by Rachel Klein
She gathered up the bones of me
And tied them in a silken cloth
To lay under the juniper.
Tweet twee, what a pretty bird am I!
I put my hands over my ears, just as I did whenever my father sang that song to me. I used to be relieved that I didn’t have the baby brother I wanted so much. I could never be like Ann Marie and box his ears and see his head fall off and roll over the floor and into the corner. My father would never eat his child and beg for more. My mother would never be a witch.
“Time to free yourself,” she said.
“I am free.”
I expected her to be angry with me for defying her, but she wasn’t.
Ernessa pushed back the heavy wooden chair, and it scraped against the floor, just as it would for a real person. With one long motion, she pulled something out of her pocket and dragged it across her left wrist. She held it out, as if she were offering me something. A moment passed. Nothing happened. Then the skin split open, exposing the red flesh, a laughing mouth of a wound. Blood sprayed out with the force of water from a hose. It splashed over her clothes, fell in pools on the floor, rained down in dark droplets on the table in front of me, over my book and notebook. It kept pouring out. There was no way to stop it.
She reached over and dropped the razor blade on the table. When she stood up straight, she blocked the light coming through the tall windows. The room grew dim for a few seconds; outside, a dense cloud had passed quickly in front of the sun. Her skin absorbed the light spilling over her the way a sponge soaks up liquid. When her body had taken in as much as it could hold, the light passed straight through her flesh and began to dissolve it, from the tips of her fingers up through her hands to her arms. Their shapes lingered in the air, like a faint halo, then vanished along with the blood.
I turned away. I refused to watch the rest. The breasts, the ass, the legs, her face. When I looked back, she was gone among the particles of dust in the air. A fly began to buzz and bang against the glass of the window.
To sublime: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state.
To sublimate: to divert the expression of an instinctual desire or impulse from its primitive form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.
Sublime: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth.
I took the razor blade back to my room. There was no blood on it. I put it in my desk drawer, along with my photographs and letters. I moved the dresser away from the door. It won’t do any good.
April 27
Six A.M.
I am standing under an enormous tree. The trunk is so thick that I can’t get my arms around it. The wind soughs through the treetops, catching on the needles. It sounds like heavy rain, but I am dry. I stretch my head back, but I can’t see to the top of the tree. I count the soft needles in each bundle: five. I examine the long, curved brown cones and the gray, furrowed bark. It is a white pine. I turn to tell my father. He’ll be so pleased that I know.
Lunch hour
During break I snuck into the upper school office and looked through the binder with the schedules of all the girls. I waited outside in the hallway until Miss Weiner left the office. I had to hurry. My hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t turn the pages. She has no classes until eleven every day. She has to show up for assembly before school, but after that, she is free for two and a half hours. That’s when she sleeps. She doesn’t need much sleep.
Quiet hour
All day I walked down the hallways and looked only at the ground directly in front of me. I didn’t want to see him. A meeting of our eyes and he would abandon everything: the cheerful wife who works for Planned Parenthood and went on freedom marches, the gray and the calico cats, the Salvation Army furniture, the baby who watched us from the sofa, his poetry. He would leave it and take me away.
April 28
Lunch hour
After breakfast, while I was making my bed, Mrs. Halton came to my room and told me that I had to see Miss Brody that afternoon, immediately after classes ended. Mrs. Halton talked to me from outside my doorway. She was very careful not to set foot in my room. She looked angry and disgusted. She didn’t bother to hide it.
They’ve been trying to get me to talk to Miss Brody for years, and I’ve always refused. Now they are ordering me. She’s a complete fraud. All she ever does is talk in platitudes about getting in touch with our inner selves, when she has no idea what’s there. Why is she a school psychologist anyway? The only person who likes her is Sofia, who will talk to any adult about her problems. Miss Brody loves it when girls confide in her. She doesn’t really listen to what they say.
Quiet hour
At first, it was pretty much what I expected. Miss Brody wanted me to talk about my father’s suicide, about my unresolved feelings for him. She seemed so eager to hear. How did he do it? “He slit his wrists. Both of them.” How did you feel? “Strange.” There was another woman, wasn’t there? “No.” And who found him? “My mother.” Did you see him? “I was kept away.”
Lies, the truth. She couldn’t tell the difference between the two.
Then she asked me about the other times I’ve seen psychiatrists. The time right after my father died, and the other time, when I was much younger. How does she know about that? My mother would never have told the school. I didn’t want to talk about those things. I’ve told her enough. Let her peep through her own keyholes. I never wanted to talk to the doctors in the first place. I kept saying that I was just anxious, that there was never really anything wrong. But that didn’t satisfy her. She kept asking more questions.
Miss Brody is a thoroughly conventional person. She was wearing black pumps, a navy blue dress with gold buttons, and a blue and gold flowered silk scarf around her neck. Her dark hair is always perfectly in place, and she speaks very slowly and carefully, as if everyone else has trouble understanding the simplest things.
“We have to come to terms with our deepest feelings, to accept them even if they cause us pain. It’s hard work, but it’s the only way we can move beyond them. Otherwise they’ll keep tripping us up again and again.”
But she didn’t really care about feelings and how they “trip you up.”
“It’s come to our attention, actually several girls reported it, that you have done something inappropriate. In fact, unacceptable. You placed some … some excrement outside your roommate’s door. Is this true?”
No one had seen me do this. I was sure of that. It was the middle of the night. And it had barely smelled. It wasn’t noticeable. Just a trace, that was all that was needed. All around the doorway, along the wooden floor, not an inch left untouched. Only someone with an oversensitive sense of smell could detect it. The ammonia they used to clean it up left a worse smell that made everyone hold their noses when they passed Lucy’s room. I looked down and smiled uncomfortably. I wanted to act exactly as she expected me to.
“It was a joke. Between Lucy and me,” I said very softly. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“A joke? What kind of joke could it be?” asked Miss Brody.
“I made a mistake,” I said.
“When you feel those impulses, you must work to sublimate them and behave in a socially acceptable manner.”
Pearl necklaces instead of rosary beads, that’s the school’s real religion. I didn’t tell her that late at night, I had finally realized that only the most extreme actions could save Lucy. And that she would never agree to anything I suggested. How could I live with myself if I was too cowardly to do everything possible to protect her? Even something so repugnant that I couldn’t defile my journal by writing about it. And it worked. For the two days that the barrier remained around her doorway, Lucy was fine. On Monday and Tuesday, she got up in the morning, went to breakfast, went to her classes. She was alive again. No one said anything about how well she looked because they don’t notice when she drags herself through school with sunken eyes and gray skin and uncombed hair.
They never notice anything.
I smiled at Miss Brody and nodded my head in answer to her questions. I admitted my guilt. Why not? I even admitted that I had never really come to terms with my grief for my father. “Grieving is hard work,” she said. “Harder than studying for an exam.” She was talking in a dull, droning voice. I lost interest. My mind started to wander. Then she wasn’t talking about guilt or grieving. “Some people find great joy in the prospect of death,” she said. “Just thinking about it can be a comfort, like lying down in your own bed and pulling up the covers. It’s a liberating experience, not a fearful one. The moment before dying is ecstatic, the most joyful sensation. One is being born into a new existence.” At first, I thought she was joking. I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. But she went on.
“You read a lot. It’s like reading a book and skipping to the end because you can’t wait to find out how it will turn out. The suspense is unbearable. I’m sure you’ve done that sometimes, taken a peek at the ending. What a relief that knowledge can be.”
She paused and said, “What do you think about this, what I’ve been telling you? Does it help?”
I finally looked up. She was sitting sideways, with one side of her face turned to me. I could see the powder covering the pores of her skin, the fine lines emerging around the corner of her mouth, the skin beginning to sag under her chin. She was older than I thought. Then she reached across her desk for a pencil and a pad of paper and turned her other side to me. It was so smooth and pink that it didn’t look like flesh. This face was without a single wrinkle or blemish or hair. It belonged to another person. The sides of her face were completely different, and I couldn’t remember what she looked like in the first place. The left? The right? I couldn’t fix that image in my brain.
“Do you think your conversation the other day with Mr. Davies was simply an expression of deep-seated fears? You don’t really believe what you told him, do you?” asked Miss Brody.
“I don’t believe any of it,” I muttered. “I was upset. Like everyone else here. There’s nothing the matter. Really.”
“I’ll talk to the doctor about this. Maybe Valium would help you to calm down, to get you through this difficult period.”
How could I defend myself if I no longer had any secrets? I only wanted to get out of there, away from Miss Brody, to get the two sides of her face to come back together, for everything to look normal again. I was excused. I ran up to my room, got into bed, pulled the covers up over my head, and put my pillow over them. I was beyond trembling and crying. I was frozen.
April 29
Lunch hour
I have detention for one month: no more weekend privileges. Mrs. Halton told me this morning after breakfast. She smiled while she spoke and then added, “Consider yourself lucky, young lady. You got off easily. You seem to want to add to the misery at our school.”
Everyone is avoiding me, even Sofia in her nice way. I can feel it. They all know what happened, but they won’t say a thing. Of course, they are disgusted. One good thing, though, they’ve suddenly forgotten about Mr. Davies and Miss Bobbie. It’s all me.
Sofia has finally managed to lose weight, the twenty pounds that dimpled her thighs. She’s gone on some kind of macrobiotic diet, and she eats nothing but toasted brown rice, which she cooks in the kitchen on weekends. After a month of that, she’s lost her appetite. So now she’s thin, the way she’s always wanted to be. She looks gaunt and anxious.
This morning, again, I couldn’t get Lucy out of bed. I gave up and went down to breakfast by myself.
“What’s with you?” asked Kiki.
I looked up, surprised that someone was talking to me.
“Me?” I asked.
Everyone’s gaze was fixed on me, even though I wasn’t doing anything. There used to be a girl called Margaret Rice who walked around as stiff as a board. She always looked straight ahead, with the same blank expression on her face. I never saw her speak to anyone else. I never saw her smile. We used to call her the Zombie. Now I’m the Zombie.
“You’ve been staring at your coffee for at least ten minutes,” said Kiki. “Drink it already.”
“I was thinking about Lucy,” I said, encouraged to speak because of Kiki’s attention. “She’s acting the way she did before she got really sick. She’s too exhausted to get out of bed in the morning, even though she’s slept for hours and hours. Someone needs to call her mother.”
“Oh, drop it,” said Kiki. “She seems fine to me. She can call her own mother if she wants to.”
“But she doesn’t realize how sick she is. She looks so awful.”
“Leave her alone. She can take care of herself,” said Carol. “Now she’s got a great bod. Not an ounce of fat. Even her little belly is gone. I wish I looked like her.”
I looked into that circle of annoyed faces. They have no idea that something terrible is about to happen. Or they already know. They are willing to sacrifice Lucy to protect themselves.
I wish, for once, someone else would mention Lucy’s name first. Those two syllables, Lu-cy. I only want to hear another girl talk about her in front of me, say her name like a charm to ward off spirits. They used to look at me first for approval when they talked about her. She belonged to me more than to anyone else.
I got up and took my coffee cup to the cart and dropped it in. The brown liquid splashed everywhere. All those eyes turned to stare at my back as I walked away. The Zombie.
When I got back upstairs, it was almost time for the last bells, and Lucy was still in bed. I left her alone, just as they told me to. Let her get into trouble for missing assembly. Let her get angry at me.
Everyone abandons me in the end. My mother and father were too wrapped up in themselves. All those indistinguishable gray ladies who are supposed take care of us at school. My teachers. Miss Brody, the confessor. Even Mr. Davies, the poet, who I thought was different from all the rest. The eyes of all those stupid girls follow me everywhere.
Study hour
After Greek I had tea with Miss Norris. She could tell that I didn’t want to go back to my room. She invited me to spend quiet hour in her apartment. I ran down to my room and got some books. I wish I could move into her room. I love her.
During tea, I talked to her a little bit about Lucy. She kept nodding her head while I spoke. She knows Lucy. I brought her once to have tea with Miss Norris. I wanted to show Lucy the birds. She was concerned about Lucy.
Then I told her that Ernessa is a bad influence on Lucy. She encourages her not to take care of herself. To ruin her health.
“That girl came to see me once, in the beginning of the year,” she said. “Her Greek is very good. I told her that I had nothing to teach her in that regard. But if she wanted to read the Greek historians, we could. She turned up her nose at that.”
“I’m afraid of what she’s doing to Lucy. Lucy’s too weak to stand up to her. She doesn’t think she’s sick. All the girls keep telling me not to interfere. That it’s none of my business.”
“You have to follow your instincts. You are a good person. Do what you think is right. Ignore what the others say. They will never listen. The opinion of the crowd is often evil, and, as Sophocles says, ‘Nothing evil ever dies.’”
Today we started translating a passage from the Odyssey. It was too hard for me. Miss Norris did most of the translating. Odysseus calls up the ghosts from the underworld and gives them the blood of black rams. He pours it into a deep trench, so that they can recover the power of speech. I have the English translation with me. The meeting with his dead mother was just as I might have written it.
I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,
and tried three times, putting my arms around her,
but she went shifting through my hands, impalpable
as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.
Now this embittered all the pain I bore,
and I cried in the darkness:
“O my mother, will
you not stay, be still, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well,
hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears?”
Everything is unfair. The body and spirit separate and disappear, like mist. There is no way to hold on to either one or to reunite them. How I’ve longed to fling my arms around my father and give him back the power of speech, but even in my dreams, he always drifts away without saying anything.
April 30
After dinner
I had a huge fight with Lucy, and I am finally free. Free of the dream of a perfect friendship. I never wanted it to come true. I wanted it to remain a dream and vanish the way dreams do. One day I would find I no longer dreamed about the girl in the light blue room. I had some other dream.
During quiet hour, I went into her room. She was lying on her bed, her eyes half-closed. She doesn’t have the strength to open them or to close them. I sat on the edge of the bed and pushed the hair off her forehead, the hair that’s as smooth as metal. Her skin was moist with sweat, and loose strands stuck to it. She tried to smile.
“Lucy, I know you’re getting sick again. I’m worried. I need to call your mother.”
“I’m not sick, really. I know I’m not sick. It’s something else. It makes me seem sick, but I’m not.”
“Don’t you want to leave here? To get away from this place? Don’t you want your mother to come get you?”
“No. I’m not afraid. You can’t call her. She’d come right away. In the middle of the night.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you want to believe I’m still the old Lucy. That’s the sad thing. You were friends with the old Lucy, not with me. You don’t care about the new one, the real Lucy. You don’t even want to know her.”