Black Ice Read online

  When I arrived back at St. Paul’s the next day, I hobbled to the squash courts to smoke cigarettes with Jimmy.

  “Are you sure this is the man for you?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t look like I’m woman enough for him, does it?”

  I leaned against him and gave a moment’s thought, as I sometimes did, to why Jimmy and I remained friends instead of lovers. I wondered whether or not I would say years later, as my aunties joked, that they had never been able to get excited over some of the nicest guys they’d known in school. “Good men. Good husbands. Loving husbands. Men you could talk to. Good fathers.” And they’d laugh together and shake their heads over these good men who were now married up to the evilest women in the universe—and were good to the heifers. I’d never understood why they had not grabbed these men, or why they weren’t sorrier to have lost them.

  There was nothing of the comfort and easy, simple laughter of Jimmy’s friendship in my angry, athletic love, nothing of the honest acceptance or joyful, everyday discovery. I asked Jimmy about it.

  “Well, darling, don’t ask me,” he said. “We see how I’m doing in the romance department. At least you have a boyfriend. Now whether he’s suitable is another question. Every girl I’m interested in wants me to be a brother. ‘I love you like a brother,’ ” he mimicked.

  I looked inquiringly at him.

  “Not you, love. What we have is different. What we have is special.”

  I laid my head on his shoulder, disappointed and grateful.

  It was at the end of that same week, I think, that I realized that the new calculus regime wasn’t doing the trick. I pushed back my despair until the weekend. On Saturday night I went to talk about it to Mr. Hawley. His front door was closed. Virginia Deane was on duty that night.

  My last contact with Miss Deane had been embarrassing. It had been she who had had to roust me out of my bed when the screeching fire-alarm bells had failed to wake me. In fact I had not awakened at all until I found myself standing outside in the snow, my bathrobe hung over my shoulders. How Miss Deane got me out of bed and down the hall, I never knew, but if anyone was up to the task, she was.

  Miss Deane was hard-core crisp. Her hair, a combination of stark straight strands of black and white, gave off the sheen of pewter. She carried her no-nonsense, long-waisted New England body on hard-muscled little legs that tapered to fine-boned ankles. She smoked constantly and had a voice as low and as husky as a man’s. When a girl in her group made varsity lacrosse or tried a new haircut, Miss Deane would smile widely and cry out with firm-bodied enthusiasm: “Oh, that’s neat! That’s just swell!”

  At Miss Deane’s that night a crowd of the house’s most boring girls were assembled talking the most boring talk. I stayed for a quarter of an hour, and then excused myself to have another go at my math assignment.

  I reworked the problem I had left and checked the answer in the back of the textbook. It was wrong again. Another wrong damn answer. I went back to the problem that my tutor and I had worked on earlier. I reworked that problem, checking my reasoning against his at each step. I could not understand it. I closed my notebook, and went to bed.

  Grace was not in the bedroom. I tried to pray, but could only sing to myself:

  Come ye, disconsolate

  Where-ere-ere ye languish.

  Come to the mercy seat,

  Fervently kneel.

  Here bring your wounded heart;

  Here tell-ell-ell your anguish.

  Ear-earth has no sorrows

  That Heaven cannot heal.

  I felt like somebody had died. Up above my head Miss Deane’s shoes click-clacked from one end of the apartment to the other. The girls had left. I went upstairs and knocked on the door.

  “You’re back. I thought you were going to bed,” she said as a greeting.

  I did not know what to say to explain why I had come.

  “Well, dearie, are you going to come in? Will you have something more to drink? Something hot? Or cold?”

  Often Miss Deane directed us to her tiny kitchen alcove to help ourselves, but this time, I seem to remember, she poured for me. I sat on her couch, then on the floor in front of her coffee table.

  “You look like you could use a cigarette,” said Miss Deane, lighting one for herself and passing me the pack.

  I was appalled to find that I was on the verge of tears.

  “You really do have to find a way to get smoking permission, Libby, if you’re going to continue this lousy habit.”

  I snatched the pack and lit one before she changed her mind.

  “But you’re not here to discuss smoking permission. So what’s up?” Miss Deane sat on her couch. She seemed content to sit and wait until I could say something.

  I began to talk about calculus, how I’d tried, how I’d studied, how I couldn’t understand it, how Mr. Shipman hated girls (except two or three math whizzes). I bawled out my humiliation. She handed me a box of tissues.

  “It is true,” Miss Deane said, “that St. Paul’s is just learning about coeducation. It’s trial and error, like everything else. It’s also true that some people in the community were more eager to admit girls than others. And it’s true that some faculty members came here, frankly, because, for whatever reason, they preferred teaching in a boys’ school.

  “I don’t know about your particular case, but you are not the first girl to feel that a faculty member has treated her differently from his boys. It’s hard to know when it’s really happening or when it’s in our heads. There’s nothing we can do about that right now—the fact of it or the way we feel—except to do what we’re doing, and to be the best we can. You girls are the pioneers, and I’m afraid that this is what pioneers do.

  “But that doesn’t solve the problem of your particular course. What are you going to do about it?”

  In one short speech Miss Deane had robbed my predicament of uniqueness and focused on my responsibility for action.

  “And what if you fail?”

  What if I failed? I looked at her. What answer did she expect? I couldn’t fail. I could not fail. How could she sit there, smoking another cigarette and not offering me one, and just ask that? How could she?

  “Libby, if you fail the course, you will go home for vacation, you’ll fall asleep in your own bed, and you’ll wake up the next morning. I do not doubt that it will be very painful. But you will be the same person. You will be you. Sometimes we feel as if something like this will destroy us. It doesn’t.”

  I could hardly hear her. She was sitting across from me talking in the big, low voice, and I could barely pull the sound into my brain. “You’ll wake up the next morning.” What did waking up the next morning have to do with anything? She was as bad as the old ladies at church who prayed: “Lord, we thank you for waking us up this morning. You didn’t have to wake us. You didn’t have to breathe the breath of life and let us open up our eyes. But you woke us up, and we’re thankful this morning.” What was the point?

  Miss Deane proffered a stern smile. “I have the feeling, Libby, that you’ve never failed anything before, and you think that that makes you who you are. It doesn’t. We all fail something sometime. So you might as well get it over with and get used to the fact that life goes on.”

  I had to get out of her apartment. “Fix your face.” That’s what my mother had said after a spanking. “Fix your face.” She’d squeeze my chin in her hand and tilt my face up to hers, so close that if it were summer I could see the sun in the tiny beads of sweat that popped out in the downy hair over her lip, so close that I could smell her skin and breathe in the fury that rose off the top of her head like heat.

  I fixed my face. I had gone to Miss Deane for hope. She’d given me a cannon blast of real life instead. I had not wanted to know what I now knew. She had treated me like a young adult, though. I held onto that. She had talked to me as though I could take it.

  Whether I could or not was another story. Miss De
ane’s reality workshop came at a bad time. I had been sleeping little (in accordance with my experiment)—and my period was overdue. A few days after our talk I checked myself into the Infirmary with a fever, headache, trembling, and nausea. I could hardly move. I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted some act of violence—to do it or have it done to me. I wanted to stop dead. I wanted everything around me to stop. I hated the nurses for their questions. I wanted them to take care of me. I wanted to turn to vapor and rise up into the clouds.

  I slept in the Infirmary nearly an entire day and arose to find evidence of friends’ visits. Textbooks, complete with carefully noted assignments, were stacked on my chair. Little treats—a napkin stuffed with cookies from the Upper, a bottle of perfume, a nightgown and toothbrush—were piled on my table. Notes wishing me a speedy recovery were scribbled on loose-leaf paper and folded in half.

  The nurse, a woman with one walleye and aggressive breasts, came in now and then to take my temperature. Once she woke me to drink a cup of bad tea and eat cold toast. I tasted the starch in my sleep. I dreamt of gladiator movies and Bible epics; slaves in fields; A.M.E. and Episcopal church services. I dreamt that I could speak fluent Spanish while Sr. Fuster and I walked arm in arm to the Upper for dinner. I dreamt of sitting alone at the red-and-white kitchen table on Addison Street trying to convince our Irish setter, Duchess, to eat the shiny green peas I had to dispose of before I was allowed to leave the table.

  The nurse woke me once to eat Jell-O and ginger ale, and I dreamt of my great-grammom crossing the street from her house to bring me bowls of black-cherry Jell-O that shimmered like garnet. I dreamt that I was alone and unloved or that I was petted, pampered, cuddled, and warm.

  When I awoke, really awoke, I went across the hall to the bathroom. Under the lights I looked puffy. I looked like women on the local news who have just been awakened out of a drunk and dragged from burning row houses. “Your son was killed, Mrs. Williams. How do you feel?” And those poor women would stand there stupefied, blinking at the TV camera. “Why don’t somebody give them women a comb before they roll the film?” we’d say.

  I looked as bad as I felt. There was a rightness to it. I scurried back to the safety of the stale, dark room with its awful reproduction of an awful oil painting of a tall ship on the sea. As long as I was there, as long as I was sick, nobody could force me to go on.

  Attracted by my movement as a fox to its prey, Nurse bustled into my sickroom and made cheerful noises about my recovery. She used the medicinal we. “We must be better tonight.”

  (So that’s why it was so dark.)

  “Oh, we’ll have you up and back to classes in just a few days. Now don’t you worry.”

  Worry? I shook my head at her as I had shaken it at the ugly child in the mirror. I didn’t want to go back to classes in a few days. I didn’t want to be up and around. I didn’t want to row anymore like a galley slave or work and work and work to clutch onto a moron’s understanding of calculus. I didn’t want to paint pictures that fell short of what I saw in my head, or open my heart to write papers that seemed, on later reading, nothing more than late-night babblings, pompous and glib. I didn’t want to talk or sing or listen.

  Then, as I lay in the dark, I felt a faraway grumping in my abdomen as if my organs were miles, not inches, below my skin. I had missed my last menstruation. Now I lay motionless to feel the glorious pain. My period was coming!

  In the morning I greeted the day nurse as cheerily as she greeted me. “My, we are feeling better,” she said.

  I bathed and ate and read poetry and napped. I braided and oiled my hair. I brushed my teeth. I filed my nails and clipped my toenails and napped some more. I heard the three-minute bell for chapel, the hurried rumble of latecomers. I heard them leave chapel and file toward the Schoolhouse. I heard it all, and I napped and snuggled into the day’s fresh linen and determined not to look into the mirror until later.

  Later that day friends came to see me. I was touched and then annoyed by their concern. Janie convinced me to drop crew. “Honestly, you’ve got to drop something, and since they won’t let you out of calculus—whatever prompted you to take it in the first place?—you’d better get out of crew. You don’t like it anyway.”

  “I do like it.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s just us, here. You know you can’t stand it, Lib. You told me yourself you wanted to strangle the cox. And besides you can’t swim. I don’t know how you passed the test.”

  She was right. I had taken an indoor swimming course in the winter, but I still could not breathe properly to execute the crawl. All I could do was the sidestroke my grandmother had taught me once at someone’s pool party. I didn’t quite trust the sidestroke to save me in the icy waters of Turkey Pond, but Nana Hamilton said it would, and she was a swimmer—and a survivor. “I don’t know why I tell you anything.”

  “Admit it. You hate it. You hate all the crewbies. I understand this mania for a well-rounded education, but you’re obviously killing yourself.”

  “I am not killing myself. I just have mono. I could have gotten it from a water fountain.”

  I did not know that I had mononucleosis, but the doctor had mentioned the possibility and tested for it. It sounded better than admitting to my friends that I had exhausted myself as they said I would.

  Janie had more news that day. She and I were among those nominated for class president. During the week, however, she’d decided to withdraw on election night—and throw all her support to me. I begged her not to.

  “It’s going to look bad,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. This is all going to work out fine.”

  I was released from the Infirmary not long before elections. On a Sunday night I joined my classmates in the lecture room in the math building, our entire form, preparing to become Sixth Formers. The present Sixth Formers seemed much older than we. I couldn’t imagine us growing to fit their places in one short summer.

  I forget who conducted the elections—that is, who wrote the names in lists on the board, and who asked us if there were any changes in the nominations. When the question was asked, however, I raised my hand. I wanted to place my name under vice-president rather than president, I said. I wanted to run for the position I believed I could win. I’d never be elected president, and I did not want my name, after being rejected for president, to be swept into the VP category like a chip that had been sitting on a losing number.

  Then, the person running the meeting acknowledged Janie. She did it. She withdrew and “threw all her support” to me. I thought I heard signifying snorts from the black kids who sat on one side of me. I did not look at anyone.

  Peter Starr was elected president. It made sense. Peter was scholarly and even-tempered. I respected his judgment. It was in his house that I had first met Mike Russell and Mr. Price. Then came the VP election. I went out of the room. When I walked back in, I was greeted by applause.

  I had figured it was possible. In fact, I had even done a roll call in my head, but the fact of winning surprised me. The year before, Wally Talbot had been the first black president, but he had been impeached after he’d plagiarized a story from the Reader’s Digest. I wasn’t the first black, but I was the first girl, elected vice-president. It embarrassed me to receive so much attention. Then came the other elections, and it was over.

  Some people congratulated me on the way out. But one student told me that the brothers and sisters had not liked the flim-flam I’d put Janie up to. White kids followed suit. I fixed my face to absorb their sidelong looks and congratulations.

  When everyone was gone, I walked through the buggy night along the path that ran from the math building, down steps past the school store and snack shop, over the sluice by the power plant, and toward the meadow behind Simpson and the other buildings in the quadrangle.

  Well, I had it, I thought, and much joy might it bring me. Fresh out of the Infirmary, I did not know how I would face anyone the next day; how I’d sit in chapel; how I’d go to cl
asses or walk along the grounds. How had this happened? Janie’s bad timing had not helped, but I could not, even though I wanted to, blame her. Now I stood falsely accused, ironically, of duplicity in the service of crude ambition.

  Bread on the water comes back tenfold. You reap what you sow. You can tell the tree by its fruit. Grammom’s old saws came winging through the years like supernal punishment.

  Certainly, I had gone into this election with honest goodwill, but what of the rest of my life at St. Paul’s? What of all the girls in Simpson for whom I had feigned more affection than I’d felt? What of cut corners, unread homework assignments, unrun laps? What of my secret hatred for my gymnastics coaches? Had I not slandered the woman as a “dyke” and made fun of the way the man’s haircut zoomed out over his big ears like the helmet of a bloodthirsty Visigoth? What of my insistence on smoking in my room after Mr. Hawley had told me time and again that flagrant rule breaking made his job harder, tore at the fabric of community in the house, and encouraged younger girls to do likewise?

  This general social rejection at the moment of triumph was precisely what I had feared. It was like the horrible scene in old novels when the parvenu appears overdressed and unchaperoned—whom would she know to invite?—at afternoon tea.

  Hadn’t we read in religion about people making their secret fears come true, like a kid who walks along a path saying to himself over and over again: “I’ll fall on that rock. I’ll fall on that rock. I’ll fall on that rock. I’ll fall. I’ll fall.”

  “Guess what, class?” Reverend Ingersoll would say. “Boom!”

  Over and over and over I had said to Jimmy, and to other friends, that I did not want to be trapped in one world. I wanted to be black, to be part of our group, to draw nourishment from it and give back, and yet I wanted to be free to come and go. How stupid I had been! How arrogant! In the process I had never loved well enough, I thought. Why else was I so alone on the dark path? You reap what you sow. Having no other outlet in my repertoire, I began to cry.