by Rachel Klein
“You girls ain’t allowed down there, ’specially with it overrun with vermin like it is. I put down traps and poison. You go tell your friends to stay out.”
I can’t get his speech right. I always feel embarrassed when I talk to him because I can’t understand half of what he’s saying. I keep having to ask him, “What? What?” He used to be the only man in school before Mr. Davies came. (Except for Bob, and no one ever sees him, except when they sneak into the kitchen at night.) I’m probably the only girl who has ever talked to him. The other girls don’t think he’s a person; he’s a janitor. They’re a little afraid of him, not because he is a man but because he’s black with frizzled gray hair.
I wouldn’t set foot down there.
November 13 (Friday)
Today we had an interesting discussion in English class, for a change. Because it’s Friday the thirteenth? Actually, it turned into a conversation between Mr. Davies and me since everyone else was too bored to pay attention. They were perfectly happy to whisper or pass notes. Claire just stared at Mr. Davies. After class, Claire was waiting for me in the hallway. She started up again, “You’re always monopolizing Mr. Davies’s attention. No one else has a chance to get a word in.”
I just walked away without bothering to answer her. What an idiot she is. Nobody’s stopping her from talking in class. If she’d done the reading instead of spending her time smoking dope with Ernessa and Charley and fantasizing about having sex with Mr. Davies, she might have something to say.
Mr. Davies started by asking the class if we found the character Carmilla to be convincing. “Does she fill you with dread and fascination?”
All the girls laughed out loud. Mr. Davies got very red in the face. Why ask them? They only know clothes and boys and makeup. They’d love to talk about that. Besides, they probably haven’t read the story. Someone had to say something. I said that I started to believe in the character when the writer realized what she was.
Mr. Davies looked puzzled.
“When the character he had created became real to him, the rest of the story did too,” I explained.
“In other words, you agree with Coleridge about the poet’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’”
“I don’t mean suspending anything. I mean creating something that exists, just the way everything in this room exists. Bringing it to life.”
“It’s a symbolic story,” said Mr. Davies. “That’s the point. Not whether things are real, but what they mean.”
I realized what he was trying to do. He wanted to convince me that the supernatural doesn’t exist. The whole point of the course is that it’s just a figment of the writer’s imagination, an expression of his subconscious. Like a dream. Or memories. My father would have understood me. He would have agreed that, fundamentally, Mr. Davies has no imagination. I had to answer him.
“I’m not interested in symbols,” I said. “I’m interested in what’s real, even if it doesn’t look real. I want to know what it’s like to be Carmilla. Does she ever suffer? Is it boring to live forever? What is it like to remember your own death? Things like that. Don’t you want answers? Doesn’t anyone else want answers?”
I looked around the room, and all those girls were looking back at me and smirking. They had the smug look of girls who don’t care about anything.
They follow the second hand as it sweeps around the clock, waiting for the loud clang of the bell to release them. They jump up from their chairs and run out of the room and never give any of this another thought, except maybe to comment, “She’s really weird, isn’t she?”
November 16
I’m sick of writing about them in my journal. They take up space that doesn’t belong to them. I don’t like Ernessa. I don’t even know if I like Lucy anymore.
We were in the Playroom after dinner having a smoke. Sofia was lying on the sofa with her head on my lap because she felt so awful. She’s practically hemorrhaging from cramps. She gets up at night and has diarrhea and then has to vomit. The other night she woke me up in the middle of the night, and I stayed with her for hours while she sat on the toilet. The nurse says she’ll have to have tests if it doesn’t get better. Sofia’s scared of all the blood, but she’s even more scared of going to the hospital. Lucy came over to give her a hug, and of course Ernessa was with her.
“This really is a curse,” moaned Sofia. “Do I have to go through this for another thirty years just so I can have sex?”
“You can have sex anytime,” said Ernessa. “This is so you can make babies.”
Everyone groaned.
When Ernessa came near Sofia, I thought Ernessa was going to retch. She hurried back to the other side of the room and sat by herself with her cigarette until the bells rang. Lucy kept looking over at her. To see if she was all right? She wasn’t the one paralyzed by cramps. Ernessa turned herself into a column of smoke. The rest of us went up together, and she waited until we left the room before she came up.
I won’t say anything to Lucy and get her more annoyed at me. She’ll tell me to stop obsessing about Ernessa, the way I obsessed about my diet last year. Every time I bring up Ernessa, no matter what I say, Lucy gets all huffy and says she doesn’t want to talk about her. She acts as if I never talked about anything else.
I bet Ernessa hasn’t had her period yet and the whole thing grosses her out, like eating and “becoming a woman,” as they say in health class. She barely has any tits anyway. She’s even more flat-chested than Lucy, who basically has little bumps with swollen nipples. Even Charley is more developed than Ernessa, and I know she has her period.
I got my period for the first time a few months after I came here. I had just turned fourteen. I didn’t tell my mother until I came home for spring break.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to get your period because you were so traumatized by everything that’s happened in the last year,” said my mother. “How do you feel?”
I didn’t answer her.
“Grown up?” she asked.
“Daddy only knew me as a girl,” I said. “He wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said my mother.
“Are you the only one who can talk like that?” I asked.
She went into her studio, closed the door, and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. I don’t know why I had to hurt her. I’ve always been so careful not to talk about Daddy.
I actually don’t mind that I have breasts and pubic hair and my period. It doesn’t mean that I’m a woman. It means I’m just like the other girls. I understand Sofia. Sometimes when I have my period, I bleed so much that I can’t believe there’s any blood left to circulate through my body. It’s violent. My body is still revolting against this.
November 17
She’s insinuated herself into this journal the way she’s insinuated herself into Lucy’s life. I can’t stop it. It’s not supposed to be about her. It’s supposed to be about school, my friends, my teachers, my books.
She was waiting for me. I had come through the doorway on the ground floor of the Residence this morning, when I heard the sound of someone playing the piano. I looked down the long hallway, and the doors to all the practice rooms were shut. The music was coming from the room I always use. That’s the best piano, and I’m used to it. It’s mine. Then I realized that the person was playing my Mozart sonata, in F, the one I worked on last year. I struggled so much with the allegro. I’ve only been happy with the way I’ve played it a few times, and I played it for almost a year. It’s partly the piano. I always play better at home. But the piano wasn’t causing any trouble this time. She was playing the allegro so precisely that it sounded like a military march. She never faltered; each note was perfect. I waited until she finished playing the first movement.
When I pushed open the door to the room, she barely acknowledged my presence. There was no music on the stand. I thought I was going to cry. It was a huge joke on me.
“I didn’t know you played the pian
o,” I said. I forced myself not to run away, to pretend that what was happening was perfectly normal.
“I hardly ever play anymore,” she said.
“But you play incredibly well.”
“My father was a musician,” she said. “I inherited everything from him. Just as you did from your father.”
“I didn’t inherit anything from my father,” I said.
I had the feeling that Ernessa didn’t want me to go. She wanted to talk to me some more. About our fathers. She wanted me to stay. I closed the door on her and ran away. She started to play the adagio as soon as I left the room. I didn’t want to hear her play it. The music followed me down the hallway. She was playing lightly, clearly, exactly the way Miss Simpson tells me to. The allegro has too much momentum. Once I start, it carries me breathlessly to the end. I don’t understand anything about it except its motion. I don’t know where it’s going. The adagio is different. I place my hands on the keys, and the music rises out of them and guides my fingers. It’s beckoning me on to a hidden place. I’m walking through the woods, and in the distance I can see an open meadow where the sun pours down on the tall grasses. I move toward it, pause, turn around to see where I’ve come from, continue down the path, start to skip along. The light draws me on.
It’s impossible for that crummy old piano to sound like that. Maybe I continued to play the sonata in my head as I walked away. I’ll never be able to play Mozart like that if I practice until I die.
Why does she want to take everything away from me?
November 18
What’s really real about people? Is there a kernel of “realness” that remains no matter what? Someone like Claire is totally fake. She pretends to be liberated and smokes pot all the time, but she’s going to become just like her mother – with a husband, kids, two cars, a nice suburban house, TV and stereo, etc., etc. She can’t escape it. She’s the kind of person who will laugh at the pictures of herself as a schoolgirl because she won’t recognize the person staring back at her. (An image of the wrong moment?) But you can be fake on a deeper level than that, where everything about you can change from one minute to the next. Like an onion, you peel away layer after layer until nothing is left. Maybe it’s not even your fault.
When Annie Patterson stopped eating, she became a totally new person. There was a just enough left of her old self that each time you looked at her, you noticed how different she was. It wasn’t just her looks. She herself changed. She became frightened. She was hunched over. She looked smaller, like an injured bird. There’s nothing more pathetic than a bird lying on the ground, flapping its wings, without any hope of lifting itself into the air. By the time she left school, she could barely hold her arms up. She spoke in a whisper. Before she had always seemed so big and happy, but there was an incredibly sad person inside. Which one was real? Even when I feel sad, I never feel as if the sadness has taken over everything. There is always a tiny part of me that’s untouched, that I can return to.
My father loved to read me fairy tales about people turning into trees and lions and birds and caterpillars, about people coming back from the dead. People never grew old when they were under a spell, so if the prince was happy being a tree, he could live that way forever. When I was little, I didn’t like to hear these stories, even though the prince always turned back into a prince, found his princess, became a king, and lived happily ever after. I would yell at my father to stop reading and pull the covers over my head. He always laughed at me and kept right on reading.
November 20
I have been really good about not talking about Ernessa and trying to ignore her, but I can’t escape her.
This morning after practicing the piano, I went to lunch the back way by Miss Rood’s apartment. I didn’t notice Ernessa until she was right next to me. I’m sure she should have been in class. She’s never in school at the right time, and no one but me seems to notice. I don’t understand how she gets away with it, day after day. She always has an excuse.
Pater ran up to the glass door of the apartment and began hurling himself against it and barking like mad. Sometimes he does that when I walk by, but today he was totally crazed. We both looked through the glass doors, hung with long velvet curtains tied back with thick cords, down the dim hallway at the heavy, dark furniture and the crimson-patterned rug. Then we looked at each other and began to laugh. Neither of us could help it.
“That dog is nuts,” I said, surprised to find myself laughing with Ernessa. “He’s going to smash through the glass.”
“I hate that yapping,” she said. “The sound drives me crazy. I really can’t bear it.” She wasn’t exactly talking to me.
There was a light behind us, and our faces were reflected in the glass, floating above the yapping dog, whose brown fur reminds me of Miss Rood’s hair. For the first time, I realized, with a shock, how much we resemble each other. I guess that’s not so surprising. We’re both Eastern European Jews, the only two real Jews in the class. (Dora doesn’t count.) We have curly black hair, large noses, dark dark eyes. I’ve never really thought about whether or not I’m pretty because the boys at the tea dances are never interested in me. I always have to be “fixed up” with a date. They think Lucy is pretty. But you can’t forget Ernessa’s face. The other girls look washed out when they are around her. Even Lucy.
Now I understand why Betsy thought that Ernessa and I would hit it off together. She made that comment the first week of school. We were the same type. I thought she said that because Ernessa is smart. She meant Jewish, as in you’re the same type of creature from another planet. That’s the kind of thing a day student would say, which is why I have nothing to do with any of them. Actually, the day students are much worse than the boarders. They like to make jokes about Jews. Why do Jews have such big noses? The air’s free. Why did the Jews wander in the desert for forty years? Someone dropped a quarter. Then they pretend to be embarrassed when they see me staring at them. I’m not afraid to stare at them. They’re too stupid to know what they’re saying; they’re just copying their parents. They nudge each other and giggle together. They try to be cute. I hate that word. Cute. It’s so insipid. In the end, they get annoyed when I won’t stop staring at them. I have no right to stare. “Take a picture. It’ll last longer.”
I never heard an anti-Semitic remark until I came to this school. In almost two years, Miss Rood has never spoken a word to me. I’ve never sat at her table for dinner, but I’ve been at every other table. I’m the smartest girl in my class, but she never asks me what college I want to go to. She tolerates me. I suppose my mother would have sent me to another school if I’d asked her to. But after I became friends with Lucy, I stayed.
It’s been my fault all along with Ernessa because I was jealous of her and Lucy. Maybe we could have gotten along from the beginning. Maybe we are the same “type.”
November 21
My father was sitting on my bed. He was reading me a story. I was lying on my side, following the words on the page. The book was thick, with the title in gold and black letters on a silky turquoise cover. The pages were so thin that the type came through on the other side. It was my father’s book from when he was a little boy.
“Once upon a time a poor Servant Girl was traveling with her boxes through a wood, and just as she got to the middle of it she found herself in the power of a murdering band of robbers. …”
“Why did they rob a poor servant girl?” I asked my father. “She probably had nothing to give them.”
My father didn’t answer. He kept on reading. “‘What shall I do now, a poor servant girl like me; I can’t find my way out of the wood; nobody lives here, and I must perish with hunger.’”
“How did she get lost? She knew where she was going before the robbers came. Don’t read anymore if it’s going to be like this. I don’t want to hear this story.”
My father was not reading the words in the book. Or I could see through the page and couldn’t tell which side he was reading. Th
e story went on. The servant girl, in despair, placed herself in God’s hands. At that very moment, a white pigeon flew by and saved her. With a magic key, he gave her food, clothes, a place to sleep. The little servant girl lived happily in the forest. Then one day the white pigeon asked her for a favor. Would she go to a little cottage and steal a gold ring away from an old woman? “With all my heart,” she answered. The girl went straight away to the cottage, but before she had a chance to steal the gold ring, the old woman ran out the door with a birdcage in her hand. The girl ran after the old woman. You could see the gold ring in the beak of a green bird. The bird was holding on to it, very tightly. You ran for a long time after the old woman. You couldn’t catch her even though you were young and strong and the woman was old and bent. No matter how hard you pushed yourself, the old woman always managed to remain a few steps ahead of you, taunting you with the caged bird. You moved your legs up and down, but you didn’t go forward. Finally, you caught up to the old woman, you reached out your hand and touched the bars of the cage, but the old woman ran around a bend in the path and disappeared from sight.
“That’s not the way the story ends,” I shouted at my father. “I know how it’s supposed to go. The servant girl gets the gold ring. She saves the prince, who had been turned into a tree by an evil witch. Every day he became a white pigeon for a few hours. As long as the witch had the ring, he couldn’t turn back into a man. All his servants and horses had also been turned into trees. The servant girl freed the whole forest. And she married the prince and became a princess. It always ends that way.”