Black Ice (14 page)

I wanted to scream.

“Your first time?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” he said.

I tried to believe him, but I could not stop crying.

Then he cried, too. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never want to hurt you. I just couldn’t help it. God, I’m so sorry.”

We comforted each other in the awkward way of adolescents, each of us absorbed in ourselves, unable to console the other, until I jumped up in bed. Pregnant! I could be pregnant, I thought. I leapt out of the bed.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said. The bright white lights in the hallway nearly blinded me, and they were brighter still in the bathroom. I threw off my nightgown and stepped into the shower, trying to remember scraps of the women’s conversation. Why hadn’t I listened more carefully? Aunt Evie had once said something about a woman whom she knew who had been too dumb to use birth control. “The least she could have done,” Aunt Evie had said, “was wash some of that out
and give herself a fighting chance. The fewer of those little tadpoles swimming around, the better.”

I washed as if to rid myself of sin and shame, and, ignoring the scum in the tub, I lay down under the spigot and did the best I knew how. Earlier in the year, I had coached a girlfriend from a strict Catholic family to insert a tampon.

“Joanne,” I’d shouted over the stall, “you’ve got to feel for the hole.”

“No! Do I have to?”

“Yes. You’ve got three openings.…”

“Three?”

“Yes!”

“Where’s the third one?”

“That depends on which two you’ve already found.”

Lying under the punishing spigot, I asked God to forgive me for having laughed at her. God knows, I thought to myself, I’m just as ignorant, and worse. Joanne hadn’t been dumb enough to get herself knocked up.

In the mirror I looked, as my mother would have said, like the wild woman of Borneo. I dared not think what else she would have said. My hair had shot up on the back of my head like turkey tail feathers, and my eyes were swollen and red. Sex goddess! I taunted myself and then replaced my flannel nightgown as if to shield me from further damage.

We went to sleep then, and it seemed like minutes later that I had to awaken and drag through classes, smiling at my friends and agreeing that, yes, I was excited that my friend would be coming soon.

In the afternoon, when he was
supposed
to arrive, I brought Ricky out of Simpson and into the daylight. I showed him off at lunch and, since I had no sports practice that afternoon, we walked together through the snowy woods. He’d brought a camera with him, saying that he wanted to have a photo of me
in his room, so we took pictures of each other. Then we sat down to talk. Ricky had something to tell me, he said, looking serious, something that he’d been afraid to mention before. Now that he knew he loved me, however, he wanted no secrets between us.

Boys were so loath to share secrets that I rejoiced at the news. The night before I’d hated us both. Now I would have something to atone for it, some delicate intimacy to give the dark night meaning. We found a rock that jutted above the snow. There we sat until Ricky was ready to disclose his secret. If I could have, I would have placed my lips against his exquisite ears and sucked it right out of his brain, so eager was I. Instead, I declared my unshakable, unassailable love.

“Last summer, when I was back home,” he began, “I made an awful mistake.”

Ricky had a child.

I had not been expecting that. I’d left teenaged pregnancy at home, which was where his baby was and where it had been conceived. I had not thought that it would follow us here, not us ambitious ones, not the someday-we’ll-give-it-back-to-the-community crowd cramming down Latin and calculus here in New England.

Ricky looked down at his feet and out onto the frozen water. The ice was pushed up, jagged and broken where it had frozen imperfectly. He seemed ashamed of the child’s existence, and desperate for me to forgive him.

My forgiveness, I told him in a moment of candor rare for our romance, seemed entirely beyond the point. He looked at me strangely.

“So what is it?” I asked him.

“What’s what?”

“The baby? Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Oh, he’s a boy.”

I had more questions that I did not bring myself to ask. Did the baby have his name? Was he healthy? Had he gone home for the birth? What was she doing for diapers? Did he correspond with her? Was he good to her?

“She doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “Never did. She said that she had protected herself. You know how some chicks are. It might not even be mine, but she said it was, and I know it could be. I’m not the kind of guy to lie about that. But, really, it was nothing. I hate to say it, but the fact is, she was nothing but a whore … and I was lonely.…”

I was trying to follow his reasoning. I tried to feel flattered by his concern that he might lose me through his confession. I tried to recapture my former appetite to share his secret. But the word he used, that word screams at me still across the years:
whore. She was nothing but a whore
.

And what was I? I thought, trying, but unable to keep from thinking it. What would I be next month if I turned up pregnant? I imagined myself big-bellied and barefoot, teeny-weeny little pickaninny braids sticking off my head, walking around the green lawns of a New England college somewhere asking: “Y’all seen mah Ricky anywheres? I’s lookin’ all over for mah man, me an’ de little one what’s a-comin.”

I wondered if Nothing-But-a-Whore had had the good fortune to be awake while
her
unfortunate seed was being planted, but then that was too cruel for me to pursue, I thought. I had a boy here who was just plain manly. If I wanted ’em smart and virile, well, I’d just have to stop acting like I wanted something else. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d be doing while I was curled in the big red leather chair in the reading room, my feet tucked under me for warmth, reading my latest James Baldwin novel or studying Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. The only seed that was planted that weekend was one of hate.
I began to hate Ricky a little that first night and a little more the next day, but I did not know it. I thought this new power and new entrapment, this new, complicated, busy denial were pangs of love. I thought that I loved this muscular young man with the sparkling smile. I could not understand why I was relieved to see him go, or why his ardent letters embarrassed me.

As winter progressed, the whole school went into rehearsal. The Master Players, the faculty drama troupe; the dance class; the Fifth Form religion classes preparing skits for our ethics unit; the dormitory houses producing short plays for the annual Fiske Cup competition. Simpson staged a brief adaptation of
Alice in Wonderland
. I was chosen to play the caterpillar by our student director, Janie Saunders.

Janie inhabited a large room on Simpson’s most exclusive and private enclave, the third floor. Passersby never strode through on their way to the library. No one stopped in to pee in their toilets. Mr. Hawley and his big black dog (who was trained, rumor had it, to sniff out illegal substances) patrolled the third floor less frequently than they did our own. Most of the residents were Sixth Formers, or people like Janie who had the assured self-sufficiency of Sixth Formers. Girls on the floor lived in large rooms with three or four windows, instead of two, and they made entryways private by setting their bureaus perpendicular to the door. To get into their dens, plush with Oriental carpets, Indian wall hangings, rockers and coverlets, you had to walk around the bureaus. Years later, the Concord Fire Marshal warned that students would be trapped in their lairs in case of fire, and bureaus went back against the walls, but in 1972, the third-floor room of Janie Saunders, complete with its bureau barricade, breathed intimacy and exclusion, spicy perfume, makeup, and forbidden, fresh tobacco.

I had no idea what attracted Janie to me or why she picked me to play the caterpillar. I suspected as I always did that she mistook my skin for attributes of character, but as we came to know each other better, I realized dimly that she, too, was angry, and angry at St. Paul’s School. She who had at first seemed so much a part of SPS—she was white, after all, and appeared rich, so far as I could see—she, too, felt herself an outsider, a rebel who didn’t quite belong in any of the several white social tiers. She made fun of them. I liked her “perspective,” as I called it.

Once I became a member of Janie’s inner circle, my curiosity about my schoolmates was not satisfied but sharpened. I took to cruising the dorm at odd hours, just before sports or on Saturday nights, and poking about in the rooms—always on some pretense. I found myself drawn to the rooms as if standing in the middle, smelling it, reading posters on the walls and scraps of letters left lying on rumpled beds, would tell me some secret I had to know—and as if knowing the secret would somehow comfort me or make me strong. A few times when I saw a dollar or a five-dollar bill on the floor or tossed onto a dresser like so much trash, I pocketed it with shameful excitement. I fingered jewelry. Once I took a pair of earrings and cringed that night when I heard their owner howl and stomp around the house lamenting their theft. I felt the fine leather of their pumps and slipped my wide feet as far as they would go into the airtight duck shoes that kept their toes dry in the rain. As the house representative to the Student Council, I dutifully noted incidents of stealing; my old girl reported that a hundred dollars had been burgled from her room. That, I thought, was
real
stealing, done, no doubt, by some rich kleptomaniac, the same one who had probably eaten my cheese and crackers the week before.

Although these thoughts occupied my mind, I did not talk to anyone about them, not Annette or Grace or Pam Hudson
or Janie or even Jimmy. I did not admit my growing difficulties in calculus. I did not tell anyone what had happened with Ricky. I couldn’t. When I thought of the sex debacle, I was overwhelmed with shame. Like foam spread hastily over an offshore oil spill, my shame soaked up and protected me from the rage underneath. Only now and then did I see the results of that slick, silent anger: tiny moments of self-hatred like dead fish washed up on the beach.

S
impson did not win the Fiske Cup prize, and in a way, I was relieved. Sitting on the stage of Mem Hall, dressed in green caterpillar tights, sucking in the marijuana-flavored tobacco from the hookah Janie had procured, I was filled with fear that gave my four-minute performance a brittle chill. “Who are you?” I intoned through the wreaths of smoke. Everyone in the audience knew what I was smoking from, and I puffed the harder just to make sure that they smelled Janie’s roll-your-own tobacco and not the sticky sludge at the bottom of the bong that made my throat burn and my eyes tear. “Who are you?”

I could barely keep my mind on my simple lines for the fear, and for the thoughts that flooded into my mind like stagelights. A fair girl, of course, played the title role, and I wondered if St. Paul’s School would ever develop the imagination to accept a black girl as an Alice, or whether we’d be consigned forever to play animals, sidekicks, curios. Who was I, sitting, stomach sucked in desperately on account of the leotards, and my head, full of smoke and chemicals, screaming for air? Who was I, who pinched crumpled dollar bills from empty rooms in Simpson? Who was I who had experienced the pinnacle of romance and could only lie still as a corpse while the deed was done and weep with bitterness when it was finished?

“Who are you?” I asked from my great height on the table
that served as a mushroom. I asked it with no sympathy whatsoever. I wanted her, this intrusive white child, to qualify herself. Try it.
Who the fuck are you?
I liked her confusion. I liked my distance. I liked my own fear that called up for itself a protective and theatrical rigidity. It felt the most natural thing in the world, as natural as the subzero loneliness of the observatory and the cold telescope bringing the Pleiades, like tiny crystals of ice, to my eyes.

It also felt natural to switch into overdrive for finals. I had enjoyed the feeling a few months before, and I liked it again. I knew that a few dazzling exams could make the difference, and I began, like some novitiate mystic, to try to induce in myself a state of being that would produce, if not visions, at least flashes of convenient insight. I read and studied. I took notes on my notes. I organized and reorganized, highlighted and underlined. I studied in the Schoolhouse and in the library, in my room and in the laundry room. I felt giddy and rigid at once, a state that I took to be the precursor to inspiration. I believed myself, finally, ready for exams.

On the night before my English exam, a boy who lived on Philadelphia’s Main Line approached me as I walked down the drafty cloister from the dining room. Doug Ballard and I had had a couple of conversations about where he lived, and how to get there from my house, as if, I thought ironically, I were in danger of being invited.

“Lib,” he called from a few steps behind me. “So, are you ready for English tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.” I slowed my pace to wait for him in case he had a good story to tell. We watched for teachers to crack around exam time, and in winter, what with the cold, dark weather, and the pace of work and sports, one of the new ones was bound to lose it. Doug had the mischievous look of someone with naughty info.

“What’s up with you?”

Doug jogged a few steps to catch up with me. We were even with the side door that opened onto the back path toward the Chapel and the woods.

“Listen,” he said in a confidential voice. “Some kids are going out a little later to party. You really ought to come.”

I began shaking my head.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “It’s just a few people.
Very
discreet. The worst thing before exams is to get all tensed up. Hey, you look tense. I just thought I’d ask.”

It worried me that I looked tense. I had thought I was on the verge of enlightenment, but perhaps not. Perhaps this high-strung fatigue was exhaustion. I had exulted in my appearance that morning, thinking it my badge of courage. “I have read the word of the Lord our God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell.…” The fact was, I just looked bad, ragglely, as they said in Philly.