Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  What if all those people on the wall found out? What if Miss Palmer and Heney and everybody at school and all the partners in the firm found out what she’d done with Eddie Lindbaeck in that room, and what if Nixon himself found out? And they could if she wasn’t careful. They would bring all their hatred down on her, and on her parents too. It was like looking into the abyss just realizing what could happen and the power she had to bring their lives to ruin. Her father was still waiting for her to speak.

  “Forget it,” she said and turned to leave.

  As she passed through reception, Miss Palmer looked over the tops of her glasses. Heard everything, she was sure. She hated Miss Palmer.

  The Home for Unwed Mothers smelled like a doctor’s office because of the disinfectant they used. There was a big lobby with glistening polished floors and no furniture except for a small desk and chair off to the side. A tiny nun sat smiling at her from behind the desk. “Can I help you, dear?” she said.

  “I’d like to see Rachel Weaver,” Carole said. “I’m her cousin.” It amazed her what people just automatically believed. There was this whole layer of information you could give out and people wouldn’t blink an eye. You could create a whole identity that way.

  The little nun asked her to wait while she dialed the telephone. “Her cousin in the lobby to see her,” the nun said into the phone, then hung up. “Somebody will be right down.”

  In a few minutes she heard footsteps on the stairs. The door below the exit sign opened, and a white-haired nun came through. Sister Crucifix. “Carole Weaver,” Carole said. “My dad and Rachel’s dad are brothers.” People said the truth set you free, but that wasn’t true at all. Lies were what set you free.

  “As you no doubt know, Rachel is overdue and can’t visit for long,” Sister Crucifix said.

  Carole followed the sister up two flights of stairs to a long corridor. They stopped in front of a door. “Your cousin is here to see you,” she called.

  “I don’t have a cousin,” Rachel yelled from inside.

  Sister Crucifix smiled wearily at Carole.

  “She can be such a pain, can’t she?” Carole said. “Rachel, come on, quit kidding around. It’s me, Carole.”

  The door opened a crack, and Rachel peered out.

  “Oh,” she said to the sister. “That cousin.”

  “I’ll rap when time is up,” Sister said.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Carole said once she was inside the room and the door was shut. “He spazzed out over it. Thought I was the one who was pregnant.”

  Rachel shook her head. “It’s okay. I finally got it out of them.” She was grinning. “They can’t take the baby unless I sign. You were right. Baby’s all mine. I’m getting induced tomorrow. They’re giving me a shot to start labor, so the baby will come like tomorrow or the next day. That stupid couple from New Jersey is coming in case I change my mind. If it’s a girl, I’m naming her Carole. If it’s a boy it’s Pepper.”

  Carole grinned. “With an ‘e,’” she said. “Carole with an ‘e.’”

  “I’m scared shitless,” Rachel said with a big grin. She looked up at Carole and made a face. “It’s going to hurt. They teach us girls a lesson, you betcha. They learned that from the Communists. We don’t get pain medicine like regular women. We get nothing. I may not see you again. I’ll be in the hospital for a couple of days, but I won’t come back here after I have the baby. They don’t want us telling the other girls what it’s like. My parents said not to come home with any baby. It’s okay, though. I don’t want to go back there, little idiotic one-horse town. It’s Rochester for me.” She started to thump rhythmically against the back of the chair she was in. There was a sharp rap at the door, and it was time to go. Rachel caught Carole by the sleeve before she left. “Hey,” she said. “Thanks. It’s been real.”

  A few weeks later, a postcard arrived with an address in Rochester. “Pepper Weaver,” it read. “Eight pounds even. Love, Rachel.” Her mother left the postcard on the hall table for her. Neither her mother nor her father ever said a word about it.

  Chapter Five

  JUNE 1965

  For graduation, all the girls had to wear white and carry a dozen long-stemmed red roses. Most of them had bought new dresses for the occasion in silk and taffeta and dotted Swiss. Carole had on a white linen dress of her mother’s. It sagged off her shoulders and had to be belted tightly to give it some shape. Her mother had buzzed around her, trying to pleat the fabric that bunched under the belt. Once upon a time she’d wanted Carole to lose weight, but now she wasn’t so sure. “Aren’t you dieting a bit too much?” she’d asked.

  “I’m not dieting,” Carole had said. And it was true. She just wasn’t hungry anymore. She weighed one hundred forty-five pounds, eighteen pounds less than when she’d started to keep her charts. But she was only half used to herself as that girl in the mirror with the flat stomach and thighs that didn’t touch. In her mind she was still as big as ever. She might be on the bus or changing for gym, and she’d feel fat again. It was like the way people could still feel their limbs after they’d been severed. Phantom pain, it was called, and that was how it felt. No matter how she looked in front of the mirror, away from it she was still her cumbersome old self, still dragging all that phantom fat around.

  They gathered in the gym before the ceremony, shortest in the front and tallest at the end this time. There was a hush when the music started and Miss P, accompanied today by some people from Juilliard, started to bang out “Pomp and Circumstance.” It was music to make them cry, and they all did, even though they were glad to leave. Naomi was first in line in a white Chinese dress, tight as a drum. Carole was last, glad to be so thoroughly separated from her on the last walk into assembly. It seemed fitting. She marched across the mezzanine, step touch, step touch, the way they’d rehearsed, and sat through speeches and awards. Carole received the history and Latin prizes. After it was over she went out to lunch with her parents.

  She’d had no intention of going to the graduation party. Once she was finished with Spence, that was it in her book. But her mother had been crushed when she heard that, and her father had taken action. It was important to stay out all night with la crème de la crème, he’d said. You didn’t go to Spence and then miss the graduation party. No, sir. When Carole had pointed out that she had no date, her father had taken care of that too. A dental student named Jeremy Lyon, the son of somebody at the firm.

  She’d agreed to go just to keep the peace, and that night she was looking at herself in the mirror. She had on a black matte sheath she’d bought for the occasion. Her mother had been disappointed in the choice. It made Carole look like a pillar, her mother said. Like a black column, which was a description that Carole actually liked. She turned sideways. Her breasts were no longer the wide, heavy things they’d been, bumping each other and in the way, but small and discrete, one from the other. Her old white bras puckered over these new breasts, bras meant for that other girl, that heavier girl, and definitely not right for a dress like this. In truth, she felt separate from her body. She liked becoming thin, feeling loose and disconnected inside her clothes, and it didn’t matter what her mother thought.

  Jeremy didn’t pay attention to what she was wearing either. He was handsome in a soft-looking way, his features still boyish. He grinned at her when she opened the door and said to call him “Jer,” but she preferred Jeremy, and he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t mind anything.

  There was a cocktail party at Amanda’s apartment, with highballs served in fancy little glasses. Most of the girls were eighteen, or close to it, and most of them had been drinking for years already anyway. But this was the first time a parent had actually served, and it made them feel sophisticated. After the party, there was a dinner at a big private club on Fifth Avenue that had an enormous circular drive in front. Carole was glad about her black dress, the only black in the whole room, not counting the guys’ tuxes. The other girls were in stiff pastel dresses or those op-
art prints like Luci Baines Johnson wore.

  It was a relief not to see Naomi. They’d hardly spoken for weeks. They were in different sections. Carole was an X, and Naomi was a Y, so they never had classes together. And lining up for assembly, Carole would wait until she knew where Naomi was before getting into line somewhere else. As far as Carole was concerned, the best way to keep quiet about something was not to talk about anything. You couldn’t screw up that way.

  Seeing Naomi made her feel shaky and exposed, as if Naomi herself were the danger. Over the weeks she’d watched Naomi reconnect with some of the other girls in the class. Deirdre and Amanda, the ones she’d been best friends with in third grade or fifth or whenever. They’d all known one another since kindergarten, and now that graduation was coming, they seemed to be closing ranks and getting nostalgic about the years they’d shared. Carole, being a latecomer, went back to being the class loner.

  Naomi was still seeing Eddie too. One afternoon Carole was leaving the building, going through the front door out onto Ninety-first Street, and there he was, leaning against a car. He had his arms folded over his chest, his feet crossed so casually, like a model in an ad for expensive clothes. He raised a finger in greeting, but she walked the other way, toward Madison, not stopping until the corner, when she took the chance and looked back. He was still there, still watching.

  The next day she sought out Naomi in the senior room. It was always filled with a smoke haze that started at shoulder level and went to the ceiling. To get out of the smoke, you had to lie down. Everybody did. But it was empty today because of midterms. Everybody else was in the library, studying. Carole could see Naomi’s orange dress through the milky window in the door. There she was, lying on the floor, faceup, smoking a cigarette.

  Carole opened the door, and Naomi looked up. Naomi’s looks would serve her well now, Carole’s mother had said. But later, when they were in their thirties, Carole would be the beauty. It had depressed Carole, one of those things her mother said to make her buck up that only made her feel worse.

  Now she felt awkward and inarticulate. “I saw Eddie waiting for you yesterday,” she said, looking down at Naomi. “I saw your sweater at his house.”

  “So?” Naomi took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “I just wanted to know. Were you and Eddie doing it, even before Stowe?”

  Naomi shut her eyes. “Oh, honestly, what difference does it make?”

  “I want to know.”

  “Don’t go getting all worked up. You make mountains out of molehills.”

  “So you were.”

  Naomi let out a big dramatic sigh. “It was like one week before Stowe, okay? Maybe two. That was all. I was talking to him all the time. I was the one who had to do all the work, if you recall.”

  Carole felt cold. “We were supposed to both—”

  Naomi took another deep drag and let it out, like this was all too tedious.

  “You let me win too, didn’t you? It was all a setup.” She hoped to God that wasn’t true.

  “It was your idea to play that stupid game, not mine.”

  Carole slumped down on the couch and watched Naomi crush the cigarette into a full ashtray. She knew the answer to the next question before she even asked it. “What about Rita? Did you know she was going to come?”

  The two girls glared at each other for an eternity. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t,” Naomi said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, who cares? What’s done is done.”

  Carole let out a whisper. “You knew all along. You and him. You pretended. And all that time on the train I thought— Oh, Nay, none of this would have happened. If I’d known I never would have—”

  “Are you saying it’s my fault? You turn this into my fault, when it was you who killed that woman?”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “How can you even stand him?”

  The door flew open, and Mrs. Danzig stuck her head in. Carole froze. Had she heard what Naomi had just said? She stared them down.

  “What?” Carole said.

  “You girls can be heard all over the floor.”

  Carole waited, but Mrs. Danzig said no more. “Keep your voices down.” And she shut the door and left.

  “Stand him?” Naomi hissed at her. “What would you know about anything? About love, about desire? You with your perfect little apple-pie family, your midwestern milkmaid mother, your dumb furniture. You’re such a straight arrow, you know. Everything by the book. And you know something else? It’s always me in trouble, but now it’s your bloody turn, and you know what? I’m bloody glad. I like being the one not in trouble for once, if you must know. And I like it that you are!”

  Carole could hardly believe her ears. Her life perfect? How many times had Naomi ridiculed her family? New Jersey hicks. “But Eddie Lindbaeck, Naomi. He’s—” There were no words for what Eddie was.

  “He’s more fun than you’ll ever be,” Naomi said. “And anyway, I feel sorry for him. He’s a lot like me. His family is a joke too. Just like Daddy and Elayne.”

  “It doesn’t even bother you, does it? That woman died, and it’s just business as usual.”

  “I’m not the one who killed her,” Naomi said, glaring at her. “Anyway, that’s the whole point, you moron. Business as usual. You’re the one who doesn’t get it.”

  Lester Lanin was playing his usual thumpety-thump music. “Come on,” Carole said to Jeremy, grabbing his hand, but he said no and they watched from the sidelines, all those preppy boys with their elbows pumping.

  When the table of parents dispersed, the real party started over at Shelly’s apartment. Her parents were up at their country house. They’d left the refrigerator stocked with sandwiches and sodas and the freezer full of ice cream, as if they thought this was a children’s party. But in no time the liquor closet was opened, the bedrooms were full, and drunken boys and girls with zippers open were staggering up and down the hallways. Jeremy took control of the stereo, playing “Satisfaction” at top level, “Wooly Bully” and “My Girl.” When the downstairs neighbors complained, Jeremy led Carole into one of the darkened rooms, stumbling over bodies. They fell on a bed and lay there.

  Around her were the sounds of people necking. A rustle of taffeta. An occasional zipper, something whispered. It was both private and public in the smoky overheated room. The so-called normal way people lost their virginity.

  She lay in the hazy darkness, aware of Jeremy at her side, wondering if he was going to try to kiss her and what she’d do if that happened. She decided she’d slide away from him. She’d go get a glass of water. Something. But he wasn’t making a move, so she relaxed. She wasn’t exactly asleep but not really awake either. She was startled alert when someone said her name. There was a tiny figure in silhouette in the doorway. “Carole? You here?” Naomi came feeling her way along through the room in the dark.

  A light went on. Ten or twelve people were splayed across the room. Kids waking up, their eyes puffy and blinking.

  “There you are.” Naomi weaved unsteadily and pointed at Carole. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Turn off the goddamned light,” one of the boys said. “And shut up.”

  “Up yours,” Naomi whined.

  Kids sat up to see what was going on. “You found her, now hit the light,” somebody said.

  “What did I ever do?” Naomi whispered. “I never did anything to deserve this. You’re the one who did it.”

  “Shut up,” the same voice said.

  Carole rose to her knees carefully, as though a sudden move could cause Naomi to tell what she knew.

  “Jesus,” Naomi slurred. “I helped you. I carried that stupid woman in the goddamn snow, and you act like I’m the one who’s poison?”

  Eddie appeared from the hall, the tie to his tux undone, his shirttails out. “Excuse us.” He put his jacket around Naomi’s shoulders and peered into the room. “Lady�
��s a little drunk.”

  “Am not!” Naomi twisted away from him.

  Carole stood, terrified. Jeremy was fast asleep, snoring lightly, oblivious. If she left, Naomi would follow. She tiptoed down the dimly lit hall to the living room, where more bodies were spread over the floor. Eddie struggled to get Naomi into the jacket. She resisted, whining that she wanted to stay at the party. She wanted to find Carole. “I’m right here,” Carole said. “Come on.” They got her to the hall, down the elevator, and into one of those big cabs with the jump seats that you can unfold. They all piled in, and Naomi passed out between her and Eddie.

  “She almost told,” Carole said.

  “She’s just drunk.”

  “She almost told. She was about to.” Why was he always after Carole to keep her mouth shut when Naomi was the real loose cannon?

  “You’re the risk, panicking like that.”

  “I didn’t panic.”

  “Sure you did. You bolted in there.” He pawed through Naomi’s purse. “I need money.”

  “You mean for the taxi?”

  “What do you have?”

  “How can you not have money? Who are you, anyway?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Eddie said. “Or Jesus there is going to kick us out. Nothing a cabbie hates like a stiff.”

  “Stop, please,” she shouted up to the driver. She’d walk the rest of the way. She put her hand on the door handle, ready to make a run for it when he stopped.