by Rachel Klein
I’m jealous of Ernessa. I’m jealous of Lucy’s friendship with her. I’m jealous of her perfect body. I’m jealous of her piano playing. I’m jealous that she’s never afraid. But that doesn’t make her anything more than someone I don’t like. That’s too weak a word. Even hatred is. When I see her with Lucy, she fills me with disgust.
All that I’ve written about Ernessa has ruined this journal. It’s not what I wanted it to be. I’m not the person I wanted to be.
After lunch
I put a strand of garlic around my bed, and I’m burning incense before I go to sleep. It’s worked. I’ve been sleeping much better. If I go back to school, I’ll have to keep doing it. Everyone will think I’m burning incense to cover up the smell of pot.
After dinner
Lucy just called to wish me a Happy New Year. We had a really good talk, finally. There were no closed doors between our rooms. Dora fell from the gutters. It could have happened to any of us. I dreamed the moths. I told her that I was thinking of not coming back to school after vacation. She couldn’t understand why I would do that.
“When we get back, it won’t seem so horrible,” she said. “We will have forgotten about it a bit. I’ve already forgotten about it, just being away from school. It’s beginning to feel like a bad dream. We’ll just get back into our routines. It won’t be the way it was right before vacation, when nobody could think of anything else.”
“I guess,” I said.
“You have to come back,” said Lucy. “I would miss you too much.”
I’m not going to read about vampires anymore. Mr. Davies should have known better than to expose us to things like this, even if he doesn’t believe in them himself.
I could tear out some of the pages and start over again.
January 4
I’ve written much less in my journal over vacation than I thought I would. It wasn’t a bad vacation after all. Tomorrow, school again. I’m going back.
January 8
Girls have moved into Dora’s and Charley’s rooms, and there’s no sign that they were ever on the corridor. Lucy has come down to breakfast and eaten with all of us. The doors between our rooms are open, and she’s been around for quiet hour. Nothing ever happened. She’s trying so hard to be nice to me. We’ve been back for three days now, and I’ve hardly seen Ernessa at all. She hasn’t even come to the Playroom for a smoke. She locks herself up in her room all the time. She probably smokes in there. She knows Mrs. Halton would never dare to bother her. Lucy is avoiding her too, I think. She waits for me now before she goes down to dinner.
It is a new year.
Once I saw a solar eclipse. The sun gradually darkened, until it was like dusk in the middle of the day. I knew that if I looked up at the sun, it would appear dark but it would actually be shining as intensely as ever. Its light would blind me. I had to hold my face between my hands, to keep myself from turning it to the sun. I had been told again and again not to look at it, but I still wanted to. The sun only appeared dark, just as the day only appeared to be night. The black sun burned.
Charley hasn’t written or called at all. I’m almost glad they’re not around anymore and that it’s all over.
January 9
This morning Claire asked me at breakfast if I wanted to go with her to visit Mr. Davies this afternoon. She was going to call him and ask if we could come.
I’d never have the nerve to do something like that. I said I’d come along even though we have exams next week. I’ve already studied a lot. She only asked me because she knows he would never see her alone.
As soon as we got off the train, I wanted to go back to school, but Claire dragged me from the station to his house. It was only a few blocks away. It’s a little white frame house, nothing much. Claire rang the doorbell, and while we waited for someone to answer it, we both burst out laughing, we were so nervous. I’m used to Mr. Davies in school, but I didn’t know what it would be like to be with him in his own house. Maybe he would seem too ordinary.
His wife, Charlotte (we don’t have to call her Mrs. Davies), answered the door. At first she was puzzled to see us there, and we couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell her who we were.
“Mr. Davies –” said Claire.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Nick’s students. He’s expecting you.”
Nick. I know his first name is Nicholas, but Nick is too offhand for him. He must be another person at home.
Charlotte wasn’t what I expected. (I don’t know what I expected. Someone intense, intellectual?) She’s a little chubby but very pretty, with light brown hair, which she wears up in a clip, gray eyes, full pink cheeks. She is always smiling and was incredibly nice to us. Even nicer than Mr. Davies. She served us tea and really good cookies: wafers with caramel filling. I ate too many because I was nervous. When I looked up from my tea, which I had balanced on my lap, Mr. Davies was staring straight at me. He started to laugh – because I ate so many cookies or because I kept spilling my tea? I looked over at Claire, sitting next to me on the sofa (an old sofa from the Salvation Army covered with an India print spread). Her hair was hanging in her eyes, just above her bony nose. Her face is so long and narrow, and her lips are thick and loose. She’s ugly. Mr. Davies could never fall in love with her.
Everything is perfect. His wife works for Planned Parenthood. Claire asked her right away what she does. They have two cats: a calico cat and a gray and white cat. Their house is like a mini-commune. Charlotte’s sister, her husband, and their baby live upstairs. We only saw the baby. They all share the shopping and cooking and cleaning. There’s an old barber chair sitting right in the middle of the living room. It’s so cool. Most of the time, the baby was with us, pulling himself up on the coffee table and taking a bite out of each cookie. No one else from school could understand how wonderful it was. All they understand is a fancy house, a new car, a stereo, nice furniture. …
Do they sit around on Saturday afternoon and have tea and talk about poetry? They probably talk about poetry all the time.
We didn’t talk about poetry. Charlotte wanted to know about school and what it was like to be a boarder.
“How are you girls doing, after what happened at school? Nick told me all about it,” said Charlotte. “It was so sad.”
“What?” asked Claire.
“The accident with your friend,” said Charlotte.
“Oh, that,” said Claire. Charlotte doesn’t understand how quickly everyone manages to forget about unpleasant things at school. “It was extremely traumatic for all of us on the corridor. But we’re trying to put it behind us and get on.”
I let Claire do all the talking. I was happy to observe Charlotte, sitting with her legs tucked up under her and her head resting on her hand. She was so relaxed.
Then she asked us if we missed our families very much. Claire loves to talk about how much she hates her stepfather and how strange it is to go home to North Carolina after being in school up North. How her stepbrothers say things like, “I’m gonna go out and find me a nigger to run over tonight.”
Mr. Davies and Charlotte were both horrified.
“It’s just talk,” said Claire. “They never do anything. They’re stupid teenagers.”
“But that attitude is so disturbing,” said Charlotte. “Those kids will grow up to be racists, like their parents, without thinking about what they’re doing.”
“That’s why I can’t stand it there,” said Claire. “My stepfather’s like that.”
All this is a pose for her. She loves getting so much attention.
It was late, and we had to get back to school. The mini-commune with Salvation Army furniture and the India print spread and the two cats and the baby was so much more real. I used to live a real life at home. How can Mr. Davies stand to come from this to the Residence every morning?
Charlotte went to get our jackets from the closet. While she was carrying them, she dropped my purple scarf, the one my mother gave me over vacation. Mr. Davies pick
ed it up and brought it over to me. He lifted the scarf over my head, wrapped it around my neck, and crossed the two ends in front. He was playful, but his actions were so precise, as if he’d planned each motion in advance. It made me think of a priest or a rabbi performing a ritual. He didn’t let go of the scarf after he had arranged it so carefully. He pulled me toward him. I drew back. He pulled harder. The scratchy wool tightened around my neck, and he smiled, the way he does in class. If he had let go, I would have tipped over backward. He was doing this, in front of everyone, and I felt myself falling into him. It was so hard to hold myself back. The baby had pulled himself onto the sofa, where he sat, staring at us. Charlotte and Claire were standing by the front door, still talking about the South. Charlotte was telling Claire about going to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders when she was in college. I couldn’t listen to them. Mr. Davies’s face was so close to mine that I could feel the humid warmth of his breath against my cheek.
As she closed the door, Charlotte said, “You’re welcome to come back anytime you want. Really. I enjoyed your visit.” But another voice was hidden behind her cheeriness.
Mr. Davies’s voice came from behind her. He sounded just the way he does when he dismisses us from class. “Remember, we’re always here to talk to whenever anything comes up at school.”
Claire and I walked in the cold toward the train station. It was dark out. I was soaked with sweat. The wind blew through my jacket, and I started shivering uncontrollably. Claire couldn’t stop talking. His wife was so nice but she was sort of fat and the house was messy and when she went to the bathroom, she looked into his study and saw the desk where he sat when he composed his poetry and she was going to visit him again and did I want to come?
His house is not the house of a poet.
January 10
Lucy was annoyed with me for going out all afternoon yesterday, so I promised her I would spend Sunday with her. After lunch we rode on the train out into the country and went skating on Crumb Creek. It’s gotten so cold this last week that the creek is frozen. Last year we did this practically every weekend in the winter. We were able to skate quite a ways down the creek. As we glided over the black ice, I looked up at the crisp blue winter sky, and I thought, I should remember this moment. My skates are a bit tight, and my feet ache. My fingers and toes are practically numb, but the sun is so bright that I’m sweating under my jacket. I feel perfectly happy right now.
We came to a bend in the creek, where it gets wider and a steep hill comes right down to the water. On the other side, the bare black branches of weeping willows brush the bank. Two boys were sliding down the hill on pieces of cardboard and what looked like a tray from a cafeteria. We slid down with them a few times, which was pretty hard since we were wearing our skates.
Lucy went down on the cardboard with one of the boys, and they fell off near the bottom. He was lying on top of her, and they stayed like that for a long time, not kissing, just lying together in the snow. When she got up, she was bright red in the face. On the way back, the day already seemed far away.
My mother’s had affairs, even when she was married to my father, I think. She always makes fun of me and asks me when I’m going to get a boyfriend. I keep telling her that no one is ever interested in me at the tea dances. They always want to dance with someone like Lucy, someone with blond hair and pale eyes. “There’s something so passive about her. She’s not quite there,” my mother once said of Lucy. “You’re the real beauty, with your dark hair and lovely skin. One day the boys will grow up, and suddenly they’ll notice you.” It puzzles me when she talks like this.
Besides, the last thing I want is a boyfriend. Last year for the May Dance, Linda Cates set me and Carol up with her younger brother and a friend. I got the friend. I was surprised that Linda asked me. I had no idea why. I’m not at all like Carol, who has thick brownish-blond hair that curls up naturally at the ends and a little upturned nose. I was sure the boys would be sophisticated like Linda, and I was excited for weeks before the dance. Lucy and I went to a fancy shop and picked out a dress of green silk with big pink and yellow flowers. It’s the only long dress I’ve ever worn. The boys arrived for the weekend, and we met them at the train station. My date had a greasy red face, covered with pimples. I could barely stand to look at him. I had absolutely nothing to say to him. We walked from the train station to their hotel, which was about a mile away, and my date carried his suitcase on his head, like a African woman with a basket of fruit. Carol and I kept looking at each other behind their backs and making faces. When they took their suitcases up to their room, we burst out laughing. We had to, otherwise we would have cried at the prospect of two days with them.
When I came to school in ninth grade, I was so excited before the first tea dance with Pottersville. Boys still interested me then. I wore a blue checked dress that I had bought with my mother at Saks. I hadn’t wanted to buy it at the time because I was so annoyed with her for sending me off to school. But I was glad that I was wearing it the night of the dance. I stood with the knot of ninth graders, waiting impatiently for the bus with the boys to arrive. Finally, the boys marched into the dining room and went to stand along the opposite wall, so that we could eye one another across the empty space as they called off the names. Boys and girls would enter that no-man’s-land alone and leave in pairs, matched up by height. They must think it’s important for us to look into each other’s eyes while we dance. It’s an unspoken rule that you have to stay with your assigned date for the first half hour of the dance. After that, you’re free to roam. I heard my name, and then a boy’s name, Matthew something. As I approached him, there was a low murmuring in the room, and all the girls turned to stare at me. Matthew was older, at least a junior, and quite good looking. I had no idea why everyone was giving me dirty looks until Charley managed to whisper in my ear, “Watch out, he’s Jill Ackley’s boyfriend.”
Even I, after only two weeks of school, knew who Jill Ackley was. She was a junior with bleached blond hair and large breasts, pretty much what I imagined the word blond bombshell meant. I looked around the dining room for Jill, but I didn’t see her anywhere. That was why I had ended up with her date tonight. I couldn’t believe my good luck at my first dance. In comparison, all the other girls in my class were with babies.
They all looked at me as if I’d done something horrible, but I didn’t care.
Matthew danced with me all evening.We drank pink punch and ate cookies together. And even though he had a girlfriend, he took me out onto the shadowy porch, where couples went to kiss under the disapproving eyes of the chaperons, and he kissed me.
I don’t know if it was the excitement of having such a nice time at my first tea dance, or the realization that as soon as his girlfriend came back he would forget that I ever existed. But after he had kissed me for a while, and he was just holding me, I leaned forward and bit him on the cheek, just under his eye. His flesh was resistant. My teeth didn’t break the skin. They left a red welt and teeth marks. He pulled back, surprised.
“Hey! What did you do that for?” he asked.
I was so embarrassed I could barely speak. I wanted to run away. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
I don’t know why I did it.
Once when I was little, I ran up to my mother, sitting on the sofa, and sank my teeth into her thigh. I bit her so hard that I drew blood, and she had a bruise there for months. When I raised my head from her leg, I was laughing, and I was shocked to see the tears on her cheeks. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was just so wound up that I didn’t know what to do with my body. It was the same impulse I felt with Matthew.
I never got another good date at a tea dance. I went to a lot last year, and they were all disappointments. I hated even more going to dances at boys’ schools, where all the boys were waiting for the bus to arrive, and we had to walk into the room and suffer their stares.
Last year Lucy had a really nice boyfriend named Juan, whom she met at a St. Andrew’s te
a dance. They were only friends because Lucy was too scared to try anything, but she always had a date for the big dances. He graduated, and this year neither of us has gone to any dances.
January 11
Once I went home with Lucy for the weekend. It was a complete shock.
We arrived at night, and her father wasn’t around. Her mother is incredibly sweet, very much like Lucy. As we drove through the night to her house and I listened to the two of them talking, I found myself wishing that she was my mother. She’s so uncomplicated and straightforward. Lucy can tell her anything. Her mother never criticizes her or makes fun of her, the way my mother does. I never know quite what to expect from her.
Then there’s Lucy’s father. When we came down to breakfast the next morning, her father was sitting at the table in his boxers and an undershirt. The forehead of his fat flushed face was covered with drops of sweat. On the table in front of him, next to the milk and the boxes of cereal, was a rifle. He was bent over it, cleaning it I think. I had never seen a gun before.
He looked over at me without saying a word. Then he took Lucy in his arms and hugged her for a long time and demanded a kiss. I don’t know how she could stand to kiss that steaming red face. After that, he turned to the dog, a little white poodle, on the chair next to him and fed him pieces of bacon. He wheezed while he did it. I could hear each separate breath. I started to count them. He sucked in the air, paused, and then released it, all used up and soiled. When he squeezed it out, he started up again. He was using up the air in the room, and there wouldn’t be any left for us. Finally, he pushed himself up, groaning, took his rifle, and left the room. I was too embarrassed to look at Lucy or to speak. I wanted to tell Lucy that I didn’t care what her father was like, but I couldn’t because she was no longer ordinary, unless a father like that was ordinary. I longed for my father, to show her what a real father was like. I actually felt sorry for her.