Black Mirror (3 page)

I was overwhelmingly conscious, as I slowly turned to
face Saskia Sweeney, that she, and not I, would be the one of whom Eleanor Roosevelt would approve. Beautiful Saskia (with the Pre-Raphaelite heaps of hair, and the wide-set eyes, and the creamy skin, and the tall slender body, and, somehow, the exactly-right clothes) was also Saskia of the warm heart and the open hands. Who on earth wouldn’t approve of the tirelessly do-gooding Student President of the Pettengill chapter of Unity Service?

Me. That was who. And even though I’d vowed to change, it was Saskia who had come to look for me tonight, not the other way around. In my head Daniel’s voice jeered:
Oh, Frances! A
bhikkhu
who envies others does not achieve stillness of mind.

“I’m sorry for barging in on you,” Saskia said, “but, well, I needed to tell you that—” Suddenly she looked disconcerted. “Andy! I was so focused on Frances, I didn’t notice you at first.” I saw her eyes flick over Andy’s coat as it hung about me and then her smile flashed brighter than ever. “I see you’re taking good care of Frances! Isn’t she lucky to have a friend like you!”

For some reason I always heard subtle slurs, condescension, a malicious little something, twisted into whatever Saskia said. Daniel had jumped down my throat the one time I mentioned it. It was a month into our first term at Pettengill. He had said I was jealous of her.
She
was never anything but kind to everyone else, he said, no matter how freakish they might be. In fact, she was extra kind in that case.

You know that, Frances. I mean, she even sat down next to you at lunch the other day! Or last week, whenever it was. What more do you want? Why are you always so negative about everyone? If there’s anyone you ought to feel comfortable with, it’s Saskia. You’re not even trying here!

I wanted to change. I did.

I said, “I’m glad you came out here, Saskia. I wanted to say something to you tonight, but I felt awkward …”

“I understand.” Saskia stepped forward. She is one of those people who always stands a half-step too close. She looked down earnestly into my face. “Don’t feel awkward. Please. I—we’re both grieving. I know that. Whatever our differences, Frances—we both loved Daniel.”

Her gaze was very intense. I felt like an ant captured beneath a magnifying glass. I was even more ashamed of myself than before. I should have been the one saying these things to
her.

“Thank you,” I managed. “I know you cared for him. And I know—” Involuntarily, I found I had taken a step back. “I know he cared a great deal about you.”

I thought I heard the porch swing creak, and I guessed that Andy had sat back down there. Vaguely I wished he had not left my side.

Saskia said nothing, but all at once she enveloped me in a quick, light embrace. I wasn’t prepared. I stiffened. I did not embrace her back. She felt my rejection, and stepped away herself. Her face was as rigid as mine now. “Well, that’s all I had to say.” She turned.

“Wait!” I said.

I thought she wouldn’t, but then she did turn back. I searched desperately for words. “Thanks for coming out here. For talking to me.”

“It’s nothing.”

Not her fault that I heard
You’re nothing.

I swallowed. “Saskia. I heard that Unity Service was planning to do some kind of … of memorial for Daniel. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Saskia said after a moment. Her voice was very reserved now. “People seem to think it would be a nice gesture. We’re not sure yet what it will be. Some kind of project, probably.”

“Well, I was wondering … um, that is—could I help? I’d like to be part of that.”

Saskia’s mouth literally dropped open in astonishment.

I hurried on. “I know it will look odd. I know I haven’t had anything to do with Unity before. But—well, this is for Daniel, and besides that, I really would like to help out. I’d do anything.”

There. However clumsily, I had said it. But as the silence continued, I felt a slow flush begin to cover my face.

“I’m sorry, Frances. I—people are very sorry for you, but I don’t think that … Well, I have to be honest here. You haven’t been a part of Unity, and Daniel was, and people might resent—I mean … oh, God. This is difficult.”

I blurted, “I was only thinking that—”

Saskia cut me off. “I’m sorry, Frances. I’ll ask people, but I just don’t think you’d be welcome.” She had taken a step or two forward again. She put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. I really am. Maybe you and I can figure out something else, some other way that—”

I found myself ducking down and darting sideways, away from Saskia. She looked startled. I backed away even more, skidding a little on the light drifts of snow that had settled on the porch floorboards. “Okay, I have to go inside now,” I said. “I just came out to get some air, but my father will be wondering where I am—there’s people to talk to. It’s okay, about Unity. About the memorial. It was just an idea.”

“But, Frances …”

From the corner of my eye I saw Andy, sitting on the swing with his feet positioned carefully below him, for all the world as if he were ready to jump up at a moment’s notice. Jump to my defense. Now there was a preposterous thought. I somehow managed to smile at him. Then I looked back at Saskia. “I’ve got to go now,” I said, and backed away. Away, away.

Inside, the house was even more densely packed with people than it had been before. I was conscious that Andy had silently followed me in and, obscurely, I was glad. I’d get him some cookies. I kept my head down. I made my way through the crowds as quickly as I could, trying to think only of getting cookies to give Andy.

But when I saw that the downstairs bathroom was unoccupied,
instead I slipped inside and closed the door and locked it. I leaned against it. I held my elbows and took in some deep breaths. I closed my eyes. I breathed.

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law.

Shut up, Daniel, I thought. Shut up!

Tomorrow I would go back to school.

L
ong is the night for the sleepless.

At three in the morning nearly a week later, I gave up and turned on my bedside lamp. I looked around my little shoebox-shaped dorm room and thought about how much it had pleased me, once upon a time. Freshman year I’d worked hard to imprint my own personality on the room—the first room that had ever felt wholly mine, even if it did really belong to Pettengill. I’d liked the result so much that I’d declined to enter the upperclassman lottery for a bigger room. Even now, sleepless, thinking obsessively about Daniel, I was insensibly comforted by being there, under the threadbare but beautiful blue and white pinwheel quilt I’d found at a yard sale, with the plain white cotton pillows around me. I kept the room impeccably clean and neat. Coming here during the day between classes and meals and
enforced activities, being here at night … kept me sane. Even during the moment of silence in Daniel’s memory at this week’s school assembly, I had been able to imagine myself here, alone. Safe.

Sitting up in bed, I tightened my arms around my stomach. I had cramps, but they actually weren’t too bad this time, and I knew they weren’t the cause of my wakefulness. In the dimness, I could see the shadowy edges of the two blue rag rugs that warmed the floor; of the school-provided computer on my desk; of the big acrylic paintings on the walls.

Until now the acrylics, which I had joyously labored over in the art studio, were the only things I’d allowed on the walls. I’d loved the contrast of the ferocious acrylics with the gentle quilt and rugs. And I’d loved Ms. Wiles for her reaction to them. I’d shown them to her, shyly, when she came to Pettengill to teach. She hadn’t made the mistake of thinking my paintings were simply blank dark squares. “Good God, Frances,” she’d said. “You can
live
with those? They don’t give you nightmares?”

I’d shaken my head, and she’d laughed a little. Except for Daniel, early freshman year, she was the only person I’d ever invited into my room.

But now something else had joined the acrylic paintings on the walls. I didn’t really want to look at the new addition, but I did. It was an oval mirror, swiped from my room at Bubbe’s. I had put it up here, and draped it in the black of mourning. A length of black silk, also swiped from Bubbe’s.
I supposed I could have chosen Buddhist white, rather than Jewish black, but the black had been available. And it didn’t really matter to me which religion I expressed mourning in. The cloth was a
personal
symbol. It was so that I would have a visible reminder of Daniel’s death at all times. It was so that I would remember my failure.

In the past days back at school I had made no progress in becoming more like the sister that Daniel would have wanted; the sister who might have helped him; the sister in whom he might have confided. I had tried, feebly. Instead of sitting alone at meals, I had steeled myself to go over and sit with some other kids. I’d tried various groups. The studious geeks one day. The burnouts another. The music freaks on a third occasion. Even the artsy types, a group with which anyone would have thought I’d fit in smoothly. But I didn’t. I didn’t fit in anywhere.

No one told me to go away or indicated in any way that I wasn’t welcome. In fact, everybody was scrupulously polite to me. But all I could do was listen to the other kids talk about things I didn’t care about or was not part of. Who was seeing whom. SATs. Weekend plans. I couldn’t make myself participate. And I could tell they wondered what I was doing there.

The one group I took care to avoid, however, was probably the one I should most have persisted with. But after Saskia’s rebuff, I didn’t have the nerve to approach Daniel’s friends from the Unity Service charity group. I did imagine, once or twice, that they were looking over at me. One
evening Saskia’s gaze actually intersected mine, and I thought she looked penitent—but out of habit, or fear, or the remains of humiliation, I turned away.

In my bed now, I sighed. Frustration and anguish fisted, again, in my stomach.

I’d seen several signs posted for the Unity Service meeting at which they were going to discuss some memorial project in Daniel’s honor. It was tomorrow. Could I just show up? It had said
All welcome.
They couldn’t throw me out, surely?

Maybe Saskia and the others just needed to be sure of my sincerity and desire to change.

My eyes burned. I tried closing them. I longed for sleep.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t tired. But my brain wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. It was already revving up even more. At lunch with the burnouts, Gail Manuel and Wendell Butler had been talking about how getting high relaxed them, helped them sleep. I was envious.

I needed air. I pushed back the quilt and got dressed rapidly; baggy old jeans, my biggest sweatshirt, warm wool socks, thick boots. Around my neck I wound an ancient gray knitted scarf that had belonged to Daniel (before Saskia gifted him with a cashmere one). Then I grabbed my coat and quietly slipped out into the hall and down the dorm stairs.

Of course no one was supposed to leave the dorm after curfew, but our housemother, Mrs. Kingston, was old, and so long as you were careful in the front entryway, it was fairly easy to get past her apartment’s perpetually ajar door.
I had no trouble. Soon I was outside and pulling on my mittens.

It wasn’t difficult to see my way; the campus was thoroughly covered with lighting and the moon was full. Snow crunched beneath my feet as I headed across the girls’ residential quad. There was a wooded area not too far away with a little-known path that took you from Pettengill to Lattimore. It was a place Daniel had liked, and it would be pretty there now in the snow and moonlight. It would feel, perhaps, like I was somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Hokkaido in winter, perhaps. That was where my mother had grown up. I had seen pictures of it.

“Have you—are you—what about Mother?” I had said to my father. It was the morning of Daniel’s funeral. It had taken me that long to bring it up. To debate internally about calling her myself and realize that I couldn’t. Couldn’t. Unbelievable. But that was my family. Our family. My family.

We were at the kitchen table, not eating. My father’s hands were cupped around his coffee mug. He was watching the liquid inside as if floating on its surface were some code he might decipher if he squinted hard enough. He said, “I called her. I told her.”

I thought I heard Bubbe snort. I ignored her. Something in me went very still. “Then is she—”

He interrupted me, speaking rapidly. “It’s too far for her to come, Frances. She’s upset. Of course she’s upset, in her way. But it would do no good for her to come. It wouldn’t change anything. We—that’s over, Frances. It’s just … it’s
over. It’s been over. Sayoko’s not—” He stopped. Then, strongly: “She can’t come.”

And in my inner ear I heard Daniel whisper:
She has found delight in freedom from attachment.

I don’t know what I felt then. I tried to see my father’s expression, but he was holding up his mug before his face. And so after a minute I simply said, “Oh.” Because I had trained myself: no scenes. No drama.

I hadn’t believed it, though. I couldn’t believe it. And so I’d taken a deep breath and e-mailed. Three times I e-mailed her, at the general address for the monastery—hating that there was no privacy—and then, finally, she e-mailed back with another Buddhist quote.

Everything is always changing.

She had added
I love you, Frances
, but that hadn’t mattered. It was like getting a reply from Daniel’s book of aphorisms, except Sayoko was serious. She loved no one, it was clear—except Buddha and the hope of enlightenment. My hands had actually been shaking as I deleted the e-mail.

I was not enlightened.

Suddenly breathing hard, I plunged into the little wood. A couple of other people had been here before me; the imprint of their footprints glittered on the narrow path in the recent snow. I deliberately stamped my feet into the snowy crust where the other prints weren’t, leaving a distinct trail of my own passing. Left. Right. Left. It was oddly satisfying.