Hate hate hate you. God damn hate you. You are homely—ugly—too.
Poor Rhonda must have noticed that her friend Cressida was far less involved in the lesson this week than in previous weeks. Cressida Mayfield who had a reputation for being moody and unpredictable now participated only minimally, without enthusiasm; she allowed Rhonda to do most of the talking; she, who’d entertained their pupils with her deftly drawn cartoons, didn’t joke or draw a single cartoon this week.
The pupils, too, sensed that something was wrong. Kellard sat a little apart from the others, shifting in his seat, frowning and gnawing at his fingers, aware that Cressida ignored him, and did not praise him once.
On the bus back to their neighborhood in a northern, hilly section of Carthage, Rhonda asked Cressida if something was wrong and Cressida shook her head no.
Rhonda remarked disapprovingly that two or three more tutors had dropped out that week. Rhonda seemed about to express a hope that Cressida wouldn’t be one of these, the following week, but Cressida, slumped in her seat, staring gloomily out the window, said nothing.
How unfair it was! She knew, Kellard had liked her—as she had liked him. Yet, he hadn’t been able to resist saying what he’d said—and now she despised him, and could not bring herself to look at him.
And the other pupils—she knew, of course they were innocent. The little girls particularly, whom she’d liked so much. But now—it was over. Nothing could bring her back to Booker T. Washington School ever again.
That evening, at dinner, Cressida was sullen-faced. With some hesitation her parents asked her how the afternoon had gone and Cressida said, with a bright, blithe smile of indifference, “It was OK. But I’m not going back next week.”
“Not going back? Why?”
“Because it’s a waste of time. The students don’t really ‘learn’ anything—they memorize. And then they forget.”
“But—you enjoyed tutoring so much . . .”
Cressida shrugged. For her, the subject was closed.
“You thought you might like to be a teacher, you’d said . . .”
And Juliet protested, “But, Cressie! You and Rhonda were having such fun, you’d said. Maybe you should give it one more try?”
Cressida shook her head, no. No more delusions!
She’d tossed her Math Literacy Squad smiley-button into the trash.
HOMELY ONE. With the passage of time she would come to believe the boy had said Ugly.
Thinking it was just as well, she’d learned beforehand how stupid and cruel young students could be. Before she’d made some idiotic, idealistic mistake.
And discovering, too, how shallow she was, herself—how easily wounded, defeated. Like a drawing by M. C. Escher that is all surfaces, dazzling and clever, ingenious, lacking depth and heart.
ON THE BUS moving north. The last time she’d glanced out the window the terrain was rural, hilly. They’d left Florida behind—and Georgia—and were now in South Carolina, unless already it was North Carolina.
In a paralysis of dread she was being borne north.
Thinking Maybe they have forgotten me, truly. Maybe I was correct all along.
And thinking Maybe the bus will capsize. Maybe—in “flaming wreckage on I-95.”
In her seat she’d slept huddled. No one had asked to sit with her.
How badly she missed the Investigator! Even the man’s disgust with her, his sharp disappointment with her, she missed.
Yet he was correct: she’d betrayed his trust, she was of no possible future use to him. And she was fifty years younger than the man which made any relationship apart from a professional relationship ridiculous.
Still, she hadn’t lost the ring. Turning it around her finger, and around.
If they will forgive me, I can return to him. If he will have me.
She’d been sleeping in her clothes for what seemed like a long time. A nasty dream of Booker T. Washington School—though the labyrinthine building in her dream hadn’t resembled the actual building, much.
The dark-skinned children hiding from her. Laughing at her, and rushing at her. Ugly ugly ugly girl! Why don’t you die.
She’d behaved badly there, too. She’d known even at the time.
Mitch Kazteb had tried to convince her. They were all discouraged with tutoring, sure some of the kids were God-damned little brats, he’d been insulted too, more than once. But you kept going, Mitch said, just kept slogging forward, and it turned out OK—or better than OK.
He’d called Cressida, when she’d failed to return for the fourth week.
A boy calling Cressida Mayfield! A senior boy, who spoke to her as if he liked her, or liked something about her.
She’d been attracted to him—but only at first. Only when things had gone well.
Feelings like cobwebs. Nothing durable about them. Her feelings, at least.
And Rhonda had called her, saying she missed her. Begging her to return, try again.
Cressida had been deeply moved, that Rhonda and Mitch had called her. How could she possibly confess to them I can’t risk it again, I am too easily hurt.
Thinking of these blunders of adolescence she’d begun coughing in the chilly bus-air. Other passengers had complained to the driver about the gusty air that was much too cold, now that they’d left south Florida.
Her throat was beginning to feel raw and scraped. Her skin, hypersensitive as if she were becoming ill.
A fear of being sick in so public a place, and so far from anything like home.
SHE WAS THE smart one.
God damn she knew it: the smart one.
Slamming out of the house on Cumberland Avenue by a rear door.
Not caring if anyone inside saw, or heard, her leave.
Not caring if she ever came back.
Inside her was a clockwork mechanism wound tight, tight, and ever tighter—ticktickticking close to bursting.
“Hate you all. Wish you were all—”
But she could not quite utter the word dead.
For of course she didn’t mean it—dead.
Why so angry, why her heart beating so hard. Why the hot-beating pulses in her head. Why this wish, so lately powerful in her, as, in another girl her age, a wish to be touched, to be kissed, to be made-love-to, to vanish?
For as long as she could remember, Cressida was uncomfortable with being looked-at, assessed in the eyes of others. But lately the sensation was growing stronger.
Since the trouble at school with her geometry teacher Mr. Rickard who’d said such stupid cruel unforgiveable things to her after she’d taken him into her confidence and shown him her portfolio of drawings—“Hate him. Wish he was dead.”
Fear/revulsion—being observed by others.
Usually it was strangers from whom she wanted to shrink, make herself small and disappear.
But often it was people who knew her name—or worse yet knew her as the younger Mayfield daughter—the ***** one.
Sometimes, her own family.
Slamming out of the house so she wouldn’t scream.
In khaki shorts, long-sleeved T-shirt, sneakers. Loose-fitting boy-clothes, that disguised her (boy)-figure. And her hair that needed washing, brushed back carelessly behind her ears.
She was angry. But mostly, she was ashamed.
What she’d done to hurt Juliet! Ashamed.
It was a Saturday in April. A week or so after Cressida’s fifteenth birthday.
Confined inside the house practicing piano. Compulsively and without joy at the piano in the living room, in a corner of the room in which natural light rarely fell and so even at midday she had to have a lamp burning, and this too she resented. The previous afternoon she’d had her weekly piano lesson that had been a disappointment to her as—(she knew)—to her instructor Mr. Goellner; she was determined to play the Beethoven sonata smoothly, rapidly, and without errors, to surprise Mr. Goellner the following Friday, and to refute the man’s (probable) estimate of her musical skill; yet despite h
er ferocious concentration, and her willingness to repeat, repeat, repeat those passages of sparkling arpeggios, she kept making mistakes—striking wrong notes, losing the beat—blundering, slip-sliding, disgusting. For this was the Sonata no. 23—the great Appassionata. It was wounding to Cressida’s pride that she would never play this sonata except as a mediocre girl-pianist in Carthage might play it, though each time she struggled through it—if Zeno or Arlette were anywhere within earshot—her effort was rewarded with a wild outburst of applause.
“Cressie! Terrific.”
Her parents meant well of course. Her parents made a show of loving her.
Yet she knew: their love for her was a kind of pity, like love for a crippled child, or a child dying of leukemia.
Slammed out of the house. No need to tell anyone where she was going.
Vaguely she recalled she’d promised to do something with her mother, or with her mother and Juliet—sometime that afternoon.
No one observed her bicycling out the long driveway to the street. As always when she climbed onto her bicycle Cressida took pleasure in moving so swiftly, and with so little effort.
Her legs were strong, hard-muscled. It was her chest, her shoulders, her upper body that were weak, and thin; her collarbones that showed through her skin the hue of watery milk.
At Cumberland Avenue she turned east, bicycling to the Episcopal church at the end of the block, and the beautiful old cemetery.
The cemetery was one of Cressida’s places. Since she’d been a child needing to slip away from her family, and hide.
Always in the cemetery she visited the old, familiar grave markers. By heart she knew the “historic” names on gravestones so very old and smooth-worn, the letters and numerals were scarcely legible.
There were Mayfelds in the oldest part of the cemetery, dating to the 1790s. But Zeno was convinced these were not ancestors of his since his great-grandfather Zenobah Mayfield had emigrated from northern England in the 1890s, as a young child; also, no Mayfield had ever attended the Episcopal church, so far as Zeno knew.
Cressida’s hot-beating brain slowed a bit, in the cemetery. For it was peaceful here, a secret sort of place.
She hadn’t been drawing so much, lately. Since that idiot Rickard had insulted her.
These are impressive, but—why repeat what Escher did so well?
Her mistake had been to trust her geometry teacher. Because he seemed to like her, often praised her in class and smiled at her; and laughed at her ironic remarks, murmured out of the corner of her mouth.
Because he was one of the few teachers she’d ever had, she’d thought, capable of appreciating her.
And maybe, she’d thought, he had liked her.
Now, that had ended. Now, she hated him.
And now, she hated geometry. She would fail to hand in homework assignments through the remaining weeks of the term, she would miss classes. Slumping in her seat staring out the window indifferent to Mr. Rickard clicking chalk against the board and asking questions which the brighter students would volunteer to answer but not Cressida Mayfield, any longer—not ever.
Curious it seemed to Cressida, in the cemetery: death was so general, and so unexceptional—death was everywhere.
And yet, death in actual life was terrible, unspeakable. Nothing mattered more than individual, unique deaths.
She found herself staring at an awful sight—a large green insect, a grasshopper, trapped and thrashing in a gigantic spiderweb, in which the carcasses of other insects were visible. How ugly! This was the sort of “biological” imagery you were spared, in the cerebral and paradoxical art of M. C. Escher.
Cressida took up a stick and smashed the spiderweb, in disgust. Where the grasshopper ended up, broken against a grave marker, still trapped in the remnants of the spiderweb, or liberated, she didn’t know.
Their mother’s mother, who’d wanted her granddaughters to call her Grand’mère Helene, had died just before Christmas. Cressida had had nightmares after her death and could not now look at older, white-haired women without feeling a stab of loss. Yet, she hadn’t been able to love Grand’mère Helene as Juliet had loved her, and felt sick with guilt afterward; she hadn’t been able to cry, as Juliet and Arlette had cried, but, at the funeral, had gnawed at her knuckles in resentment that she had to be where she was, so confined. But Grand’mère Helene hadn’t been buried in the Episcopal cemetery.
Cressida could not bear to think of the circumstances of her grandmother’s death. She could not bear to think of the (future) death of her parents—Zeno, Arlette. Her brain just stopped like a garbage disposal into which a spoon has fallen. (When sulky Cressida helped clean up after mealtimes, often it happened that spoons, forks and knives slipped into the whirring blades of the garbage disposal, which wrecked them.)
She thought It’s so far off, it will never happen. Don’t be silly!
Amid the familiar, old part of the cemetery she stood on a gravel path. She liked the newer parts of the cemetery less, though they were on higher ground, beneath tall chestnut trees at the edge of the churchyard.
Newer meant the likelihood of seeing a surname she might recognize.
Now she spied a funeral party in the newer section, in dressy clothes.
They appeared to be strangers, which was a relief.
Hesitantly she followed the gravel path. She did not want to turn around abruptly to avoid the mourners, but she did not want to attract their attention, either.
Feeling ill-at-ease in khaki shorts, baggy T-shirt in the churchyard. Yet there was the thrill of believing herself unknown and unnamed, unrecognized.
Someday, she would go out into the world: anonymous.
But then, as if to mock her, one of the women mourners looked pointedly at her, and nodded to her.
Lifting a gloved hand, and not quite a smile.
Of course, the woman was known to Cressida: Mrs. Carlsen.
Ginny Carlsen, Patrick Carlsen’s wife. Mr. Carlsen was a business associate of Zeno Mayfield.
The Mayfields and the Carlsens were friendly acquaintances. Though the Carlsens were older than the Mayfields. Very likely, it was an older parent who’d died and whose coffin was being lowered into the earth.
How like a netted animal she felt, for a moment breathless as several other mourners looked over at her, lifted their hands in greeting.
Who is it?—the Mayfield girl. The younger one . . .
Soon then she left the cemetery, pushing her bicycle roughly along the gravel paths. Though the sky was darkening with rain clouds yet she didn’t return home but descended Cumberland Avenue in a series of hills. Much of the residential neighborhood was still undeveloped, vacant lots and woodland between properties of several acres. She knew the names of the families who lived in most of these houses but her mind had gone blank. She was feeling strangely light-headed, mildly anxious, as if she’d narrowly escaped—something.
Several of the hills were steep, glacier-hills. She had to get off her bicycle to walk it downhill. A voice like nettles in her brain—Arlette! I saw your daughter the other day—we were at the cemetery. What a strange wild-looking girl alone and not with friends on a Saturday afternoon.
There was a phobia—autophobia—which meant a terror of being alone. And isolophobia—a terror of solitude, which came to the same thing.
Such peculiar phobias, she’d discovered: spectrophobia (a terror of seeing yourself in a mirror), ornithphobia (a terror of birds). And there was zoophobia (a terror of animals), and anthrophobia (a terror of people).
More common phobias, with which most people could identify, were claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia (a terror of heights).
Her heart was beating quickly, like a trapped bird’s wings. It was a kind of claustrophobia, conjoined with anthrophobia—her fear of other people, trapping her with their eyes, making a claim upon her.
Zeno had joked the other evening about the common and yet “utterly bizarre” phobia—triskaidekaphobia—a terror o
f the numeral thirteen.
Zeno liked to boast that he was without superstition as he was without any “supernatural” benefactor but most other people, including even Cressida herself, in a weak mood, were fearful of something.
A fear of the unknown: what was that called?
Worse yet: a fear of the known.
Cressida laughed, this was all so absurd.
Her brain was tangled and snarled like loose thread in a carpet, sucked into the spinning, wooden wheels of the vacuum cleaner.
Oh Cressida!—have you messed up the vacuum cleaner again?
One after another household task, Cressida was excused from.
It wasn’t her fault—truly! Until finally, Arlette assigned her to tasks that didn’t require close concentration but allowed her to daydream freely without disastrous results, like folding towels out of the dryer and carrying them to the upstairs closet.
Cressida climbed back on her bicycle, though the hill was still fairly steep. She’d gone out without a safety helmet: her parents would scold, if they knew.
Careless about hurting herself. Since she’d been a toddler, often she bumped into things, bruised and cut her legs. The thought came to her of a need to punish herself, for her bad behavior with Juliet, and Juliet’s friend Carly Hempel.
Shame! Shame on you Cressida Mayfield.
Your punishment is: splattered brains.
Yet a better escape would be simply to vanish.
For, if she disappeared, just never returned from this bicycle ride, who would miss her?
She’d heard them—her family—talking and laughing together, their words muffled, at a little distance, many times. When abruptly she’d gone upstairs to her room and shut the door to be alone—with her books, with her “art”—knowing that her parents and her sister were baffled by her rudeness; yet knowing that soon, within minutes, they would cease to miss her, they would forget about her, Zeno, Arlette, Juliet—relaxed and happy together.
They’d become accustomed to Cressida’s behavior, within the family. Relatives and friends understood. Allowances were made for Cressida. You wouldn’t expect Cressida to answer with a smile when she was greeted, or make eye contact with most people; you wouldn’t expect Cressida to jump up, with others, to offer to prepare a meal, drag picnic tables and benches into the backyard, set a table or clear a table.