely a swath of tough grass and gravel between the woods and the river, with a few splintery picnic tables. But early in the Depression, the township had repossessed adjoining land parcels from people who had defaulted on their taxes, and WPA workers had filled in boggy spots, trimmed away underbrush, made paths, and built more tables, a shaded pavilion, and a bandstand. The new park had been grandly renamed Brinker’s Green, after the mayor who pushed the project through, but people still called the swimming area Oratam Beach.

  This summer, Helen and Rosie had avoided the park as assiduously as they did the strictly forbidden railroad tracks. There had been no discussion, no overt decision. It was simply something they’d always known—that the river beach was for younger children and high school kids only. Helen and Rosie felt like they were neither. They’d graduated from eighth grade, but they hadn’t yet spent one day in the high school’s large, intimidating brick building. They had left a school where their age and size made them royalty, and they were facing an institution where they’d be like first-graders again.

  They might have surmounted this unsure status enough to be able still to enjoy the river if it were not for the problem of bathing suits. Helen and Rosie and most of their friends had begun to develop figures, and bathing suits had become occasions of anguish. Bodies filled them out either too little or too much. Some styles allowed pubic hair or cleavage to show. A suit might look all right dry, but when wet, might cling too closely to nipples or to the curving cleft of a rear end. Rosie’s suit, after having been stretched over the varying charms of three owners, was incapable of rendering even a Hollywood glamour girl presentable. For economy’s sake, Helen was expected to make do with a suit bought two years ago. Its little pleated skirt and its straps trimmed with eyelet ruffles clearly and embarrassingly marked it as a child’s bathing costume.

  All the shortcomings, of both bathing suits and figures, would be, at the river, put on parade for boys. There were always boys at the river. Older boys who took an interest in ogling and didn’t hide it, and boys the same age as Helen and Rosie who took an interest in acting like the older boys.

  Older girls didn’t seem to mind the scrutiny. If anything, at times, it was the boys who seemed nervous and tentative, especially if the girls arrived in a big group, as they often did. But the presence of those girls was no comfort to Helen and Rosie and their friends. They only made them feel like interlopers. Not by anything they did or said directly, but by how they slipped their shirts off bare shoulders, how they rolled over on their blankets, how they waded, shuddering, into the river up to their knees and scooped water over their rounded arms. There was some kind of power in all that, and the way to it was still a mystery to the new ninth-grade girls.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Rosie said. “What if we go swimming somewhere else?”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “In the river, but not at Oratam Beach.”

  Intrigued, Helen sat up. Why hadn’t they thought of that before? In the woods lining the river, there were a few narrow footpaths that wound through the tangle of briars and ferns, then widened at the river’s edge to muddy banks with room enough cleared for two or three people to sit. These were fishing spots. They didn’t attract swimmers. Except at Oratam Beach, the river close to shore was reedy and its bottom slimy. If Rosie and Helen went to one of these places, it wouldn’t be as pleasant as Oratam Beach, but it would be private. And if they brought inner tubes, they could push out away from the reeds and the dreaded touch of green ooze and imagined eels.

  “We could take the trail behind Dohrmann’s field right down the block,” Helen said, standing up.

  “Now we’re cookin’ with gas,” Rosie said. “I’ll go home for my suit.”

  “I’ll get the tubes out of the garage.”

  Rosie started out of the yard, then stopped.

  “How’s about I take the trail off Cedar Street that joins up with your trail? It’ll be quicker than coming back here.”

  “Okay. See you at the river.”

  Helen held up her bathing suit and regarded it with disdain. She was still slender enough to fit into it, but she would’ve liked cups or bones to give her chest some shape and lift, even if Nanny said she didn’t need that much support yet. She put the suit on, pulling Bermuda shorts up over it. She braided her hair and pinned the braids on top of her head. Sliding her bare feet into a pair of beat-up moccasins, she felt something hard under the ball of her left foot. Perching on the edge of the bed, she shook out the offending object. A small stone dropped to the floor. It had probably been in the moccasin since last August, when she’d last been at Oratam Beach.

  Helen picked up the stone. Out of the blue, she felt dizzy. She closed her fist around the stone and shut her eyes. Billy’s face appeared in her mind. He was dappled with shadows, and there was something odd about his smile. “C’mon, let’s go,” she heard him say. He was looking at her, yet he didn’t seem to be speaking to her. Then the vision was gone.

  As these things went, it hadn’t been too bad an episode. Puzzling, but brief and bland. Ever since her run-in with Mary Steltman at Thanksgiving, Helen had been struggling to sidestep or ignore seeing and hearing things outside the normal range of experience. She no longer played with looking for the lights around people, and she rarely saw them spontaneously anymore. No spirits had appeared to her. Iris had kept her word to stay away.

  Helen had come to recognize a kind of hum emanating from a person that meant she was about to find out so
mething about them, and she had learned to obfuscate whatever images or thought-messages came, however compelling, by reciting the multiplication tables under her breath. Sometimes, simply getting away from the person prevented anything coming through. Today had been a little different.

  Helen had never been in a physical fight with anyone, but she imagined it might feel something like what her bouts against her abilities felt like—moments of mastery alternating with thumping setbacks, constant effort and alertness and enforced bravery. Until the fight was over. Helen believed there must exist a switch to turn off her abilities permanently, not merely disregard them, and she meant to keep groping in the dark until she hit it.

  What meaning did today have in her struggle? Was the mildness of the event a sign she’d gained more control, or did the novelty of it indicate the spirits had found a new path into her mind? She didn’t want to dwell on it. That was part of her plan, too. She walked to the open window and tossed out the little stone.

  Helen was walking at a good clip through the woods, despite the awkwardness of the fat inner tubes, one slung over each shoulder. From time to time, a tube would strike a tree and bounce her slightly to one side or the other, but she didn’t slow her pace. She wanted to reach the river before Rosie, to ease herself in and be already floating when her friend arrived. Rosie might be as queasy as Helen about the sucking mud and nipping crayfish of the murky shallows, but she’d never show it. She was sure to plunge in without hesitation, stirring up muck and marsh gas and creating an unappealing stew for Helen to enter.

  At the point where the Cedar Street trail joined hers, Helen paused to look for Rosie, but there was no sign of her. Helen hurried on. Soon the glint of the river was visible through the trees. Near the trail’s end, where it turned to meet the small stretch of cleared bank, Helen spotted a white shirt hanging on a bush.

  “Drat!” she said, stopping short.

  But maybe Rosie was waiting for the inner tubes. Helen could still have a chance of getting into the river first. If she could overcome her reluctance about cold water and the icky shoreline, she could run by Rosie and jump in before Rosie even knew she was there. Helen’s plotting was interrupted by the sound of laughter from the riverbank, a girl’s voice.

  A young woman came from the other side of the bush and retrieved the white shirt. She was wearing a plaid halter and a dirndl skirt, with a yellow scarf as a belt. Here was someone who would have no trouble with any kind of bathing suit. She was lifting her long, dark hair over the collar of the shirt when a young man stepped around the bush behind her and put his arms around her waist. She leaned back against him, and he kissed the side of her neck. She laughed again.

  Helen coughed loudly to let the couple know she was there. When they saw her, they parted with a little jump that would have been comical had not Helen suddenly recognized the boy.

  Billy’s face was dappled with leaf shadows. He moved in front of his companion as if he were shielding her and smiled crookedly at Helen.

  “Hey, hi,” he said with artificial cheer. “What are you doing here?”

  “Going swimming,” she said, her heart hammering.

  She saw the girl examining her over Billy’s shoulder. Her appraisal was bound not to be as flattering as the one Helen had given her.

  “This is Helen, my next-door neighbor,” Billy said, turning to the girl.

  “Cute,” the girl said. Then to Helen, “I’m Beth.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry,” Billy added. “This is Beth.”

  Helen had heard the expression about wanting the ground to open up and swallow you, and now she fervently wished for just that. Anything but to have to stand there one more second with her stupid pinned-up braids and her stupid patched inner tubes. At least the tubes were hiding the awful, babyish ruffles on her bathing suit straps.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” Billy said.

  Beth slid her fingers down Billy’s arm, and he reached back and let her take his hand. They had to sidle carefully past Helen single file to fit on the narrow path. Thickets of poison ivy on both sides prevented any of them from stepping off the trail. The protruding inner tubes grazed first Billy’s chest, then Beth’s breasts.

  Helen ran to the river. Kicking off her moccasins and dropping one tube to the ground, she stumbled into the water with the other tube. She hadn’t stopped to take off her shorts. Holding the tube out in front of her, she beat her legs in the water to propel herself out into the river. Twice, to keep down sobs threatening to erupt, she ducked her head underwater and held her breath as long as she could. She worked her legs until they ached, and worked them some more, then climbed into the tube and used her arms to row herself downstream. In a few minutes, she was around a shoal and out of sight of the mud flat where she was to have met Rosie. Let her friend think what she liked, she couldn’t face her or anyone just now.

  The exertion of kicking and paddling was both an outlet and a container for her churned emotions. She would keep going until she felt calmer, until the sky and the woods and the bridge upstream no longer looked like scenery flats but became three-dimensional and regular again. In this suspended piece of time, only her feelings seemed real, and in this suspended piece of time, being real was thorns and gouges and stinging nettles. She didn’t think about where she was going. She wasn’t thinking at all, only moving. Pushing through the water. Getting away. Off the too-solid ground, out of the enshrouding woodlands, beyond people and clumsy talk.

  Finally, she was too exhausted to go on. She laid her head back on the tube and drifted with the current. Her skin dried quickly in the hot sun, and her face and shoulders and knees soon achieved an agreeable sensation of baking. When they began to smart, she splashed water over herself, and the lovely process of drying and baking resumed. She knew she was getting a sunburn that would cause her misery tonight, but she didn’t care. It was blessedly quiet on the river. She was far enough out that sounds from shore were muffled, and there were few of them, in any case.

  “Billy,” she whispered, trying out the name to see how it would feel, waiting for the tailspin.

  No tailspin happened. Only a terrible tug at her heart and a tiny flash of anger.

  “Billy,” she repeated more loudly. “Billy!” she shouted, safe from all hearing.

  A motor boat sped by the far shore, and a minute later, the inner tube was rocked gently by its wake. Helen picked one ripple and tried to track its progress all the way to shore.

  What should she do when she saw Billy again? She was sure he would be as reluctant as she to mention the meeting in the woods. But it would be there between them all the same.

  Unless. Unless she could convince him that it needn’t be and wasn’t. She would behave toward him exactly as if there were no secret, no embarrassment, no rotten Beth. And he would see that she could be counted on, that she wasn’t silly or small-minded. After a while, maybe it would feel that things were the same. Maybe even better.

  She noticed she was opposite a familiar sandy spit and started paddling toward it with long, smooth sweeps of her cupped hands. She wanted to go home. She wanted to rinse the river out of her hair and put lotion on her shoulders. And she wanted to throw away her contemptible bathing suit.

  CHAPTER 14

  OCTOBER 1938

  It was the end of October, and high school had come to seem to Helen not only a congenial environment, but a mildly intoxicating one. She liked having different teachers for different subjects, and she liked sharing complaints about them with her friends. She liked hugging a pile of heavy books to her chest, and writing with her grandfather’s thick fountain pen, which Walter had ceremoniously given her on the first day of school. She liked the loud, bustling halls, the noise of metal lockers banging shut, the babble in the crowded girls’ rooms, the way students poured out the doors at the end of the day in clamorous throngs, the way the throngs gradually diverted into side streets like cooling lava. There was excitement in all of it, and a sense of being part of something large a
nd dynamic.

  Of course, she still had uncertainties. She was already beginning to worry about mid-term exams and how she’d ever manage to hold in her head all the information needed to get through them. The marvelous confidence of the juniors and seniors as they moved splendidly in small groups through the halls could make her feel gangly and dull. The gang showers in the gym were a challenge to composure. And both the logic and the allure of football remained inscrutable. She went dutifully to every home game, joined in the chants the cheerleaders led, stood up and shouted when everyone else did, but she was only aping form, as she would have done at services in a strange church.

  Once, she had spied Beth standing with three other girls near a water fountain. Helen ducked round a corner to avoid passing her, but not before taking in the girl’s attractive stance, weight shifted to one foot, hip nudged outward. Helen and Billy had never spoken directly of Beth, but Helen would not let herself presume his interest in the girl had waned.

  Billy had stopped by the very next day after Helen encountered him and Beth in the woods. He was going away for the rest of the summer to work on a road gang in the Ramapo Mountains and had come to say farewell to the Schneiders.

  “That’s good work for a young fellow,” Walter said. “Out in the open air, being useful. You’re fortunate to get it.”

  “Yes, sir, I know. I wanted to go to the CCC—those fellas make thirty dollars a month, and the CCC sends all but five dollars straight to your family. They’re digging drainage ditches and building dykes in the Hackensack Meadows and in Secaucus to control mosquitoes, but I’d have to sign up for at least six months, and my mom doesn’t want me skipping school.”

  “Your mother will miss you,” Emilie said.

  “It’s only ’til September,” Billy said. “Barbara’s got some hours down at Woolworth’s now, and Lloyd can look out for the family. My Mom would rather have him home than me, anyway.”