“Well now,” Mrs. Delatte, the French teacher, said. She was dinner chaperone that evening; the teachers took turns, a week at a time. “Such a serious gathering. This must be a meeting of the Académie!”
So that’s what we called ourselves. For a while we tried to speak only French, but that didn’t work. No one was really at home in the language, except one girl from Quebec. We went back to English but kept the seriousness. There were no jokes, no pictures of boyfriends, no gossip. We talked about the future of the world, how to live a meaningful life, the duties of one human being to another. We were, I suppose, reinventing the Ten Commandments…until the sound of rattling polishers and floor machines scattered us back to our dorms.
Sandra Robinson’s favorite subject was self-knowledge. She was then reading Freud on the unconscious. (She kept her copy, a small book with a red cover, hidden in her room.) Night after night she talked on and on, arguing, questioning, presenting her own thoughts in a long monologue. The other girls, bored by the subject, drifted away. She went on lecturing to me alone. “It’s all a matter of self-knowledge. If you know what you are, you can accept what you are. But how do you know yourself? That’s the real problem.”
“Not for me,” I said truthfully. “I never thought about it.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay then, if you don’t want to look at yourself, you can start with your family.”
“Freud says that?”
“I’m saying that. You can look at your family and you see yourself.”
“I can? Well, my mother’s a retired prostitute who’s got a dressmaking business now. I’ve got a more or less resident stepfather who’s a cab driver. Now, how does that say anything about me?”
“I didn’t mean details.” Sandra Robinson looked very embarrassed. “I didn’t ask you about that.”
“Of course you did,” I said cheerfully.
“No.” She got up and began to pace around the table. “You’re just not listening.” She sounded more confident now; her classroom lecturer voice had returned. “What I’m saying is that you should make some effort to know yourself, all the secret thoughts and feelings you aren’t aware of.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You should be, that’s the point. The unexamined life is not worth living—who said that?”
“Freud?”
“No. And don’t be silly.”
“Any kind of life is worth living. Better alive than dead, that’s what I say.”
“You can be very annoying.” Sandra Robinson tapped me on the shoulder.
“Everybody tells me that.…But they love me just the same.”
She took a deep shuddering breath. “Oh come on now. Stop being so vain.”
There was a rule at St. Catherine’s that all freshmen must be able to swim the length of the pool four times. The thought of the warm chlorine-reeking water made my skin crawl, but I put on a suit and went to the pool.
“You can’t swim at all?” The swimming coach, whose name was Nydia Carter, looked at me with horror. “You have never even tried? Not ever? Just think what would happen if a boat sank or you fell overboard.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said politely, “but I’ve never been in a boat. And where I live I am more likely to get hit by a car than drowned in a flood.”
“Oh dear,” she said, “oh dear. Well, you’ll just have to learn now.”
“I could teach her, Miss Carter, if you’re busy.” Sandra Robinson emerged from the pool, sleek and dripping.
My guardian angel, my alter ego, my own personal policeman.
“If you would, my dear.” Miss Carter looked relieved.
“Okay, kid,” Sandra Robinson said cheerfully. “Let’s start right now. You really mean it, you’ve never even gone wading?”
“Of course I mean it.”
“It’s easy.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay, start teaching me.”
She pushed me in.
Water was hard, I realized as I broke the surface. I curled myself into a ball, arms around knees, and sank. I felt tiles under my feet; I opened my eyes and saw wavy lines of grout. I held my breath, my head puffed like a balloon. The water was heavy on me, heavy as earth, and I was buried. In a panic I thrashed out, felt something, grabbed it. It was the splash rail on the side of the pool. I hung on, looked around, saw an expanse of empty pool, looked up, and saw Sandra Robinson grinning at me.
I shook the water from my eyes, gingerly released one hand, and stretched it out to her. She shook her head. Panicked, I returned the hand to the splash rail.
She sat down at the side of the pool, legs crossed Indian fashion, laughing.
“You tried to drown me.”
“Straighten out your legs, girl. They’re all curled up, straighten them out and stand up.”
Warily, I did. One touched bottom, then the other. The water was only waist deep.
“You sank like a stone,” Sandra Robinson said cheerfully, “curled right up on the bottom in three and a half feet of water.”
“It’s not funny. I could have drowned.”
“You came up, didn’t you? I told you swimming was easy. Let’s get on with the lesson.”
Later, tired, furious, half sick with embarrassment, I sat on a locker room bench, dressing.
“Don’t be mad,” Sandra Robinson said. “It’s just a way to start. It’s the way my father taught me.”
“Then your family are cretin idiots.”
“Oh come on.” She stood behind me, bent, kissed the left side of my neck, then dragged her lips across my shoulders.
I dressed quickly and left, running across the quadrangle in the cold air.
I did not understand what had happened. Not for a few hours. Then, drowsing through evening prayers in the chapel, I jerked alert with the shock of understanding. I was not horrified or sickened by the fact of aberrant sexuality. (I was, if anything, quite curious about it.) But I was very annoyed at myself. I had been foolish. I had relaxed, grown careless, and been caught unaware. I did not care for such surprises.
After months of lessons, I managed to pass the swimming test, barely. (I hated the water.) Sandra Robinson remained the archetypical older sister, kind, thoughtful, considerate, protective. But now her level glance sparkled with mockery and laughter and secret knowledge.
I went back to the violin, cut my nails short and built up the proud calluses on the tips of my fingers. They did not hurt so much this year. They did not bleed so much. I played with the school orchestra now, sheltered securely in the midst of the second violins, working through endless dull scores.
I joined the track team and spent my free afternoon hours training on the cinder oval beyond the tennis courts. I liked distance running; I liked the feeling that the world drew back to let me pass. At first I heard everything, my feet on the cinders, car horns in the distance, birds in the nearest trees, voices from the tennis courts. Then those sounds faded into perfect silence. My arms, my legs, flexed and relaxed without will or effort. I moved through not earth, not air, but an entirely separate space all my own.…Around and around the track until sensations came back: the thud of my feet, the ache in my back, the harsh scratch of my breathing. Sweat poured down my arms, down my fingers. When I rested, hands on knees, body bowed with cramp, sweat fell from my forehead, salt rain on the grass.
Late in the year, in November—the missals we held at Mass said Advent and were counting the Sundays to Christmas—my roommate, Connie, refused to answer the rising bell. I showered, dressed, returned for my books, and found her still in bed, crying. (Had she cried all night, I wondered, and how could anyone do that?) I pulled back the blankets that covered her head. “Come on. It’s morning.”
People look ridiculous when they cry, blotched and bumpy, like a stone or a lump of earth thawing in the sun. I tossed the covers back over her.
“You’ll be late for class,” I said. “Come on”—I hesitated, trying to remember her name—“Connie, you can’t have any tea
rs left. It’s a wonder that bed hasn’t floated away on its own river.”
No answer. I left.
At the end of the second class period, the two other black girls stopped me. “Is Connie sick?”
Two black raisins, I thought, squat and ugly. “You should know. She’s your friend.” I changed books from my locker. “You three are always together.”
“She didn’t come to class, not the first or the second.”
“You even take classes together! Such good friends. Well, she was in bed when I left.”
“Shit,” they said softly to me. And hurried off.
When I returned to my room that afternoon, Connie was gone. The bed was made neatly and tightly; the things on her desk and dresser were arranged in orderly rows. A few days later, all her things were gone; her closets and drawers were empty. I had a room to myself again, a large room, quite comfortable.
I was called to Sister Lea’s office. For an instant I wondered if I had done something very wrong. But my grades were good, and I had broken no rules, because I had no reason to break them.
“Connie has gone home,” Sister Lea said.
I held myself deferentially, waiting.
“A complete breakdown. A total collapse.” Sister Lea twirled a pen on her desk blotter. She had large heavy-knuckled hands, like a man’s. “We need to know what happened, precisely what went wrong, so it will not happen again.”
“Yes, Sister,” I said obediently.
“Did she ever talk to you about problems?”
“She hardly spoke to me at all, Sister.”
Sister Lea sighed. “But you’ve been roommates for three months.”
“We had different schedules, Sister. I suppose that was it. Or perhaps she just didn’t like me.”
“Did she seem unhappy?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Explain then.”
“She cried in her bed every night.”
“Every night?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone.”
“No, Sister.”
“Why was she unhappy? Her class work was good, she had friends, two especially.”
“Yes, Sister, the other two black girls.”
“They went to her room, found her still in bed, and informed the sister in charge.”
“I told her to get up, Sister. I told her she would be late to class.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. The fingers of one hand played with the knuckles of the other. “It is hard to believe, child, that you could see someone so miserable and not try to do something about it.”
I opened my eyes wide, to let the gleam of her desk lamp reflect from the black irises. “What could I do, Sister?”
“You might have told someone. You might have told me.”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested, Sister. You’ve got this whole school to run. And she must have liked crying or she wouldn’t have done so much of it.”
As I left her office, I heard—clearly, distinctly—the sound of cracking knuckles.
The other two black girls did not return after the Christmas holiday. I lived on, a single in my double room, next to their empty one.
(The following year there were eight black girls enrolled. As fast as they left, I thought with a smile, the good sisters found replacements, exponentially. I was proud of that word. I had just learned it.)
My high school freshman year passed into the spring. The mails began bringing seniors the answers to their college admission applications. Sandra Robinson was accepted by all three of the schools she had chosen. We, the members of the Académie, had a party for her in the dining room after dinner: fruit punch faintly flavored with wine, and a large cake decorated in the school colors, yellow frosting and blue roses. For the correct shade of deep navy blue the bakery had used far too much dye, and the blue roses were bitter to the tongue.
Much later that night, when only small dim lights burned in the halls and the building shifted and creaked and muttered to itself, Sandra Robinson slipped into my room and my bed. And to tell the truth, sex with her was not unpleasant.
The term ended. School closed. I returned to my mother’s house and its familiar routine. The business was doing well. A few white faces appeared at the shop door, not many, two or three at a time, but they were enthusiastic and ordered lavishly from the sketches and the swatches my mother showed them.
“Do they come to your regular showings?” I asked.
“Of course not,” my mother said. “I even have a separate design book for them.”
That struck me as very funny, but I didn’t dare laugh.
That was the summer I visited the Sister Servants of Mary Home for Children, where my mother had spent so many years.
I asked her to go with me.
“Why?” she said.
“I don’t know. I just want to. Wouldn’t you like to see it again?”
“I have seen it. I pass it now and then when I am in that part of town.”
“And those men, the ones you remembered in your prayers…wouldn’t you like to find out where Clark County is?”
“No,” my mother said.
I went without her.
To amuse myself, I turned a streetcar ride into an adventure. I became Orion, the mighty hunter. I saw myself dressed in skins, carrying a club, wearing a beard and a gold crown, following my mother’s spoor, stalking through the urban wilderness.
It was a brick building: three stories, lines of small windows on each of its floors. Steep stairs led to a narrow front door so squeezed and squinched by heavy walls it looked like a guppy’s mouth. In front was a statue of the Virgin wearing a crown of stars and a flowing blue dress. Across the street was a small park, scrubby grass and a small lagoon where pink concrete flamingos stood fishing in green-scummed water.
The community was at meditation. I waited in a small square hall, with two staircases at the far end and another statue of the Virgin Mary in the center. I sat in one of the wooden chairs that stood against the wall, a tall straight chair with a back carved into the face of a lion. A trickle of moving air passed me, carrying smells of laundry soap and furniture polish and something like mildew. Boards creaked and groaned softly as the building shifted on its foundations, a sound very like a sigh. Behind one wall something stirred, light and rustling; it could have been a mouse.
Eventually a nun appeared. You could see that she had once been fat, but the flesh had fallen away, and the contours of her face melted into her neck in folds, for all the world like a turkey. She might have been imposing in coif and wimple, but she wore the modern habit—a gray-and-white kerchief on her head, gray-and-white dress, a small rosary dangling like a watch fob from her belt. She was, she said, Sister Celeste.
We went into her office, a jumble of papers and ledgers and binders, where she listened to me with the professional patience of a religious, nodding gently like a car’s dashboard ornament. When I had finished, she paused for half a minute, organizing her thoughts.
“Yes, I would have been here in those days. But the home was much larger then; it is hard to remember just one of the hundreds.”
I wanted to say, to shout at her: My mother was different. She was a princess lost in the thorny forest of the night, an enchantress, herself under a spell.…
Instead I waited silently.
After a few minutes Sister Celeste said, “Sister Agnes, who was in charge then, kept wonderful records.” Her toe tapped steadily on the floor: one, two, three, pause, tap, tap, tap, pause. “But they were destroyed in a wiring fire in the small storeroom.”
So it was gone, the name Mary Woods written in a firm precise nun’s handwriting; certificates of baptism and confirmation; perhaps even a picture of a first communion group, an image of Mary Woods fixed on paper.
Sister Celeste rubbed her finger along the wattles of her neck. “I do seem to remember, it has been so many years ago…”
“Was her name Mary?”
Sister Celeste was annoyed by the question. “The foundlings were often named Mary. To put them under the protection of the Blessed Mother.”
My mother had never looked for protection to the Christian gods. She had her own, along with her spells and sorceries.…
Sister Celeste went on, “I can see her face quite clearly.”
But her inner vision was not a photograph for me to view. Was this truly my mother, the one among all those Marys?
I shifted in my uncomfortable chair. “What was she like, this child?”
“She only wanted to draw and paint and sew. She was so very clever with her fingers, she made beautiful altar cloths. She was left-handed, I remember that. We made her go to school, but it wasn’t any use, she could not seem to learn.”
My mother loved to draw, all those dresses with their elaborate details, their rich colors. My mother was left-handed. My mother could not read well. She had learned very little in school.
“Sister, what did she draw?”
Sister Celeste’s eyes moved slowly back to me, focused. “Everything and nothing. There was just no way to stop her. Finally Sister Agnes let her cover one whole fence with pictures. A tall board fence at the back of the play yard, she worked on it for months—trees and flowers and two-headed animals, and people. The people, I remember, always had green faces.”
My mother. Large, teeming, carrying millions of years of Africa with her. A stranger drawing strength and fertility from the foreign earth into her bones and blood. Disguised as a child…
“I saw Sister Celeste,” I told my mother that evening.
She was sorting out fabric orders, the kitchen table was covered with papers. “And how is she?”
“You’re not listening. Sister Celeste from the Home. I went there.”
Roadwalkers Page 19