She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  She starts to talk about camp, and my interest picks up, maybe because I will appear—the two of us will come back. Jessica has no memories of the pool, the sandwiches, Greg La Rosa. She tells how her parents left her there and she begged to come home. She had terrors at night and cried in the dark, trying not to wake the sleeping girls. No one wrote to her, she remembers, even though she pleaded in every letter home to be picked up. She remembers my mother, so fabulous and pretty, coming to get me and taking me away. She remembers I left her.

  After the lunch, tired with performance, an act that isn’t gelling, I’m eager to part. We say good-bye on the sidewalk. I don’t cross to the car with her, but we’re both promising more visits, longer reunions. Isn’t she feigning interest in me by now? Hasn’t she, too, admitted that arbitrary overlap is all there is to us? Beyond the noted preferences and exclamation points of Facebook, we share only name recognition, and when I return to Montana I won’t know what to write to the tiny thumbnail photo, smiling online. It’s puzzling.

  • • •

  Back home I remember that after camp there was a last time we got together. In the early fall, when Jessica and I had missed each other for an eternity, our parents let us plan a visit on our own, and I went to Port Authority to meet her bus from New Jersey. My stomach was knotted with excitement until we were jumping up and down in the gate area. Then some mysterious, empty feeling arose, an unnameable not-there. We tried to whip up the bigness again, but school and real friends had filled the spots we’d briefly held, and we turned reticent.

  “Want to go to the movies?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “Or we could go to Bloomingdale’s?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  At my apartment, with extra sheets, pillow, and blanket in my room, Jessica talked about her best friend in New Jersey—they took gymnastics together and liked to stage scenes from Judy Blume books—which made me jealous and bored. When my phone rang, Jessica looked at People on my bed while I talked to Gwen and gripped the tether to immediate life. I knew this was rude but didn’t know what else a person did when she didn’t feel connected anymore. We never saw each other again, until lunch in Brooklyn, after which I realized that Jessica Ribicoff mattered so much, will always, because with her I got to be a girl again in a time of seasoned fear. I can’t leave this as a post on her Facebook page. I will write her something else instead.

  Proctor Duties

  I chose boarding school. My room filled up with neat stacks of applications. In our apartment, the phone’s clamor, the television hum, the delivered boxes from the liquor store in the hallway, I felt erased by my mother, adolescence my violation. Anyway, she was moving to New Mexico, beautiful skies, better cocaine. She would sublet our apartment. I craved order and imagined that if I conceived of it, I’d have it. I would be glad to no longer monitor her druggy comrades splayed on our couch cushions for too many hours, their crumbs and empty glasses on the floor. I wouldn’t have to assess for threat her charming frenzies or oblivious sleeps. I was twelve when I toured my first campus—the lawns edged, the library hours posted, the controlled bustle of the dining hall—and I wanted in.

  The senior on my hall was called the proctor, the word sturdy with earned clout. Abigail lived with the freshman girls, in charge of answers. She had a cast on her leg and crutches for the first weeks. Her door stayed ajar, her mild music seeping out as she tapped the end of her yellow highlighter on her open chemistry textbook, from which she’d look up, on call for us and our logistical problems. By day two, drawn to the most obscure promise of motherly indulgence, I flopped on her bed and fingered the lacy edges of her pillows. On her desk she had a photo, her family standing as a wall, many people gathered, and Abigail’s floor-length dress matched those of the other women and girls. “That’s my brother, that’s my new sister-in-law, that’s my mom, my nieces,” she said, and named a dozen others. Her mother was “my mom,” neither an event nor a burr. Abigail’s voice betrayed no tiny spike, no tinge of buried trouble. I knew difficulties might be dressed up and disguised, and when a girl didn’t reveal problems, I suspected her. But I hung around to hear her say “my mother” like that, “my mom,” to inspect the support she presumed.

  Abigail was my friend. That’s what I called her. She didn’t mind, if she gave it a thought. She talked to me, liked me. To be with her when she was hobbled, I stepped slowly, too, as we trickled down the stairwell. Other girls, her charges, passed us and called, “Hi, Abigail! Hi, Abbs!” She was game for my intimacy, the way I insisted on it, as she was game for squash and senior prank day, the way she captained other girls, able to direct and exhort everyone in the friendliest way, but her attention came to a stop. I couldn’t penetrate her barrier, get more from Abigail, special treatment. She didn’t hug. She stayed in her chair, drumming her pen on her thigh, as I cried, homesick on her bed or mad at a mean teacher. She’d been trained in peer counseling for a few days and could say, “You should see if there’s a study hall,” or “Why don’t you sign up for swimming?” I marveled at her quick speech, its mimicry of the pep talks given to us by anyone in charge. I asked after her volleyball and her acned boyfriend. She was discreet but allusive, mature jokes about his body, his energy, which may have been about sex, but may have been about the sex that was not to be had because of youth and rules. When my mother spoke to me about sex, as she had since I was eight or seven, she headed into it, used wet, direct terms and elongated her anecdotes. Abigail would say, “We made out,” a big grin, and that was it. She knew the dark places before curfew, damp grass and empty auditoriums. Something more was up, and I wanted her to know I could handle it, but she had Yankee distaste for explicits. In a state of peculiar gratitude and relief, I worshipped her.

  I had closer, better friends that year, equals—cynical Jackie from the UK with her Cure poster, and studious Nell, whose brilliance was made clear the day she brought to English class her own Canterbury Tale in iambic pentameter. Like me, they were fourteen years old, occupied the east hall of the dorm, and attended third-form classes. We roamed campus together, discussed the same boys. But I tried Abigail on like her pea coat, which I coveted. I pretended to be concerned with her concerns. I took note of her Clearasil, her boiled-wool slippers, her tuck of books between crooked wrist and outer thigh, and, after the cast came off, her square walk, a product of multiple sports, cross-disciplines. My crush, fierce and devoted, was on her blond hair, carelessly flyaway, on her pink Fair Isle sweater with the white yoke. I had a crush on her competence, her busy fingers as she laced her lacrosse stick. She could make up a nickname for anybody on the spot, spout it in good humor. With Abigail, what seemed was what was. She wasn’t sarcastic, hid no dark agenda. She laughed her same phlegmy giggle at everything—embarrassments, tragedies, coaches’ names, final exams. Still laughing, she pulled her inhaler from the hip pocket of her wide-wale cords and sucked. Most afternoons, dressed in a sweat suit and track shoes, she returned to our hall in need of a shower. She’d pass my room, where I was stalling the taxing rigors of assignments or being careful with my LPs as I pressed them down to the turntable and calibrated volume, dorm etiquette, not too loud, but an anthem anyway: I’m here, I have something to add. Sometimes she tapped on my door—strawberry shampoo, plastic caddy. “Want to go to dinner when I’m done?” She protected me, I decided, especially in the first days, when I was at a loss, lost. The school had picked reliable Abigail for this job, had spread a dozen such seniors through the girls’ dorms, and it was the right place for her but indifferent to me. I was perpetually unlaced, unmet, always crashing into my blunders. You didn’t challenge the bitchy teacher, you didn’t miss practice or skip out on study hall, you didn’t masturbate in your single room with the door locked and your breath held. At least, Abigail never did, ordinariness her emblem.

  Once, she introduced her mother, who’d come up for a game. I grew nervous, as if her mother would divine my naked baby-sister crush, pity me. I
shook her hand, then blurted, “How long have you known Abigail?” Abigail burst out with the coarse, rowdy laugh she usually shared with teammates. I was hot and foolish beyond foolish. The mother lifted a tight eyebrow, smiled emptily. Abigail never teased me about this, which meant a lot to me, a sweetness and sign of care, I thought. Probably, though, she forgot it happened. She did not dwell on discomfort, or much else to do with me.

  She turned eighteen, which impressed us. She shrugged it off, left the dorm in a hurry with her lacrosse stick, walking with other players, all of them dressed in pastel shorts and docksiders, grosgrain headbands, gray phys ed T-shirts stamped in blue with the school crest. I wanted these things, these tokens of unity. I wanted to love a flat birthday cake in the common room with a dozen girls in pajamas and nighties, to honestly enjoy that, as if it could be enough.

  In May, of course, Abigail would graduate and I would not. This ally would go, erased from school life. All year she’d let me tag along, so I knew a good portion of the senior class, towering boys with visible Adam’s apples, girls with Audis they parked in a special lot, who walked across campus paired in sly adult conference. I hoped they’d boost my status, carry me off when they left, too, but the opposite happened. The seniors cleared out their gear and their trunks and departed in their blaze of valedictions. Quiet was left behind, distant mowers, slammed doors from across the quads, the thwock of tennis balls. The rest of us hurried to get through exams. I had few good friends in my own grade. My second year went badly.

  • • •

  For junior year I transferred to a different boarding school, and by chance I followed Abigail to Colorado Springs. I’d have my big sister again. My mother even phoned her and said, “You’ll be a love and keep an eye on Susy?” “Sure,” said amenable Abigail, who’d always thought my mother’s affected style was a hoot.

  My affair with the English teacher started midway through the year. I was sixteen and a virgin. He was married, thirty-four. He was risking much more than his job, he said, as he pressed shut the door of his office with one hand and stared down at me for our first talk “as equals.” “You must tell no one,” he said. How unimpeachable, uncontestable he was. Papers from the Shakespeare class waited on his desk to be graded, mine among them. We had just kissed, I was triumphant and astonished. The month before—just a few weeks!—he’d teased me about my crush on him. He knew, but I turned my horrified exposure into a game, a magnificent challenge, and every week he came closer, our held glances pitched with danger. I drew him. In the last recent days, our silent, mutual certainty had kept me constantly aroused, unable to work, far-sighted and distracted at the dining table with my silly friends.

  In spite of my teacher’s dire command and the way he trusted me, I had to discharge the sensation of knowing so much, and I called Abigail at her college dorm to whisper from the phone booth in mine. “I have to tell you something, promise not to tell, promise?” Abigail said “Yup,” unconcerned. I could picture the shrug. She’d crack up at scandal without caring, she wouldn’t ask for details. If she didn’t approve, she never said, and, besides, I wasn’t looking for an honest reaction. I was looking—or my teacher, after I admitted to him I’d told, was having me look—for an accomplice, and I asked to use her name for lying, for fake overnights and trips off-campus. If we had an hour, after the dorm mother signed me out to Abigail’s on the permission slip, my teacher would whisk me to a remote campsite, or to a motel scattered with miniature cabins for an afternoon. “Sure,” she said again. “That’s a good friend,” my teacher said, and I thought so, too.

  Not everything was a lie. I still worked hard at school. Well, at my English class assignments. I divided the lie, my spectacular secret, from all else. I saw Abigail for real, too. We’d grab an early dinner of nachos or go to a weekend matinee. One Saturday, she invited me to spend the night, and I found myself back in dormland with her, a reassuring happiness. We had inhabited another long hallway, been surrounded by these same sounds of high, fast voices, the clatter of fire doors, the muffled flight of feet on industrial carpeting. The place reeked of synthetic scent, the fruited chemicals of so much perfume, shampoo. But I couldn’t settle, and we were not the same as before. Abigail was no longer charged with my well-being, and our yearlong separation had exposed the absence of connection. With her college friends, she was preoccupied with ski weekends, car keys borrowed and returned; she spent money. She had a fake ID. She was not engrossed in petty duties, of which I had been one. I thought we’d talk about romance and sex, my consuming new interests. Answer my questions, Abigail. I need the big sister. Have you ever done this, I needed to say, or should it feel like this? I would have loved to confide in my mother, share with her the world she’d split open to me so early, but I didn’t dare. I had too much to lose. Abigail, however, curated other topics instead. “You should really learn to ski,” she said. Sports, grades, she focused on those. She’d never revealed the personal; I didn’t know her. Our friendship had been an assignment.

  We left my stuff, and she took me to a frat party, an off-limits basement dangerous for anyone, especially a sixteen-year-old girl, up late. But I didn’t know to worry, made newly stupid by my unsupervised leap into the adult world. I got beer, let reckless boys squirt it into red plastic cups, someone passing one over to me. The beer tasted of rancid water, thin and wrong, but I gulped. The room was overhot. At the ceiling, through the transoms, lamplight shined the nighttime grass a bleary orange, and lit the concrete paths that rimmed the frat house. Things got louder, harder to manage. People yelled over the pool table, cues hoisted. Across the dim room, out of reach of the neon cast from the Coors sign, Abigail traded whatever with the roaring men and the other girls, lacrosse sticks propped, face masks on the floor. I waited on a sprung couch, holding the rest of my beer, shaking my head no to the guys. Their saliva burst into the air as they shouted, as their shoulders and chests flexed, puffed, wrangled. I wanted my friend to take me back, get ready for bed with me and talk, and we’d sleep and get up in the morning and go to brunch, but, nodding wildly, Abigail was backed against the wall as she cajoled and hassled the boys. This was her element? Them? I willed her to want to leave, but she didn’t. I willed her to worry and come over to me, but she didn’t. She’d forgotten I was there. She wasn’t aware of the affection I’d pinned on her, how I willed her to be worthy of it, and how I hoped she’d notice the care I hadn’t yet had.

  The Root Cellar

  Claudia gave me the number of a pay phone in the Safeway parking lot. That’s the thing that made me concerned, seemed the tip-off that things weren’t fine. She was living with roommates for the summer, didn’t want to use the joint phone. I could picture her holding a grimy receiver, Mick’s truck idling beside her. She sounded excited, or happy, some emotion that didn’t fit. She had to get an abortion, she said. She was always enthusiastic.

  I said I’d fly out to be with her, because that’s what friends do. She’d been my best solace at boarding school. We’d just graduated. We relied on each other for reflection, company, mealtime allegiance. After curfew I sometimes left my dorm and snuck over to hers. I’d sleep over, our two bodies crowding and comfortable in her bed. I needed to be held that way, sistered. Claudia had a familiar manic looseness, let me laugh big and whisper big, and she seemed to greet me as a long-awaited permission. But she could also unbolt, threaten to break apart, and I worried. She left notebooks behind, screamed at her coach, seethed too readily when the riding instructor admonished the group after a lesson. “It doesn’t matter,” I’d say. “I love you.” I offered her steadiness, perspective. “You’re right, Sue,” she often said, and I liked that.

  I was planning to fly to Colorado anyway for a reunion with our English teacher. Claudia didn’t know this. For the two years I’d been sleeping with him, was in love with him, I’d hidden it from her. I’d lied to her, deflected, invented alternate scenarios as cover with such precision I nearly believed them. In the solemn minute after our f
irst kiss, the teacher grabbed my chin, forced my gaze, and said, “You most certainly cannot tell our friend Miss Claudia.” She loved him, too, though not the way I did, not with such a desperate need to be chosen. She loved his guardianship and approval, made manifest in the high grades he assigned her. “You’re involved in something now she will not understand,” he said. He knew the girl-world trait of wrecked secrecy, and every few weeks he’d check if I’d told her. I never did. I didn’t think that deception affected our friendship. I told her everything else. It didn’t seem that I was living inside his mean ideas, shadowing his habits.

  • • •

  I first met Claudia the morning I started junior year at my second boarding school. The office assigned her to give me the tour, and she said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you” in a formal voice. Then she released a peal of laughter, took my arm, and settled her own in the bend of my elbow. She was a confident guide, known by everyone. Here’s the clay studio, the pool, the theater, here’s your mailbox, the dining hall. We came to the stables, and she marched us in. “I just got this,” she said, star pleasure, showing me a shiny saddle. Someone called her name, and she wheeled around. Another girl leaned out from a stall.

  “Hey, you!”

  Claudia cried, “I love you!”

  “I love you more!” the girl cried back.

  We returned to our path. Claudia rolled her eyes and said, “That’s Julie.” This girlish cartoon seemed a waste of powers. It was just two sentences, a moment, Claudia exposed as a little less secure than I’d thought. I intended to conduct myself as a woman for junior year, and I wanted friends who would do the same. But still, I liked her giant welcome. Julie, it turned out, lived in my dorm as the senior RA, and by Thanksgiving she was my other best friend. We had privilege in common, childhoods of foreign vacations, winter sunshine. Claudia was intriguingly earthy, someone who could come up with a crude lesson on unions or women’s rights, certainly more than I knew. In real life, separate from the performance for my benefit, Claudia and Julie didn’t care for each other, masking dislike with pretty fakeness, but I could have both girls, move in two worlds. In the spring, when I was boiling with the terrific joy of my mighty secret and lost virginity, I confessed the affair to Julie. My teacher hadn’t said I couldn’t tell her, and she was involved with a faculty member, too, he thought. She’s special, he said, the same way you are.