Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  “Did you tell your mom?” I asked.

  Skye shook her head, then nodded. “I promised him I wouldn’t, but then I couldn’t help myself. The way he backed off keeping me in Devon, when he could tell how much more press he would get if I were expelled. He broke his promise, so I broke mine. But I think my mother already knew. She seemed less angry about the woman than about my knowing. Still there were big, ugly scenes. Talk of divorce.”

  “But she stayed with him.”

  “She says she respects what he’s trying to accomplish. As a man. For the world. He promised to get rid of the woman, but I don’t think he did. I know she still works on his campaign.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I wondered if all husbands cheated on their wives. I thought of Drew out on Sandy Neck with Skye and couldn’t imagine John Paul ever doing such a thing. I remembered Mrs. November, that scornful flick of her wedding ring, and wondered if her slender and unworthy husband sometimes strayed. I imagined my mother catching my father with another woman, and wondered how she would react. I pictured her narrowing her eyes and closing the door with a reprimanding click, then getting on with the rest of her day. She would saddle a horse and take a long ride through the old-growth forest, then come home to make a complicated dinner. Rolling out pastry dough, a taut tendon in her forearm and a slight hardness in her jaw would be the only indication that something had gone amiss.

  Skye reached over and eased the photograph out of my hands. Put it back on the table in its precise original spot.

  “Remember that poem,” she said. “That Shel Silverstein poem, about the language of the caterpillars and the gossip of the starlings?”

  “I think it’s the language of the flowers,” I said, grateful that for once I recognized one of her references.

  “That’s how I feel sometimes. Like there’s this language I knew when I was a kid, and every year of my life it unravels just a little bit. Becomes more and more indecipherable. So that I’m left all alone, trying to figure it out. Trying to remember it.”

  She sipped from her wine again and grimaced, as if it were distasteful but necessary medicine. And I wanted to ease it out of her hands—returning her to the times before last winter, when nothing threatened her high ideals and grand illusions.

  She broke my sympathy with a non sequitur. “John Paul’s not what I expected,” she said.

  My spine straightened, an involuntary bristle, and for some reason I pictured my father: his weathered and grouchy intelligence. Never knowing or caring about the right fork, or what anybody—particularly the proper and wealthy—thought of him.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Skye said. “I can’t put it into words. Is he the one who gets the cocaine?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s not.”

  Skye waited, a polite and abiding pause. Still on the defensive, I didn’t feel the barest temptation to tell her. Any other time, Skye might have pressed me. But so soon after her disappearance and her dalliance with Drew, she felt penitent. Cautious.

  “Okay,” she said instead. “Tell me something else about John Paul. Tell me something I wouldn’t guess.”

  “He speaks perfect French,” I said, and she laughed.

  “That’s a very personal detail, Catherine,” she said. “But does he speak the language of the flowers?”

  I frowned, scratching my fingernails across the chair’s embroidered armrests. Skye retreated back into her poem.

  “Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets,” she said. “And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow, / Once I spoke the language of the flowers . . .”

  So many opportunities, and I missed them all. There was so much I could have changed, and rescued: if only I had given Skye and Susannah the information that might have brought them close together. Instead of always protecting and guarding.

  “How did it go?” I asked, rather than tell Skye the truth. “How did it go?”

  8

  PIPPIN HAD COLIC. Two days after our return from Cape Cod, I found him in his stall—biting at his abdomen, then stretching out like he needed to urinate. The vet was summoned; he pronounced the condition mild and administered sedatives, instructing me to let him walk. I led him round and round the outdoor ring, a wool blanket draped over his back, the cold burning through my leather riding gloves.

  Nobody knew what he’d gotten into—no evidence of crab apples or tipped-over barrels of grain. I felt sure that my own indulgences had somehow transferred to him. Sweat glistened on his neck, his nostrils flared. Every few rounds, I would stop to bury my face in his slick mane and inhale that musky animal smell, manure and sweet grass, like restorative oxygen. The illness—the fear that he might die—transformed my feelings for him. My resentment and antipathy evaporated into the frigid autumn air, and I found myself awash in anticipated grief. Please, I whispered, to whatever nebulous deity might have been listening. Please let him be okay. I’ll never do it again.

  What “it” might have been, I couldn’t say specifically. Certainly I didn’t mean I’d never sneak away to see John Paul: I could still feel his fingertips, sliding out of my hand as we said good-bye. But I was relieved that Susannah, in her anger, had neglected to replenish my supply of coke. I only had a scant half gram left and wished I had the courage to flush it. Just thinking of the drug made my bones feel rattled and poisoned, but I knew this aversion wouldn’t be enough to dissuade temptation. At least not as it would present itself: in the form of Skye’s insistence. Faced with Pippin’s adversity, my friendship with Skye seemed painfully lonely and limited. If Susannah had been there, or John Paul, they would be walking by my side, stroking Pippin’s neck and promising me that he would be all right.

  That weekend on the Cape, with no ride to the bus station, Skye and I had decided to hitchhike all the way back to Esther Percy—Skye tucking her hair under a wool cap to keep from being recognized. On the way, we received the usual lectures from concerned adults who picked us up.

  “Some fella could take you for a one-way ride,” one woman said, after we’d clambered into the backseat of her battered AMC Spirit. A menthol cigarette dangled from her bright red lips.

  I leaned forward and showed her the pearl-handled stiletto I kept in my coat pocket.

  “You think that’s going to help a little wisp of a girl like you?” the woman said. “Pull that on some two-hundred-pound guy, it’s going to end up under your ribs.”

  “If you’re so worried,” Skye said, “why not drive us all the way back to school?”

  Skye may have been obedient, I thought. But clearly she’d never been meek.

  The woman considered this for a moment—assessing us through her rearview mirror. I could see the spiderwebbed wrinkles around her eyes, magnified in the reflection.

  She shrugged. “I guess I’d rather take a little time out of my day than see the pair of you on the ten o’clock news.” And she drove all the way to I-91, all the way to Esther Percy. Hours out of her way, as she pointed out several times.

  At the end of the school’s long dirt road, she let the motor run for a minute.

  “What if I walk up with the two of you?” she said. “Tell your teacher how I found you on Route 2 with your thumbs sticking out?”

  My heart skittered to a halt at the thought of my father’s consciousness absorbing this image. But Skye just smiled.

  “You wouldn’t do that to us,” she said, leaning forward and patting the woman’s shoulder. I thought of Obi-Wan Kenobi, controlling the storm trooper’s thoughts.

  The woman smiled back, a little chagrined but mostly charmed. Perhaps she recognized a small piece of her own reckless youth. Or else felt too pleased with her good deed to ruin it with betrayal. So she told us to take care of ourselves. She told us to behave. We didn’t watch her drive away—the last piece of evidence that our trip had not had parental sanctions—but walked up the hill together. The air had become infused with seasonal c
hill; I worried for Mrs. Chilton’s pumpkins, nestled among vines and leaves in the school garden.

  “That was nice of her,” I said to Skye. “Driving us all the way here.”

  Skye nodded. I worried for a moment that she would say something derisive about the woman. I didn’t want to hear anything scornful about her rusty car or cigarette-stained fingers. And to her credit, Skye just smiled—more fond than superior. Still, she said nothing further, and I longed for Susannah, who would have taken a minute to reflect on the poetry of the woman’s generosity, not only the ride itself but the refusal to betray us.

  Now, Pippin snorted and pawed the frozen dirt. “That horse is too good for you,” my father had said the year before, in the wake of his disappointment with my behavior at Waverly. I’d sneered openly. What did my father know about horses, beyond their price tags?

  But now, watching Pippin suffer—and feeling responsible in a bleak, karmic way—I worried that it might be true. That the horse, too good for me—too pure of blood and spirit—somehow suffered whatever chemicals I ingested. My coke jangled his nerves, my alcohol infected his veins. The idea made me feel a connection to him approaching the one I had with Bloom.

  “How is he?” a reedy voice asked.

  Laura Pogue-Smith leaned over the rail, dressed in riding clothes and a bright orange vest. Another regular on the Medal Maclay circuit, I’d known her before I came to Esther Percy. My first week there, before the full-bore advent of Skye, we’d gone for a trail ride or two. Laura had a crisp, brunette prettiness—regular features and neat lines maintained by careful starvation. She hadn’t qualified for the indoor shows this year because of time lost in treatment for anorexia, a common syndrome on the A circuit.

  One time I’d introduced Laura to my mother at a dressage exhibition in Roxbury. “Pretty American girl,” my mother had said, in a dismissive and slightly superior tone. I thought how immediately she would prefer Skye.

  “He’s okay,” I said now, to Laura. “The vet says it’s intestinal dysfunction. He should be fine.”

  “Good,” she said. “My first pony died of colic. Very traumatic.” She twirled her crop like a baton, a motion that would have spooked Pippin if he hadn’t been so miserable.

  “Are you going for a ride?” I said. “It’s so cold.”

  She shrugged. “Doc needs the exercise,” she said. “And I’m feeling a little stir-crazy, with midterms and applications and everything.”

  I nodded. There was a stack of college applications on my bureau, but I hadn’t filled out so much as a line. The thought of contacting old teachers at Waverly for recommendations made my head hurt.

  “Want to come?” she asked. “You can take one of Zarghami’s horses. We can go up the ski trails. Just be mellow.”

  I started to reply, and to my dismay a sob came out instead. It sounded horrible, diseased: a struggling and pregnant honk.

  I threw my arms around Pippin’s neck and wept into his shoulder. I could hear Laura climb over the fence and walk across the ring to me. She patted my back lightly, with a soft and circular motion. “I know,” she said. “I know exactly how you feel. But he’ll be all right, if the vet said so.”

  I nodded in agreement but didn’t unbury my face.

  “Come for a ride,” Laura said. Her voice sounded gentle and reasoned. “Let Pippin rest. He’ll be better by tomorrow, I bet.”

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “I shouldn’t have said anything about my pony. Plenty of horses recover from colic, too.”

  I led Pippin back to his stall and saddled up one of Zarghami’s geldings.

  “Don’t forget this,” Laura said, emerging from the tack room with another orange vest. Deer-hunting season had just started.

  “Are you voting next week?” she asked, as we headed away from the stables. She had dispensed with my outburst the moment my crying had stopped. I felt grateful for this politeness, her moving on from emotion rather than dwelling and dissecting.

  “I’m not eighteen,” I said. “I’m not even seventeen till December.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “You have another year to get to Nationals.”

  I felt my cheeks warm from pink to red. Everyone knew about my humiliation in Harrisburg.

  “I sent in an absentee ballot,” she said. I didn’t bother asking whom she’d voted for. I hadn’t yet met a student who was rooting for Reagan. Not that we discussed politics that afternoon. We just rode up into the hills, horse hooves crunching over frozen mud. Our faces becoming white from the deep, deep chill. Laura talked about college and horse shows.

  “You’ll make Nationals next year for sure,” Laura said, obviously wistful at her own ruined career. “My father saw you last year in Halifax. He says you’re the most natural jumper he’s seen in years. And he worked with Greg Morris.”

  There was no envy in Laura’s voice, not even particular admiration. Everything about her seemed so easy, calm, and peaceful. Wholesomeness glowed around her shiny brown braid like an aureole. Anorexia was a good-girl’s disease. I’d never seen Laura anywhere near the drugs that were rampant at horse shows. To me, she looked innocent as Skye used to—the distant, pixilated Skye, staring back from the television screen.

  That Sunday before, returning to Esther Percy from Cape Cod, I found myself in uncomfortable agreement with Susannah’s assessment of Skye, and couldn’t wait to get away from her frenetic energy. The light beneath her skin seemed to crawl and swirl, searching for some manner of destructive escape, and I wanted to retreat before whatever tragedy befell her could be blamed on me.

  By contrast, how wonderful: toes and fingers tingling near frostbite, the musky scent of a cold-sweaty horse. An activity that no one anywhere could possibly frown on and a companion who had placidly and happily followed every rule ever laid down for her. Never occurring to her that I might teach her how to break them.

  LATER, FROM ACROSS the dining hall, Skye looked perplexed to see Laura and me sitting together, still wearing our matching vests. As she slid her tray across from us, Laura perked up so visibly I had to remind myself that she had liked me before I became Skye’s official best friend.

  “You’ll never believe what Eleanor just told me,” Skye said, barely glancing at Laura, who didn’t seem to notice the rebuff. She leaned toward Skye right along with me. A few feet away, the Amandas held hands under their table; they stopped talking to look over at us. Skye lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “Mrs. November has disappeared,” Skye said. “She packed up all her things and left. Mr. November’s taking the week off to search for her, but nobody’s seen her since last Friday afternoon.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Do you think we should say something?”

  “Why?” Laura said. “Did you see her?”

  “I’m not going to say anything,” Skye said to me, ignoring Laura. “I mean, what if she doesn’t want to be found?”

  “Poor Mr. November,” Laura said. I noticed she hadn’t touched her food and felt a slight jab of worry. I wanted to say something, to encourage her to eat. But I couldn’t think how to do it without invading her privacy.

  “I’m sure Mr. November didn’t know what he had,” Skye said. “None of them do, you know.”

  Laura stared at Skye, waiting for some life-illuminating pearl. Or perhaps she was just basking in the envy of the other girls, all around us, and the status granted her by sitting with Skye.

  “Anyway,” Skye said to me. “How’s your horse?”

  “He’ll be okay.” I felt guilty that for a moment I had forgotten Pippin. Laura excused herself to get a cup of hot chocolate and Skye leaned over the table.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you think we could do the last of that cocaine tonight?”

  “Why tonight?” An ordinary Wednesday, with evening chapel looming and nothing to celebrate.

  “I don’t know,” Skye said. “I feel so bored since we’ve been back. It seems so weird, doesn’t it, that we could have done everything
we did last weekend and not be caught? Think of how we spent our time. And here we sit, in no trouble at all.”

  It amazed me that Skye didn’t consider herself in trouble. Wasn’t she nursing at least a little remorse? I wondered if she had erased the interlude with Drew from her mind or simply decided it didn’t matter. Even so, it seemed like Susannah’s departure ought to have made an impact. For me, in areas of disaster, losing favor with Susannah would have ranked as high as expulsion.

  “I feel like Lucy,” Skye said. “From the Narnia books. Dying to get back into the wardrobe. You know what I mean? I’m so tired of this lackluster pace. I need a taste of something different.”

  My shoulders sagged, weary at the thought of a sleepless night. Of charged intimacy and forced confessions. I told her about the pot John Paul had given me.

  “You can have that, if you want it.”

  “By myself?” she said. “But I’ve never smoked it before. And I can’t do anything like that in my room, in front of Eleanor. Anyway, it won’t be fun without you.”

  “I’m so tired,” I said. “All this cold, and worry about Pippin. I think I just want to sleep.”

  Skye blinked at me, unaccustomed to rejection. Then she picked up her fork and began eating. And I knew as I watched the settling of her shoulders—the stubborn, childlike set of her soft jaw—that she would appear in my room tonight, regardless of what I said, because she knew that those four walls weren’t nearly enough to contain me. I might commit myself to them with the best intentions. But simple, studying hours would crawl by in dull light, the moon outside my window too painfully close to earth. It would shine insistently through my worn, meager shade, and at some point I would look up from a book, or open my eyes from sleep, and there Skye would be: standing over me—all gauzy smiles and invitation—for my weak and restless heart to follow.

  WINTER

  9

  MY HORSE RECOVERED—his old bright and jittery spirit, an energy that no amount of exercise could contain. But something had changed, some quality in his affect toward me, as if he thought my ministrations had healed him. When I brought him an apple he would press his nose past the fruit to nuzzle my sweater. His eyes seemed to deepen; whereas before his face had seemed a blank, horsey slate, there now appeared a specific and loving character. Seeing so clearly what I had almost lost, my ambivalence settled into staunch loyalty and unadulterated love.