Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Deirdre took over for the afternoon classes, including gym. Carole had been worried about changing in front of these perfect girls, but the locker room had little cubicles. There she put on her brand-new gym uniform—a stiff pleated navy-blue jumper with bloomers and a white middy blouse underneath. Deirdre came bursting out onto the basketball court, her uniform top densely covered in gold chevrons for all her years of varsity sports. There had been no volleyball at Ridgewood, and the Spence gym teacher kept blowing the whistle on Carole for violations, but she wouldn’t stop to explain what she had done wrong. When it was over, Deirdre told Carole that everybody went to Havilands after school for cherry Cokes and she should come too. The three of them had been so polite, friendly, and full of information that Carole started to feel that Spence was going to be okay. Then, after school, Amanda, Shelly, and Deirdre ditched her and went off together. The next day they acted as though they barely knew who she was.

  Maybe it had to do with her clothes. These girls wore stockings and flats to school. They had kilts and cashmere sweater sets when all Carole had were her old plaid dresses from tenth grade, saddle shoes, and the thick socks that had been quite the thing in Ridgewood, but totally dowdy here. And the glasses she’d thought were so great—cat’s-eye glasses with glitter frames—were out to lunch. These girls wore tortoiseshell glasses. Real tortoiseshell.

  Carole had cried herself to sleep that first week, wishing she were back in her old house, her old school, with her old friends. But the whole move had been because of her. Her father finally was making enough money to live in the city and send Carole to a good private school. There, according to him, she’d receive a real education and get into a real college, namely Vassar. Carole was supposed to carry the torch for the family. All their hopes rested on her. She knew her father wished she’d been a boy. Boys were better at torches than girls, but she was an only child and he’d had to settle for her. Buck up, he’d said sternly when she’d grown morose those first weeks. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. She knew her mother hated New York as much as she did, but there was no help there. Her mother wouldn’t ever stand up to her father.

  One day in November, eight miserable weeks into the school year, Carole was sitting in homeroom, studying—at least she knew how to do that—when Naomi plopped herself down on the desk next to her. “Hey,” she said. Carole had noticed Naomi. How could anybody not? Naomi was small and nervous and flashy. She dressed in bright colors and wore more makeup than she was allowed to wear. She was constantly being sent to the washroom to take it off. And she kept apart from the other girls too. Always at the end of the line for assembly. Always off to herself in gym. “Wanna go to Lamston’s this aft?”

  It was the first real invitation from anyone at Spence since her fateful first day, and she said yes, sure. She followed Naomi to the Eighty-ninth Street Lamston’s, aware of what an odd-looking pair they were, Carole towering over Naomi, outweighing her by thirty pounds. Naomi had told her to do what she could to distract the salesladies, and Carole had wandered around asking the prices of things. Afterward they went to Naomi’s apartment, where they streaked through a whole series of rooms to an enormous kitchen that had two industrial-sized refrigerators along one wall. Naomi dumped the contents of her purse on the kitchen table. Pens and lipsticks and key chains spilled out, along with things Carole didn’t even recognize.

  “You took it all?” she said. There had been times in her life when she’d been tempted, but she’d never had the nerve.

  “Take what you want,” Naomi said. She got up and checked one of the refrigerators. “We’re in luck,” she said. “Sometimes Elayne locks them.” Naomi took out bottles of Coke, a platter of little cakes, and a jar of pickled string beans and set them on the kitchen table.

  “I’ve been watching you from day one, you know,” Naomi said. “And I can tell you a thing or two about Spence. First, and don’t take this personally, but it’s useless to try to make friends with anybody else because it’s already way too late. New girls never get into a clique in less than two years, and fat girls don’t stand a chance. No offense, of course. It’s just the way things are.” Naomi was so matter-of-fact that Carole didn’t feel hurt.

  Naomi said she’d been at Spence since kindergarten, moving each year from room to room and floor to floor. She knew everything about everybody, including the teachers. In particular, Naomi knew which ones were lesbians: the ones who wore tweed suits and would arrive together every morning and leave together at night. It’s very common in these places, Naomi told her. “In fact,” Naomi said, then stopped and looked appraisingly at her. “You’re a virgin, right?”

  Carole nodded.

  “Me too, and we’re almost the only ones.” She went through the class girl by girl, telling who was a virgin and who wasn’t. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “If we don’t lose it before we graduate, we’re going to wind up like one of those teachers. You most of all. Because you can bet that when those women were young they were just like you. Big and brainy and without a sense of fashion. Sex just passed them by and they had to settle for other women.”

  At first Carole thought it was just a joke, and she’d had fun talking about what they’d do and how they’d do it. Sometimes on the subway they’d pick out guys. Her mother had told her in that awful conversation about sex that her body was a temple, something that made Naomi scream, laughing. Naomi said that really, while she couldn’t stand Elayne’s guts, at least Elayne knew more than Carole’s mother ever would when it came to sex. That was, after all, the reason Daddy had ever married her in the first place. It had to be, because there sure was nothing else to recommend her. Naomi did Elayne’s Czech accent to perfection. Ze first lover must be ze best to set ze expectations high for ze rest of ze life. Ze first iss ze standard!

  Naomi found Eddie Lindbaeck in January of their senior year at a huge party her father and Elayne had thrown at a restaurant. Eddie had crashed the party from the bar downstairs, which was good because it meant he didn’t know her father or Elayne. That very night Naomi had asked him to do the honors, and he’d said of course. She came flying into school the next day to tell Carole the good news. Carole was going to have to meet him, of course. One morning in February Naomi sprang the meeting on her. All day, Carole could think only about how awful she looked. Her hair was more frizzed than usual and kept coming loose, and she was wearing her worst brown skirt and a plain white blouse that made her look even fatter than she was. She had on oxford shoes and falling-down bobby socks. She would have worn her best dress if she had known earlier, but Naomi said she just found out herself, which Carole didn’t completely believe.

  They’d met at Havilands, a big old dark coffee shop two blocks down Madison from school. Girls from school went there every day and stayed most of the afternoon, under a fog of cigarette smoke. A lot of girls were in there, not just from Spence, but girls in Nightingale Banford uniforms and Sacred Heart uniforms. Each group had a cluster of tables pushed together so they could huddle and gossip about one another. Carole was sure it was all mean. Everything they said. She skirted the edge of the place to a booth way in the back. She sat down and gently laid her books on the seat beside her. It didn’t take Amanda Howe two seconds to come through the smoky haze toward her. “What are you doing here?” she asked with the emphasis on the doing, as though Carole had no right to be anywhere.

  “Waiting for somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Just somebody.”

  “So why do you have to wait all by yourself? Be sociable, why don’t you.” It wasn’t an invitation at all. She would be shredded if she sat with them. “It’s not a boy, is it?”

  Carole had her eye on the front door. Naomi had said Eddie was about five ten with sandy-colored hair and dark eyes. Drop-dead gorgeous. Carole didn’t want him coming in with Amanda standing there. Wouldn’t want to have to make the introductions and wouldn’t put it past Amanda to slide into the booth and ask Eddie a bunch of questions. Go
d. If it ever got out what Carole and Naomi were doing, they’d be laughingstocks. Naomi had to have been insane to have her meet Eddie here in the lion’s den with all these predatory bitches.

  “None of your beeswax,” she said. Amanda turned and went back to her table, where she obviously took pleasure in telling the others what Carole had said. They all shrieked, laughing at her. Nobody said beeswax anymore.

  The waitress came over twice and finally said Carole couldn’t sit there without ordering something, and it had to be more than coffee. If the other person didn’t come soon Carole would have to go sit at the counter. She weighed the choices: order something and then be caught sitting with it, looking as if she couldn’t wait to eat, or else go sit at one of those little spinning stools in full view of Amanda and her buddies when Eddie came in. She ordered a cup of coffee for herself and a hamburger, and when it came, in about two minutes, she slid it over to his side of the table.

  The door swung open, and she knew it was him right away. He had silky light-brown hair that fell in his eyes, a black leather jacket over a dark blue Shetland sweater that made his dark blue eyes pop right out and, peeking out of the sweater, a pale blue button-down shirt. He had on penny loafers with no socks. When he got to her table, he winked at her, then let his eyes drop to her neck and her breasts, making her feel strange and weak. He slid into the booth across from her. He smelled of something. Some sort of strong aftershave. The other girls were staring. He was miles better-looking than their Trinity boys with their pimply faces.

  “That’s for you,” she said about the hamburger. “They made me order.”

  He pushed it away, ordered a cup of coffee, and drank it in silence, looking up over the cup’s rim at her with eyes like deep dark pools. “My mother used to tell me I had the map of Ireland on my face,” he said. “What do you think?”

  It sounded like something to do with his skin or veins or something. “You look fine to me.”

  He winked and grinned. “Naomi said you were funny.”

  But she hadn’t meant to be funny. He reached out and touched her hair, swept it off her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  “So tell me about you,” he said.

  “I moved here from Ridgewood, New Jersey, last year,” she said.

  He was looking around, preening. She felt a desperate need to speak faster, to hold his attention. “My dad used to commute. What about you? Where are you from?”

  “New York.” His eyes continued to sweep the room and returned to her as if she were only slightly more interesting than what was out there.

  “You probably think it’s the only place on earth, right?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  She finally figured out what he’d meant when he first sat down. “But Lindbaeck isn’t Irish, is it?”

  “Norwegian,” he said. “My father’s the fish eater. My mother’s the Mick.”

  “What school did you go to?”

  He grinned at her. “I’ve been kicked out of all the best schools on the East Coast.”

  “Really? For what?”

  “You name it.” He leaned over the table. “Mostly sneaking out of the dorm at night to meet girls like you.” He leaned back and smiled at her again. “I learn best in the theater of the real, if you will. Did Naomi tell you I’m an actor?”

  She nodded. Naomi had told her all sorts of things. That Eddie was twenty-six, that he knew Doug McClure from Checkmate and George Maharis from Route 66. “What do you act in?”

  He smoothed his hair with the palm of his hand and said he didn’t act in anything she would have seen, like Cactus Flower or Fiddler on the Roof. Too sophisticated for that, was the impression he gave, although Carole wondered, guilty for being suspicious, if it was something else. He kept switching accents. It would be Brooklyn one minute, British the next. Sometimes southern. Maybe it was on purpose, but she didn’t think so.

  “So,” he said, sitting up straight and looking her in the eye. “Let’s talk about sex.”

  “Sshh,” Carole said.

  “Come on. What do you know?” he stage-whispered to her. “Tell me what you know.”

  She didn’t know anything except for a guy in a furniture store who had exposed himself to her once, and she wasn’t going to admit to that, and it wasn’t exactly sex anyway. “Things,” she said.

  “Ever been kissed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Deep kissed?”

  She shrugged.

  “Second base?” She didn’t know what he meant. He glanced at her breasts, held up his hands, and wiggled his fingers.

  “No,” she said, feeling her face burn with embarrassment.

  “Has anyone ever told you that a man undresses every single woman he sees with his eyes? I like what I see.”

  She felt herself blush crimson. She cast an eye around the place to the waitress, who was fiftyish and heavy. “Her?” Eddie looked and nodded, then shrugged and grinned.

  “Not bad.”

  She started to giggle and pointed him in more directions. The two matrons at the window, a woman sitting at another table with her husband.

  He leaned across the table. “You’re going to be fun,” he said. “I can tell.”

  It was the first time she knew it would happen. Really knew. Up until that moment it had only been something she and Naomi had talked about, giggling on the bus or whispering on the phone. Eddie knew a place in Stowe. He’d been there before, lots of times. And he knew the layout. “You’re doing a very smart thing,” he told her seriously. “And not for just a couple of hours in the afternoon at my place, the way Naomi and I had it cooked up at first, but a full week, so I can show you everything there is to know. Are you open to everything?” he asked her.

  She said yes without hesitating, thinking she knew what everything was. Kissing and touching and then losing her virginity.

  His hand crept under the table and rested on her knee. “More girls should have the courage to do what you’re doing.”

  Chapter Three

  The Double Hearth smelled of bacon and coffee, and there was a fire going in the bigger of the two fireplaces when Carole got back. A group of girls was waiting at the long tables for the kitchen to open up. They stared when she walked by them. She looked like hell, and there was no mistaking that she’d been out all night. After she passed, they laughed.

  Upstairs, all she could think was that she had to get into a shower, to wash every molecule belonging to Eddie Lindbaeck off herself and get rid of the smell and the taste in her mouth. She had to wash her hair, scrub her ears, and brush her teeth. Then she’d know what to do.

  The bunk room was crowded with girls running around in long underwear and rollers, wriggling into stretch pants. Carole’s and Naomi’s bunks were the ones at the end. Both were untouched, the blankets and sheets still pulled tight over them. She peeled off her black slacks, her yellow sweater, and her underwear and stuffed them between her bunk bed and the wall so she wouldn’t have to see them again.

  She rummaged around in her suitcase for her bathrobe, pulled it out. An envelope fluttered from the sleeve. Inside there was a ten-dollar bill and a note. “From Daddy and me,” it said. “A little fun money for you. Love, Mom.” Tears wet her face, and she crawled onto the lower bunk, her face to the wall, and sobbed, her whole body shaking. Somebody touched her shoulder, and she jumped.

  “Sorry,” a voice said. A girl’s voice.

  “Go away.” She was so afraid people already knew her secret.

  “You homesick or something?” the girl asked.

  Carole didn’t answer, and the girl left. She waited until the dorm quieted. It seemed like forever until everybody had gone downstairs to breakfast and she could sit up and look around. The place looked as if a bomb had hit it, stuff everywhere. She made her way down to the shower room, stepping over clothes, shoes, bedding. There were four shower stalls, each with a pink plastic curtain. A girl was toweling herself off. One of those slender girls she couldn’
t stand, with their sleek, shiny hair.

  “Hi there,” the girl said.

  Carole glared.

  “You feeling better?” It must have been the girl who saw her crying. Same voice. She was older than Carole, probably in college or something. “Look at this.” The girl hoisted her foot up onto the sink and motioned Carole to look at something. “Boot burn. Worst I ever had.” There was a chapped patch on the girl’s shin, just above her ankle, scabbed over. Carole couldn’t understand why it mattered about her shin. The girl put her foot down and stood there, hands on her hips. “You’ve been through the wringer, haven’t you?”

  “I’m fine,” Carole said. Naomi would have done a job on this one. On the accent in particular, which was one of those top-drawer jobs that always sent them both right over the edge laughing. Her hair was auburn. “Please, just leave me alone,” Carole said. The color reminded her of Rita’s hair, the hardness of the skull beneath.