Morning (6 page)

The girls’ rooms were on the second floor of the building, and so
was the large many-stalled bathroom we all shared. I raced for a stall and entered, locking the door, grateful for privacy. I was cramping with a fierce attack of diarrhea brought on by nothing I had eaten. As I sat there, racked with every kind of torment, I heard the doors open and the eastern girls came in, their assured voices floating unabashed in the air.

“… Jeremy can’t possibly like her. It’s just her big tits.”

“Tits, my dear,
udders
!”

A scream of laughter. “She is such a cow.”

“I think she’s beautiful. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”

“Oh, God, I suppose, but her ‘beauty’ is so tacky.”

“I think you’ll discover, darling, that what you call tacky is what men like.”

“Exactly.”

More laughter.

I was bent double in my stall, trying not to make any noise that would embarrass me and make them aware of my presence. All around me doors slammed, toilets flushed, girls laughed.

“I don’t think Jean has anything to worry about. I can’t imagine that he’d ever be unfaithful to Jean.”

“Still, perhaps we should write her?”

On this note, they left. I sat in my stall, paralyzed, really ill. I tried to console myself, to do what my mother would tell me to do: to “be sensible.” It wasn’t that those girls disliked me, it was that they were championing a friend, I told myself. And no one likes a girl who steals someone else’s guy. I tried not to take it personally.

But it was a very personal summer. Everything came close, too close. All the other Outsiders were in math or sciences; I was the only literature Outsider, and so I walked from my room or the dining hall to the classroom and back to my room alone; and while the group of eastern girls who walked in a cluster just in front of or behind me were not within touching distance, their presence pressed in on me like the Kansas heat. My face burned. I would shrivel into myself, wishing I could pull my ears right into my head so that I wouldn’t hear the low hum of their laughter,
their whispers, which I was sure were all about me. I would carry my books against my chest, my arms crossed over my books hard, trying to crush my offending bosom flat. Olivia DeWitt spent every evening until lights-out in the other girls’ rooms; at lights-out she’d run into our room, jump into bed, and go to sleep without a word to me. Her absolute avoidance of me was as vivid and visceral as insults or blows, and I lay quaking in my bed, sick at my stomach, as if physically attacked.

But what came closest that summer was Jeremy Gardner. That summer I wrote for my class a short story about a woman who wore around her neck a heart-shaped locket with an intricate design like an arabesque on the front. If one looked closely, he could see that the design was really a keyhole, and in truth the locket was her heart and she was living her life waiting to meet the man who carried in the lapel of his jacket a small gold key. That key would unlock her heart and the man and woman would know they were meant for each other, had been sent to each other by fate. But no one came to the town where the woman lived, and no one wore jackets, let alone anything extraordinary in their lapels. So the woman traveled, saved her money, took jobs that would enable her to travel and to live among men who wore jackets. Still she did not meet the man with the key to her heart. And it embarrassed her so, as she grew older, to wear that heart-shaped locket, and it kept her from knowing other men. Finally, when she turned thirty (which to me at sixteen seemed infinitely far away), she gave up in despair and went to a jeweler to have the locket and chain broken, and her neck was free. As she turned to leave, a wonderfully handsome man entered. He had a gold key in his lapel. The woman cried
“Oh!”
and smiled at him. She almost threw herself on him. The man looked at her face, then looked down at her neck, and, as it was bare, his face went blank and he walked on past her without speaking.

It was a foolish story but not without its humble truths, and no one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart. Jeremy and I might as well have worn locket and key, for we responded to each other on sight and when we were together we were complete and satisfied. In spite of our different interests, we were
intellectual comrades, and I told him about the symmetry of poetry; he told me about the symmetry of math. We both felt separated, apart from our families and peers, different. We could put on a good show, but we were lonely most of the time, even with others. Together, we were blissfully content.

Every night after lights-out we would sneak out of our rooms and walk down to the pond together. It was really the only way we could be together for any amount of uninterrupted time. We would hold hands as we walked, and we would talk about everything, and finally we would lie on the grass by the pond and hold each other and kiss. That was all. We did not make love. Jeremy didn’t insist, although we lay on top of each other and pressed against each other, wanting to make love. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to work out a way so we could see each other after camp ended. I told him I loved him. Jeremy Gardner came closest to me that summer of all the things in the world, and I could bear the daytime, when I was with the Outsiders or walking alone, surrounded by the hot whispers of the eastern girls.

The third week I was at the camp, an eastern girl named Dottie Collier became friendly with me. She was in the writing and literature class and she wasn’t stupid; after I had read aloud my story about the locket, she approached me, smiling. “That was a really good story,” she said. She left the classroom with me, and walked and talked with me as we went down the hall to lunch. She asked me to sit next to her at the table with the eastern girls. The others ignored me, but Dottie kept talking to me—we were telling each other about our favorite novels, and in that were caught up in a spell.

Dottie wanted to be a writer, too. When we had a chance, we told each other the plots of the novels we would like to write, but there was never enough time, camp was always so regimented and busy, with classes in the morning and sports and homework in the afternoon. I was surprised but thrilled when Dottie suggested that she trade rooms with Olivia so we could talk to each other during the free part of the evenings and after lights-out. Olivia was glad to trade, and from then on, how delicious camp
was! Still I swam in the afternoon with the Outsiders or played bumbling games of volleyball with my breasts thumping against my chest; but I had the nights to look forward to, talking in my room with Dottie, then sneaking out much later to meet Jeremy.

“Jenny?” she would whisper, when I came sneaking back into the room. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” I would sigh. “Did I wake you up?”

“No, no, I’ve been awake. I worry about you, you know. You know how boys are—you aren’t letting him
do
anything, are you? I mean—you aren’t
doing it
, are you?”

Dottie’s voice was so warm, she was so concerned. I was wrapped in bliss.

“Of course we’re not doing it,” I said, sliding out of my clothes and into bed.

“Well, girls can get pregnant so easily, and boys just slip away,” Dottie said.

“That won’t happen to me,” I promised. “I’m not a fool.”

But I was. I lay awake, in my joy telling Dottie everything, telling her that Jeremy was going to help me find ways to apply to eastern colleges, to get scholarships, that he was going to write me, that he was going to try to come to visit me at my farm on his school vacation that fall. The night after Jeremy told me that, and I in turn confided it to Dottie, I met Jeremy at the pond as usual. We lay together, wrapped in each other, rapt in each other, and so we did not hear Mr. McCausland, the headmaster of the camp, approach.

“Mr. Gardner,” he said.
“Miss White.”

We rose awkwardly, adjusting our clothes, shaking, the warmth of our bodies disappearing in the sudden numbing cold of fear.

“You will follow me back to the hall,” he said.

We followed in silence, walking back through long grass that tickled my legs as foolishly as it had done when we walked earlier, arm in arm, down to the pond.

“Mr. Gardner, you will go to your room. I’ll deal with you later.”

Jeremy obeyed. He was pale, looking down, and so our eyes did not meet.

“Miss White, you will go to your room and pack. Tomorrow morning our van will drive you to the airport. You may consider yourself expelled. You know our policies. We do not allow girls who let themselves behave wantonly to remain at our camp. I will of course of necessity write to your parents and your school authorities about your actions here.”

There was no compassion in his voice. I did not argue. It was the best I could do not to weep before him. I walked, stiff-backed, to my room. How could I tell Dottie? I was so ashamed.

But Dottie was not in our room when I entered. It was after lights-out, and she was not in our room. There was not a trace of her, all her clothes were gone, and she had not left me a note.

I did not go to sleep that night. I sat up all night long, packing, smoking every cigarette in the contraband pack I had hidden under my mattress, which Dottie and I had often shared during our late-night talks. It did not take an “academically talented” person to guess how it was the headmaster knew why and where to look for Jeremy and me.

The cabdriver came for me the following morning. He carried my luggage, and I followed behind him, walking down the dormitory halls and into the foyer of the school. Wide double doors gave off the foyer to the dining room, and clustered in that doorway were a variety of students. At the front, lounging against the doorframes and each other, arms folded, eyes drooping with smugness, were the eastern girls. Dottie was with them and she looked right at me with a triumphant smirk on her face. She would be the heroine with her group now; first a spy, then the instrument of my departure, saving Jeremy for Jean.

Behind the eastern girls, weaving and jumping and looking like general fools in order to make themselves seen by me, were the Outsiders. They called and waved; Larry, who was tall, called that he would write me.

I did not wave back. I did not cry or smile or let any expression
cross my face. I had learned how to do that at camp. I just kept walking, through the foyer that expanded with Einsteinian magnificence, until it almost echoed around me. All those eyes burned me so that I felt I was walking through flames. But I did not faint. And I did not catch any sight of Jeremy.

Later, the film
The Wizard of Oz
would capture with bizarre accuracy just what it was like for me to return to Kansas after my stay at the eastern camp: it was like going from dazzling Technicolor back to black and white and gray. Dust and heat and empty spaces, loneliness. My parents and the principal of the school were incredibly kind and understanding. They blamed Jeremy Gardner as much as me for our escapades, and took a compassionate view of what we had done—and really, we had done so little. The principal of the school did not enter my scandal onto my school records, and he kept the information to himself, something of a miracle in our small gossiping community.

I spent the rest of the summer in our basement, reading and writing. Jeremy Gardner wrote to me when camp was over; he had been allowed to stay at camp, because his father knew the headmaster. At first his letters were passionate and full of promises, and he did try to help me get back east; he sent me catalog after catalog about eastern colleges and scholarships. But we were so young. I was so poor. The distance between us was so great. Once school started, our letters tapered off and finally stopped.

What I learned on my summer vacation. I could have knocked my English teacher’s hat off with an honest essay. For this is what I learned on my summer vacation that year: that I had some power over boys because of my looks and my body. That if I was to get anywhere in my life—away from the dust and emptiness of our Kansas farm—I had to use that power, for there was little charity in the world, and no equality. And finally, most important, that I could trust men, to a certain extent, because of my power, but never females: females betrayed, smiled and lied and conned and betrayed worse than any man. I knew I never would have a female as a friend again in my life.

Sara rose and carried the manuscript box to the dining room table. Turning on the chandelier so that its light would blend with the sunlight to illuminate the pages clearly, she carefully went through the manuscript, page by page. Two hundred and five pages of Seraphina and Errol (Errol
had
turned out to be the hero, after all, and the author had left them in a passionate embrace waiting for the priest to arrive to marry them). Only about fifteen pages of Jenny. Yet it was Jenny, not Seraphina, who sprang alive from the paper. Where had Jenny come from? Who had written about Jenny? Those pages had a ring of autobiographical truth about them—but so did any good novel written in the first person.

Sara gathered together the fifteen pages of Jenny material and studied them. She compared them to the Seraphina story—almost certainly the two stories had come from the same word processor. At least the typeface was the same, the margins, the weight and color of paper. It seemed that the same person had written them both and somehow gotten the two stories mixed up. Sara looked back at the title page. Could someone who called herself Aurora Dawn actually have written the Jenny material? God, Aurora Dawn.