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“After all she has gone through, she has way too much emotional and psychological damage, Teddy,” he told him right in front of me. “You can’t just send her off to live in an unfamiliar environment with strangers. She needs support, professional support, and we both know you’re too busy to provide it.”
Of course, Uncle Perry had been right, and if it hadn’t been for Dr. Ryan, I probably wouldn’t have been this close to finishing high school, even one as insulated and protective as Collier. I certainly would never have had the strength to go off to college, not that I thought I would. I avoided filling out applications, but to satisfy my curious classmates, I pretended I had already been admitted to an expensive small college in Kentucky. They believed it. For the most part, everyone believed whatever I said because I said it with such conviction and nonchalance. I think that was because I made myself believe it first.
Even though I didn’t see a therapist on a regular basis here, I had many informal sessions with Mrs. Hathaway. She obviously knew when I had a long break between classes and either casually came by my room at the dormitory or caught me walking on campus and invited me to her office for a cup of tea.
Her questions were always the same. “How are you getting along with your roommate, your classmates, and your teachers? Why aren’t you participating in any activities like the drama club, chorus, or one of the athletic teams? You’ve got to expand your interests, explore, experiment, Semantha. Doesn’t anything we offer interest you?”
Almost always, she’d tilt her head and smile softly before asking, “Have you met any nice boys at our social events?”
All of the girls thought little of Collier’s social events. There were so many chaperones, and the security personnel hovered outside every entrance like killer bees ready to sting anyone for the smallest indiscretion. It was nearly impossible to go off and do something we considered more exciting. It was like being brought up in the mid-forties, when there were actually rules about how many inches apart a boy and a girl had to be when they danced together. And of course, if you wore anything Mrs. Hathaway considered inappropriate, you weren’t even permitted to enter the auditorium for one of the official socials.
In general, the boys we met at these highly controlled gatherings came from brother schools for boys or nearby parochial schools. On very rare occasions, boys from one of the area public schools were invited, but they were usually what Mrs. Hathaway would call the créme de la créme, the honor students. Davina Bernstein said they were rented from Geeks R Us and at midnight would turn into laptops.
I told Mrs. Hathaway that I hadn’t met any boy who remotely interested me or whom I interested. None of my answers to any of her questions really pleased her, but she wasn’t pushy. Like most of the people my father had spoken to about me, she tiptoed and whispered and showed great patience and understanding. I was so tired of this so-called tender loving care that I wanted to scream, but instead, I turned myself into a sponge, absorbed what I had to absorb, and then squeezed it out of myself as soon as I was alone again or when Ellie was on the phone or out in the hallway talking to other girls.
Right now, she continued to stand in the bathroom doorway, impatiently waiting for an explanation for the lit candle and my sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor talking to myself.
When I was at home on my daughter’s birthday, I lit the candle in my bathroom with the windows wide open so no one would smell the wax melting. Softly, under my breath, I would sing “Happy Birthday” to her and pretend she was there, now almost four years old, sitting on the floor with me, her eyes wide with excitement. I even pretended to give her a present and watch her unwrap it. We
would hug, and I would hold her and give her the security and comfort that came with knowing your mother is always there for you, loving you and protecting you. I cried tears of joy for both of us.
Then I would hear someone walking in the hallway or a door open and close, and I would quickly smother the candle flame and hide the candle again in the bottom of a sink cabinet. I knew how furious my father would be if he discovered I had done such a thing. Maybe for a few seconds, there was some awareness of the special day visible in his eyes on the first-year anniversary after I had given birth, but that candle burning in his memory was soon snuffed out. It was truly as though he had clapped his hands over the tiny flame.
I could never forget any of it, even though it was all so painful to remember. Of course, I tried to forget. I really did, and maybe I was making some progress. Maybe that was why Cassie was coming back to me in whisperings and shadows. She was afraid I would leave her in her grave forever.
“Semantha?” Ellie pursued. “Will you please tell me what you’re doing in our bathroom?”
“It’s just something I do in memory of someone I loved and lost,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.” I knew she thought I was doing it for my mother or my sister or perhaps both.
When Ellie and I were first assigned to room with each other, I didn’t reveal anything about my seeing a therapist on a regular basis. I did that later, when it was clear to me that none of the girls would leave me be until I told them something negative about myself. It was almost as if they wouldn’t tolerate someone who had nothing to hide.
However, I told Ellie the story that was so embedded in my mind that it was practically a recording. I couldn’t avoid telling her, because I never had a mother call or visit, and the logical question was why not.
“My parents at a late time in their marriage tried to have another child, hoping for a boy,” I began. “My father had always dreamed of having a son he would name after one of his famous ancestors, Asa Heaven-stone, a young man who fought and was killed in the Civil War. His portrait hangs on a wall in our house in Kentucky with the portraits of other Heaven-stone ancestors.
“Not long after my sister and I were told that my mother was pregnant, it was determined that my mother was having a boy. The news brought my parents great happiness. They immediately began work on setting up the nursery, but my mother suffered a miscarriage and went into a deep depression. She took too many sleeping pills one day, and we lost her.”
Of course, I didn’t tell Ellie about the things Cassie had done to cause all of this. Only my father, my uncle Perry, and I knew the truth.
Ellie, like everyone else, looked devastated for me and nearly broke into tears.
“Less than two years later,” I continued, “my sister, Cassie, tripped and fell down a stairway in our house and broke her neck. She died instantly.”
When I added that, some people would just sit with their mouths wide open, and some would shake their heads and say, “You poor girl and your poor, poor father.”
I would bear their sympathy like someone who had been beaten beyond pain and thank them.
Ellie didn’t linger after I explained the candle. She nodded, backed out of the bathroom, and closed the door. She either fled from or ignored sad news and stories of family tragedies. It was one of the reasons I could get along so well with her.
I continued with my private birthday ritual and blew out the candle. Ellie never asked me anything else about it again, and, of course, I never mentioned it to her. I didn’t like lying to her. I never liked lying to anyone, in fact, even though my sister, Cassie, had thought that was a weakness.
“There are very few people, Semantha, whom you can trust with the truth. The truth is naked, unprotected. Once it’s out there, it’s alone. Lying,” she had said with that Cassie smirk I had grown used to seeing, “is simply another layer of protective skin.”
I knew the other girls at Collier thought I was unusual in many ways, but my brutal honesty did the most to keep me from becoming very friendly with anyone else but Ellie. Despite what Cassie had told me about the value of lying, she had rarely bothered to do so even when it came to holding on to a friend. I had her way of simply telling other girls and boys whatever I really thought, no matter what the consequences. My quiet manner and my revelation about a potential nervous breakdown already had done much to create a deep, wide valley between me and the others at Collier. This characteristic of being coldly and factually honest at times was the icing on the cake. Even when I sat with them in the cafeteria or walked alongside them in the corridors, most avoided looking at me, and when anyone did, she usually turned away quickly. It was as if she was looking at something forbidden.
From the way the others whispered and sometimes hovered with Ellie in corners, I knew they were peppering her with questions about me. They surely wondered what it was like sleeping in the same room with someone as weird as I was. I never asked Ellie about it, but occasionally, she would reveal some of their questions—mostly, I think, because she was curious about the answers herself.
