Black Ice Page 10

  “I don’t know him. I promised that girl’s parents that I would be a mother to her just like I’m a mother to my own children. I tell you what: I would not want anyone to let my child go off in some strange city with some strange man they’d never even met. That is not my idea of looking out for a young girl, and despite what you all may think about yourselves and your independence, the fact is that you are still children, and I am still mother.

  “And besides,” she continued, taking another tack, no doubt because of some scrap of resistance in my face, “let me tell you one thing. Some of the weirdest people I know are educated people. Why? I don’t know. But the fact that he’s a preppie doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. I am not impressed by education. He could be even crazier than he would have been had he stayed home in North Philly!”

  So Fumiko’s admirer came to visit on a weekday afternoon (not evening). The trip took an hour and a half on public transportation. (“I am not using up my gas and my day to chauffeur some boy. If he can’t find his way, with that education he’s getting, well, shame on him.”) When he arrived, my mother made a face to indicate that he was bigger than she’d expected. He had a bigger bush, and a hat that he made the mistake of leaving on in our house. Something else was wrong, too.

  My mother and I went into the kitchen to leave them alone together. We closed the door. “I’m sorry,” my mother said after a minute. “I can’t take this any longer.”

  “Oh, Mama, please,” I whispered. “It’s just for a little while. My Lord, you’ve only given them an hour or two. How much could a little funk hurt in one hour?”

  “A little funk? Is that what they’re teaching you? You don’t smell like that. Not yet at least. God knows that child doesn’t smell at all.”

  “Japanese don’t smell.”

  “That’s the goofiest thing you’ve said yet. I know he smells, though, and I can’t have it. I just cannot have it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  My mother looked at me scornfully and mounted the staircase. I was aware that I was placing the tender feelings of this big, funky dude ahead of my mother’s sovereignty in her own house. I spent a few idle moments wishing that they had gone to the movies as they’d wanted. I had promised to chaperone. Then I spent a few more moments cursing my mother’s need to lord it over us that this was her house. Her house. I had thought St. Paul’s would have freed me of all that, but instead, I was back here getting double doses, just so I wouldn’t forget under the subversive tutelage of those people, people who obviously had no control over their own children. Mom had several complaints about what those people were doing to me: they had me eating too fast, dumping pepper on my food as if she hadn’t already seasoned it just right, neglecting to wash my hands frequently enough, forgetting to mind my tongue. By the time I had done thinking and sighing, my mother returned from upstairs.

  She stood on the landing. “Now I want to do a little something,” she announced to the pair on the brown brocade couch, worn shiny in patches.

  “What is it?” Fumiko asked, prettily biting her consonants.

  “Close your eyes, everybody!” Mama’s voice was falsely bright.

  I knew that tone. I watched her with suspicious dread from the kitchen. Then I saw them close their eyes, and my mother pulled from behind her back an aerosol can of deodorant.

  “Keep them closed!” she sang.

  She sprayed all around them, making sure to get some mist on the big, odoriferous interloper. Then she opened the window behind them a crack to let in the winter air.

  “Just a funny little family custom,” she said to Fumiko as she floated back into the kitchen. “There,” she said to me. “All done! Just like a needle at the doctor’s.”

  I visited Karen and Ruthie. They asked how St. Paul’s was, and whether or not I liked it. I wanted to answer them honestly. I wanted them to know how my life had changed so that we could sit down in the dim light of Karen’s living room and talk about it. But I did not have enough words or time to make them see it and feel it with me, and besides, nobody, not even my best friends, cared as much about St. Paul’s as its students. Nobody else lived there. They lived, as we Paulies joked, in the real world.

  Fumiko told them in her halting English that St. Paul’s was “very hard.” I agreed, and once they laughed, I broke into the monologue that I repeated, with variations according to the audience, for years: “First of all, you’ve got to understand that the teachers are all a little screwy. You’ve got to be to stay in a place like that for twenty years. These are the people who decided to opt out of real life at some point, and they are set loose on us twenty-four hours a day.

  “OK? You got the picture? There is no escape from these people. They are out to improve you: how you read, how you write, how you run, how you look, what you say at the dinner table, how you think. You see what I mean by no escape? Meanwhile, back at the dorm, the white kids are blasting the hardest hard rock you’ve ever heard.…”

  Later, I figured, when I understood the school better, then I could talk to them seriously about it. For now, I wanted to make them laugh. I wanted to entertain. I didn’t dare risk being boring or snobbish or cry-babyish about my new school. I didn’t want to lose them.

  “Now you tell me about everybody at Yeadon. How was the new majorette squad this season? Did Mr. Cenatempo let you do flaming batons this year?”

  Each time we began a new subject, I needed them to fill me in on facts, and I had to fill Fumiko in. I didn’t know what they’d just read in English, or who had sung the solos in this year’s Messiah, or what prank Bob Bailey had pulled in science lab. Too much exposition weighed down our conversation. We couldn’t anticipate each other anymore or jump back and forth between subjects until we landed in intimate territory. I was with my friends, but I could not get the full pleasure of them. I wanted to weep with frustration.

  Two nights before we returned to school, I stayed up by myself drinking my mother’s Christmas liqueur late into the night. I decided to level with myself. My new friends and I knew each other’s daily routines, but we had no history—and no future, I thought, when we all went back to our real lives. But back in real life, Karen and Ruthie and I, once past the memories, had to work hard just to keep talking. At my own house I felt as if I were fighting for a new position in the family order, while Mama pretended not to notice and Dad maybe didn’t notice for real. Everywhere I went I felt out of place. The fact was that I had left home in September gleeful and smug. I took it as divine justice that now I felt as if I no longer belonged anywhere.

  Chapter Six

  I returned to St. Paul’s that winter with a definite agenda. I would earn at least straight Honors. I would get myself elected to the Student Council if I had to make nice with every girl in my house. I decided to take biology, and despite my fears, I signed up for calculus, too. Mr. Hawley advised against six courses, but in the end, I had my way. Once I was settled—back in the groove with Jimmy, used to my new classes, elected as Simpson’s Council representative—I felt ready to make public my fledgling romance.

  Ricky Lockhart had been more pen pal than boyfriend until then. We’d met at a party in the fall, and had since corresponded. When his brightly colored envelopes appeared in my mailbox, my girlfriends and I made a fuss on the way to lunch. Not only were his letters flattering, they were convenient: I had an excuse for not spending my boarding-school career hanging onto the elbow of some boy at St. Paul’s (which was what going steady seemed to mean for a girl). Ricky wrote that he adored me; he pined for me. All that and freedom, too. The boys in the Third World took to saying that I’d made him up and was mailing letters to myself.

  Meanwhile, Ricky and I were making plans for him to visit me at school. He would bear scrutiny. Ricky was as beautiful as an African sculpture, with skin as smooth as roasted coffee beans, high cheekbones, and nostrils that flared when he laughed. At his prep school, he played varsity football, raced on the bicycling team, and played baske
tball in the winter. He loved computer programming. And he was a senior. The oldest of three children from Schenectady, New York, he, too, was on a mission. He addressed my letters in perfect, black calligraphy, and asked me to perfume my letters to him.

  Maldonado agreed to let Ricky stay in his room, and Ricky and I exchanged a flurry of short, practical letters to set the date. He would arrive after classes on a Saturday afternoon, and stay until early Sunday evening.

  Not only romance, but new friendships were sprouting. I spent more time in the evenings with Annette, the Third Former from Chicago whom I’d met that first afternoon in Simpson’s lobby. Through her I met Grace, a Chinese-American who had gravitated to the Third World group. She came to the meetings, first with Annette, and then by herself. She sat at our lunch table and became one of us. Grace and I petitioned for permission to room together by converting my room into a bedroom and hers, down the hall, into a study. The housemasters conferred. For a hundred years and more, we were told, the school’s policy had been to allow boys to room only with their formmates, but since girls matured faster and in less predictable patterns, they would let us have a go at our novel idea. Miss Deane, Grace’s groupmaster, cautioned me to remember, however, that as a Fifth Former, I probably had more influence than I knew on my Third Form roommate, and that I needed to behave accordingly. Great, I thought guiltily. I’ve already encouraged her to smoke, but I was determined to do better in the future. A couple of weeks before Ricky was due to visit, Grace and I made our move.

  I could hardly believe how organized she was: removing her contacts, putting on her glasses, brushing her hair fifty strokes, then face and teeth—on it went each night, a precise ritual, perfectly efficient and never missed, as consistent as an adult.

  She seemed amused that I belonged to the Astronomy Club, an activity I could not dodge in the cold midwinter, because Mr. Hawley was its adviser. He banged on my door as he hustled past on subzero nights when the New Hampshire air stretched cloudless and clear to the ends of the universe. A handful of us met at the old observatory at the end of the fields. The others were the school science buffs, white boys, pimply, young. We made corny science jokes together. Away from my cooler friends, I giggled happily.

  Through the cold lens stars appeared as close as shaved glass in a kaleidoscope. The moon took on a vague landscape, pitted and creased.

  Throughout the winter I looked for the constellations: I pointed them out to my friends—Orion, the passionate hunter, and the seven sisters, called Pleiades, whom he chased—eager to show off my knowledge, and yet reluctant to reveal how affected I was by my new relation to the heavens. One of the Pleiades hid because of her shame. I looked for her as if she were a friend. The sky hung as close to me that winter as it had in my childhood, when it covered the dark alleys behind our Philadelphia row houses like a dropped ceiling from God. Out in the night with the sky stretched taut overhead, I could feel it again, my right place in the universe: infinitely small, but nearly tall enough to touch the sky.

  It was on such a Friday night that I stood by the post-office telephone waiting for Ricky to ring. We had arranged that he’d call to confirm his arrival the next day. I was watching the lights of the library shimmering across the pond, and planning to take Ricky to the observatory the next night, when the phone rang.

  “Is that you?” His voice sounded delicious and near.

  I laughed to hear him. “Yes. It’s me.”

  “Guess where I am.”

  “You’re not at school?”

  “I’m in town.”

  “You’re in town this late?”

  “No, silly. Your town, Concord, New Hampshire.”

  “You are?”

  “I found a way to get out of my commitment for tomorrow morning. And I couldn’t bear to wait all day to see you.”

  He was two miles away. What was I going to do with him? I had filled out the card requesting permission for a weekend guest to stay in Maldonado’s room, but the permission was for Saturday night only. Any changes had to be filed with the Vice-Rector’s office by the Wednesday before the weekend. I couldn’t ask Maldonado to hide him for the night, and I couldn’t tell him to go back.

  “Aren’t you glad?”

  “Sure. I’m just trying to think how to smuggle you in.”

  “I hope this won’t cause any trouble for you. I should have called before.”

  “No, this is great! Just let me think.” I told him to catch a taxi and have it drop him off at the entrance to the school. I’d wait for him there.

  I rushed to Simpson. Grace would be in our room changing from her dinner clothes into pants.

  “Thank God you’re back,” I said. “Listen. Ricky’s here.”

  “I thought he was coming tomorrow.”

  “He was, but he’s here now.”

  She laughed. “Uh-oh. I guess that’s my cue.”

  “Where else can I put him?”

  “The guys wouldn’t mind hiding him.”

  “But then they could get in trouble.”

  “Not as much trouble as you could if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” I wailed. Ruthie Belding appeared at the door. She lived across the hall.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I looked at Ruthie hard and tried to judge whether or not I could trust her. All I could see as I looked at her, however, were her snow boots. She always had the appropriate footwear, I thought, conscious of my wet feet. Ruthie tossed her cornsilk hair. The other girls never tired of saying how beautiful she was. She and I worked together on the balance beam.

  “Well, come on. There’s a mighty big secret here, and I’m dying to know.”

  “Listen, Ruthie. My friend is here. He’s here. He’ll be here, at school, in minutes.”

  “Ooooh, Libby.” The nickname Pam Hudson gave me had stuck. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I got used to it. “You naughty girl.”

  “Oh, Ruthie, please. I’ve got to get him in. It’s all cleared for him to stay over at Conover House tomorrow night, but he just showed up early.”

  “Just showed up? Libby!”

  “I’ll clear out,” Grace said.

  “You could spend the night with me,” Ruthie volunteered.

  Grace looked at me and laughed. “Don’t look like that. Your face’ll give you away.”

  “Right,” I said. “Listen, I’ve got to go get him. Could you please stick around to help me sneak him in?”

  I met Ricky walking along the road into campus. In the dark I studied his features again, and was relieved to see that he was as good-looking as I’d remembered. He was also as ardent as his letters.

  “We can’t kiss out here,” I whispered.

  He laughed his low, quiet laugh. I began to hope that we might pull it off after all.

  Grace met us at the back door. I left her with Ricky while I ran upstairs to check the hallway, then signaled them to go up. Once the three of us were in the room, we sighed together and then burst out laughing, Ricky with his hand over his mouth.

  I do not remember much until after check-in, when the flushing and tooth-brushing and door-swinging subsided and the hallway grew quiet. I do remember that I went into the bathroom to get undressed and into my longest, thickest flannel nightgown, and that I brushed my teeth until my gums were sore.

  I remember insisting, after our excited talk together, that I had to finish my calculus homework for Saturday-morning class. No doubt I could have used Ricky’s help. I don’t think I asked.

  Later we had a long discussion about sleeping arrangements. We tried to keep it light-hearted, like a ‘30s comedy. I began the night, swaddled in my flannel nightgown, in Grace’s bed. Her pillowcase smelled dry like her hair. Ricky and I talked across the room. He wanted me to come to my bed, and I told him no, as I’d always said before.

  I’d said it to Washington, even though I had not wanted to say it to him. I’d said it to Russell on the night of Yeadon’s prom when
he drove up a road I’d never seen, parked in the mist, and told me only half-jokingly that I’d never find my way home. But I had not wanted Russell, so it had been easy to bust out of his car like a SWAT team, and walk into the drizzle in my turquoise-and-white gown and peau de soie shoes until he relented and drove me, unmolested, to the after-party we had planned to attend.

  I’d said no before, but before, I’d had only to get back to my front door to make it stick, and then the big stone-and-stucco house took me in to where the judo black-belt father slept. (Boys joked about being afraid of him, which was how I learned that they were.) Before, we’d had only to subdue ourselves for a few hours. In my old world, everybody but the most in love or the most careless did the same. I was supported by the knowledge that my girlfriends were out on dates, in cars, on porches, in living rooms, with or without parents nearby, fighting the same fight. We’d all kiss goodnight at the same time in different doorways, with the same longing, tragic and moist.

  Here there was no doorway. I could hear him breathing, and when he lay down his voice curled around deep in his chest. The room was full of him. My stone house, my black-belt father, my ubiquitous mother, my intrusive little sister, and yappy dog were four hundred miles away. I talked and talked, desperate to make time pass, until I had nothing left to talk about.

  We said no more, but my room was not quiet. The air buzzed with a hormonal hum like a burglar alarm. I closed my eyes tight.

  “Listen, it’s silly for you to sleep over there. I know you don’t want to do anything. But does that mean we can’t hold each other? Just hug?”

  I got up and went to my bed. He turned on his side to make room. I liked the feeling of curling up next to him, and resting my head on his arm.

  “Is my head too heavy?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I did fall asleep, and just the way I always did. (“It’s weird,” Pam Hudson said. “You really do just ‘drop off.’ People always say that they drop off, but you really do it.”)