by Rachel Klein
I’ve got to do some work before I go down to set up. I’m at Mrs. Davenport’s table. She lets us finish quickly, have coffee, and then get down to the Playroom for a smoke before study hour. That’s because she doesn’t eat much. She watches her weight. If you get at a table with Miss Bombay, she never lets you go without eating everything. It takes forever.
After dinner
Poor Lucy is stuck at Miss Bombay’s table. And she has to clear. That means we won’t have any time together in the Playroom after dinner. I haven’t been at Miss Bombay’s table since I came to school in ninth grade. It was bad enough that I came in the middle of the year, and then I was put at Miss Bombay’s table. I had to go away to school because my mother couldn’t have me around. She wanted to wallow in her own pain, alone. At night we sat down to dinner in silence. The only sounds were chewing and swallowing. If we had to speak, to ask for the salt or something, we would whisper and try not to stare at my father’s empty place. Every night I would think, I can’t stand to have another dinner with her. Then I got to school, and it was even worse. I was terrified of everything: the other boarders, the corridor teachers, the gym teachers, Miss Rood, all the rules and bells. I couldn’t even find my way around the school. One night I ran away from the other girls who gathered at the top of the stairs to go down to dinner together and came down the back stairs by the music practice rooms. I had no idea where I was. I stood in the dark hallway and cried. No one heard me. I could have been dead. At the table, as we stood for grace, I couldn’t stop staring at Miss Bombay. Her legs were so big and her ankles so swollen that her calves seemed to go right into her shoes, like thick wooden pegs. Her ankles and calves were wrapped up in ace bandages. She lowered herself slowly into her chair, clutching the edge of the table for support, and sighed with relief when she sat down. I was too petrified to eat. The room was flooded with the sounds of voices and clanking silverware, which got louder as dinner went on. There were conversations all around me. Girls jumped up and delivered the food from a cart, then ran around the table to clear away the plates and threw them back onto the cart. I looked up. My plate was still covered with food, there was a bite of lamb in my mouth, and I found the table had grown silent and everyone was staring at me. I couldn’t move my jaw to chew.
“Don’t hurry, dear,” said Miss Bombay. “Finish your meal.”
“Hurry up,” whispered the girl sitting next to me. “We want to have a smoke.”
I managed to squeak, “Done.”
“Go on now, finish up,” insisted Miss Bombay.
“No, I’m finished,” I said. Only my fear of the other girls made me speak louder.
Miss Bombay sat there without saying a word. I felt that if she made me finish, with everyone staring at me as I choked down each bite, I wouldn’t be able to stay at school. When she finally told the girls to clear, I was drenched in sweat, and my legs were trembling under the table. The worst part was that dessert was angel food cake with whipped cream. I wanted a piece so much, and Miss Bombay kept offering me one, but I kept shaking my head. Then I heard Miss Bombay whisper to one of the older girls, “The poor child is still in a state of shock.” Nothing could have been worse than those words. I wished I’d taken some dessert and my mouth was stuffed with the soft sweet cake like all the other girls sitting around the table, who seemed to stop chewing at once and stare at me again. This time not with annoyance but with disgusting pity in their eyes.
Now I’m one of those older girls. I hurry through dinner and go down for a smoke afterward. I have lots of friends, and no one stares. I always take a big piece of angel food cake.
September 17
There’s something strange about the new girl. Or else she’s totally out of it. I was coming up the Passageway after gym, and I found her standing there, leaning against the wall and staring out the window. I hurried right past her, but then I remembered how awful it was to be a new girl, so I turned around.
“Are you lost?” I asked.
Ernessa turned away from the window. “No. This is one of my favorite places here.”
“The Passageway?” I asked.
The Passageway is just a way of getting from the Schoolhouse to the Science Building to the Residence. There’s no reason to hang out there, unless you like a place that’s cold and dim and closed-in. The leaded glass windows make it feel more like a cloister than a school. The glass is thick and swirly, and outside the trees on the Middle Field look as if they are melting into the sky. Only pallid light comes through, underwater light. When I get to the Passageway, I almost run.
“I like to look out the windows,” said Ernessa. “The world is broken up into little fragments.”
“Are you going back to your room?” I asked just to be polite.
“Eventually,” she said.
“Then I’ll see you later.”
She turned eagerly back to the window as if she could actually see something out there. I left.
I have to ask Lucy if she’s ever talked to her. I think they’re in the same English class. I don’t know why Lucy wants to read the romantic poets. Probably because poems are shorter than novels, and she thinks it will be easier. I don’t have any classes with Ernessa, and I only have chemistry with Lucy. I hardly have any friends in my classes. I’m mostly stuck with day students. I guess there could be nice, smart day students, but I’ve never met any.
After dinner
Ernessa is in her English class, and Lucy went on and on about how “brilliant” Ernessa is and how she always has such interesting things to say in class. I’m not sure Lucy would know what brilliant is. I got impatient with her. She couldn’t stop talking about Ernessa.
“How can you know how smart someone is after a week of school?” I asked.
“I know she’s smarter than me,” said Lucy.
“She talks like one of those Magic 8-Balls, you know, ‘It is decidedly so,’ or ‘Signs point to yes.’”
The conversation really annoyed me. Now I can’t concentrate on math.
September 19
Lucy’s gone home for the weekend, and I don’t really have anything to do. I don’t feel like doing my homework or playing the piano or even reading a book. Why do I feel so lost with her gone, even though I have lots of other friends? I don’t even need to be with her; I just need to know that she’s in her room, with only the two doors between us. I can always go in there, flop down on her bed, and say, “Let’s do something.” Lucy pulls me away from my books and my thoughts and makes me laugh and eat junk food and be silly like the other girls. I hope she doesn’t start going home every weekend. She lives only two hours away, and her mother doesn’t mind picking her up. My mother doesn’t want me home on weekends. She says she misses me when I’m gone, but she’s gotten used to being alone.
They’re all down the hall in the TV room. Except for Ernessa across the hall, probably. She’s kind of like me, but much worse. I don’t think she cares about being friends with anyone. She spends all her time in her room with the door closed. It’s the only closed door on the corridor. I would never think of going in there without knocking. I’ve only been in there once, when the door was left open and she was talking to Dora. I figured they were probably discussing Nietzsche or something, which is all Dora wants to talk about. Other than taking drugs, which she apparently does a lot. In her spare time, Dora’s writing a novel based on Nietzsche’s philosophy. She’s already written three hundred pages, she says. She tried to explain it to me. It’s a dialogue between Nietzsche and Brahms. Actually, I was trapped in her room while she read passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She’s only bothering with me because there’s no one else who would listen to her without going, “Oh, please …” At the same time, I’m supposed to feel flattered because she’s enlightening me. Dora’s the kind of person you think you like until she manages to insult you by treating you like an idiot. In the end, I don’t know if I even like her or if she likes me. I get the best grades, and she thinks she’s the smartest
. The most intellectual. She always says, “I don’t take grades seriously. They can’t measure real intelligence, just how well you can regurgitate what the teacher feeds you.”
Ernessa seems pretty smart. Maybe she’ll be able to understand Nietzsche better than me, all this stuff about the Superman and the myth of the eternal return. Anyway, I stuck my head in, because I wanted to see what her room looked like, not because I wanted to listen to some heavy philosophical discussion. Ernessa gave me a look that said, “What are you doing here?” I wasn’t interrupting anything important. They were talking about furniture. Ernessa wanted to move her dresser over by the door. “It’s going to block the doorway,” I said. She ignored my comment and picked up the dresser and carried it across the room. Dora and I stared at her. Dora asked, “How can you carry that? It’s got to be incredibly heavy.” Ernessa seemed surprised. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said.
No one talks like that around here.
She stood by the door, waiting for us to leave. I don’t like the way Ernessa looks at me. I had thought we might become friends, but I don’t think we will.
Her room also smells even though it’s perfectly clean and practically empty. A dresser, a desk, a desk chair, a bed, bare floor. That’s all. Maybe the smell is coming from the bathroom. It’s a kind of mildewy, rotten smell.
Dora gave me Nietzsche to read, and I did look through it. I can’t understand how someone could write a novel based on that book. It’s an incredibly pretentious thing to do.
This was underlined:
“Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity.
“Thus spoke the Devil to me once: ‘Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.’
“And I lately heard him say these words: ‘God is dead; God has died of his pity for man.’ … Thus spoke Zarathustra.”
The point being what?
September 20
The weekend is crawling by. Lucy probably won’t be back until right before supper, another three hours. By ten o’clock this morning, I started to feel anxious. I’m waiting for something to happen, but I have no idea what the something is. I should practice the piano. I should do my homework. I should read a book. After lunch I went and bought a package of cookies from Carol, who sells them for the Service League, got into bed, and read “My Sister Antonia” for English while I ate the cookies. It’s still September, but my room is so cold. My hands and feet were like ice. I couldn’t warm them up. But I forgot about them because I loved the story so much. I read it over again right away when I finished. I went from the last page back to the first without stopping, sinking deeper and deeper into the twilight language. I want to write a story like that, to set up everything so carefully, detail by detail, that when something totally outlandish happens, it seems perfectly natural, even inevitable. It’s a perfect story. I just need something to write about. How do writers come up with really good stories? I’m sure no one else in the class will like it. They’ll say, “What’s the point we’re supposed to get?” They want everything explained, even though they are taking a class on the supernatural. What do they expect? I admit Mr. Davies has come up with some bizarre stories. A few are so hard to find that he’s had to leave his own copies of the books in the library, and we can only sign them out for a few days to read them. He says he doesn’t care what order we read them in, or if we read all of them, which means that most of the girls will hardly read any. He doesn’t understand that no one reads anything that isn’t on a test. He also doesn’t notice that when he’s talking to us so enthusiastically, the girls are whispering to each other or passing notes or staring out the window. I’m trying to read everything right away.
I’m going to copy out the list to remind myself to make notes about the stories as I go.
“Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu
“The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen
“My Sister Antonia” by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
“The King in Yellow” by E. K. Chambers
“The Black Spider” by Jeremias Gotthelf
“The Jews’ Beech Tree” by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
“The Man Whom the Trees Loved” by Algernon Blackwood
“Sredni Vashtur” by Saki
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A nap until Lucy gets back. She has to be here soon.
I took my nap, and Lucy still isn’t back. I don’t feel like going out and being sociable. The only thing the others want to do is get stoned. Especially Charley. I always see her slipping into Ernessa’s room across the hall. They smoke dope together. That’s the only thing they have in common. Ernessa seems to have a good supply. Charley doesn’t understand why I don’t like to smoke. I lose control of my thoughts.
This is my favorite passage from “My Sister Antonia”:
One afternoon my sister, Antonia, took me by the hand to go to the cathedral. Antonia was much older than I; she was tall and pale, with dark eyes and a smile tinged with sadness. She died while I was still a child. But how well I remember her voice, her smile, and the chill of her hand as of afternoons she led me to the cathedral. Above all, I remember her eyes, and their tragic gleam as they followed a student who walked up and down the cathedral portico, enveloped in a blue cape. I was afraid of that student: he was tall and gaunt, and his face was that of a dead man. His eyes were the eyes of a tiger, terrible eyes, beneath a stern, finely molded forehead. To make him seem even more like the dead, the bones of his knees creaked as he walked. … He caught up with us at the door of the cathedral and, drawing out his skeleton hand, took some holy water and offered it to my sister, who was trembling. Antonia looked at him beseechingly, and he whispered with the spasm of a smile: “I am beside myself.”
When I close my eyes, I can hear the soft creaking of his knees as he paces the corridor outside my room. I wonder what it would be like to be a Catholic, to dip your hand into the cold water and to believe in its holiness.
September 22
Yesterday Lucy wasn’t back at quiet hour. Usually we spend part of it together in her room. That’s why we have a suite. My first year I felt so alone in my little cell. I didn’t realize how much I’ve come to look forward to spending that time with her until she didn’t show up. We talk a little at first. Then I sit in her chair and read while she does her homework at her desk. I don’t need to sit at a desk to work. I can study in bed, on the floor, in a chair, standing up. Lucy needs to sit at a desk. She says it helps her to focus. Usually I don’t want to be friends with someone who’s not smart, but with Lucy that doesn’t matter. She’s not stupid. She just doesn’t do very well in school. She has a different kind of intelligence from me. She knows how to get along with everyone. Last year, I helped her with her German homework. Even though I’d never taken German, I could do the translations for her.
You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them. My father and I had our afternoon walks, our bedtime reading, and when I was really little, the ritual of my bedside lamp at night. I could only go to sleep with the light on, and every night my father would come in after I fell asleep and turn off the lamp. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I would turn the lamp back on, but it was never on in the morning. I used to think my father stayed up all night to make sure that my lamp was turned off. Later I found out he stayed up late to write poetry. The lamp had a turquoise base and a little white shade with turquoise dots. When the light bulb was turned on, the dots glowed.
After my father died, I tried to hold on to him by repeating our rituals. When I took walks in the Botanic Garden, I kept expecting him to be there. I peered down the pathways, around trees, through the glass walls of the conservatory, across the water of the pond in the Japanese garden. If he came back, this was where I would find him.
I didn’t see Lucy until we had our smoke in the Playroom after dinner. I asked her if she’d had an away hockey game today. “I was in Ernessa’s room. She was helping me with my German. She’s so incredibl
e. Totally fluent. I didn’t want to come back to my room because I was afraid Mrs. Halton would see me.”
Mrs. Halton never comes out of her suite during quiet hour. She wouldn’t come if you were burning the place down. Besides, it’s only across the hall. Lucy seemed annoyed at me. She can do whatever she wants during quiet hour. I don’t see how she can spend an entire hour in that room. It has such a smell. It’s not just the old socks smell of Charley’s room. I gag when I pass by Ernessa’s door.
September 23
Being a poet doesn’t impress me. I would rather Mr. Davies was just a plain English teacher. He’s going to teach a poetry writing course next semester. Everyone will read their poems out loud, and the class will comment on them. How awful! Today after class he asked me to stay for a few minutes. I could see Claire burning up. She is completely mad about him and is always hanging around after class to try to talk to him. She has no idea how ridiculous she is. I guess this is what the word “besotted” means. He doesn’t interest me at all. There’s something mushy about him. I wonder if his poems are the same way. He asked me if I wanted to take his poetry class. Everyone has to write something to get into it, but he was sure that I would be good.
“You’re the only one in the class who understands the stories we’re reading,” he said. “The other girls are either bored or confused, or both. Besides, you have the sensibility of a poet. That’s a good start.”
That annoyed me. How does he know what kind of sensibility I have?
He really just wanted to talk about my father, the great poet. He’s trying to find out about my father through me, but I won’t let him. Why should I talk about my father to anyone? Lucy never asks me about that. That’s what I love about her.