Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  She heard him get his breathing under control, the space between breaths lengthen. “I can explain,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to explain. We’ll have no more of this.” He clicked off the light and left her alone in the now-dark room. She stayed where she was, his accusation ringing in her ears.

  “The plum,” he’d once said, “is the truth people tell at a point when they think they have no other alternative. It comes after skillful questioning by an attorney, a building, if you will, of questions or statements, one upon the other so that the person thinks you already know the truth and simply blurts it out in corroboration.”

  All spring, that was what hadn’t ever made sense. He could so easily have done that. He could have gotten the truth out of her in minutes if he’d wanted to, the questions shooting out like bullets about what had happened in Stowe. Think back. What did you eat? What was the first symptom? Did you vomit? What was in it? He could have found out in a matter of seconds that it wasn’t the food. Wasn’t even diarrhea. So then why DID you come home so soon? And then the rest. Why isn’t Naomi home? What happened when you got up there? Where did you sleep? What did you do that night? Tell me about the other girls and boys. He could have broken the night in Stowe into tiny fragments, found the flaws in her story, and put everything together in minutes. But he hadn’t ever done that.

  He hadn’t wanted to know.

  Chapter Seven

  SEPTEMBER 1965

  They drove to Poughkeepsie on a mild day. Carole sat in the backseat, studying their heads. Her mother’s hair was pulled into a shiny bun coiffed for the occasion with a royal-blue clip-on hat. There would be other parents there, people her mother needed to look her best for. Her father had a full head of hair at sixty. He had been forty-four when she was born, much older than most people’s fathers, so he was sixty now. Or sixty-one. Her mother was only forty.

  She liked the miles going by and wished she’d applied to another school instead of Vassar. Carleton College in Minnesota or even Stanford. It would have been good to have more miles separating her from her family and from that night in Stowe, which were, by now, sort of the same thing. The whole spring was behind her, though, and she thought of this trip as her escape from the fishbowl, as her real departure from all of it. She would never return to Spence. She would never again see Eddie or Naomi. Little by little, she would become free, like the coating on a grain of sand. That’s what they did to make pearls. They dropped a grain of sand into an oyster. The irritation made the oyster secrete something that coated the grain so it wouldn’t hurt so much. This went on for year after year until all those secretions hardened into a pearl, and the original grain of sand was gone, never to be seen again. It was like amnesia. The thought of that pearl helped her to relax in the backseat and watch the scenery go by. Leaving home, more for good than any of them knew.

  The day after the scene in the living room, her father had called her from work and told her not to see Jeremy anymore. That had been okay with her, though. Jeremy had told his mother she was on the pill, that they were doing it. Everybody lied to protect themselves, even people you liked. Sometimes they had to sacrifice somebody else, and she’d been it.

  Her roommate’s name was Josie. She was from Framingham, Massachusetts, and she reminded Carole of the girl from the Double Hearth that night, the girl with the chapped shins. She had the same neat pageboy, the same upper-crust accent. And she was immaculate in her madras Bermuda shorts, her sleeveless cotton blouse with the circle pin. Everything was neatly lined up on top of her dresser, the drawers full of folded Shetland sweaters, her closet an orderly row of plaid skirts. Josie had taken the best of everything by the time Carole and her mother got there, the larger dresser, the bed near the window, the larger closet. Carole had the sense that she was moving into bits of the room, here and there, fitting her belongings in around Josie’s, and she stood there looking around. They’d said in the freshman letter to wait until your roommate got there so you could plan the room together, but Josie hadn’t bothered.

  Oblivious, her mother dove right in, asking where Josie was from and which school she had attended. “Farmington” came the answer and her mother gushed. Jackie Kennedy’s school. Her mother remembered exactly which girls had abandoned Spence for Farmington, and she rattled all of them off, and of course Josie knew them all. Carole caught a glimpse of herself in Josie’s full-length mirror. A wild girl with her frizzy blond hair, her beige cutoff jeans, and a black poor-boy sweater. Carole ran her hand over the tops of the two desks, then hoisted a suitcase onto the newer one, the one without the pen carvings on the top, and began opening the desk drawers.

  “Oh, that one’s my desk,” Josie said. “Next to my bed.”

  Carole stared at her, deciding what to do.

  Josie chattered on to Carole’s mother about boarding school and how different this was for her, even though she’d been living away from home for years. It was as though she’d barely registered the impasse with Carole and everything was hunky-dory, but Carole could tell she knew exactly what she was doing.

  “This is the desk I want,” Carole said.

  “Carole, dear,” her mother said, nervously adjusting her hat, and then to Josie, “I’m sure she doesn’t mean that.”

  Carole was struck by how timid her mother could be. How submissive in certain situations. Her mother was about to let Josie get away with this. She was about to let her commandeer the better half of the room just to keep the peace, even if it meant Carole, her own daughter, had to live with less. Carole understood her mother was just trying to get through the moment without conflict. But Josie was taking advantage. “Mother,” Carole said. “She already has the better part of the room, the part with the windows and the sun. The least I can get is the desk without pen marks.”

  “Oh, but I’m sure she didn’t mean—” her mother said. “We were a little late.”

  “I was only trying to be helpful,” Josie said, looking as though her feelings were hurt. Fat chance, Carole thought. “To get organized so we wouldn’t both be unpacking at once.” Josie appealed to Carole’s mother.

  “I want that desk.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake then.” Josie opened the desk drawers and dumped out the contents on her bed.

  They had an Indian summer that year, steamy and sultry long into September. Starting the first weekend, there were mixers with boys from Yale and Williams and Amherst. Carole was a fish out of water at them. She didn’t know how to make small talk, how to run on at the mouth the way Josie did, flirting and giggling and saying almost nothing. Even so, boys sought Carole out. She found them smooth and confusing, so sure of themselves. And they drank a lot. There was almost always a bottle of liquor in the car or a flask in somebody’s coat pocket. She didn’t dare. She remembered what Eddie had said: You were pretty gone on the scotch. She’d vowed never to drink again. When one of the boys called her, she wouldn’t take the call. Not yet. She wasn’t ready for anything having to do with boys or liquor or anything else. Josie thought she was such a piece of work. He’s a Yalie! Are you crazy?

  She spent more and more time in the library reading newspapers. It had become a habit back in New York to scan the New York Times every morning and the Herald Tribune every afternoon, skipping the big stories up front and concentrating on the small items at the back, where there might be news of a body found, a murder investigation. But always there was nothing. Now she had so many more papers available, and she scanned them all—the ones from Burlington and Manchester and Boston.

  She had almost nothing to do with Josie, who would spend hours lolling around the room with her friends, talking about boys and what the boys’ fathers did for a living and where they lived and how rich they were or weren’t and how you could tell. Josie said with great seriousness that she deserved to be married to somebody rich because she knew she’d be good at it, and Carole had said in disgust, “Everybody’s good at being rich. It’s poverty that’s hard.” Josie looke
d at the others and rolled her eyes. They hated Carole. At Spence they hadn’t been friendly, but she was sure they hadn’t hated her. Not like this.

  They were almost never in the room at the same time. If Josie was studying at her desk, Carole went to the library. If Josie had her friends in the room, Carole headed outside. When Josie would be out, which was most weekend nights, Carole had the room to herself and lay on her bed, listening to the radio or reading. Going to Vassar was supposed to have been such a big deal, all those years with this as the endpoint. But how had she even known about Vassar? Had it ever been her idea? No. It was her mother’s. Or maybe her father’s. She couldn’t even remember, but everything had pointed to Vassar, and now she was here and she couldn’t see why. A few times she put in some effort. She memorized facts about the development of Western civilization and repeated them on the exam and got an A. But that didn’t last. She’d lost her ability to concentrate. What’s more, other parts of her life, when she thought back, were a lot better. She remembered Rachel in particular, who had been so straightforward, who always meant what she said. Carole smiled privately when she thought about the nuns and how it must have looked, all of them waltzing with those pregnant girls.

  Sometimes she whiled away the afternoon at the Star Luncheonette in downtown Poughkeepsie, listening to people talking at the counter. Just ordinary conversations. A couple of pregnant women talking about how much weight they’d gained. A man trying to decide whether to put the snow tires on this week or wait until it snowed. Just normal life. Comfortable. She preferred that to school, and she was attracted by the order of the place, how it seemed all hit-or-miss the first time she went in, but then little by little she saw that everything, right down to the last fork, had a place and that there was a routine for everything. A few times, when the waitresses were shorthanded, she even helped out behind the counter in exchange for a cup of coffee. She loved it. She’d watched so much that she knew all the routines—how the waitresses filled the sugar, ketchup, and mustard containers when business slacked off. How they were always cutting up lemons and tomatoes and onions or filling the spare coffee urns so they’d be ready. How sixty percent of what they did was preparation, and only forty percent was serving the customers. It was a revelation. It took way more time to be ready than it did to do the actual work.

  She skipped classes and didn’t join any of the organizations at Vassar. But when her parents called, she had to say something, and it was Josie’s life that Carole described to them. She told them she’d met a boy from Princeton. She described the boy Josie had met at a mixer whose name was Neal, who was tall and redheaded, the son of a professor at Rutgers.

  Her parents were thrilled, and over the months, Carole filled them in on all the details. She paraphrased letters that Neal had sent to Josie. She described the little gifts in Josie’s top drawer—the little heart-shaped pin, the scarab bracelet.

  One cold afternoon Josie piled into the room, still in her winter coat. A long camel-hair job with a belt slung low in back. “Guy downstairs for you,” she said. “I told him I’d get you. He said you’d know.”

  “Know what?”

  Josie put her hands on her hips. “I don’t know what. Mrs. Beckley said there was a visitor for you and would I please give you the message. The guy was standing right there, and I couldn’t say no. Very cute guy. And he just says ‘She’ll know who it is.’”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “So go down and find out!”

  “No,” Carole said.

  “What is your problem?” Josie went back down, slamming the door behind her, and came back to the room a few minutes later. “He says he met you in Stowe.” Josie was standing, hands on her hips. “You’re probably right. He’s got the wrong girl. He’s gorgeous.”

  Eddie sat cross-legged in a striped armchair in the receiving room. He watched her cross the room, looking her up and down as she approached. His hair was golden and he was tanned, like he’d been away. Seeing him, she felt that familiar loathing and fear again. Fear that something had happened, that the body had been found, that she’d been traced to the motel. Loathing for the man who looked up at her with those lizard eyes and said, “Long time no see.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  “What do you want?”

  Josie came down with her friend Fiona, and the two of them fell giggling onto a sofa nearby.

  “Okay,” she said. It wasn’t safe. “Let’s go.”

  Eddie’s car was parked on the drive. A blue station wagon that surely belonged to somebody else. He didn’t own anything himself. Maybe not even the clothes. “Hotchkiss looks like this,” he said, looking around.

  “What do you want?” she said for the third time, sitting in the passenger side of the car, watching the windows start to fog.

  “To see you,” he said. “You’re looking good. Really. I’m not just saying that.”

  “I don’t care what you think.”

  He rested an arm on the back of the seat and slid a few inches closer while she, in response, pressed herself back against the door. In the late-afternoon light his face was only light and shadow. The neat eyebrows, the planes of his cheeks under high cheekbones, his pointed chin. “Naomi got married, the little bitch,” he said. “She’ll never be happy with him. Have you seen him? He looks like David Eisenhower. Like the class president everywhere I ever went to school. But he must be loaded. If Naomi married him, he’s gotta be rich. She invited me to the wedding.” He studied her face. “Were you invited?”

  “You know I wasn’t,” she said.

  “Everything she ever said about that father and stepmother was all true. You’d have thought it was that Elayne’s wedding. She comes sashaying down the aisle. Mother of the bride in a red sequined dress. Couldn’t take my eyes off her. And then Naomi in this little slinky number. Cute but no contest.”

  She didn’t know where this was going. She would have to wait him out. And now Josie was going to start asking her questions about him. She had managed to contain her life in a neat package, and he showed up and poked a hole in it.

  “Look, Eddie,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re here, but the whole deal was for us to lay low. And stay away from each other. Why do you keep coming around? Just leave me alone, will you? I mean, why can’t you? Naomi’s married. I’m at school. And you’re—I don’t know, an actor.”

  “Not stay away from each other,” he said. “I never said that. Keep our mouths shut. That’s all.” He leaned closer and touched her hair. “I like knowing what you’re doing. Where you are. It’s nice you’re in college. I like that. Just a regular girl doing what girls do.” She pulled away, out of his range. “You can’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.” He let his hand fall to the seat. “You feel it too, I know you do, you have to. You and Naomi and me, but you and me most of all because she died right there with us, you know? We were all touching each other, and one of us dies. We’re fucking, and she dies. Alive one second, dead the next. Jesus, Carole. Christ. It just blows me away every time.”

  “You make it sound—”

  He leaned toward her and purred the words. “Yes, I do.” Carole put out her hand to keep him from coming closer. “Nobody’s asking any questions. Nobody even knows.”

  “Are you sure?” she said. She hadn’t known how badly she wanted to hear that. “Nobody ever found her?”

  “Nope,” Eddie said. “Or if they did, they never put it together, what happened. They never connected us.”

  “I still don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I mean, I know it did happen. I’ve gone over it a zillion times in my mind, but I can’t remember. I think I should remember. Shouldn’t I?”

  “You were smashed.”

  She remembered getting pushed off the bed, the slippery, awful way she kept sliding off the side to the floor, how cold she felt. “She said to get up on the bed, and I thought she meant up near the headboard, but now I don’t know
. Maybe she meant on her other side, but once I was there I didn’t dare get off or do anything because you were so pissed, Eddie, so I stayed up there, but it was hard to keep my balance, and that’s all I really remember.” At least all she remembered in sequence—after that, it was all a blur. “I just wanted it to stop.”

  “I was pissed? I don’t think so. You were the pissed-off one. You came at me. You lunged at her and me.”

  “No.”

  “She never invited you up on the bed. She would never.”

  This always happened. The way what she knew for a fact could slip right out through her fingers. “She was breathing funny, remember? Kind of rasping. Do you remember that?”

  “Nah,” he said. “She was fine.”

  “No. I remember that.”

  He thought for a few seconds. “Maybe that was after you did it,” he said. “After you broke her neck.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “I think it was earlier.”

  “So you broke it later.”

  “I must have,” she said.

  “I saw you do it.” Eddie smiled at her.

  She pressed herself hard against the car door at his words. “Please shut up,” she said.

  “I didn’t tell you that before, did I? How I saw what you did. It’s how I know. Here you go over it a zillion times like you say, but you block out the main event. I saw what you did, Carole.” Eddie whistled. “You must have been drunker than I thought.”

  She turned her face and looked out the car window across the drive to the lit doorway of her dorm, where a group of girls was pushing their way inside, all dressed in camel-hair coats and striped scarves. Girls without any problems. He must be right about what she’d done. She thought she remembered a pang of jealousy, anger that Rita had ruined their night. She remembered the feel of Rita’s head, her hair, damp with sweat. She curled her hands in her lap. She didn’t want him to say anything else. “Why did you come up here?” she said.