Speak Softly, She Can Hear Read online

  “Some of the guys up here can be real jerks,” the girl said. “Especially the ones from Dartmouth.”

  “I’m sorry. I just—” Carole draped her robe and towel over the rod outside the shower stall, turned on the tap, and stepped in. It was a good strong shower with plenty of hot water and plenty of force. The girl was still talking as though she could be heard over the running water. Finally there was silence. Carole washed between her legs, trying to get the soap up into herself, to flush out Eddie Lindbaeck. The night had left her with stinging sores. Her mother always said if the cure didn’t hurt, it wasn’t a cure. She scrubbed with a washcloth until her skin was red. She washed her face, inside her mouth, then lathered her hair. When she got out of the shower, the girl was gone. She dried herself off hard with a rough towel. There was someone in one of the other shower stalls. She wrapped a towel around her hair, put her bathrobe on, and waited. Maybe Naomi. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten so far ahead of her on the road. “Is that you, Nay?”

  Naomi peered out of the shower stall, holding the curtain up. Her bony face was white and her eyes oddly small without makeup. “Boo.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Naomi shrugged.

  “Oh, Nay. What if anybody saw?”

  “We could hardly see each other, for Christ’s sake.” Naomi came out of the shower, toweling off. Carole was surprised by how angular and small her body was and looked away. She didn’t want to think about bodies.

  “What if they find her?”

  “How can they? Eddie said she doesn’t have any family. He knew her from before, from other times he’s come up here. She lives by herself. He says there’s no way anybody can connect you with her.”

  “Him either,” Carole said. “Or you.”

  Naomi bent over to dry her hair. “I’m not exactly the one who got rough, Carole. Not that I won’t stick up for you or anything, but come on.”

  “He invited that woman. He knew her.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “No, but I thought we were only supposed to—”

  “He told me what happened.” Naomi righted herself with a whip of wet hair. “He said you probably didn’t do it on purpose. It was just because you’re, you know, big and all. You must not have realized—”

  “Not you too,” Carole moaned. “Please don’t say that.”

  “He said you were all over her.”

  “Naomi, I mean, did you know about her? Oh, Nay, he got all scary and he knew all that stuff about my family. How could he know all that? Oh, God, Nay, you didn’t tell him, did you?”

  Naomi stuck out her lip and shook her head. “He said he kept trying to stop you, Carole. You were this crazy woman. You pushed her.”

  “No. It didn’t happen that way.”

  “What do you remember, then? You’ve got to remember. Like exactly. Every minute.”

  “I only remember bits and pieces.”

  “He said you were jealous.” Naomi made a face. “That when he wasn’t paying attention to you every minute of the time, you got mad. You were pretty drunk. Is that true?”

  “No! I just—”

  “I want to believe you. Honest. But, you know, you don’t remember,” Naomi said. “And he does.”

  Carole moaned again. “Oh, Nay, if only I’d left when she came. If only I hadn’t ever come up here in the first place. Oh, God, what were we even thinking?”

  Naomi looked at Carole’s reflection in the mirror. “If nobody talks, you don’t have anything to worry about. And nobody will. Eddie won’t. I won’t, and you sure as hell won’t. The end.”

  “I’m going to ask the guy at the desk when the next train goes. We can get a taxi.”

  Naomi turned. “We can’t just leave.”

  “Just us. You and me. We’ll make up some excuse. Pretend to be sick or something. All I know is I have to get out of here.”

  “Eddie said to act like everything is normal. Like nothing happened. We can’t all go checking out. It’ll look really weird.”

  “Eddie isn’t the boss of us.”

  “He’s a lot older than us,” Naomi said. “He knows things. Anyway, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Daddy and Elayne are away, and the little prick at the door is under orders not to let me in. They said.”

  “You could stay at my apartment.” Carole noticed something in the way Naomi wouldn’t meet her eyes. She remembered again the way Eddie’s and Naomi’s shadows had come together in front of the cabin. “Are you going to see him?”

  “Maybe.” Naomi looked back into the mirror.

  Carole felt a spasm in her gut. It had been a kiss.

  Until yesterday she would never have considered getting on that train and leaving Naomi behind. But yesterday was already a million miles away. Now she was alone.

  On the train from Stowe back to New York, a man named Tom sat down next to her and started talking. He was divorced, he said, and he went to Stowe all the time. How about that skiing? He jabbed her in the side. Carole let him talk. She barely answered any of his questions, but it didn’t seem to matter. He went on about his job. He worked on Park Avenue in the Fifties, something also about the window washers that he thought was funny or frightening. He wanted to know things about her too. What year in school she was. She said she was at Vassar. And what was she studying? She made it up as she went along. Medieval history. Maybe pre-med. She had another year to decide. She gave little fragments of answers here and there that kept him going on and on about himself. A week ago she would have given real answers to all those questions. She would have felt an obligation to explain things carefully. But everything was different. Now it seemed important not to let anyone know who she really was, and the only way to do that was to lie about everything.

  The ride went by like that, a blur of fatigue, bad dreams, and Tom suggesting maybe they could get together sometime for a drink. Did she ever get away from school during the week? In New York? She said her name was Celia and gave him a phony telephone number. For the first time lying wasn’t hard at all, and he believed everything she said.

  As the train came in to Grand Central, she pulled her suitcase from under the seat and righted it, handle up, and ready to go. “I’d like to see you,” Tom said.

  “Okay.” He’d never find her. She could say anything.

  “Great.” He put a hand on her knee and patted it.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “I was just—”

  “I said don’t.” Her voice was way too loud. People stopped what they were doing and turned to look. Calm down, she thought. Nobody knows. Tom held up his hands in surrender. He was looking around at people on the train as if to say, “Beats me. I didn’t do anything.” The train lurched to a halt, and Carole bolted, pushing past Tom, through people in the aisle. Somebody lost his balance. Somebody swore at her.

  She took the subway to Fifty-ninth Street and walked three blocks to her building, skis and poles clattering and shifting. She hadn’t let her parents know she was coming home. She hadn’t dared. She’d decided to wait until after she got to New York, thinking it would be easier then, but here she was, coming into the lobby, getting on the elevator, where she experienced a brand-new horror. She’d only that moment remembered that she was going to need a reason for being home so early. She might have walked in the door, and they would have asked right away why and she wouldn’t have been prepared. How could she not have thought of this until now? Until she was almost there. It was terrifying. There she’d been lying through her teeth to that guy on the train without a single thought as to what she was going to say when she walked in the door.

  Naomi always said the deal with lying was to keep it simple. It was scary, though, because Carole had never lied to her parents. She’d fudged plenty, but that was different. Like broaching the subject of going to Stowe, how she’d told about the ski lodge and how it catered to high school kids and ran a shuttle bus to the mountain every day. Her mother checked it out. She called the Dou
ble Hearth and found out that no liquor was allowed, that they locked the doors at night, and that there were dorms on separate floors. One for boys and one for girls. Her mother just assumed the rest—that Carole was going to be on that bus, asleep in the dorm at night, and learning to ski during the day. Just thinking about the Double Hearth made her all weak again. She stood in the vestibule. Diarrhea, she decided.

  When she opened the door, there were voices. Many of them. She left her skis and suitcase in the hall. In the living room her parents were having cocktails with people. She knew the sounds by heart. They’d been the background noise of a lifetime, her parents’ cocktail parties. Without even looking, she knew the women would all be sitting on the low living-room furniture, their legs elegantly crossed, the men standing and talking in little clusters. But she was glad. Her mother would be too busy, too distracted, to grill her about what had happened. She hesitated long enough to find her mother in the crowd. Her back, exposed almost to the waist in her black dress, was to Carole, and she was leaning in to some man with an intimacy that said she’d had a little too much to drink. Good, Carole thought as she slipped down the corridor to her room. They’d put fur coats on her bed. There was a pile of them, black and gleaming. She lay down, feeling the soft, perfumed fur against her face, breathing in the smoky scent. She listened to the distant sounds, the bursts of laughter. She knew who the people were. The partners in her father’s law firm, their expensive wives. The Iveys, the Morrises, the Whites, all tuxedoed and slick, the women in their stiff coifs. Probably some of the clients too. It was the usual crowd of important people tonight, people her father needed to impress.

  There was a metal tick of high heels on the marble floor. The door cracked open, and her mother was there. She was large and soft-looking, her plump cleavage showing in the black dress. She stood in the door staring, uncomprehending. “What on earth? What in the world? Carole!”

  Carole buried her face in the fur.

  “What on earth?” her mother said again. The bright inflection of her voice, like an actress’s in a TV comedy, was more evidence that she was on her way to being drunk.

  “I got diarrhea up there,” Carole said. “Bad.”

  “Oh.” Her squeamish mother was clearly taken aback by the suddenness of the word. “And you just came home? My lord, Carole.” Her mother sat on the side of the bed, leaned over, and put a cool hand on Carole’s forehead. “Do you have a temperature?” She paused a moment and withdrew her hand. She opened a blanket, shook it out, and stood to spread it over Carole, a gesture that must have happened hundreds of times before, her mother, smelling of liquor, covering her with a blanket, stroking her hair. It used to feel so safe.

  “I might barf,” Carole said.

  Her mother made a sudden gesture to save the furs, reaching around and under Carole, gathering them up in her arms. She stood in the doorway, the furs spilling over. “I can tell them something’s come up.” She hoisted the furs to indicate the people out in the living room.

  “I’ll be fine,” Carole said. Her mother’s pretty face soured with indecision. “Really. If I need you, I can call the restaurant. Where are you going?”

  “The Sign of the Dove.” It was the restaurant Eddie had mentioned, and Carole shuddered at the memory of all he knew. “Oh, my. Chills?” her mother said.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Well, if you think …” Her mother’s voice trailed off.

  “I think.”

  The sounds rose and fell as people put on their coats, used the powder room in the hall, and finally left. Carole took a shower in her parents’ bathroom, with her mother’s tough little nailbrush, which she used to scrub and scrape her skin almost raw. She let the hot water sluice over her. Her skin was chapped, the pain comforting. When she finished, she dried herself and didn’t put lotion on. She wanted her skin and everything that might be on it to dry and flake. It was something she’d learned in biology in the tenth grade. That the body creates all new cells every seven years. At some point there wouldn’t be a single cell in her that was there right now. Already there were new ones forming. Old ones dying and falling away. Already she was becoming someone else.

  But how would she ever survive what was happening now in her mind? Now that she was home, there was nothing to keep the million nonstop memory fragments from eating her alive, the images and sounds from the night before, a constant screen of moving darkness shot through with atrocious pale scenes of snow, of night, of Rita’s slick skin. She’d killed her. She’d broken her neck. The cold certainty shocked her time after time, and she wondered how she would ever quiet her thoughts enough to go forward. She would have to believe whatever she said, even if it was a lie. She understood that implicitly. If she didn’t believe it herself, nobody would. Diarrhea. It was simple and familiar. It was a subject her mother would not press for details about. She clutched at her abdomen, willing herself to remember the train ride differently. I sat in the row next to the toilet. The smell was awful, but I didn’t dare get too far. The train rocked a lot. The door kept banging.

  She backed up, dispatching the night in Stowe in case they asked. I had the lower bunk in the dorm, next to the wall. I hardly slept because I felt so bad. The story was effective because she needed to generate nothing more. The man at the morning desk helped me get a taxi to the train. Naomi wanted to stay and ski. And anyway, her daddy and Elayne are out of town. It was amazing how easily you could fit lies into the truth, the truth into lies.

  In the morning her mother came bustling in, sat on the bed, and put a cool hand to Carole’s forehead. “You feel okay, but do you feel okay?” Her mother frowned and then laughed, her soft face lighting up with her own little joke.

  Carole sat up. “Yes.”

  “I don’t think we need to call doctor, do you? Just a little bit of rest should do it?”

  “The doctor.” It drove her crazy, the affectations her mother had picked up, as though they made her sound more cultured or something.

  “So you’ll be what, staying in bed today? Do you think?”

  “I guess,” Carole said. “Did the paper come?”

  “Your father’s reading it.” Her mother’s hands fidgeted in her lap. “I’ve made some plans for this week,” she said. “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you would be here.” She rolled her eyes. “Luncheons. Shopping.” She sighed. “I’d give my eyeteeth to be staying home with you.”

  “It’s fine, Mom.” Carole was grateful that her mother had no spine. It was safer to be alone. There was less chance that she’d slip and say something.

  Left alone in the apartment, she padded around barefoot, from her bedroom and into the wide dark foyer with the gloomy ancestor prints. Four bigger-than-life old men with wispy beards and faded ceremonial robes peered down at her without expression. Her mother was so proud of them. She had bought them at auction for a fraction of what they were worth, and if she ever decided to sell them again, she’d make a killing. They were always a conversation piece, and Carole was sure her mother had talked about them last night to whoever would listen. “So stately,” her mother liked to say. “So inscrutable.” Carole winced every time.

  At the end of the foyer was the living room. It had dark Persian rugs laid out across the floor, left over from the people who had owned the place before. “Exquisite taste,” Carole’s mother liked to say of them. “Very cultured people.” They’d also left some of their mahogany furniture and the heavy drapes along the wall of windows. Against this stuff, their own furniture stood out like a sore thumb. Naomi could tell the difference the first time she’d seen it. She’d picked out every piece that they’d had in Ridgewood. “Yours is the country stuff,” she had said.

  Carole glided around the room, touching things, trailing her fingers across the tabletops, and sitting in the chairs and couches. She almost never came in here. It was the formal room, used for parties, and she hadn’t ever sat in some of the furniture. She liked the den better. Small and cozy, it had only
the furniture from Ridgewood—the big leather chair her father liked and the couch covered brightly in red and yellow. The newspaper lay on the table beside his chair. She spread it out on the coffee table and went through it page by page, her hands trembling as she searched for items from Vermont. But there was nothing. Emboldened, she went through it again, this time studying the weather map, which showed cold and snow in Vermont, a drop in temperature. She refolded the paper and replaced it on the table.

  She headed down the other corridor, to her parents’ bedroom. It had the same dark paneling as the rest of the rooms, but it got more sun and the drapes were always pulled, so it seemed lighter. She lay down on her parents’ bed. She’d been in this room the night she got her acceptance to Vassar. They all had. But she’d been sitting in the armchair, and her parents had sat side by side at the end of the bed, facing her.

  It was after they’d come home from Giovanni’s. Her parents were both sort of drunk, and her father had gotten all grandiose and said that when it came time for her to go to Vassar, he would have his secretary, Miss Palmer, establish an account. He would fund the account, and Miss Palmer would send the invoices directly to Carole at school, and she’d be responsible for paying her own bills.

  None of the girls at Spence handled money. It was almost unseemly. But that was where her father broke with those other people, he explained. He wanted to teach her the value of a dollar, and this was the way he would do it. Carole remembered how he’d taken her mother’s hand. “We have every faith in your ability to manage very well,” he’d said. He’d brought out the family checkbook, a big ledger with three checks to the page, and showed her how they entered each check on the little stub at the side, how they made a notation about its purpose. He showed her bank statements, how they reconciled the statement against the stubs in the book. She’d been floored by the amount of money passing through the account. She’d had no idea.

  The room was warm, and she fell asleep only to be startled awake by a dream. A large coyote dug in the snow exposing a dark mouth and eyes, a patch of hair, attracting other animals that circled and ripped at Rita’s body, darkening the snow with blood, dragging a thigh here, part of the torso there.