Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  “Keep driving,” Eddie said. “I’m telling you to keep going.” He lunged for the jump seat in front of Carole, pulled it down, and was leaning into her, pushing her back against the seat. “You’ll get out of this cab when I say you can.”

  She tried to slide across to the other door, but he grabbed her wrists. “Don’t piss me off,” he said. “When are you going to learn?”

  “I want to get out and walk.”

  “You think you’ve seen me pissed off, don’t you? Well, you haven’t seen anything.”

  “Let me out,” she said, hoping the driver would help her, but he was ignoring them. She slumped back against the seat and stared out the window.

  “Look at me,” Eddie said, but she wouldn’t. She kept watching the traffic out on the street, the bright storefronts passing by. “You do what I say.” She felt a searing pain in her breast, where Eddie socked her with his fist, a pain so intense it took the breath out of her. “When I say.”

  She ran first thing to the bathroom to see the mark he’d left on her breast in the mirror and touched the angry redness of it lightly. Then she went around turning off the lights her parents had left burning for her and slept away the sultry morning. When she finally got up, she felt groggy. She slipped out of her room. Everything was still and quiet. She found a note from her mother on the dining room table, saying she’d gone to meet Emily for lunch.

  Barefoot and still in her nightie, Carole repeated the routine she had begun when she came back from Stowe, padding silently from one darkened room to another, convincing herself, crying, that last night was the last time ever. She no longer needed to go to school. She’d never see those girls again. Never see Eddie or Naomi. One giant step behind her.

  She went to her parents’ bathroom and opened their prescription bottles. Both were full, a sign that things would go her way. She took three pills from each bottle and put them into the change purse in her room. Then she paced until midafternoon and fell asleep in the afternoon light in the den.

  She woke later from sounds in the hall. Her mother and Aunt Emily. “Carole,” her mother called out sharply. She didn’t respond. There was the shuffle of the women putting down their purses and shopping bags, maybe kicking off their shoes. A low discussion about something, one of them shushing the other. Then Carole’s mother called her name again, louder this time. Carole pretended not to hear. Every time Emily came over, it was trouble. Maybe if Carole stayed quiet, Emily would leave. She tiptoed to the door of the den and peered out at them through the crack. They were at the door between the foyer and the living room, looking around and then at each other, waiting for her to answer. Emily shrugged, and the two of them disappeared down the hall that led to her room. Carole came out into the living room and followed. Her mother whispered her name at the door to her room. When there was no answer, they went in. Carole tiptoed farther down the hall behind them and listened from the hall.

  Emily was in charge, commenting on the condition of the room, the unmade bed, the clothes strewn over the furniture. “You shouldn’t allow this, Patsy,” she said. “Mother would be appalled.” There were other sounds, muffled. Then Emily told Carole’s mother where to look. “Under the mattress. In the desk drawers. Try her pockets. The closet.” She tried to remember with her sleepy mind what was in there that they might discover. The first thing that came to mind was the notebook where she wrote her measurements. Pages and pages of calculations. Her waist size, hips, chest, and thighs. Everything. She measured every day and calculated the loss as a percentage of the original. But so what? Her mother wouldn’t even know what that was. Even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. She’d been after her to lose weight her whole life, it seemed. But that little red change purse … She could hear drawers being opened and closed, the Venetian blinds pulled. She opened the door, and it was a few seconds before they noticed her.

  Her very formal mother was down on all fours, looking under the bed. The woman who was so religiously careful about never invading her daughter’s privacy, who wouldn’t ever open one of Carole’s letters or listen in on conversations the way other mothers did. It scared her to see her mother like that.

  “What are you doing?” Carole asked.

  Her mother blanched.

  Carole came into the room and took the stack of papers that Emily was holding. They were just some old school papers. “Mom?” she said again. “What are you looking for?”

  Her mother held a hand over her mouth as though she was about to be sick.

  “Emily?” Carole said.

  Emily threw up her hands. “Your mother is worried sick,” she said. “It’s not just this, is it, Patsy?” Carole’s mother didn’t speak. “She thinks something is the matter. You’re not the girl you were,” Emily said.

  “People can change,” Carole said. But what did they really know? What was this about?

  “Your mother said you hardly ever talk to her anymore. Your manners are atrocious. Your grades are in the gutter.”

  “They are not in the gutter. I won the Latin prize yesterday, in case you hadn’t heard. And the History prize.” It was true she’d been quiet. She didn’t dare talk anymore. She was always afraid of what might come out of her mouth.

  “You didn’t make the honor roll,” Emily said. “You didn’t even try.”

  “Of course I tried. And anyway, so what if my grades went down? It’s not like I failed or anything. And what business is it of yours?”

  “Your mother is my business.”

  Still sitting on the floor, her mother looked shell-shocked. She rose to her knees, then sat on the bed. She shook her head.

  “Did you tell her all that?” Carole asked.

  “You doubt me?” Emily picked Carole’s black dress from last night off the back of a chair. “You treat your clothes so badly.”

  “And you live off other people’s misery.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Uncle Jack. He ships all that lousy food to people. It makes them sick. It must. It probably kills them.”

  “Jack’s work is none of your affair, young lady.”

  “And my room is none of yours.”

  Emily reddened and trembled. “Are you going to ask her, or should I?” She waited a couple of beats for an answer. “Then I will.” Emily looked Carole in the eye. “Are you pregnant?” Emily was triumphant.

  “Oh, boy.”

  “It’s not funny, young lady,” Emily said. “Don’t you smile at that.”

  “Stop it.” Her mother was looking up at her for the first time. “Just stop it, both of you,” she said.

  “Good, Patsy. Finally!” Emily said. “Finally!”

  “Leave us alone,” she said.

  “Not on your life,” Emily said. “You can thank me for getting you this far. I’m not leaving now.”

  Her mother pursed her lips and shut her eyes. She got up and took Emily by the arm. “Leave us now,” she said. She saw the surprised Emily to the door, shut it, and turned. She approached Carole. She was so close Carole could see tiny veins of lipstick over her lips. She concentrated on those veins. Her mother was saying something. “We had no business invading your privacy this way.” She was shaking, and her voice was small.

  Her mother sat down on the bed again, as though her legs wouldn’t hold her if she stayed standing. She continued, but without looking at Carole. “I did tell her those things. I did say it started when you came back from that vacation. You didn’t get sick.” She glanced up at Carole and then away. “You fled, Carole. I know the difference.”

  Carole braced herself for the tidal wave that was about to break, the moment she’d been dreading.

  “I’m not wrong, Carole. I’m your mother, and I know a thing or two. I know what I’ve seen. You used to come home in the afternoons and sit and talk to me. You used to tell me everything. What happened in school that day. You used to be so disciplined about everything. You used to laugh with us, with your father and me. About silly things.” Carole remembe
red that. It was true. But she’d kept things from her mother then too. “Since you went to Stowe, you just stay in your room all the time. Like you’re hiding something from us.”

  “I won’t anymore,” she said. “Now that school’s out. Now that I don’t have homework.”

  “It’s not just that!” her mother said. “I’m not finished. We’ve never talked about this. You arrived home from Stowe without warning, claiming to have been sick, but in fact you were fine. There was no word all week from Naomi, which was peculiar given the way you two used to call each other daily. Not that your father or I mind, but that’s beside the point. Your grades dropped. And things have been disappearing. That little silver cigarette box from the living room. And Miss MacNamara said something at the graduation about my forgetting to call one day when you were sick. But you never were. I was humiliated.”

  “It was—”

  “I’m still not finished. You arrive out of the blue at your father’s office with questions about pregnant girls.” Her mother shook her head. “We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what’s happening to you. To our family.”

  She had no idea her father’d told her mother. She’d thought it was over and done. Forgotten. “Nobody else has to tell their parents where they are all the time.” It was weak, and she knew it.

  “It’s the change, dear. It’s all those things together. And this.” She opened her hand. There, squeezed small, was the red change purse. “Why?”

  “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

  “You could have asked.”

  Carole had no answer for that.

  “And so many,” her mother said. “We couldn’t figure out where they were going.” She took several quick breaths, her bosom rising and falling, the sound of exhaling sharp in the quiet room. “You weren’t planning—” She stopped, unable to say the words.

  “Of course not,” Carole said. “Oh, no, Mom. Really. I just thought it would be good to have some in case I needed to sleep and couldn’t. You know, before exams or something. I didn’t mean to—”

  Her mother let out a long sigh, lifting her hands to her chest in a gesture of gratitude and relief. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

  Her mother needed more, though, sitting there looking so fragile, so broken. She needed a lie. Carole sat down beside her on the bed. “The thing is, I’ve been worried about college,” she said. She remembered something Deirdre had said rather melodramatically at lunch once, and she repeated it now. “It’s such a big step. Spence is over, and I can never go back to these years of my life. Spence has been the best time of my life, and now it’s over. And I’m afraid I’ll miss home,” she explained. “And what if my roommate’s awful? I’ve never had to share a room with anybody. I don’t know if I can do it.”

  Her mother, moist-eyed, looked at her, believing every word. Carole took a breath and kept going, verbatim from what she remembered of what Deirdre had said. And in fact there was some truth in it. There were so many things to worry about. “What if the work is harder? What if the other girls are smarter than me? What if I flunk out? What if I turn out to be the biggest disappointment of your life?”

  Chapter Six

  Jeremy turned out to be her summer salvation, already vetted by her parents because of where they’d found him. They saw only one side of him, though—how he came to pick her up wearing a coat and tie, sometimes with a little bouquet of flowers or a box of candy. Sometimes it was for Carole and sometimes it was for her mother.

  Her father sat in the living room with a pipe in his mouth and the newspaper in his lap, looking like the dad in Father of the Bride. He waited for Jeremy to squeak down the hallway in his white bucks to say hello, to sit down opposite and talk about dentistry and the world at large. Her father had things to say about the Vietnam War and about Young People Today, how they no longer respected institutions, and what did Jeremy think about that? Jeremy said it was a shame. Some institutions needed to be questioned, no doubt about that. The Catholic Church, for one. But certainly not this wholesale questioning of the government and the whole military-industrial fabric of the country. Carole’s father couldn’t have said it better himself.

  In fact, Jeremy didn’t believe any of this. He was just saying what he knew Carole’s father wanted to hear. His heart was really with the war protesters, the self-immolating Buddhists, and the underground. He told her that on their dates. He dug the counterculture, he said, and she’d been impressed. She liked that in him. It confirmed for her that the world was packed with liars and phonies after all. She had company.

  Her parents were thrilled about Jeremy. In their minds the trouble they’d all had in the spring had blown over. That trouble with Carole had been only “nerves” over the end of the school year, over the prospect of going off to Vassar, all thanks to what she’d told her mother that day. It was a very quick coming-of-age. With some girls it took years. With Carole, it had happened in a couple of months, to hear them tell it. She’d lost her baby fat and gotten moody for a few weeks. Nobody mentioned the details. Nobody brought up the subject of the sleeping pills, the missed day of school, even the abrupt end to her friendship with Naomi. They were things of the past. Even Emily seemed to believe it.

  The first night they went out, Jeremy took her to the Brasserie, where he apologized for falling asleep at the graduation party. He said he couldn’t blame her for leaving him there, and he was glad she’d agreed to go out with him now. He told her that he was still asleep the morning after the party when Shelly’s parents came home. By that time everyone else had left, and Shelly herself must have been asleep in her own bed. The bedroom he found himself in was the parents’ bedroom, he explained with a laugh. They’d planned to come back early all along to check up on things, sneaky petes that they were, and there he was.

  Jeremy had a broad nose with a galaxy of tiny pores and dark eyes under heavy brows. When he talked, he tipped his head down and looked up bashfully. He was always smiling, no matter what. “I got blamed for the whole thing,” he said.

  “What whole thing?”

  “The place. It was pretty wrecked. Broken glass, spilled stuff on the carpets. The mother went berserk. I felt bad, sure. But I didn’t do any of that, and I told them so. I said I came alone, that I was one of the extra guys, so I wouldn’t get you in trouble. They reamed me out anyway. That woman swears like a sailor. They let the daughter sleep right through it all.”

  “Mrs. Taylor swears?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jeremy said.

  Carole used to think the world was orderly, everything was known by all, and that missteps were always noticed, especially her own. But life kept proving differently. Jeremy didn’t know about Naomi screaming in the darkened room that night. He didn’t know Carole had left not because of him but because she had been afraid of what he might find out. The Taylors hadn’t known the kind of party Shelly planned to have, although everybody else had. When they found out, it didn’t matter to them who had made the mess. They’d punished the sleeping boy in their bed when he’d had less to do with it than anyone. Apparently the truth went every which way. Apparently the truth was nothing special. She started to laugh about it all, and Jeremy joined in even without knowing what was so funny.

  After dinner, he asked where she wanted to go. “Fort Tryon Park,” she said.

  Jeremy looked up at her with a smirk. “Really?”

  “Sure. The Cloisters. I’ve never been.”

  “Now?” He dug in his pockets to see what change he had.

  She’d meant sometime. But the challenge in his voice was too good to pass up. “Sure,” she said. It made her feel a new kind of power to say yes and see if he’d really do it. “Now.” The thought of heading off to someplace new so late in the evening made the night seem to stretch endlessly away, with nothing—no parents, no future—on the other side.

  It was close to ten when they got off the express A train to 190th Street. Everything was closed, locked up tight, but they walked around the pa
rk in the dark. An unlit road took them through a parking lot and past a darkened cafeteria. They went farther along in the semidarkness, scrambling up the lawn toward the tower, walking beside the rampants and then back to the lookout at Fort Tryon. Down below were barges and tugs lit like little Christmas trees on the Hudson River. Jeremy was leaning on the wall, staring at New Jersey.

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t hate me.”

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “Just don’t.” He was concentrating fiercely on the river below them.

  “God, Jeremy. I don’t hate you, I like you,” she said.

  “I like you too,” he said, not taking his eyes from the scene below. In the movies, this was when he was supposed to kiss her. But he was so brooding and pulled into himself that she thought he might not. Even so, the very idea of kissing a boy, any boy, even Jeremy, whom she liked, made her sweat and worry. She pulled away protectively from him and began to walk back the way they’d come. She needed to be free of the feel of his body beside her, the way it reminded her of Eddie’s and Rita’s naked bodies on her skin, their sweaty hands, the feel of Rita’s breast on her cheek and the crush of Eddie’s weight.

  Jeremy had always wanted to ride all 230 miles of the New York subway lines, and he couldn’t believe his good fortune that Carole would do it with him. For her part, Carole didn’t care that much about the subway, but it was fun to have a project, fun to be with someone who wrote down numbers and kept records the way she did with her weight, which was down to 142 and holding. There were parts of the city she could see with Jeremy that she’d been forbidden to see since she moved to New York. The whole city had been pretty much off-limits, since she was only allowed to travel between Ninety-first Street and Forty-second Street and only in daylight. Everything she needed to see and do was within those blocks and within those times, her father had said. But there was so much out there. There was Coney Island and Harlem. There was the Bowery and Greenwich Village, places she’d read about. Yankee Stadium and 125th Street.