Inside Madeleine

by Paula Bomer

  Nancy and Melissa looked stunned. Part of this was because of how stoned they were. Ruthie tried to read if it had worked or failed. Not that it really mattered. Sometimes, she just tried her hardest and hoped for the best.

  “Whatever,” said Nancy.

  “Oh fine, I’ll wear my nightgown next time,” Ruthie said.

  The following day was Saturday, a half day of classes at Lyndon. Ruthie was not accustomed to school on the weekends and it still was a terrible affront to her. She struggled through Advanced Biology, having entered because science had once been her best subject. Next came English, where they discussed Shakespeare’s Richard III. Was he a bad man? Certainly it was a little bit more complicated than that. Or at least the ways in which he was bad were worthy of discussion. Her teacher was a kind, very tall Asian-American man named Mr. Lin. And lastly, Ruthie chewed her nails through Algebra. Done! She headed back to the dorm where she changed into jeans. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays were the children allowed to wear jeans. Thank God Levi’s were a universally okay thing to wear. Alicia was at her desk, despondent over a textbook.

  “Classes just ended, Alicia, give it a break!” Ruthie said as she searched for her cigarettes.

  Alicia looked up from where she sat. “I’m going to fail. I’m going to fail everything and I have nowhere to go. I can’t go back to Atlanta. You smoke pot all day with those rich girls, and you still get better grades than me.”

  “I wouldn’t say I get very good grades,” said Ruthie. She was getting all C’s, except maybe in English and Art a B. This, after being a straight-A student in South Bend.

  “You’re not failing.” Alicia turned back to her textbook.

  “Ask for extra help.”

  “I have.”

  Ruthie didn’t know what else to say. “I’m going to the butt room.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  The butt room was located in the basement of Condon Hall right next to the laundry, which Ruthie greatly underused, as opposed to the butt room, which was like a second home to her. An airless, dingy room with three wooden benches and littered with cigarette butts, it had a pathetic fan that whirred on the ceiling. It was the only place the girls were allowed to smoke. Melissa and Nancy were there, puffing on Merits, which Ruthie switched to after being made fun of for her Kools.

  “Ruthie, we’re sneaking out tonight and going over to Bob and Jesse’s room. You should come. They have a great weed and sometimes other stuff.”

  Ruthie wanted to hug them but then thought better. “Okay, what time?”

  “Midnight, meet in the common room,” Melissa said. She gave her long, straight horse hair a shake.

  Midnight came and one by one the girls tiptoed down to the common room, across from the laundry room, spacious, with a few dirty couches and a small television. The windows were ground level. They all listened very carefully. Had anyone heard them? Was Miss Cranch on the prowl? After all telepathically discussing this through wide-eyed stares and deciding they’d gotten this far without getting busted, they carefully opened a window and looked outside. It was a hundred-yard dash to the boys’ dorm. Ruthie noticed that Nancy was wearing deep red lipstick that looked amazing with her dark hair, and Melissa had on delicate blue eyeliner. Ruthie had given up on make-up altogether as her orangey base and black eyeliner were not a hit. She was having a moment of envy and awe. This happened a lot.

  Melissa explained, “There’s one night watchman for the whole campus. But we could get unlucky, so if it’s all clear we still need to run like hell.” And that is what they did, without coats or shoes, in the cool October night. It took minutes but it felt a lifetime, and soon the three girls were sitting on Jesse’s bed, with Bob and Martin in the room, too. A tapestry hung on the wall, another over the window. Grateful Dead posters abounded, and the song “Sugar Magnolia” played gently in the room. The boys were less fearful. Their dorm monitor didn’t give a shit. He was the junior lacrosse coach and very handsome. In fact, they claimed he occasionally got high with them. They didn’t even use hit towels.

  As perplexing as the girls at Lyndon were to Ruthie, the boys were from another planet. Jesse in particular had the most intense lockjaw. Ruthie often nodded while he talked, but really she had no idea on earth what came out of his mouth. Bob was a little more normal. At least she could understand him. And then there was Martin, a dark-haired, extremely tall boy. He most exotically was from Los Angeles, a place that Ruthie imagined was like a fairy tale from her childhood, full of strange things like dwarves and unbearable sunshine. Everyone gossiped how Martin was heir to a huge department store chain. And then there was the way they dressed. They wore incredibly baggy, ill-fitting, worn corduroys, tie-dyed T-shirts, and beat-up deck shoes which were in stark contrast to the tight jeans and cowboy boots the boys in Indiana wore. She found these boys effeminate, not just because of the way they talked, nor their slim builds—everyone was a jock in Indiana—but deck shoes? Girls wore them, too. She had never seen them before and yet everyone wore them with a sense of pride, especially if they were falling apart. This baffled Ruthie. Why would young men wear shoes that women also wore? Why were shabby things so cool? These were insanely rich boys. Why didn’t they wear nice clothes? They wore suits when they had to, but otherwise they looked like pansy slobs.

  The bong got passed around. Jesse said something, and Ruthie nodded. Soon, everyone was blind stoned. Martin leaned over and opened a package which contained dried up brownish things. “Shrooms,” he said. Melissa and Nancy looked at each other nearly gasping for joy as they popped a couple of the gross looking things in their mouth.

  “Come on, Ruthie,” Martin said, lifting one of his bushy black eyebrows. “Don’t you want to trip?”

  Ruthie had never tripped and wasn’t so sure she wanted to, but she was a curious, adventurous spirit, otherwise she wouldn’t be in the boys’ dorm, let alone at Lyndon. How many girls from Indiana choose to go to boarding school? Because it was her choice, unlike most of the students. She reached into the package and carefully chose two of the least disgusting shriveled mushrooms. Eating them, she focused on their texture, their musty taste, and then it was over.

  What a mistake. Within half an hour everyone else was exploring parts of the room with awe and wonder, exclaiming about the beauty of it all, while Ruthie sat there rigid, seeing skeletons and blood instead of her friends, never mind her own legs, and the dark demons floating by and through everything visible. As the misery of her trip began to subside, the timid light of dawn shone through the tapestry covering the window. The girls snuck back, forgetting to worry about the guard and getting away with it. Ruthie spent Sunday in bed, only making it to dinner, and even that was a blur.

  The following week moved slowly. In English class, Ruthie became confused about Richard III. He was such a bad man, but wasn’t that because he was ugly and miserable? And how quickly things turned on him. One minute, he’s the king and then he’s all alone, without a single friend. This frightened Ruthie. The trip had made her sensitive, but not in a good way. She stared out the window, feeling a bit trembly.

  “Ruthie? Ruthie, I asked you a question.” Mr. Lin was standing in front of her.

  “Oh, sorry, I spaced out,” she said.

  “Clearly. I’ll repeat, what do you think about Richard’s personal responsibility in regard to all the terrible things he did?”

  Ruthie looked straight into Mr. Lin’s eyes. “I actually was thinking about that.”

  Mr. Lin smiled. He didn’t believe her.

  “I just sort of got lost in thought about that. I was thinking how hard it is to be ugly, how hard it is to be an outsider, how it turns people cruel and bitter and mean. Richard is sort of super ugly, but even if you’re just not what everyone else is, it makes you act in ways that you wouldn’t if you were like everyone else. Not that pretty people can’t be mean, too. But that’s not the point of this play. Anyway, he doesn’t get away with
his behavior, right? Maybe that was God’s hand, as the end of play says. Maybe God had to take care of things because Richard had demons inside of him. There are demons, I do believe that. I’ve seen them.” Ruthie raised her arms. “Not everyone can see them, not all of the time. I’m sure they change shapes, I’m sure they are shape-shifting demons. But I saw these brown ones, floating around and entering and exiting people without their knowledge. They were ugly and sought to hurt. I didn’t see God. But who else could fight them?”

  Everyone looked at her strangely and for a moment she was back to normal, noticing other people, noticing them noticing her. Was it because she said God? Probably saying she had seen demons sounded strange. She hid her religious background from everyone—her father was a deacon at the First Presbyterian in South Bend and she was forced to attend Sunday school her whole life—because she discovered no one else she was friends with was religious. It had been freeing, forgetting about God. But since she’d eaten those poisonous mushrooms, He was coming back to her.

  Later that night, she sat in Melissa and Nancy’s room, wearing her polyester blue nightgown that made her skin itch, expertly sucking down bong hits. The weed was making her feel much, much better.

  “I think Martin likes you,” Melissa said.

  “Really,” Ruthie said.

  Nancy removed the hit towel from her face. “You should come to New York with us this weekend. You need to have your parents give permission to the dean, but you can totally stay with me—Melissa is. It’ll be fun. Martin and Bob are going, too. They’re staying with Jesse.”

  When Ruthie returned to the room, she told Alicia.

  Alicia was sitting at her desk, studying algebra to no avail. “I wish I wasn’t the only black person at this place. I miss my people.”

  The weekend was mind blowing. Ruthie had never been to New York. She had some vague idea what it meant to live in a penthouse on Park Avenue but to actually stay in one was a whole different thing. Nancy’s parents were at their house in Barbados, another thing that was vaguely imaginable but also not, and they had the apartment to themselves, except when the extremely petite Chinese housekeeper in a blue starched uniform was there. It was one thing when she was sleeping in the “blue room” but another altogether when she had to sit patiently while the housekeeper poured her Cheerios. After she left the room, she asked Nancy, “Why does she pour the Cheerios? I can pour my own Cheerios.”

  Nancy said, without any real emotion, even with some patience, “Because that’s her job.”

  That night, they were meeting the boys for drinks at the Plaza Hotel and then heading back to Nancy’s presumably, since her parents were out of town. The girls had taken Ruthie shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and Ruthie was wearing her brand new electric blue ribbed sweater dress. The only thing she liked about herself, her legs, were encased in black stockings that gleamed. She was so excited and overwhelmed she had to pee every five minutes for a while.

  Being at the Plaza Hotel, getting served gin and tonics without having to produce a fake ID, was exhilarating. That’s how the Plaza was, and everyone knew that except for Ruthie, of course. How could she know? She tried to control her excitement, tried to be blasé, which was not easy. The boys were in jackets and ties, and despite their usual boyishness that Ruthie found unmanly in comparison to the Midwestern boys she knew, they seemed quite sophisticated to her tonight. Ruthie had borrowed Nancy’s red lipstick and sprayed Anais Anais perfume on herself, and even though she was in desperate need of a haircut, she felt okay about herself. Especially after the fourth gin and tonic.

  All the little things that her posse took for granted made her wide-eyed and fragrant with excitement. Watching the boys act like men, hailing cabs for the lot of them. Watching them then open the doors, while the girls in their dresses, wrapping their coats gently around themselves against the fall wind, stepped primly inside. She had never in her life taken a taxicab. Nancy, eyes wet with liquor, telling the driver her Park Avenue address, arriving at this enormous beautiful building, the doorman in his gray uniform and cap deferentially opening the door for them. And then an elevator! Imagine taking an elevator that went right into your apartment! The only elevator she rode in South Bend was … well, she couldn’t think right then. She was sure she had ridden an elevator before.

  They all nestled into the deep cushions of couches and chairs in the living room, drinks in hand, passing around a lovely glass pipe bursting with killer weed. Jesse pulled out a small white package that at first appeared to be some uninteresting origami to Ruthie, and then it was clear that it was cocaine. Bob whooped. Nancy fetched a mirror and Jesse expertly cut lines with a razor blade that Ruthie was unsure from where it came. She looked up from the pile of white powder, and Martin was smiling at her. His eyes seemed particularly blue. She felt they matched her dress.

  “Ever do blow, Ruthie?” Martin asked, his elbows on his knees, leaning very close to her.

  “No,” she said.

  “I think you’ll love it,” he said.

  He was right. Never had conversation been so urgent! Never had she felt so confident! She belonged in this huge apartment, with these foreigners who were her friends or something close to that. Even Bob was interesting and engaging. He usually receded into the background, but tonight his completely average brown hair and eyes and height and personality seemed suddenly quite vivid. And although she always found Jesse a bit sinister, he didn’t scare her as much because, well, she was powerful, too.

  She leaned over to do another line—it was her turn!—and when she sat up sniffing and rubbing the tiny excess on her gums (she was a fast learner), Martin’s face was so close to her she couldn’t really see it all.

  “Let’s go to the blue room. You’re staying in the blue room, right?” he said rather quietly. They’d all been sort of shouting all at the same time for some time.

  After Martin refreshed their drinks from the living room bar that reminded Ruthie of an old movie she watched with her father years ago, she followed him to the blue room, where her sad little duffle bag laid on the ground, looking terribly out of place. He sat down and patted the bed next to himself. She followed obediently. He’d loosened his tie; it hung strangely down the length of his narrow torso.

  They began kissing, their drinks sitting on the nightstand next to the bed. Ruthie had kissed boys in junior high, back in South Bend. In fact, in seventh grade, after smoking shitty weed in the alley behind her house with three eighth grade boys—how flattered she felt, why were they there with her?—she somehow found herself blowing all three of them. She remembered the feel of the gravel through her blue jeans, the feel of their dicks moving in and out of her mouth, the wonderful noises of pleasure the boys made. At the time, she felt powerful, as if she had this wonderful gift, as if they maybe loved her and appreciated her. Of course, this wasn’t the case at all. She was ruined after that; no one would talk to her, except to call her a slut. This was one of the reasons she begged her grandmother to send her to Lyndon. But not the only reason. She was a girl who wanted out of South Bend, who wanted to kiss the department store heir in the blue room in a penthouse in Park Avenue. But she was not going to blow him, or anybody from Lyndon. It didn’t work in South Bend and she knew it wouldn’t here, either. The two places couldn’t be more different but blow jobs meant the same thing all over the world, of this Ruthie was certain.

  After a while, Martin stopped kissing her and pulled back, looking at her face. At this point they were lying on top of the bed and their bodies had mushed against each other some.

  “Do you know what we have in common?” Martin asked, grinning, his eyes an incredible mixture of intense blue and bloodshot whites, hundreds of thin red lines intersecting around the blue. His mouth, grinning, was a loose, long thing.

  “What?” She couldn’t think of one thing.

  “We’re both outsiders.”

  “Because you’re from Los Angeles?” This didn’t make much sense to Ruthie.
/>   “No. Because I’m a Jew. I’m not a WASP like everyone else at Lyndon.”

  Ruthie wasn’t exactly sure what a WASP was, but she had an inkling. She’d had no idea that Martin was Jewish. The few Jewish people in South Bend all kept to themselves and owned car dealerships. “I didn’t know you were Jewish. And I’m not Jewish. I don’t get it.”

  Martin lay on his back now, right next to Ruthie who propped herself up on her elbow next to him, and his impressively large hands lay on his chest while he laughed softly, as if to hold onto his gentle laugh.

  “Of course you’re not Jewish. Even though Ruth is sort of a Jewish name.” Ruthie thought about that. It was a Biblical name, she knew. Her father had named her purposefully after what he called, “the foremother of Jesus.” Martin wasn’t laughing anymore, just looking at her with those awful wonderful eyes. “You’re white trash,” he said. “And there are practically no other of your kind at Lyndon.”

  Ruthie got up, straightening her new dress, the dress she was so proud of, the dress she’d been so excited to wear. She picked up her drink. “I’m going to go do more blow,” she said and walked out of the blue room, momentarily getting disoriented as to how to get back to the living room, stumbling a bit down the long, dark, endless hallway.

  On the train ride home for Thanksgiving break, Ruthie sat by the window looking out at the world passing by her. It was dark, but she could make out shapes of houses, with their endless people in them, and a parade of scarily tall trees devoid of any leaves. She hadn’t slept, her mind a storm of thoughts. The conductor had been kind enough, like the waiters at the Plaza, to serve her even though she was clearly underage. She had been slowly polishing off a bottle of red wine and she felt warm and woozy. Her thoughts, drunkenly floating through her mind, were of deep significance. It was a twenty-four hour ride to South Bend, and she was more than halfway there, the Midwestern land flat and straight around her. Her once perfectly curled bangs hung limply over her eyes. White Trash. She would never have a mane of hair to toss over her shoulder. She would never have a lot of things, she would never be many things—but she wasn’t the same person she was a few months ago, no matter what anyone said.