The Lost Landscape (16 page)

Meanly, or perhaps funnily, Cynthia said: “Maybe she's waiting for you to become famous, Joyce.”

11.

“I HATE MY BODY
. Sometimes I think—I'm being led out into a prison yard, to be shot by a firing squad. Because when you are
so ugly
, you don't deserve to live.”

In the darkness when I'd thought Cynthia was asleep she began suddenly to speak of the most private things.

She was a freak, her spine was twisted. And her eye—her pathetic eye—that made people think she was cross-eyed but
she was not.

People looked at her with pity and scorn. Boys whistled at her out of meanness. Boys said terrible things to her which she would never repeat. She hated boys, and had a plan to one day carry a concealed gun, and shoot them in their jeering faces.

Or, maybe: she'd get some acid. From chem lab. Toss it in their hateful faces so they'd know what it was like to be
freaky
afterward.

Everything about her body was hateful except her hands. Her fingers. These allowed her to play the violin, that made her so happy.

“But that's almost all. Sometimes school, some of my courses—biology, chemistry. It's fun in French conversation—
avec mon amie très rusée
. But school itself—
c'est de la merde
. Seeing how people look at me and feel sorry for me.”

It was astonishing to me that a girl of Cynthia Heike's reputation could feel like this about herself. A doctor's daughter, who lived in a beautiful house. Whose sarcasm could be withering, even as a sudden smile from her could be thrilling.

“Cynthia, nobody feels sorry for you! People admire you . . .”

“Adults maybe. Some adults. But nobody would want to
be me.
”

“That's ridiculous.”

“Is it? Would you want to
be me?
”

The question was vehement, childish. I had no idea how to respond.

In the twin bed beside Cynthia's bed in the glimmering dark of her peppermint-striped girl's room as inappropriate for Cynthia's fierce spirit as a pink satin bow would have been in her thick unruly hair I could only murmur feebly protestations—she couldn't possibly mean what she was saying . . .

“I do! It began back in grade school, being stared-at, laughed-at—called a freak.”

“Nobody has called you a
freak.
”

“Yes! I have been called a
freak.
”

“I—I don't believe that.”

Of course, I believed what Cynthia was saying. The crude, cruel, stupid and unvarying insults of boys were not unfamiliar to me, though I'd never been called a
freak
—I had been spared that at least.

Now I was led into confiding in Cynthia as I had confided in no one else how I'd been “teased” pitilessly at the one-room country school when the school had had eight grades; after my third year the school district transferred older students elsewhere, and the teasing stopped. Cynthia listened intently and asked if any of these boys had “done things” to me and I told her no—not exactly.

I explained to Cynthia that in the country school the oldest boys were fifteen, still in eighth grade, because New York State law did not allow anyone to quit school until his sixteenth birthday. These were farm boys deeply resentful of being kept in school who took out their antagonism on anyone weaker than they were.

I thought of their jeering eyes—the stupidity in those eyes, and the cruelty—for cruelty is a kind of stupidity: I knew that. I thought of how they had tormented me but I did not want to think that they had tormented
me
—that is, not exclusively me. For their meanness and brutality were indiscriminate, directed against several of us, because we were younger, and hadn't older brothers or sisters to protect us at the school. It is true, by contemporary standards some of this abuse would be categorized as
sexual
, but in fact it had seemed just roughness—physical roughness—not unlike the tormenting these same boys inflicted upon helpless animals (cats, rabbits, raccoons, snakes) they managed sometimes to catch. Much
of the time they threw things at us—stones, mudballs, snowballs. Decades later reading of the horrific stonings of Muslim women and men condemned as “adulterers” I would feel sick at the memory of being harassed by these boys, my friend Helen Judd and me running, breathless and running for our lives (as we'd thought) along an overgrown path by the Tonawanda Creek, behind the schoolhouse where the teacher never went.

In desperation running ahead of Helen, who could not keep pace with me. Leaving Helen behind, abandoning Helen.

I told Cynthia that the most dangerous abuse hadn't been directed toward me or the other young girls but toward a boy a few years older named Hendrik who had weak eyes and wore glasses: they'd rolled him in the leaves so that the leaves would get in his eyes. I told her that because I could run faster than the other girls, the boys sometimes chased me in particular—“But it was more like ‘teasing' then. I think you would call it that.”

How pathetic this sounded.
More like teasing. I think you would call it that.

My voice was trembling. I had never told anyone these things before and seemed unable to stop as if my words were a way of helpless sobbing. As I spoke in the darkness of this unfamiliar bedroom—to a girl whom I did not really know, and could not really trust—I realized how astonished I was that this harassment of my childhood, protracted over months and even years, had actually happened to me, and that in some way I had learned to accept it, with the fatalism of a child who sees no way to alter things and so must alter her perception.

Cynthia was indignant on my behalf. She asked what on earth the teacher had been doing—or had not been doing—to allow such bullying and abuse in the school yard, and I said that the boys attacked us along the road, on the way home from school mostly, not
usually in the school yard within view of the windows. She asked if I'd told my parents and I said yes. And my parents came to speak with our teacher Mrs. Dietz. And possibly, following that meeting, the harassment abated—for a while. But the problem was that Mrs. Dietz herself was intimidated by the older boys who were essentially unteachable. And several were taller than she, heavier, and physically threatening. How the poor woman had managed to confront such antagonism in the classroom, week following week, for years, I have no idea. By the time I'd enrolled in the school, Mrs. Dietz had been teaching there for at least fifteen years. I can shut my eyes and see her tall sturdy figure, flushed face and disheveled hair, but when I try to hear her voice there is only a muffled murmur.

Forgive me but I tried. I tried to do my best. Tried to be the best teacher in those terrible circumstances that I could be.

When the harassment began again, and became more physical and threatening, I could not bring myself to tell my parents a second time. Instead, I lingered inside the schoolhouse with Mrs. Dietz, until (sometimes) the danger was past. (For the older boys could not linger after school long, they were expected to return home to work.) I learned to run—very fast. I learned to run faster than other children like Helen Judd, who could not so easily escape our tormentors. I learned to run and to feel the intense excitement of such running which may become identical with exhilaration. Nor was the bullying constant, rather only intermittent. You learned to rejoice that another, more vulnerable and more accessible victim might appear. There are stratagems of survival we discover young that become so second-nature to us it is possible to forget that they are stratagems of survival at all.

Cynthia marveled that I'd gone to a one-room schoolhouse at all—“Like something on the frontier. Eight grades in one room!”

I told Cynthia of other girls in the school. Of Helen Judd and her sisters whose father had (allegedly) abused them. And possibly oth
ers had abused them—the older brothers, the father's friends. I told Cynthia of the house fire, the arson. I did not tell Cynthia that Helen Judd had once been my friend but referred to her as a “neighbor girl.” (I no longer saw Helen, for she lived in Lockport and must have attended Lockport High School.) Helen Judd had never “told”—not anyone. As her mother had never told police of what her husband had done to her and the children. No one could accuse Helen Judd of trying to get anyone in trouble, blaming others, snitching on others for something that had happened to
her.

“Was she pregnant? The girl? Did they—
make her pregnant
?”

This was an unexpected question. I had not ever thought of the possibility of Helen Judd pregnant.

“N-No.”

“No? But how would you know—absolutely?”

Absolutely?
I had no idea what Cynthia meant.

Later I would surmise that she was referring to an abortion, or a miscarriage. The neighbor-girl might have been pregnant and the pregnancy ended and I could not have known, for how could I have known.

“Things like that could be reported to the police,” Cynthia said, thoughtfully. “If they happened to someone here . . .”

She was thinking of how, in the rural north country, different and cruder standards prevailed. In her genteel suburban village no girl could be so badly treated.

“What did she look like—‘Helen Judd'?”

“I don't know . . .”

“What do you mean, you don't know? Why do you say you don't know?”

Cynthia was becoming impatient with me. It was inevitable, Cynthia often became impatient with her girl friends—even Lee
Ann Krauser whose way of contending with Cynthia's ill humor was to laugh at her and call her
Heik-ee
with a pronounced Germanic accent. But I could not laugh at Cynthia. I had not that power.

I could not think how to reply. It did not seem relevant to me what Helen Judd looked like, only what Helen Judd had endured. But I could not tell Cynthia this, for Cynthia seemed angry with me.

My hesitancy, my indecisiveness—others interpreted as obstinacy. My occasional shyness, others misinterpreted as aloofness.

Cynthia persisted: “She wasn't freaky-looking, was she? Like me?”

“No! She was not.”

“And me? What about me?”

“For God's sake, Cynthia. You are not ‘freaky-looking.'”

In the darkness Cynthia laughed loudly. She was making no attempt to keep her voice down. I was in dread of her parents hearing her through the walls, in their bedroom at the end of the hall.

Mrs. Heike would come to the door, and knock softly. Mrs. Heike would murmur through the door—
Cynthia? Joyce? Is something wrong?

Or rather, she would not come to the door. Cynthia's mother was wary of Cynthia, I'd noticed. A tense veiled gaze, a hesitant smile—Mrs. Heike was conditioned not to press her high-strung daughter too far.

Before I'd known Cynthia Heike well, when I'd seen her from a little distance I had wondered if her back were somehow misshapen; one of her shoulders appeared to be higher than the other, and she walked just slightly oddly, dragging one of her feet. And her left eye seemed not quite in focus so that you looked from one eye to the other, disoriented, uncertain where to look. In gym class Cynthia
was one of those girls last-chosen for teams for she lacked what is called hand-eye coordination: where another girl might snatch a basketball out of the air, or strike a volleyball with just enough force to propel it across the net at a shrewd angle, Cynthia would fumble the ball hopelessly, as a young child might do, biting at her lower lip and flushing with embarrassment and frustration.

But when I'd come to know Cynthia better, I seemed scarcely aware of her “twisted” spine. When I spoke to Cynthia I knew to look into her right eye, not her left eye. Her strong personality, her presence among others, her quicksilver wit and sardonic smile so dominated, you would not think—
That poor girl! There is something wrong with her.

It is true that in gym class as in the school swimming pool I managed to avoid Cynthia Heike. This was not difficult, for Cynthia herself held back, reluctant to be involved, resentful. Often she did not attend swim classes at all, with an excuse from her mother. In such circumstances there is invariably a small cadre of girls for whom athletics is anathema as there is a small cadre of girls for whom athletics is a great pleasure, and competition exciting and not fraught with anxiety, and these cadres rarely overlap.

I tried to convince Cynthia that she was mistaken about herself, and should not say such things. And Cynthia said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “Would you change places with me, then?”

The possibility filled me with anxiety.
Of course not! No.

“I—I would change places with you—of course. Your life, your parents—your musical talent . . .”

“But you'd have to be in my
body
. What about that?”

It was a rude unanswerable question. I was too young and too intimidated by Cynthia to think of a witty rejoinder, as Lee Ann Krauser might have in my place.

Cynthia could not know that the fantasy often came to me, that I might change places with another girl my approximate age: the next girl who came into my line of vision, the next girl who turned a corner. If I entered a room at school—if I hurried up a flight of stairs. If, closing my locker, I turned to see . . .

Of course, I didn't mean it. The thought of losing my parents and my grandmother whom I loved, and who loved me, filled me with horror.

And yet. The fantasy of
becoming another
was fascinating to me at this uncertain time in my life.

By the time I managed to stammer a reply to Cynthia's accusation I had waited too long. She said, “Thank you for not lying to me, Joyce. You're the only damn one who doesn't.”

With a snort of derision Cynthia turned over in her bed.

12.