by Monica Nolan
She found Norine and thanked her for the pleasant time they’d spent together. Lon had long since disappeared. When she returned to Enid, she discovered the Math Mistress chatting with Miss Watkins and Netta as if they were old friends. Netta seemed delighted that Bobby and Enid knew each other. “How ideal!” She beamed. “Bobby, I hope to see you again soon, either here or at Metamora. Hoppy and I are going to have a real powwow about our socioeconomic exchange idea.”
“Good-bye, Bobby, good-bye, Enid,” Miss Watkins chimed in. “Enid, you can’t deny Spindle-Janska. I’m calling my contact at Business Machine Corporation tomorrow!”
“How do you know them?” Bobby demanded as they walked along the dark, deserted street. Bobby zipped her jacket up to her chin against the icy dampness.
“In the gay life, everyone knows everyone, haven’t you learned that?” Enid said haughtily, wrapping a scarf around her throat.
“This was my first time at a place like the Knock Knock,” Bobby admitted.
Enid relented. “Miss Watkins was my guidance counselor in high school, and coincidentally, Netta is going with Lois Lenz, a high school classmate. She was telling me that Lois is doing very well, working as a private secretary to a top advertising executive. Apparently she foiled some scheme—”*
Bobby was interested in Enid, not this friend of Netta’s. “What did Miss Watkins mean, ‘You can’t deny Spindle-Janska’?” she interrupted.
“Oh—that.” Enid grew thoughtful. “Miss Watkins was telling me this teaching job is a big mistake. She said my Spindle-Janska Personality Penchant Assessment showed that I should be in a job where I work solely with data, not people.”
“But you know so much about teaching. The Spindle-Janska must be wrong!”
“Bobby.” Enid stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put her hands on her hips. “I’m a terrible teacher! You must be the only person in the faculty lounge at Metamora who hasn’t figured this out. I can’t keep discipline. Half of my third formers still can’t solve a basic quadratic equation. I simply haven’t your knack with adolescent girls! I don’t even like them, most of the time.”
She began to walk briskly, and Bobby hurried to catch up, trying to absorb this additional reversal of the Enid she thought she knew.
“The only reason I took this job was to save on living expenses. I need every dime I can get for graduate school—I want to study advanced probability theory, not drone on about basic math. That’s why I go out with Rod so much. We’ve been entering dance contests, for prize money.”
Bobby spotted a little bean wagon through the mist of the waterfront, the lit window like a warm beacon in the chill. “I sure could go for a hot dog,” she murmured. She needed sustenance to help her take in all this new information, and the bowl of chili she’d had earlier that evening seemed very far away. “How about you?”
They each ordered a hot dog, piled high with sauerkraut, pickle relish, mustard, and catsup. After they’d munched a few minutes in silence, Bobby said, “So what happened to you with gym teachers in adolescence? Was it that teacher who made you run laps?” Enid sure can hold a big grudge over a little mandatory physical exertion, Bobby thought.
“No, it was her student teacher. When I was fifteen I developed a huge crush on Miss Schack, who came to Walnut Grove that year.” Enid’s expression grew dreamy. “She had short brown hair and blue eyes, and I loved the way her biceps bulged when she demonstrated rope climbing. I quit the math club that semester to join the Hi-Y Safety Squad she moderated.”
“Well, what was the matter with that?”
A note of bitterness crept into Enid’s voice. “As it turned out, she was carrying on with the captain of the swim team! A whole semester doing duck-and-cover drills, and for what? She was never going to notice a greasy grind like me. And even if she had, what was the probability of such a mismatch lasting? When I want to pair up—and I’m too busy for that right now—I’ll do it based on logical criteria of shared characteristics. Meanwhile, I just have to get over this unfortunate fixation I have. I’m looking into psychoanalysis.”
“What’s on this logical criteria list?” Bobby asked with interest. “What kind of girl rates with you?”
“Well, first of all, she must share my basic values, background, and goals,” Enid declared.
Bobby nodded. That’s what Adolescent Development Patterns said too.
“Shared intellectual interests are important.” Enid continued to tick off items. “She must like to read, prefer foreign films to musicals, and have a good sense of humor. In addition, she should be a good cook, have a car—”
“What should she look like?” Bobby interrupted.
“Oh, tall and strong, kind of outdoorsy, with greenish gray eyes, high cheekbones, and—” Enid caught herself. “Actually, looks don’t matter to me. Or they won’t after I get over this—this odd attraction I have.”
Bobby tried to picture Enid’s ideal girl but the best she came up with was a cross between that actor from Rawhide and Miss Watkins. “Can you really be so calculated about love?” she asked.
“I think so,” Enid replied, wiping mustard from the corner of her mouth. “But I’m betting you disagree, right?” She wadded up the napkin and threw it away.
“I generally go after girls without thinking at all,” Bobby admitted.
As they walked to the train station, Bobby wondered if Enid had the right idea. If not for her ban on gym teachers as mates, they probably would have ended up in bed together and Bobby would have had nothing more than another notch on her belt. Instead, Bobby felt they might be friends. She’d never had a friend who wasn’t a teammate. It made her feel hopeful, as if her development wasn’t arrested after all.
“It’s funny,” Bobby thought aloud. “I always thought you had the teaching part of the job solid, and it turns out you don’t even like it! And Rod—I was so sure the two of you were for real.” She remembered that night she’d seen the two of them going down the stairs to Francine’s and the bitter twist of jealousy in her stomach. “It’s like the fellow said,” Bobby observed wisely. “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Well, if you’re going to make the gay scene, you’ll have to learn what to look for, how to identify other women like yourself.”
“There’s a method?” Bobby asked eagerly.
“Of course!” Enid was the knowledgeable instructor again. “Sometimes women wear a green handkerchief on the second Wednesday of the month; or they might mention liking Alexis Smith—”
“Who?”
“Or the movie Young Man with a Horn—”
“What?”
“Or if they’re thick as thieves for no good reason, like Dot Driscoll and Mona.”
“Really?” I told Elaine they were playing for our team, she thought triumphantly.
They were approaching the train station now, and as they reached the top of the stairs leading down to the waiting room, Enid added, “And of course that’s why Miss Craybill is crazy with grief over Miss Froelich’s falling to her death.”
Without warning the flight of steps swung around and upside down, like a crazy kaleidoscope, and Bobby grabbed the brass banister to keep from falling. Through the pounding in her ears, she heard Enid’s alarmed voice. “Bobby, are you all right? Can I do anything? Do you want to sit down?”
“Help me down the stairs,” Bobby croaked. She closed her eyes and tried to slow her panicked breathing as Enid slipped her arm around the stricken teacher’s waist and helped her down the marble steps. At the bottom, Bobby opened her eyes. Enid’s dark eyes were wide behind her glasses.
“Can you walk, Bobby? They’re calling the Muskrat River Local.”
“I’m fine,” she answered as the dizziness subsided. She felt embarrassed as they hurried toward platform 8. The big train station was empty at this time of night; the jumble of track announcements echoed hollowly and incoherently around her. Enid followed her onto the car without speaking, but once the tickets were co
llected, she leaned forward. “Have you always had such severe vertigo, Bobby?” There was scientific curiosity in her voice, but sympathy in her eyes.
“No, it only started this past spring, after I had a fall.” Bobby leaned back, grateful for the support of her seat. “But I don’t want to bore you with my problems. Tell me more about ‘making the gay scene.’”
Enid was not distracted. “You won’t bore me. I’d like to help.” She leaned forward and there was that look in her eyes that had been there the night Bobby changed the fuse in Manchester. Bobby sat up, but Enid drew back immediately. And Bobby leaned back, reminding herself again that she didn’t need any more flings.
“It sounds like you’re suffering from a psychological block of some sort that would benefit from what analysts call the ‘talking cure,’” Enid continued analytically. “Have you ever told anyone about this?”
“Not really,” Bobby admitted. Of course Chick knew, and Pat, and the twins. But she’d never told anyone the whole story of that night. “I thought if I did some exercises…”
“Bobby, you can’t solve mental problems with calisthenics,” Enid told her firmly.
Why not tell Enid? Bobby reflected. She did seem to have some experience with deep-seated neuroses.
“Well, it was last May, just before finals,” the young phys ed instructor began. “We’d wrapped up the softball season with a victory over the Weslington Wolves, and we were celebrating at The Old Crow—a pub where we used to go after games to drink a few beers.
“It was a hot night. You know how hot it can get in Bay City? Pat—she’s our goalie on the Spitfires, I mean she was—Pat said how great it would feel to go for a swim. Then Frieda—she wasn’t a team member, but she came to all the games, to cheer us on—she said couldn’t I do something, seeing as I was the captain.”
“She had a yen for you,” Enid guessed.
Bobby didn’t want to brag. “Oh, I don’t know. She was pinned to a Sigma Tau boy.” Briefly, Bobby wondered why it was that fraternity pins had never gotten in the way of fun in college the way engagements did in the real world. “She was an art history major,” Bobby added irrelevantly.
“Go on,” urged Enid.
“Of course, the gym’s pool was closed at that time of night, but I happened to have the keys. I was Coach Mabel’s right-hand man, and besides, I’d been doing a special project, a history of the development of gym equipment. So…I guess I wanted to show off a little, and I said I’d give us a pool party.”
“Normal college hijinks,” Enid observed a little enviously. “Of course, I had to study all the time to keep up my scholarship.”
“We all trooped over to the gym, me, Pat, Chick, this girl Frieda, and the rest of the team. Chick brought along a dozen bottles of beer. I was a little worried about what Coach Mabel might say, but I’d earned my Red Cross Lifesaving Certificate the summer before, so I told myself it was the same as if a lifeguard was on duty. Besides, we were all athletes. We knew how to take care of ourselves.”
Bobby paused, remembering how still the water of the pool had been, like a sheet of glass, until Pat shattered it with a cannonball; and how they’d left the light off, so as not to attract attention, and the way the moonlight streamed in through the big windows overlooking the empty tennis courts, making their bodies glow a luminous white.
“We didn’t have our suits, so we went skinny-dipping. It’s a great sensation. We had our beers lined up along the edge of the pool, and you had to take a swallow every time someone did a perfect swan dive. Frieda was swimming in her underwear—she said she wasn’t used to swimming in the raw, but after a couple beers and everybody teasing her…”
This was the part that was blurry in Bobby’s brain. She tried to remember every detail. “I was up on the dive, and I heard her say, ‘Oh, all right, I’ll take off my bra.’ And then somehow I slipped and fell off the dive. I hit the edge of the pool and I broke my collarbone, my right humerus, and—”
“Just a moment,” Enid interrupted. “You left something out—you were trying to get an eyeful of this art student!”
“No, no!” protested Bobby. “It was just the beers I’d drunk, and her voice distracting me, right when I was about to dive!”
“Oh, Bobby.” Enid was laughing. “Your psychological block is quite simple. You associate your desire to look at a girl undressing with the physical pain and injury resulting from your fall. If only you’d been in the library looking at pictures of classical statues like me instead of on the high dive, none of this would have happened.”
Bobby blinked. Was it really so simple? Suddenly she could see Frieda, reaching behind her back to undo the clasp of her bra. Had that picture been in her subconscious all this time?
“I hope you got a good look, at least,” Enid was following her own train of thought. “The little exhibitionist! I know the type.”
“No, she was just a sweet kid,” protested Bobby weakly. “Although I did think she could have come to see me in the hospital. That’s when the dreams started.”
“Tell me about these dreams,” Enid ordered her.
Bobby told her about the mysterious girls who led her off the cliff. She didn’t mention that sometimes her dreams featured Enid in that sinister role.
“Well, that clinches it, doesn’t it? You have a guilt complex. You desire a woman, yet secretly fear pain, perhaps rejection. That’s why they always lead you off a cliff.”
“Really?” Have I been desiring Enid all semester? Bobby wondered.
The train swayed past the outer suburbs of Bay City, big houses nestled among tall trees. The stars were visible in the sky. “It would be nice not to have those dreams anymore,” Bobby remarked. “They’ve been getting stranger. Sometimes the girl’s on a bicycle, and I’m following her through the Metamora woods.”
Enid eyed her narrowly. “Is it a glowing bicycle?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Breakdown
“You’ve seen it too!” exclaimed Bobby. “The ghostly rider on the glowing bicycle!”
“I’ve seen something,” Enid corrected her. “But it’s not a ghost. It must be a student who’s somehow managed to get hold of some phosphorescent paint.”
Phosphorescent paint? Was the explanation as simple as that? Bobby felt foolish for not thinking of the possibility sooner. “Of course,” she said. “A phosphorescent adolescent. It certainly fooled me, all the same. When did you see it?”
“The first time was the night of your game with that Catholic school. I’d slipped out to the quad for a cigarette, and I saw it for just a second, entering the woods. Then a week or so later, I saw it again, this time from one of Manchester’s third-floor turrets. It was quite late—I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to escape that cooped-up feeling dorm life gives me. The night was clear and the moon was bright. I saw the bicycle coming from the woods, heading toward the quadrangle. I ran down the stairs, but when I rushed out into the quadrangle, the bicycle was gone.”
Bobby was thinking hard. Was it a coincidence that the glowing cyclist appeared the same day the Savages competed in a field hockey match?
“I saw the cyclist the night of the Metamora–St. Margaret Mary’s game too,” she told Enid. “Only it was coming from the woods, after midnight, and it disappeared before it reached the quadrangle. Do you think this bicyclist is making round trips—maybe to Mesquakie Point and back?”
“But why?” wondered Enid. “At night the gift shoppe, the information booth, the replica cabin—they’re all shut down. It would be deserted. What would be the point?” A thought struck her. “Unless Linda—”
“Linda wouldn’t go alone,” Bobby objected. The amoeba of an idea—a crazy, way-out idea—was wiggling around in her head. “And honestly, I can’t see any student sneaking out repeatedly, for so many hours, after lights-out, without getting caught!”
“You think it’s a teacher?” Enid laughed, and then stopped, when Bobby just looked at her. “You could be right,” she said s
lowly.
“The night I saw it coming out of the woods,” Bobby said, “it disappeared behind Kent!”
“You don’t think it’s Miss Craybill!” Enid looked horrified. “I know she’s been acting strangely, but—”
“She’s the most logical person,” Bobby pointed out. “She lives alone in Kent, so no one would see her come and go. I imagine there’s scads of space to hide a glowing bicycle in that building. And as everyone knows, she can’t forget Miss Froelich!”
“But why? Why bicycle to Mesquakie Point and back in an academic robe, on a glowing bicycle?”
“Why dig up the pansies around the sundial? Why chase after every nuthatch that flies by? Why spend the school’s first hockey game poking under the bleachers?”
They sat for a while in silence, a silence broken only by the lonely sound of the Local’s whistle as it racketed past the empty fields. Although she’d chalked up the midnight rides to Miss Craybill’s eccentricities, Bobby couldn’t help wondering if there was some darker explanation for the Headmistress’s visits to Mesquakie Point. Was Miss Craybill hiding some sinister relic of Miss Froelich in the replica cabin? Bobby discarded the idea, only to be seized by another, more frightening one. What if Miss Craybill was possessed? It would certainly explain her strange behavior. Yet again, why would the spirit of Miss Froelich drive her to Mesquakie Point and back? What meaning did Mesquakie Point hold? What dark passions had driven the pair of them?
“I guess we ought to tell someone, Miss Otis, probably.” Enid broke the silence. Bobby warmed at the “we” Enid used, as if they were a team. If only she could help Enid over her queer neurosis about gym teachers the way Enid had helped her!
Her thoughts had wandered back to Enid’s ideal girl when the cab let them off at Metamora’s closed gate and they headed up the road to the quadrangle. The blackness had a palpable quality, as if the pair of them were walking undersea, like in that Jules Verne movie that had played at the Bijou last week. It was like the blackness in the cellar earlier, so total that the other four senses were sharpened.