Chapter 14
I got permission to skip any lesson with a volunteer if Carol needed me to read as she smoked.
She was always outside first, and within a week, she told me that I needn’t announce my arrival, as she could smell my approach in the mothball coat.
I told her the smell was worse from inside the coat, though really, I didn’t mind.
I couldn’t quite button it up over my belly, but I liked that the pockets were lined.
I soon learned that Carol did plenty of reading on her own.
Every week, her mother mailed her a novel in Braille, and Carol would burn right through it.
She’d already read all of Dickens, she said, but what she really liked were mysteries by Agatha Christie or James M.
Cain. I asked her if she’d read The Sun Also Rises.
She said that she had, and that she’d liked it.
I told her that I’d tried to check it out from the school library, only to be told that it was vulgar, and inappropriate reading for a young lady.
“Hmm.” She seemed amused. “You’re either from the South or the Midwest. But I already guessed that much.
” She was quiet for a while, then said, “There’s nothing graphic in the book, not that I remember.
The problem, I imagine, is Lady Brett. That’s the main female character.
She’s beautiful and sophisticated. She does as she likes.
Sexually, I mean. And almost everyone in the book is in love with her. ”
She went on to explain that Lady Brett was also in love with the narrator, but he was made impotent by a war injury, so Lady Brett wouldn’t marry him.
“And it’s not that she wants children.” Carol paused to take a drag, but I could see she was still thinking.
“She comes out and says she doesn’t want them.
So this is a woman character who likes sex for its own sake, and has it, and won’t settle for a life without it, even for love.
But nothing terrible happens to her. She isn’t murdered.
She isn’t pregnant and abandoned, or left impoverished, or even disrespected.
She’s unhappy and drunk most of the time, but that’s true of the men in the book, too.
So she gets away with it, more or less. The freedom with herself, I mean.
That’s why the schoolmarm called it vulgar. ”
I thought of Leonard’s mother, reading this same book.
When I’d told her the shower with Leonard was my idea, she’d looked horrified.
I suppose it’s one thing to read about Lady Brett, and another to have someone with the same proclivities spending time with your son.
But both Mrs. Lifton and her husband had been right about one thing.
They’d been worried I’d end up pregnant.
I’d already told Carol that the next time she was listening in on my sessions with Mrs. Kilgore, she shouldn’t expect any fire and argument from me.
I’d taken Lucy’s advice to heart. I was determined to graduate to the nicer social worker, Miss Berry, no matter what Mrs. Kilgore said about me or my true motives.
It wouldn’t kill me to sit there and listen quietly, only talking back in my mind.
I’d also told Carol that I didn’t want to hear personal details about other girls in the home. It didn’t seem right, not when we all already had the naked and exposed feeling of being at Shaded Acres.
Carol said fine—she would stick to telling me what she knew about girls who’d been here but were already long gone.
She told me that her first roommate, Judy, had not only been married when she arrived, but the mother of a two-year-old who was being cared for by her mother-in-law back home.
According to Carol, Judy wanted to give this new baby up for adoption because the two-year-old was showing signs of locked-in syndrome, and her pediatrician back in Chicago said Judy’s coldness was likely the cause.
“I assume it was Chicago,” Carol said. “That accent is hard to miss.”
“What’s locked-in syndrome?” I shifted in my chair, my arms around my belly. The day was overcast, colder than before. It was a nice feeling, knowing the porcupine was safe and warm.
“He’s not talking, apparently,” Carol said. “The child, I mean. And he won’t look at her, or anyone. Judy said she didn’t know what she did wrong, but she didn’t want to do it to another one. Her husband wanted her to come home, but her mind was made up.”
“She told all this to you, or to Mrs. Kilgore?”
Carol nodded back in the direction of Mrs. Kilgore’s window.
“What did Mrs. Kilgore say?”
“She was sympathetic. Surprisingly so.” Carol adjusted her glasses. “But she agreed that if Judy couldn’t figure it out, what she’d done wrong, the new baby would be better off with someone else.”
I blew on my hands, then put them back in the coat pockets.
I hadn’t seen much of Judy—she’d left a week after I arrived.
I remembered she’d worn a wedding ring, and I’d thought it was a little pathetic that she felt the need to pretend in front of the rest of us.
She’d been seated across from me the night we had liver for dinner, and I know she saw me stuff my entire serving into my napkin and up my sleeve when the nurse wasn’t looking.
She’d smiled a little, and looked away, not saying anything.
It was hard to imagine she’d been so cold to her child that he wouldn’t even look at her.
“Don’t tell me anything else you heard,” I said. “Even about girls who are gone. It’s not my business.”
“Such a goody-goody.” Carol leaned back her head and blew smoke straight up. She exclusively smoked Lucky Strikes, which her mother mailed to her every two weeks in an eight-pack carton. “It’s not gossip. You’ll never see Judy again. You don’t know anyone she knows.”
I told her that it didn’t matter. All I had to do was imagine her telling people I’d never meet about Leonard not writing back, and his parents thinking I was lying about Bradenton. I wouldn’t like it.
Carol said fine, no more overheard stories.
But she would tell me something she’d heard directly from her first roommate, a girl named Florence who told Carol that a week before she came to Shaded Acres, she’d tried swallowing two full bottles of castor oil over the course of an hour, and got so sick she had to go to the emergency room, where she’d hallucinated that she was tied to the blade of a windmill for hours, and truly felt that was happening to her, though obviously, the castor oil did nothing to change her situation as she’d still had to come to Shaded Acres and tell all this to Carol.
Carol said what Florence should have tried was giving herself salmonella, which could have killed her just as easily, or maybe more easily, but at least that had a better chance of working as intended.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I told you,” Carol said. “Florence told me herself.”
“No. I mean about the salmonella.”
“Oh. My mother knew someone who died that way. But she knew another girl who tried it, and she allegedly survived.”
I had trouble imagining Carol’s mother, this Connecticut woman who bought Lucky Strikes by the carton, and who apparently told her daughter things even Mae didn’t know or wouldn’t say.
Carol told me that her father knew Frank Sinatra because of the business that he was in, and that she’d actually met him once, at one of her father’s parties, and when Frank Sinatra took her hand, just briefly, she’d felt warmth moving up her arm, and whatever caused it was mutual.
She could hear in his voice, and feel in his grasp, that he, too, was struck by whatever passed between them.
She said her great-great-great-grandfather had lost his head, literally, in the French Revolution, and that her great-great-great-grandmother had seen it happen.
She said she lost her vision when she was fourteen, after what she called “a tumble” from her favorite horse, Fleetfoot.
“He’s fine, by the way,” she added. “Right now, I imagine he’s grazing happily outside of New Haven. My mother wanted him shot, but he was worth too much.” She gestured at her belly. “Of course, she’d like to see this one’s father shot, too.”
“Did you love him?” I asked.
“The horse? Oh, yes.”
I clicked my tongue. “Carol. The baby’s father.”
She tilted her head from side to side, as if letting a little weight roll back and forth. “Say, did you hear that? That’s a hawk.”
“Did he propose?” I asked.
“The hawk? I don’t think they’re so formal about it.”
That’s how it was, talking to her. She’d tell you anything in the world about somebody else, but if you wanted to know about her, you had to dig. It was hard to imagine Carol being dumb about a boy, or about anything, but clearly, something had gone wrong. I wanted to know what it was.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said finally. “He was already married.”
I gasped. Even with the dark glasses covering her eyes, I could see that she was irritated.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I’m fine, thank you. Say, Nora, do you ever listen to Brahms?”
“The composer?”
“Yes, the composer.”
I tried to think. “I know the lullaby. Brahms’s ‘Lullaby.’ ”
“Well. You should listen to more of him. I tell you, the three intermezzi of 117, they destroy me. But he has jaunty pieces, too. Earthy and folky. You’d like him.”
I had no idea why she thought I’d like classical music that was earthy and folky. I liked the Andrews Sisters. I liked Frankie Laine. And she was just changing the subject again.
“Carol. Are you going to tell me more about how you ended up here?” I didn’t feel bad for pressing her. She knew so much about me. About everyone.
She shook her head. We sat without talking, listening to the hawk. It’s a lonesome sound, that cry.
“I got a proposal,” I said. I didn’t know if she cared.
She turned to me. “You think he meant it?”