Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Rachel talked a mile a minute, pouring out her life to Carole, ducking around people and jaywalking. “You like to jaywalk? I love to jaywalk,” she said. They tore across streets, ducking between cars. Rachel gave the finger to a cabbie who leaned on his horn at her. She said she was from Long Island, way down at the end, a place nobody’s ever heard of. Her family was telling everybody she went to live with an aunt for her senior year of school. “Like anybody believes that,” she said. “I don’t even have an aunt, for crying out loud.”

  The boy was somebody she’d known all her life. He wasn’t her regular boyfriend. Everybody thought it was, of course, but it wasn’t, so let them think what they wanted. “What about you?”

  “I never skipped school in my life.”

  “I know,” Rachel said with a laugh. “You look like a deer caught in the headlights. What else?”

  “Nothing.” I went to Eddie’s house this morning before school because he shouted to my mother on the street and now I’m so scared he’ll tell her what I did that I can’t even get to school. I feel like I’m drowning.

  “Well, sure there is,” Rachel said. “Everybody has things to tell. You don’t need to be knocked up to have a story to tell. Like what’s it like to live with all those rich people. They look snooty, but are they? Really? And that old guy at the door? He hates us over at the home, I just know it. He scowls at us.”

  “He hates everybody,” Carole said. “Heney can’t stand me. The more I go out of my way to be nice, the meaner he is.”

  Rachel charged through the door of a corner drugstore, slid into a booth, and ordered a Coke. The place reeked of disinfectant. She leaned over the table toward Carole. “That was Sister Crucifix that night,” she said. She pronounced it sistah. “I would have been chucked out of there a million times by now if it wasn’t for her. She hates me, sure, but she always picks me for waltzes. She has to pick the other girls for the fast dances, the polkas, and all, but I’m it for the slow stuff. I’m a great waltzer.”

  “You dance with them?”

  Rachel roared with laughter. “Oh, the look on your face!”

  “Well, it’s weird.”

  “You’re not Polish, are you? You’ve never been to a Polish wedding or an Irish wedding, for that matter.”

  Carole shrugged, a little embarrassed. “What will you do?” she asked. “After your baby.”

  Rachel ran her hands over her belly. “I’m not giving it up,” she said. “I swear to God I won’t.” Her face soured, and her eyes filled. “Everybody wants me to. The nuns, my parents, Father Ryan. There’s some couple that wants it, a couple that can’t have babies of their own. They want me to meet them, but I won’t.”

  “But it’s your choice. It’s your baby.”

  “They steal babies when they get born,” Rachel whispered. “They tell you it died, but they really give it away.”

  “They can’t,” Carole said. The whole idea was impossible. “I mean, that would be illegal.”

  “Sweetie, they do whatever the hell they want,” Rachel said.

  “But you’d have to sign something, I think. They can’t do it unless you sign.”

  “In your world, maybe.” Rachel’s face took on a new look, pleading and serious. Maybe Eddie was right when he said she didn’t know anything. Maybe people died, people got killed, people stole babies, and nobody did anything. “Who’s going to stop them? Not my parents. My parents would love it if somebody took this baby off their hands.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Yeah, well, they’re after me all the time, and I keep saying no, and then they tell me what a selfish girl I am. Not only nasty, but selfish too. They say there’s nothing worse in the eyes of God than a selfish and nasty girl.”

  “You’re not selfish.” That was so plainly true. “It’s your baby. Your possession. Your flesh and blood. What makes it selfish to want it for yourself?”

  “Yeah?” Rachel said. “You mean that?”

  “Sure,” Carole said. “I just met you, and I can tell already.”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  Carole looked down at her hands, and Rachel let out a big booming laugh. “You’re not! You’re just as nasty and selfish as I am, and you live in that fancy building. I wish those old nuns knew that. They’re always holding up girls like you to us. ‘Exemplary girls,’ they call you.”

  “If they only knew,” Carole said.

  “This girl I know had a baby a couple of months ago and has relatives in Rochester. She said I can go there for a little while. After.”

  “My dad is a lawyer. He might know,” Carole said. Rachel looked puzzled. “About whether they can just take the baby.”

  “Could you ask him?” Rachel grabbed her hand. “Oh, please?”

  “I think so,” Carole said. “I’ll try. I know how it feels to be in trouble.”

  “You? How? What did you do?”

  “What didn’t I do?” She tried to make a joke of it so Rachel wouldn’t ask more questions.

  “Seriously, come on.”

  “I can’t tell. I promised this guy I’d never tell. You just have to believe it.”

  Rachel pursed her lips and looked at something in the distance, then she leaned across the table. “Not to mess with you or anything, but that’s what I used to think. I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I was going to kill myself before I ever told.”

  Carole felt her face redden.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Carole shook her head. “Worse.”

  “It probably isn’t. I thought I’d let everybody in the world down. And then I told after all, and you know what? My folks went crazy, but it wasn’t that bad. It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be. After all, it’s the truth, is all.” She shrugged. “It just is.”

  When Carole got home, there were voices in the living room. Her mother and Emily. She shut the door silently and waited to see if they’d heard her come in. The chatter went on, and she listened. It was about the day. About something Emily bought. It sounded like she was holding it up to herself. The conversation was about the color. Blue? More of a blue green. Teal. So casual, so normal, that Carole was sure her mother couldn’t have known she wasn’t in school today. Her mother must have been out shopping when the school called.

  But she wasn’t out of the woods. Far from it. The school could call again at any minute. She slid into the kitchen, dialed the school number, and got the secretary. “Oh, Miss MacNamara,” she said in the breathiest, sickest voice she could conjure. “My mother told me to call you. She forgot to call you this morning, and she’s not home.” It was a big chance. A huge chance. “I was sick today. I had a stomachache.”

  Miss MacNamara fumbled with papers for a few seconds. “I tried to call,” Miss MacNamara said. “Let’s see. Four times, and no one answered. Were you there?” Her voice dripped with suspicion.

  “The phone’s all the way on the other side of the apartment,” Carole said. There were phones all over the place, but what did MacNamara know? “I must not have heard it. I thought my mother already called, but she forgot. She just called me to see if I was okay and said I should call you.”

  “Okay, dear. But let’s try not to let it happen again. Let’s talk to Mother about it, shall we? Let’s remind Mother of the importance of that telephone call.” Carole was so literal she thought MacNamara wanted to talk to her mother right then, before she remembered it was just the way she talked. Let’s not make so much noise. Let’s not run in the halls. Let’s clean our plates.

  “Of course,” Carole said and hung up. They always believed her. She had a ton of currency built up because she was such a goody-goody. They called her that behind her back. She knew they did, Amanda and the others. Square too. Well, wouldn’t they be surprised, she thought. It was almost too bad she couldn’t go in and brag about taking a day off and lying to MacNamara and getting away with it.

  She cruised into the living room, where her mother and Emily were sitting
side by side on the couch. Her mother wore a brown dress that strained across her bust and she was smiling up at Carole the way she always did, a little nervous, a little shy around her sister, as though everything needed to go just so.

  Emily had on a black suit with big fur cuffs, a red pillbox hat over that helmet of hair, and those creepy foxes chasing one another around her shoulders. Emily was like a Bedouin. She wore as much of her wealth as she could fit onto herself. She extended a bony hand for Carole to shake, her wrist thick with gold bracelets, fingers loaded with rings. She pulled Carole down to her level—she was surprisingly strong—and planted a waxy kiss on her cheek. Carole knew it would leave a dark red stain. While she was bent over, she saw the wallet on the coffee table. Blue plastic with a big red and white Minnie Mouse on it, and bent as though it had been folded in half. Carole snatched up the wallet. “You were supposed to send this to me.”

  Both her mother and Emily looked at her sharply in surprise.

  “Really, dear.” Emily’s husband had probably poisoned half the Third World, but even so, Carole’s mother was cowed by her sister, as though she’d never be as good. She started talking rapidly, explaining how Emily had made a special trip into the city to return the wallet.

  “I think it was just fine to open it,” Emily said, her eyes widening. “It feels very wrong to open a stranger’s wallet, but under the circumstances …” In Carole’s opinion, Emily would open anybody’s wallet. “There’s a ten-dollar bill and her driver’s license,” Emily noted. “I hope she hasn’t had to go out and get a new one, retake her driver’s test. I wouldn’t wish that on my own worst enemy.”

  “Did she mention that when you talked to her?” Carole’s mother indicated the chair opposite so Carole would sit down. “Carole called this woman and talked to her.”

  “You found her?” Emily said.

  Carole nodded.

  “Hmmm. I couldn’t,” Emily said. “I tried, but information had no listing.”

  “I got through.” Carole hoped they wouldn’t hear the tremor in her voice. She was so unprepared for all this.

  “I tried twice. Are you sure?” Emily wasn’t going to give up.

  “Of course I’m sure. I called at the Double Hearth. Where she was. She’s probably listed under her husband’s name. Or her parents.” It was so dangerous to create a Rita she knew didn’t exist—a married woman, a woman with parents. But it was working.

  “I’ll see it gets mailed tomorrow,” her mother said, holding out her hand for the wallet.

  “No,” Carole said. “I said I’d do it.”

  Emily gave her mother a sour look. “Common-looking thing. Open it and show your mother. That’s her, right? That’s the same woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t even look,” her mother said.

  Carole looked quickly. In the space beside Rita’s driver’s license was a photograph of her sitting at a table in a kitchen. Her brown hair, parted in the middle, hung down in curtains to either side of her expressionless face. She held a glass of something. Carole’s hand trembled as she stared into that face with its sad accusing eyes.

  “I still think it very strange that her wallet would be in your parka,” Emily said. She could purse her whole face. “You didn’t use it as a fake ID, I hope.”

  Carole slumped back into her chair. “Of course not,” she said. So they thought she’d used this woman’s driver’s license to get served. She opened the wallet and held up the picture. “You think anybody in their right mind would think this is me?”

  “They look fast,” Emily said, quick in her own defense. “They want you to drink. All they want in those places is to say they looked at your ID.”

  “She helped me,” Carole said, the implication clearly that Emily wouldn’t understand anybody helping anybody else. It felt so good to use Rita against Emily, whom she’d never liked. She folded the wallet shut and stood up to leave. Her mother’s face was slack with confusion. “I have homework.”

  In her room, Carole wrapped the wallet in a brown bag and put it in the top drawer of her dresser, under her underwear. That night, very late, she took the wallet from the drawer and studied the picture of Rita. It was the flat, bland face of a stranger half smiling into the camera, a person relaxed at a kitchen table. Rita must have liked this version of herself to keep it in her wallet that way. A flattering picture in ways. “This might not work,” Rita had said. She must have known that Carole was in over her head. If only Carole had been able to hear the concern, the warning. Way over her head. She doesn’t look any eighteen to me. It shamed her now, remembering what she’d thought of Rita at the time—that Rita was cheap, a rival wanting to steal Eddie away from her, when really, Rita had been trying to help her. She studied the information. 127 Baldwin Terrace. Morris Center, VT. Five foot five. 150 pounds. Eyes brown. Hair brown.

  Carole turned sideways to the mirror. She could suck in her stomach and make her skirt drop several inches to her hips. It was as though her body was morphing, disguising itself of its own free will, as though it had decided she’d be less dangerous if there was less of her. She went to the bathroom and got on the scale. One hundred and sixty-three. Thirteen more pounds than Rita. Back in her room, she wrote “163” down in tiny black numbers at the upper-left-hand side of a piece of graph paper. She got out another sheet for her measurements and did the same, writing the size of her hips, waist, and bust on the left side of the page. She tucked the papers away in the closet with the red change purse. Then she slipped out the service door to the back hallway, where the incinerator chute was. She pulled open the door. Down at the bottom she could hear the flames roaring, smell the fetid, garbagey draft. She was there for a long time with the grate open, her hair blowing, holding the wallet. Then she let it go.

  Carole’s father’s secretary, Jackie Palmer, had a large smooth forehead and big eyes, but Carole could never recall the bottom of her face, which seemed to melt away into the rest of her. She always gushed to Carole. Her father said Jackie wasn’t a very good secretary, and Carole figured she was trying to get points with him by being nice to her. She made a big deal of how much weight Carole had lost and how beautiful she’d become. All grown up. A regular young lady. Carole had to wait for her father on the settee outside his office for fifteen minutes listening to this. Finally he came out and ushered her in. He rubbed his hands together when he saw her. “Well, sweetie,” he said. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  “I have a question. It’s sort of a business question.”

  He sat down behind his desk. “Shoot,” he said. She could tell he thought this was cute.

  “Do you have to sign a paper before somebody can take your baby away?” she said.

  “What baby?” His face dropped.

  “I mean, if you’re not married. If you’re under eighteen?”

  He got up, closed the door, and came back to his desk. “What baby?”

  “I told you. It’s just a business question. A legal question.”

  “Is it about you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Naomi,” he said, his anger gathering. “I told your mother it was something like this.”

  “It’s not Naomi. Can’t you just answer the question? Can’t you just say?”

  “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

  She looked down at her shoes, which were scuffed and embarrassing. “One of the girls in that Home for Unwed Mothers across from us wanted to know. I said I’d ask. You don’t need to make a federal case out of it, Daddy. It’s just a question.”

  “How did you get to know one of them?” The way he said “them” made his dislike clear.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Carole asked.

  “Well,” her father said. “They’re not our type of person, are they?” She’d never expected this from him. From Emily, but never from him. Not in a million years.

  “And what type is that?” She raised her voice.

  Miss Palmer cra
cked the door and looked in. “Anything you need?” she said. He waved her away.

  “You’re not to go giving my legal advice to one of them.”

  “I’m not asking you for advice. I’m only looking for information.” She knew the difference. He’d told her often enough. There was advice and then there was information. Two completely different animals, although people mixed the two constantly.

  “You’re asking for advice, Carole. And you don’t know it.”

  “I’ll look it up in the library, then. I just thought you’d help out since you already know the answer.”

  He got up and came around the desk. “All this is getting entirely out of hand,” he said.

  “All what?”

  “First you cut short your ski trip with no explanation.”

  “I had diarrhea,” she said.

  He ignored her. “Then you take up with one of those pregnant girls.” All she could think was of skipping school, and if he didn’t say anything about it, he didn’t know. “You’re going to Vassar,” he said, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “Vassar, for God’s sake.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Vassar is just a college,” she said.

  “It is not just a college,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “It is one of the oldest, most respected institutions of higher learning for girls in this country, young lady, and don’t you make that kind of a face at me. I won’t have it.”

  She stared beyond him at the wall of photographs.

  “I want an apology,” he said.

  Some of those photographs used to be in their living room in Ridgewood. She fixed on one in particular of her father and mother at Ruby Foo’s restaurant in Montreal with two other men and their wives. The other men were friends of theirs from when they were all students at the University of Wisconsin, and the picture was old, taken before Carole was born. But one of the men was now the assistant secretary of the navy, and that, she realized, was why the picture was here and not at home. Here, important people would see it. In the picture below that one, her father was shaking hands with Vice President Richard Nixon. She didn’t know where it had been taken. A reception someplace.