Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  “I’ll put them away,” he offered. “If they bother you.”

  She lay back against the pillow. It disappointed Skye, the idea that he’d use the pictures to gain leverage, displaying them so their removal could constitute a nod of respect to her feelings. His face hovered over her, expectant, and she peered back—trying to ascertain whether he believed he’d fooled her.

  “The pictures don’t bother me,” she said. “I like them. I like looking at her.”

  “You like looking at my wife?” he said.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  He stared back for a long, quizzical moment before leaning in for a kiss. A few minutes passed before he reached inside her jeans. Skye let him unzip them but stopped him firmly when he reached for his own buttons.

  He sat up and shook his head, feeling, no doubt, as if he’d traveled backward in time—to the frustrating make-out sessions of junior high.

  “Here,” he said, reaching for the mirror. “Do you want another line?”

  “No thanks,” Skye said. “I don’t like that cocaine. It makes me nervous, jittery. It’s nothing like Catherine’s.”

  “Catherine’s,” he echoed, with a forceful jolt of surprise.

  And I can see the picture of me in his head: sitting in his class, quiet and fidgety and looking younger than seventeen. Crossing campus in my jodhpurs and helmet, my cheeks rosy from the cold—the shyest and most unlikely of drug runners.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE you told him.”

  We sat on Skye’s bed, studying French—the one subject I could actually help her with. I whispered my rebuke fiercely, not just because of Mr. November but because Eleanor sat at her desk, wool-sweatered shoulders hunched over a book. Skye followed my startled gaze.

  “Don’t worry about Eleanor,” she said. “She won’t tell.”

  “What did Mr. November say?” I whispered. I had yet to hear Skye refer to him by his first name, which I think was Stuart. For all I knew, even in the throes of their everything-but-intercourse gymnastics, she persisted in the student–teacher nomenclature.

  “He said he wants you to get some for him,” she said. “He’s not going to turn us in. Don’t worry.”

  “There is no more coke,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “They’ll get more, right?”

  I thought about the multihued birds and the green, green jungle. The wind in from Africa and the evening storms drumming percussive concerts on tin roofs. At the biological station where Susannah’s father worked, they collected rainwater in great cisterns. To bathe, they pulled a string that released the sun-warmed rain through a nozzle. Sometimes, Susannah found jaguar prints in the soapy mud her shower had left behind. Not so many years later I would travel to South America myself, carrying a backpack that contained two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts, an extra pair of Teva sandals, and a raincoat. Plenty of insect repellent. And I would be amazed at how exactly Susannah had bestowed the place to me, in all its heat and color.

  Esther Percy and Waverly had their breaks on the opposite sides of Easter. So it worked out well that Susannah had chosen Drew to accompany her instead of me. Still, I sustained that original slight, especially since she’d discovered his faithlessness. The image of Venezuela lingered in my mind as a personal belonging, something Drew had been allowed to usurp.

  “There might be more coke,” I said to Skye. “But not till after Easter vacation.”

  “Maybe we can all meet at the Cape house again,” she said, oblivious to Susannah’s feelings toward her. “Or you and I can go down to Waverly.”

  I thought how livid Susannah would be if she could hear us—talking about her coke in conjunction with a teacher. Eleanor listening away while she pretended to study. And of course I realized that Susannah was right, that Skye was hell-bent on a trajectory of destruction. She embarked on every possible avenue toward an ignominious expulsion and didn’t care who she took down with her.

  Still too young to believe in my own instincts—let alone the potential for my own tragedy—I dismissed the realization like a midnight fear of burglars or ghosts.

  MID-FEBRUARY, ZARGHAMI declared the cross-country course free enough of snow. Laura and I took turns on the outdoor jumps. A crisp day, gentle green hills rolled for miles across the sky, a watercolor backdrop. Pippin was never great on cross-country, the open air and successive jumps a little too much stimulation for his high-strung disposition. I worked with him by following two jumps behind Laura; the lead of her older, calmer horse seemed to mellow him. Afterward, we rode through the woods and down toward school. The warm weather had brought everyone outside. Girls sat on the stoops of the dormitories and walked together toward the damp dirt road that led away from campus.

  Laura suggested riding to the orchard to see if Mrs. Gray had made pie, and we followed the exodus of girls in their down coats and sneakers. As we reached the road, I heard the sound of bicycle wheels. It was Skye, racing to catch up on her BMX. I squeezed the reins and turned Pippin around, so she wouldn’t take him by surprise.

  She barreled down the hill and came to a sideways halt, mud spraying up at us. Both horses startled a little, Pippin especially, and Laura frowned—less prepared than I was for Skye’s entrance, righting herself awkwardly in the saddle.

  “You going down to the orchard?” she said. “Let’s race.”

  Pippin pawed the ground, uncertain of the little bike and its lanky rider. The breath from his nostrils looked like the agitated steam of a cartoon animal.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Laura said, giving her horse a kick and heading out onto Percy Hill Road. I was impressed that adherence to safety rules could override her longing for Skye’s approval. I shrugged an apology to Skye and followed Laura. Skye stood up over her seat and pedaled after us.

  “Don’t be so prim,” Skye said. Her face looked drawn and mottled from lack of sleep, the nights with Mr. November finally wearing her down. She had the restless, uncontainable air of an overstimulated child.

  “She’s not being prim,” I said. Apology lingered in my tone, but my horse’s quivering withers gave me the rare ability to assert myself. “We’re on top of large, high-strung animals here. Pippin’s not some gentle pony.”

  “Oh, come on, Catherine,” Skye said. “I thought you were an expert.” She maneuvered the bike too close to Pippin, who backed away from her with a sideways canter. Skye laughed.

  “Hey,” Laura said. She laughed in a stilted, ingratiating way—clearly wounded at the earlier rebuke. “You really do have to be careful,” she pleaded. “These horses spook easily.”

  Maybe it had been too long since I’d allowed my state to be altered. Maybe some sort of dullness had crept into the clear, sunny day, and I liked the idea of Pippin at a gallop, the reins slack in my hands, standing in my stirrups the way Skye stood over the seat of her bike. Maybe I preferred Skye’s daring to Laura’s caution. Who wanted to be oppressed by rules, the endless dos and don’ts of safety? Who could help longing for high speed, the full-blown racing gallop? Certainly not me, in kinship with Skye even as she goaded me, even as I scolded her.

  Laura wore dainty metal spurs on her riding boots, blunt silver rectangles to prod into her horse. But I’d never needed anything of the sort with Pippin. Just the slightest touch of my heels and the barest easing out of the saddle. And we were off, that wonderful immediate advance, a moment where it seemed I’d left my body behind and dissolved into mist through horse-induced wind. As we headed downhill, the other girls on their way to the orchard shrilled objections to the mud and dirt raised by Pippin’s hooves. His mad clip-clop thundered through the calm day, and Skye couldn’t possibly catch us.

  Pippin tore past the orchard. I wondered if he could have had a career in racing. The trees galloped backward in a gray and green blur. I sat back in my seat and whispered, “Whoa, whoa Pippin.” He slowed to a trot, too smooth for my seat to bounce on the saddle, and then a walk. We turned around and I could see Skye, waiting for us by the
orchard’s driveway, sitting sideways on her bike seat, defeated.

  I recognized Pippin’s pace as calm and exhausted. I let my feet dangle out of the stirrups and relaxed the reins completely, so they hung in two wide half circles. A light steam rose off his neck, and I leaned forward and combed my fingers through his coarse black mane, still crimped from our last show’s braids. So that I saw Skye too late, back on her bike and heading toward us. I remember that she held her legs out to the side, away from the pedals. I remember her hair streaming behind her like some kind of crazed Amazon warrior.

  And of course I remember Pippin: rearing up and then racing forward. I flew out of the saddle for a moment, then heaved forward and grabbed the pommel as he galloped up the hill, toward the barn and safety. Skye stopped short as we passed from the opposite direction, her brakes letting out a mud-soaked screech. Pippin started sideways before I had a chance to right myself. So that I flew off of him, my foot catching in the reins like a lassoed calf, and then landed on the road at Skye’s feet, mud geysering up around us, my arm cracking audibly as it broke in two places.

  While my horse thundered away, the clattering of his hooves still heard as he rounded the corner and ran, riderless, out of sight.

  15

  MY PARENTS DID NOT arrive in Brattleboro until after my arm had been set. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep—drifting in a blissful haze of Demerol—when I woke up and saw my father sitting in a chair beside my bed. I instantly closed my eyes again, hoping he hadn’t seen me stir.

  Once, when I was about seven years old, I hurt myself jumping rocks in the stream behind my elementary school. For some reason they hadn’t been able to reach my mother, and my father came to bring me to the pediatrician. While the doctor had stitched up my knee, a nurse had comforted me—holding me in her arms and muttering soothing, motherly words. My father stood far to the side, hands in his pockets, wincing.

  “Catherine,” he said now, the gruff voice never familiar as it ought to have been.

  I opened my eyes reluctantly. His face was drawn with concern, but to me he looked stern and admonishing. For some reason his hair always seemed especially white when it had just been cut. He smelled like cigars and rich coffee.

  “Where’s Mom?” I said.

  She bustled into the room the second I’d finished the sentence, smelling of Diorissimo and seeming in contrast like all the youth and light in the world.

  “Ma pauvre,” she said. She ran her fingers through my hair, her pinky snagging awkwardly on a tangle. “You close your eyes and worry about nothing,” she said. “Your horse is just fine, safe in his stall. Your arm, it will heal.”

  I glanced down to my left, where a thick plaster cast bent my elbow into a stiff ell. Three days until a winter equitation in Connecticut.

  “The Nationals,” I whispered, looking straight into my mother’s dark eyes, hoping she would say something breezy and comforting. That she’d spoken to the doctor, and the arm would be healed in a month, maybe two. There was still plenty of time to amass the points I needed in time for the August qualification date.

  She paused for a moment, then laid a cool hand on my stringy blonde head.

  “You still have the college team,” she said, disappointment evident in her softest and most forgiving tone.

  I SPENT A WEEK recuperating at my parents’ house. When I returned to school, the first thing I did was walk out to the stables. Because I had begged—and because his board was paid through the end of the year—Pippin was staying at Esther Percy. Even though I couldn’t ride him, I felt the need to have him close by. In his stall I fed him an apple, then knelt to examine his legs. I ran my hand disbelievingly over each perfect fetlock, certain I should find an injury comparable to my own. But the only discernible change in him was a strangely calmer demeanor, as if the accident and my ensuing absence had not traumatized him but made him wiser.

  Afterward, on the way to the dining hall, I stopped to check my mail. A postcard from John Paul waited in the little wooden slot. On the front was a picture of Wallace Hall, the library at Waverly. Laura stood a few feet away from me, checking her own mail. The only communication from John Paul that I didn’t save, I remember what he wrote verbatim.

  Dear Catherine,

  Bummer about your arm. Here the snow has melted but it still doesn’t feel like Spring. Mostly I’ve been studying. Anyway, I seem to be running out of space. I hope you’re feeling better.

  Your friend, J. P.

  We had never been the sorts, either of us, to gush romantic poetry. There had been no carving our initials in trees, no Ts, Ls, and 4s connected in a true-love-forever diagram. But there had been a tacit language, full of short syllables and ellipses, a whispered rustling of spiral notebook paper that bore its own testament to everything that occurred between us. And now: Your friend, J. P. The name that squirmy third-form boys used, calling across the game field in hopeful admiration. The wooden configuration of mail slots blurred before my eyes, less with tears than fury. I made an instinctive motion with my left hand to rip the postcard in half and was reminded of my debilitating injury by a sharp and frantic pain in the fractured bone below my elbow. I put the card between my teeth and ripped at it with my right hand.

  “Here,” Laura said, stepping toward me. She took the postcard gently from my mouth, as if retrieving a dollar bill from the jaws of a puppy. Without a glance at what John Paul had written, she tore it neatly in half, then quarters, then eighths. She walked across the room to the garbage can, deposited the pieces, and returned to me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Most other girls would have asked me who the card was from. Laura just slipped her arm through my good elbow, and I felt a swell of affinity.

  “Can I sign your cast?” she said.

  “No,” I told her. “I want to keep it clean.” I didn’t want anything cheerful about this injury—colorful markers and glib sentiments insinuating that what had happened was just fine.

  “I understand,” Laura said, and we walked into the dining hall together.

  Skye sat at a table across the room, with Mr. November and Eleanor. I averted my eyes in the awkward, obvious way of teenagers, but could feel her unmoving stare as Laura went to load a tray with both our lunches. When I couldn’t help but look back, Skye’s face looked drained and white, like the sight of me was frankly shocking. As if I were a ghost and hadn’t been meant to return.

  Laura returned with the tray, giving me an excuse to look away. I busied myself with my one-handed dining.

  “She’s staring at you,” Laura said, so that the other girls at our table turned to look, Skye as usual managing to suck any vortex of attention toward her. I looked, too, and saw that she didn’t blush or glance away. Just kept watching me, in a way that conferred all of her discomfort, her disquiet, her sorrow, her guilt. While Eleanor looked inordinately pleased to have her back—evident in the triumphant rhythm of the rise and fall of her soupspoon. Apparently sharing Skye with Mr. November was more amenable to Eleanor than sharing her with me.

  You’re both welcome to her, I thought.

  Those first few days at home, I’d sat in the barn with Bloom. Every afternoon, I would haul myself onto the horse’s bare back, lying back against her haunches, staring up at the post-and-beam ceiling. And thinking that it should have been Skye, not only because her life would have been minimally altered by a broken arm but because of the misalignment of stars. A mistake had been made. Skye was doomed. Not me.

  Many times during our association, I had feared being held responsible for the terrible fate that awaited her. But until I got hurt, it never occurred to me that the bullet meant for her might strike me instead.

  “Now do you see?” Susannah said, on the phone from Waverly, scarcely able to contain her victory. “Skye’s on this mission,” she said. “She doesn’t care who else takes a fall. If breaking your arm will hurt her father, then she’s perfectly happy to break
your arm.”

  I didn’t point out that Susannah seemed perfectly happy to have my arm broken, as long as it meant the end of my friendship with Skye. Still, she didn’t suggest that I tell the headmistress what had really happened. Even Laura Pogue-Smith understood: we never turned each other in. Besides, getting Skye in any kind of trouble would have felt more like reward than punishment.

  While I was home, Skye called every night at five forty-five—just before the dinner bell at Esther Percy. I would listen to my mother or the maid explain again that I was not available for conversation, and I would imagine Skye standing in the student lounge, her finger looped over the pay phone’s cord. Incapable of accepting rejection, she would replace the receiver gently, resolute to try again tomorrow.

  The girls at my table turned back to their meals with brief, apologetic glances thrown my way. With my good hand, I pushed my plate away and walked out of the dining hall, followed by a collective sigh.

  It was 1985. The term anorexia nervosa had joined the common vocabulary with the same filmy glamour as cocaine. As my deserted dinner companion knew all too well, loss of appetite was as enviable as the swirl of drama that now surrounded me.

  SAD FOR THEM, those curious girls in the dining hall, that they didn’t see Skye racing after me as I crossed the road to the old part of campus.

  “Catherine,” she called. New snow last night, and I could hear the moronic squishing of her sneakers. I pictured the neat row of warm winter shoes and boots in the closet of her dorm room. Why don’t you wear the right shoes? I wanted to scream at her. What will frostbite accomplish? Why can’t anything be normal with you?

  I picked up my pace, refusing to look back.

  “Catherine, wait,” she said again, impassioned as Stanley Kowalski. White Cottage had come comfortingly into view, but of course there was nothing to stop Skye from following me inside.

  “Leave me alone,” I said, not looking back at her. My pace was fast, but her legs were longer. I could hear her closing in.