Just Another Kid

by Torey Hayden

  This was the first time Ladbrooke ever spoke directly of her beauty, the first time she ever acknowledged it as a notable factor in her life. She didn’t feel beautiful, she said flatly. An empty box with pretty wrapping. But it was there. It was something to use, something to assuage the terrible helplessness. In the end, I could tell that it had become just one more expression of her frantic anger, as she enticed men to give her love and then despised them because they never saw the worthlessness she felt. Listening silently, I realized that perhaps this was the source of Tom’s powerful hold over her. Her beauty hadn’t blinded him. He was only too willing to confirm her own opinion of herself.

  I could appreciate Ladbrooke’s need to recount all of this and found it interesting that, once we got onto the subject, she was anything but inarticulate. Alone with me in the privacy of the classroom, she could reconstruct all those terrible little moments with wrenching eloquence. However, after the first few days of listening to her, I wanted to make sure something constructive came out of it. All this insight wasn’t worth much if it didn’t change things for the better.

  My two main concerns were closely related. The first was to develop some way to help her cope with her anxiety attacks and eventually curb them, as they were considerably more debilitating than her unexpected moments of speechlessness. The second was to get Lad to realize that the methods she’d already come up with to cover the panic and avoid unnecessary interactions were almost as unpleasant to others as her anxiety was to her.

  We talked then about relaxation techniques and other methods commonly used with phobics. I reminded her of some of the things I did with Dirkie, who was also prone to panic attacks. But beyond these, I admitted that mostly it was going to be a matter of getting back into social situations and just plowing on through. An inelegant solution, I’d called it, a term used on me years earlier when I’d confronted a phobia myself. I told her about that too. And inelegant as it was, the method worked. If you plowed through long enough, you got over the disabling anxiety.

  I also brought up the other matter: the impression she gave people when she tried to save herself from panicky situations. Interestingly, for all her perspicacity regarding her own situation, Ladbrooke had surprisingly little insight into how her behavior affected others. I had noticed this shortcoming on other occasions, particularly in regard to her relationship with Tom, but it was more marked here. On one level she did appear to realize that she projected a cold, thoroughly hostile image. But on another level, she seemed genuinely amazed that people had believed that was how she was. I’m not really that way, she’d replied, miffed. Why did everyone insist on taking things so literally? I explained that that was just the way people were, that in general, all of us tend to accept what we see as what’s true. But Ladbrooke, still too desperate for understanding herself, had none to squander on other people. So I let the matter drop for the time being.

  Toward the middle of March, Tom was taking Leslie and his other two children upstate to visit his mother. They were planning to be gone five days, and Leslie was due to be out of school from Wednesday to Friday of that week. Ladbrooke was staying home, openly grateful to have her work in the classroom as an acceptable excuse. Knowing that Ladbrooke had no commitments over the period, I thought I’d ask her if she wanted to join Carolyn and me for one of our evening swims at the spa. It seemed like a good idea at the time, a friendly gesture. I knew Ladbrooke had been slightly envious of Carolyn’s and my frequent evenings together and the silly things we got up to. This seemed a good opportunity to include her. Moreover, I thought we could kill two birds with one stone and provide Lad with a chance to cope in a slightly broader social situation. The relaxed, distracting atmosphere of the swimming pool would be, I hoped, less threatening than that of the teachers’ lounge.

  After discussing it with Carolyn, I did ask Ladbrooke, who accepted the invitation readily, a surprised smile on her face. I apologized ahead of time for the facilities, which really weren’t very spectacular even by my rather undiscriminating standards. And I explained that our routine was pretty much a do-it-yourself affair. I tried to get a mile’s worth of laps in before we degenerated into just lounging around the whirlpool and chatting. Carolyn, however, usually felt less energetic and spent most of her time treading water.

  I hadn’t anticipated any problems when I’d first thought of asking Ladbrooke. The invitation had been extended purely in the spirit of friendship, and I’d counted on Lad’s feeling more at ease than in previous social situations and not letting the side down. However, by the time Friday rolled around, I found myself overwhelmed with misgivings. I’d tended to forget how truly unpleasant everyone else found Lad because we didn’t interact much with anyone else at school and it had been so long since I’d felt that way about her myself. Now, suddenly, the memories were very vivid. What if Ladbrooke didn’t cooperate? What if she kept her old, bristly, hostile guard and made Carolyn thoroughly unhappy I’d invited her? This thought for my own possible discomfort concerned me much more than the possibility that Lad might grow uneasy herself or panic. Agonizingly tense by the time we arrived at the spa, I found myself wondering how the heck I got myself into things like this when it would have been a lot less trouble to stay home and watch TV.

  I can only assume that my anxiety accounted for assorted other silly behaviors on my part that evening. For instance, after years of feeling fairly satisfied with my body, I found myself unexpectedly self-conscious beside Lad. Covertly, I watched Ladbrooke as we changed, and all the while I compared bits and pieces.

  Ladbrooke further aggravated things by being in better shape than either Carolyn or I. She went off the diving board into the water and swam away like a fish, while Carolyn and I just stood there, trying to look skinny. This was no small disillusionment to me. Here I was, straight as an arrow, while she abused her body mercilessly—and this was the reward I got?

  She then quickly snatched from me the one small gem in my crown. Swimming had been a hard-won skill for me, something I’d learned in later years and had never found particularly natural. Yet, I’d persevered, and the fact that I was one of the better swimmers among the regulars at the spa had always pleased me tremendously. But Ladbrooke was very obviously superior. Joining me for the laps, she effortlessly passed me and was sitting with Carolyn on the edge of the pool when I finally dragged myself out. Generally disgruntled, I returned to the water and kept swimming until at last I was too tired to care about anything.

  Afterward, we all sank gratefully into the whirlpool. I leaned back against the jets and let them massage hard-worked muscles. Ladbrooke lowered herself into the deeper part, her long hair spreading out around her in the water, making her look like one of the girls in the Maxfield Parrish paintings. Only Carolyn seemed full of chat. She launched into a hilarious account of her tortuous efforts to get one of the children in her class toilet trained. Always a first-rate storyteller, she proved very funny that evening. The rather poopy humor of the tale left all of us giggling like schoolgirls.

  Then Ladbrooke came up on the bench beside me. Leaning her head back against the edge of the whirlpool, she closed her eyes. We all drifted into companionable silence for a few minutes.

  Carolyn looked over. “So, Lad,” she asked, “what do you think of us? Do you like our kind of work?”

  Ladbrooke opened her eyes. She glanced briefly in my direction before looking past me to Carolyn. She nodded.

  Carolyn didn’t say anything further.

  “Yes, I like it,” Lad said. “I’ve learned a lot.”

  “Would you want to go into it?” Carolyn asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Carolyn smiled amiably. “Well, at least that’s honest.”

  “I kind of like being in there with all that goes on,” Ladbrooke replied quietly. “If you know what I mean. It all sounds odd, when you’re on the outside, but when you’re actually in there, in with the action, it’s a lot more exciting than I thought it’d be. It’s
more … more … It’s more …” She paused.

  “More honest,” Carolyn supplied. “More real. More alive.”

  Ladbrooke nodded. “Yes, that’s what I meant, I think. Alive.”

  Carolyn grinned. “Yeah, Lad, that’s what hooks you. It’s like dope. Once you get a snort, nothing else is quite the same.”

  Afterward in the dressing room, Carolyn apologized for having to hurry. We’d stayed longer than we ordinarily did, and it was Friday night. She had a date at 8:30. Ladbrooke was still drying her hair, so I sat on the long bench between the lockers and waited for her. Coming back over from the dryers, she stood over me and combed her hair, pulling it way out to the side with a wide-toothed comb to reach the ends. Then it would fall, swinging past my face, one section after another.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked, as she worked on it.

  “Now?”

  “Tonight, I mean. Anything? You want to come over chez Taylor and have something to eat?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I’m no great shakes as a cook. I’ll tell you that now. But I can manage something if you don’t mind that it’s not fancy.” She paused to pull hairs out of her comb.

  “Okay.”

  I sat alone in the Considynes’ cavernous living room. It was the first time I had ever been inside the house. Ladbrooke had disappeared into the kitchen, and I could hear her banging pots and pans around. So I’d been left to my own devices. Leaning my head back, I stared at the vaulted ceiling.

  There was nothing chez about this place; it was definitely château. I’d never really seen anything like it up close. It felt like a church to me, with its massive, hewn beams and pitched roof. The peak of the ceiling must have been twenty feet above me. And way up there along the beams ran little tracks of spotlights that provided a soft, very diffuse form of illumination. It was attractive, but I wasn’t sure I’d have cared to carry on my normal life under it.

  The fireplace was gargantuan, like the rest of the room. Dividing the living room from the dining room, it had a magnificent stone hearth that ran half the length of the room. Studying it, I was overcome with an unexpected moment’s homesickness. My tiny cottage back in Wales had an equally mammoth fireplace, born not of opulence but of the mistaken belief in days gone by that bigger meant warmer. It didn’t, of course, because all the heat went up the chimney. I expected all the heat went up this chimney too, although here probably no one noticed. Once the cottage was on my mind, however, I was unable to shake the homesick feelings. So, to keep the evening from being spoiled, I got up and went into the kitchen to see what Ladbrooke was doing.

  She wasn’t kidding about her cooking ability. I found her scraping a concoction of ground beef and canned spaghetti onto two plates. The incongruity of such food in these luxurious surroundings struck me as amusing, and I smiled.

  Lad smiled back. “You like this?” she asked, her voice hopeful.

  I nodded.

  Opening the refrigerator, she stared into it. “What do you want to drink?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Six months ago, I would have suggested we wash all this down with a bottle of plonk.” Her voice was wistful. “That’s the kind of drinking I really miss.” She looked at me over top of the refrigerator door. “Do you want wine? There’s some in here.” She lifted up a large, half-empty jug of California white. “I don’t mind, Torey. Tom drinks it all the time. I don’t care if you drink in front of me.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve got that much self-control. It won’t make me feel bad or anything. Really.”

  “No, that’s okay. Have you got milk?”

  She looked back into the refrigerator. “Milk? What kind of drink’s that? I’d feel silly giving you milk.”

  “Milk’s fine, Lad. It’s what I drink at home.”

  We sat down at the table. Very aware of the huge house echoing around us, I was uncomfortable. I would have hated it here on my own. Even with the two of us, we created such a negligible bit of life in the silence that I’d have been happier with more light or some music or something to fend it off.

  Ladbrooke, however, seemed unbothered. In fact, she was more relaxed than I customarily saw her. Taking up her fork, she tucked into the spaghetti mixture with undisguised enjoyment.

  Then, unexpectedly, she giggled. “This is great. It’s just like having my teacher home to dinner.”

  “I’m not your teacher, Lad.”

  “You are,” she said with feeling. She was still smiling, clearly relishing the idea.

  Adjusting my napkin, I picked up my fork and began to eat. Ladbrooke, I noticed, was already halfway through. Where she put it, I didn’t know, but she usually ate with the appetite of a lumberjack.

  When she’d finished, she rose from the table and went into the kitchen. “Do you want some ice cream, Torey?” she called. She returned with two cartons. “There’s this kind, let’s see, what is it? Raspberry ripple. And this one. Double chocolate fudge.” She grinned gleefully. “That one’s Tom’s, but this one’s mine. I love chocolate.” She scooped a bit off the edge of the lid with her finger and tasted it. “Have some of this. It’s nicer than that.”

  “Okay.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen to get bowls. I was left, contemplating the carton of double chocolate fudge. It struck me suddenly how normal this all was, the ice cream, the canned spaghetti, Ladbrooke’s obvious pleasure with the evening. And I realized with poignancy that I had almost no knowledge of Ladbrooke in the small, ordinary ways of friendship. Four soul-searing months together and I’d never known she especially liked chocolate.

  Ladbrooke returned. Putting bowls on the table, she began to scoop generous helpings of ice cream into them. “Tom hates chocolate. He says it ruins your skin. I don’t think it does, but he’s always telling me I shouldn’t eat so much of it.” She shook her head wearily. “I don’t know about Tom sometimes. He can be a real pain. And bossy. He treats me like I’m about six years old. Everything’s got to be done his way. I hope your future husband isn’t like that. I hope you have more sense about this sort of thing than I did.”

  Ladbrooke took the carton back to the freezer while I tried to soften my ice cream slightly with my spoon.

  “Why did you marry Tom?” I asked, when she’d sat down again.

  She shrugged. Taking an enormous spoonful of the ice cream, she held it, bowl of the spoon upward, and licked it as if it were a cone. Her eyes were on me. “I don’t know.” Pause to lick the ice cream again. “He was nice.” Pause. “I was impressed with what he did—you know—the painting.” Another pause. She took up a second scoop of the ice cream. Lifting the spoon, she studied it a moment before licking it. “Tom had a lot of things to offer. You’ve got to understand, I was young when I met him. I was not quite twenty-three. I didn’t have much experience. You get this guy coming along who’s rich and famous and really somebody. It’s pretty hard not to be flattered when he makes it obvious he wants you. It’s pretty hard not to do what he wants.”

  “Were you working then?”

  She nodded. “I was still doing my graduate work at Princeton when we first met. I was a couple years from finishing my doctorate. We started out just living together. Tom had an apartment in Manhattan, and I just moved in with him on the weekends, when I wasn’t at Princeton. But then after a while he kept wanting to come back here. I’d never been here before, but he made it sound nice. And he kept wanting to come back; his roots were here. I was just getting established about then. But Tom got pretty insistent. He wanted to get married; he wanted everything formal and above board. We had Leslie and I think, deep down, I already knew something was wrong with her; so I thought, maybe I’d better—you know—for her sake. Tom kept telling me that I didn’t have to give up the project anyway. He had the jet then, and we thought we’d just carry on like we always had, my living in Princeton during the week and at home with him on the weekends. We were together five years before
we ever actually spent an entire week together under the same roof. So I didn’t object to the move a whole lot. The way Tom talked about it, the area sounded interesting. And I really liked planes. I was intending to get my pilot’s license, so that sounded exciting, flying back and forth across the country.”

  “What kind of work were you doing on your project?”

  “It was experimental work on the geometry of certain molecular substances.” She glanced over. “You familiar with Raman spectroscopy?”

  I shook my head slightly. In fact, I’d never heard of it.

  A rather disappointed expression crossed her face. “I know. It sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? It does to most people. But I really like it. I’m good at that sort of thing.”

  “I doubt that’s the kind of talent you could fake.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What made you give it up in the end?”

  Another shrug. Scraping the sides of her bowl, she finished the very last of the ice cream. “It got to be too much of a hassle, I guess. I was wrong about its being exciting, trying to commute halfway across the country every week. I mean, there I was, weekdays in New Jersey, weekends here. Tom was always wanting parties and his kids over. Then back to work and long hours and endless meetings over funding and all that. I was continuously exhausted. I was twenty-eight and feeling about eighty-eight. And I was never getting anything done. I never got my pilot’s license. I was too busy sleeping on the plane to think about flying it.” She paused and exhaled a long breath. “You see, if I’m honest, it was just an ego trip in the beginning. It seemed glamorous to me, to be able to commute all that distance, to be able to afford to commute and all that. But it wasn’t worth it. I was too tired to enjoy anything. Leslie was getting worse and worse. Tom nagged me nonstop about what I wasn’t doing with him. It was killing me. And it wasn’t as if I were Einstein or anything. I was just a junior member of the project. The juniorest. They didn’t need me that much. So, when it got too hard, I gave it up.”