Outer Banks (19 page)

I felt a curl of sullen anger.

“That nitwit Molly Sloan isn't going to have the slightest idea what Dorothy Parker's talking about,” I thought.

“Well, hey,” Cecie's voice said from behind me. I turned. She stood in the twilight, with the light from the hall behind her, and I drew in my breath sharply at her silhouette. She was as frail now as a starved child, and her red hair, that had burnt like living fire with health and vitality, was dull and lay in damp tendrils against her skull and her cheeks.

I snapped on the overhead light and looked at her.

“Cecie, what on earth is wrong with you?” I whispered. “You look absolutely sick.”

“I think I might be,” she said, and I noticed then that her voice was husked and forced. She was white, too, and soaked with perspiration. It was hot outside, but it was not that hot. I reached over and felt her forehead. It was dry, and burned as if flames roared behind it. I let my hand trail down the side of her neck. There were spongy lumps under and behind her ear. I jerked my hand away.

“They've been there for a week or two,” she said in the new froggy voice. “And my throat's been on fire, and I can hardly drag myself out of bed. I…Kate, I'm really scared.”

“You've got a high fever,” I said. “Oh, Cecie, why on earth didn't you tell me?”

“You haven't been around much,” she smiled. It was as if a skeleton smiled; I grimaced in pain and fear.

“Or somebody, anyway,” I said. “Come on. We're going to take you over to the infirmary right now. Tonight.”

“Tomorrow, maybe,” she said, looking around. “Look at you, you've brought the cokes and everything. Let's have an old-fashioned
Hart-Lee gabfest tonight, and you can run me over there in the morning. It's been so long since we've talked…”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “We're going now. Sit down and I'll get a nightgown and toothbrush for you. You probably just have a bug of some sort and they'll pump you full of penicillin and you'll be back in a day or two, and we'll talk then. But not now. Cecie, how long have you felt this way?”

“I don't know,” she said vaguely. “A long time, I think. Not as bad as this, not with the sore throat and the lumps and stuff, but I've been tired an awfully long time. I was tired when I went home between quarters.”

I remembered that indeed, she had been. Why had I not paid more attention? But I knew why. Guilt spread a flush of anger along my veins. She was surely old enough to get herself to the infirmary without waiting for me to take her.

“It was really dumb of you to wait this long,” I said crisply.

She was silent a moment.

“I've been afraid it was cancer,” she whispered, and I turned and took her in my arms and hugged her. It was like hugging a bird, all light bones and damp, feathery hair. She hugged me back, briefly, and then pulled away.

“You don't have cancer,” I said. “People our age don't get cancer. But we need to go tonight and find out what you do have.”

“Okay,” she said. “I guess you're right. I just can't go any further like this.”

On the way over to the infirmary in the MG, with the hot, sweet air rushing past us, she said, dreamily, her head back against the seat, eyes closed, “You were going to tell me about Paul Sibley tonight, weren't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I still am, when you're feeling better. And what's more, you're going to meet him, because he wants to cook dinner for you, and maybe Ginger and Fig. We'll do it when you get out.”

“That's nice,” she said. “And I'm glad you were going to tell
me about him. I wanted to hear it from you, not from that idiot Fig, who's got him kind of a combination of Rupert Brooke and Laurence Olivier now. She's devoted a whole chapter to him in the famous diary.”

“I was never not going to tell you,” I said. “I just…it hasn't seemed to me that I knew quite what to say about him yet.”

“He's the biggie, isn't he?” Cecie said.

“Oh, yes. He's it, Cece.”

“Well, tell, then,” she smiled, her eyes still closed. “For starters, what does he look like? Can he possibly look like Ginger and Fig say he does?”

“This time they're right,” I said. “He's…oh, Cecie, he's beautiful. He's very dark, and his eyes kind of tilt up, and his hair is as black as a crow's wing, and falls in his eyebrows…”

Cecie murmured it drowsily.

“This time it got me everything,” I said.

“Really everything?” Cecie said. I could barely hear her; her voice was fading in and out.

“Really everything,” I said. “Cecie, what's the matter with you? You sound like you're passing out or something.”

“Nothing. Just sleepy,” she slurred. “Oh, Kate. Remember that other one we liked?
Sanctuary?
‘My land is bare of chattering folk; the clouds are low along the ridges. And sweet's the air with curly smoke, From all my burning bridges…' Have you burned your bridges, old Effie Lee?”

I knew what she was asking me.

“Yes,” I said, and when she did not reply, I looked over at her. She lay still and white, her head had slumped against the door. I
stepped on the accelerator and took the corner on two wheels into the street where the infirmary was. When I reached it, Cecie was unconscious, and they carried her in on a stretcher. I sat in the bleak, antiseptic-smelling waiting room until nearly eleven, when I had to be signed in, and then sat, silent and frightened, in our room until Mrs. Frederick, our housemother, came up at midnight to tell me that Cecie had mononucleosis, and would have to spend at least two weeks in the infirmary.

“But she'll be all right?” I said, my voice quivering.

“Oh, yes, she'll be fine,” she said. “But I wish to goodness she'd come and told me earlier, or you had. She's let it go far too long. She's going to miss a lot of classes. Really, you girls act like children more often than not…”

She clopped back along the hall in her backless slippers and I shut the door to my room and crawled into my bed and cried. I cried for more than the fact of Cecie's illness; I knew that, but I did not know for what, and for the moment I did not wish to know. I turned my face into my pillow so that the weight of the great white moon hanging level with my window did not press on it, and I cried silently for a long time. And finally, without knowing when I did it, I slid into sleep.

The next few days were strange for me. I felt disoriented and divided: incomplete. Cecie, virulently contagious, was as effectively shut away from me as if in a cloister. Paul was utterly sunk in his hospital competition; except for a quick cup of coffee here and there, and once a brief, hard kiss in the stairwell in McCandless, I saw almost nothing of him. He looked sallow and haggard when I spied him in passing, and his white smile was perfunctory. I knew he probably was eating little and sleeping less, but knew, too, that there was virtually nothing I could do about that. I had the odd and vivid impression that despite the stress of the charette, he was happier than he had been since I had known him, and I know he was more alive. He hummed with excitement like a telephone wire. Not for the first time, I felt a craven coil of jealousy
for the drawings that he was shaping with his dark hands. They were, I suspected, more seductive to him than my body.

But that was as futile as being jealous of the dead wife, and I knew it. If there was a living woman for him, it was me, and I could and would be content with that. And I was content in those long summer days, despite my loneliness for Cecie and my wanting of him. It was as if the world was in suspension; had ground to a stop. Soon a great gear would slip forward and the world would flow on, but for now, it was permissible simply to float on the surface of it, at rest, rocking gently in the sun, fitting everything that had happened to me into the grid of experience. I slept a lot, and read voraciously, and visited back and forth with girls I had scarcely seen for three months, and cleaned our room until it shone, and washed and ironed my clothes, and listened to every one of my records in a non-stop marathon of music. I think of those days, now, as perhaps the most peaceful I have ever known, although the strange sense of mutilation, the emptiness where Paul and Cecie had been, was never far from me. For the first time in years I was alone with myself, and for the first time ever, found the company fulfilling. There was no conflict in my heart, or for it. The abyss was silent. That sense of myself, alone and sufficient, has never come to me so completely again. I floated, and was happy.

Looking back, it seems incredible to me that I did not worry about sleeping with Paul. Or rather, worry about the consequences of it: pregnancy and ostracism. No child of those times was ever more primed for worry. But I didn't, not for a moment. Perhaps it was because I had already known and bested the latter, and the former seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the wild, sweet, joyous things we did in the nights. My mind knew we were running risks; but my heart basked in safety. Paul used condoms with wry resignation and efficiency, never failing to observe that he felt like an SAE at a houseparty, with that little round intaglio in his wallet.

“Why bother, then?” I said once, when his disgust at the
devices became apparent. “You're going to marry me anyway. You could just make an honest woman of me at a JP someplace and I could move in here and it would be a whole lot simpler.”

“You know what a kid would do to our future right now?” he said, and I saw that he was absolutely serious, grimly so. “It would be the end of everything. We'd be living in Levittown and I'd be working at McKim for the rest of my life. Right now the whole ball game is riding on you, Katie. When we're in the white house you can have ten, if you like. But for now, it's Trojans or nothing. The first thing I want you to do when you get to New York, though, is get fitted for a diaphragm. As it is, we're taking chances with these things.”

“I could go to Montgomery or somewhere and do it now,” I said, obscurely hurt at his insistence. Somewhere deep within me, the thought of a child of his had lain like an actual embryo, warm and safe and secret.

“Too easy for talk to get back here,” he said. “My landlady knows every doctor in a five-hundred-mile radius. Your housemother probably does, too. The whole campus would have it in an hour.”

“God, Paul, you think they don't talk about us now?” I said.

“Yeah, but they don't
know
now,” he said. “We'll just have to be careful until New York.”

“Okay,” I said obediently. But I never could, that enchanted summer, make myself worry about the specter of pregnancy. It seemed, like all other perils and dangers, simply outside the charmed circle in which we moved.

Cecie came back from the infirmary near the end of July, having been adjudged no longer contagious, but still too weak to attend her classes. I went and picked her up, and Ginger and Fig and I installed her in her bed, and heaped books around her, and dragged the Webcor and the pile of LPs close to the bed so she could change them without getting up, and trained the laboring fan on her. Ginger called home and the mute and thunderous
Robert arrived with a new compact refrigerator and enough Coca Colas and fruit juices to stock it for the rest of the summer, and we plugged it in and set it up on the desk. Fig went down to the big dim kitchen and produced, from various boxes of mix, a sagging, sprawling chocolate cake that lay on its plate like a clubbed animal, and bore it proudly into our room.

“It sort of split in the middle, but I filled the crack up with icing, and it really tastes fine,” she said, hanging her head and smiling at Cecie. “I thought double chocolate might be good. This is Duncan Hines; it's the one Mama always makes.”

“It looks wonderful,” Cecie said in her still-husky voice, smiling valiantly at her. “Why don't you cut it and give us all some?”

Fig did, bustling about like a Vermeer dwarf. The cake, in fact, tasted as dreadful as it looked, of stale cardboard and grainy, unmixed frosting. But we all ate it. Fig's power in some matters was awesome.

Later, when Cecie and I were alone, we looked at each other and burst into laughter. We were, I think, so relieved to be laughing together once more that we carried the laughter further and louder than we would have ordinarily. Her laugh was the same, with perhaps a rasped edge to it now, but still the rich, skating, fluting, careening thing that drew people like Pan's pipes.

“It looks like a scale model of a medieval fort,” she snorted, and I fell backward across my bed, clutching my sides.

“Or a sacked and pillaged Greek city-state,” I gasped. “ ‘This is Duncan Hines; it's the one Mama always makes.' God, I'll bet Mama makes Libby's English peas and mushrooms for Christmas dinner, too, and lime sherbet and ginger ale punch.”

“And jello with those shitty little marshmallows in it,” Cecie howled, tears running down her face.

“And Spam with cloves stuck in it,” I choked, rolling back and forth on the bed, my hands over my face.

And for the space of minutes we could not speak for the
laughter, which trailed to a stop and broke forth again whenever we looked at each other. Several people came and stuck their heads into our room to see what was going on.

“It sounds like old times in here,” Trish said. “I could hear you all the way downstairs. You must be feeling better, Cecie.”

“I am,” Cecie said. “If I don't die laughing.”