The Lake of Dead Languages (6 page)

On this night Deirdre’s tea had a minty bite to it that set my teeth on edge and made the objects in her room glow around the edges. In between lines of Catullus I found myself mesmerized by the texture of the hemp mats on the floor and at one point the ceremonial dancers on a Balinese tapestry seemed to take a spin around the floor.

We were translating Catullus’s poem 2, the one where Catullus says he’s jealous of Lesbia’s pet sparrow. Deirdre claimed that the poem was really about Catullus’s jealousy of Lesbia’s female sexuality. Lucy, as usual, was annoyed by Deirdre’s reduction of nearly everything in Latin to sex. Having failed to interest Lucy in her interpretation of Catullus, Deirdre cast about the room for something that might capture Lucy’s approbation. Her eye alighted on a bit of folded paper stuck between the pages of the Tantra Asana that Deirdre kept on the night table beside her bed.

She slipped the paper, which had been folded into the shape of a flower, out of the book and held it up in front of Lucy.

“Do you know what’s in this?” Deirdre asked.

“Some illegal substance, no doubt. Honest, Deirdre, you’re going to be dead by twenty if you keep this up.”

“Better a short life full of glory than a long inglorious one,” Deirdre quoted. Deirdre was fond of quotes having to
do with death. After sex, death was her favorite subject. She kept a silk-covered notebook filled with quotes from the ancients and moderns on the subject of early death. “Anyway, it’s not drugs.” Deirdre tugged at one petal of the flower and the whole thing blossomed in the palm of her hand, only to reveal another packet folded in the shape of a grasshopper. Deirdre loved this sort of thing, secrets within secrets, Chinese boxes,
sanctum sanctorum.
She knew Lucy did, too. With a flick of her long lacquered fingernail, the grasshopper sprang open. In the center of the folds lay a single hairpin.

I started to giggle. The unveiling had been so theatrical; the result was anticlimactic. Lucy, I noticed, wasn’t laughing.

“Where’d you find it?” she asked, touching one finger to the coppery wire.

“Behind the cushions of the love seat in the Lake Lounge. Where
she
always sits.”

Lucy lifted the hairpin out of its paper grasshopper carcass and held it aloft. A single strand of gold hair clung to the metal for a moment and then slipped to the floor where it evaporated into the straw mats. We all three leaned forward at the same time to catch it, but Deirdre plucked it from the matting with a quick dart of her fingers, nimble as a child picking up onesies at jacks.

She held it up to Lucy’s short hair.

“See, it’s the same color.”

“You can’t tell from one strand,” Lucy said, but I knew, with a pang, that she was pleased. That Deirdre had pleased her. To be like Helen Chambers in any small way was all any of us wanted. To find some hidden affinity, or to acquire one by emulation, we studied her more carefully than we studied our declensions and conjugations (and we worked on those hard enough, if only to please her). If Helen Chambers left a cardigan draped over a chair back one of us was sure to read its label. If she left her teacup in the Lake Lounge after four o’clock tea, we read the tea bag she’d chosen and studied the lipstick smudge left on the rim. Later, when we were invited
to her apartment in Main Hall, we memorized the book titles on her bookshelves, the album covers stacked by her phonograph, and the perfume bottles on her dresser. We amassed our common knowledge into one eclectic but (to us) cohesive portrait: She wore Shalimar and read a Dickens novel every Christmas. She had gone to Vassar and always stayed at the Vassar Club when she went into the city, which she did twice a year to see the ballet
(Giselle
was her favorite, too) and shop at Altaian’s for the simple but beautifully cut black jersey dresses she favored. Her favorite novel was
Persuasion
by Jane Austen and her middle name was Liddell, which, Lucy felt sure, must be her mother’s maiden name. We liked to think she was related to the Liddell of Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the father of Alice Liddell—the model for Alice in Wonderland. Wouldn’t it be fitting, we thought, if she were related to Alice! But the one thing we never knew was how long her hair was because she always wore it twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.

Deirdre held the strand of hair between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “I already measured it,” she said, “twenty-seven inches long. It must hang below her ass.”

I thought Lucy would be most interested in the hair, but instead she held up the hairpin so that its prongs faced up. The metal was crimped halfway down each side.

“That’s to hold the hair better,” I said. “Look.” I took a pin out of my own hair. I had started wearing it up that term because Lucy said it made me look more scholarly. The pin was shaped the same but was darker to match my plain brown hair. I took my pin, prongs down, and linked it with the one in Lucy’s hand. It dangled there limply. Lucy took the single bobby pin she used to hold back the bangs she was growing out that year and slipped it over the prongs of the top hairpin—Helen Chambers’s pin. Then she held the thing up by the end of the bobby pin.

“It looks like some kind of animal,” Deirdre said. “A goat, maybe.”

“It’s a talisman,” Lucy said. “Of the Horned One. A …” she paused, looking into the middle distance, a look she often had right before she read her Latin translation, as if a page invisible to all but her was unfurling in the air. “A corniculum. A little horned one. From now on this will be the sign we leave for each other.”

“A sign of what?” Deirdre asked. “What will it mean when we find one?”

Lucy looked at both of us. I became conscious of how we were sitting, cross-legged in a tight triangle, our knees nearly touching, each of us leaning into the middle. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the tapestry dancers take another spin around the room and then Lucy’s gaze brought me back, told me to pay attention, made the room still again.

“A sign that we’re always here for each other,” Lucy said.

I saw Deirdre smile. It was what she wanted, a sign of affirmation from Lucy (I knew that I was beside the point, but she’d take me because I came with Lucy). It’s what I wanted, too, of course, but there was something in Lucy’s tone that unnerved me, that made what she said less a promise of friendship than a threat of constant surveillance.

I
T
’
S A SENSE OF BEING WATCHED THAT
I
HAVE NOW, HOLD
ing the little hairpin totem up so it catches the light slanting down through the tall pines. I look toward the lower school, but all the children have gone inside to collect their things. I can hear, faintly, the good-bye song they sing at the end of each day.

“So long, so long, it won’t be so long till we see each other again….”

Deirdre and I used to wait here to meet Lucy when she worked at the lower school as an aide. The younger girls would follow her out the door, begging for another song, or another story. I remember there was one girl in particular, a skinny girl with pale, colorless hair like dried straw, who
would trail after Lucy dejectedly until Lucy would go back and promise that she’d be back the next day.

“Do you really
promise?”
the girl, standing at the edge of the woods, would yell.

“Yes, Albie, I
promise,”
Lucy would yell back, drawing out
promise
as if it were a magic word that could bind the speaker just by its utterance.

I look behind me toward the lake, which glitters between the tree trunks like slivers of a broken mirror. The water pulses so brightly that when I turn away my vision is slashed with dark jagged shards. I have a hard time spotting Olivia in the crowd of brightly dressed children coming out of the school now. For a moment my heart pounds with the fear that she’s not there, that when I go up to her teacher she will look at me blankly and tell me that someone else has taken her … didn’t I send a note saying it was all right? A ridiculous thought. I saw her go into the school five minutes ago.

Still, I am so panicked that the faces of the children blur into bright spots and I can’t make out Olivia’s face until she rushes right into me. I can barely hear what her teacher is trying to tell me, something she doesn’t want Olivia to hear, I guess, from the exaggerated mouthing adults use when they’re whispering secrets in front of children.

“… a bad day…” I make out. “… overwrought …” I nod and say something about Olivia not getting much sleep the night before, how we’re still getting used to the new house, excuses that come easy and are, in their way, true.

“She’s probably just tired,” I conclude.

“I am not,” Olivia snaps, as tired children will when told they’re tired.

“Okay, sweetie,” I say, taking Olivia’s hand. “Let’s go home.” I steer her away from the school. “Let’s go home and have a snack. We’ll make cookies …” I say before I remember I don’t have the supplies for baking. In my mind we were heading home to the kitchen in our old house where the
matching ceramic canisters were filled with flour and oatmeal and chocolate chips.

“I want to go down to the magic rock and look for tadpoles,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, glad to get out of the baking promise. Tomorrow I’ll go to the store and buy flour and baking powder and cookie sheets.

“… and then the tadpoles turn into frogs,” Olivia is telling me, “and Mrs. Crane says we’ll have tadpoles in our class so we can watch it happen…”

Olivia drops my hand and runs ahead on the path, chattering all the while about frogs and tadpoles. I’m left alone in the woods I used to wander with Lucy and Deirdre. We often came down this path to the swimming beach, and yes, sometimes we came at night and swam out to the farthest sister stone. We made our own sacrifices to the Lake Goddess. And once Deirdre introduced us to it, we were often stoned.

Olivia disappears around a bend in the path, but I can still hear her voice. She is singing one of her made-up songs.

When my students ask me what the school was like when I went here, I know they expect to hear that we worked harder, the rules were stricter, more was expected of us. Some of that is true. It was a given that you’d go from Heart Lake to a Seven Sister college. Our teachers even hinted to us that after our preparation at Heart Lake we’d find the work in college easy. They were right about that. No test I ever took in college was harder than
Domina
Chambers’s Latin final, or Miss North’s history orals, or the slide test in Tacy Beade’s art class. But what the girls don’t guess—and I can’t tell them—is that when I went here in the seventies the rules were already changing. In some ways, things were looser. The Pill had become available, but no one had heard of AIDS yet. There was no war on drugs, because the teachers didn’t even suspect we had access to them. Cigarettes were vaguely tolerated as a bad habit, like chewing your nails or wearing laddered tights. Even the school uniform had given
way to a haphazardly enforced dress code that specified skirt length but neglected to make bras mandatory.

I’ve come to a bend in the path where the path divides in two. To the left the path goes up to our house, to the right it slopes down steeply to the lake. I stop here and realize I don’t know which way Olivia has gone. She’d been talking about seeing the tadpoles, so she probably went straight down to the lake. I stand still and listen for her voice, but the only thing I hear is the wind sifting through the dry pine needles on the forest floor.

I still the flicker of panic that licks at my brain like a small flame. Panic. I hear Helen Chambers’s voice telling us the word originated from the god Pan. The Greeks thought he inspired the unreasoning fear that sneaked up on mortals in wild places.

I head down the path to the lake. The sun has gone behind the clouds again and the water looks flat and gray. If she went to the house, I figure, she’ll be all right for a minute or two, but if she went to the lake … I decide not to finish that thought.

The swimming beach is empty. I look down at the sand for footprints and see some, but they’re too large to be Olivia’s. I realize that they’re probably my own, made last night when I watched Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite on the rocks. I am about to turn back to look for Olivia at the house when I hear a small splash. The sound seems to come from the farthest edge of the Point and when I look in that direction something white flashes briefly and then is gone. Just the sun glinting off the rock, I think, turning back toward the steps, but then I see her. Olivia is standing on the farthest rock. Her back is to me and she stands on the very edge of the far side of the rock. I start to call her name, but then think I’ll startle her and she’ll fall into the water. The lake, I know, is deep on the other side of that rock.

I kick off my shoes and wade into the water, moving slowly so as not to make any noise. The water is warm at the
shallow edge, but as soon as I’m up to my waist I can feel the icy cold currents from the underground springs that feed the lake. I stroke out, keeping my head up, eyes on Olivia, just like Miss Pike, our gym teacher and swimming coach, taught us in Lifesaving.

I approach the rock from the shallow end because I am afraid that if Olivia sees me she might be startled and fall into the water. I am too scared to take my eyes off Olivia even for an instant to look down for a place to put my feet, so I feel the rock with my toes. My feet hit something hard and slimy that falls away when I try to put my weight down. I try again and find a flat rock where I can get enough purchase to lift myself up onto the rock, but my foot, numb from the cold, slips just as I’m pulling myself up.

I hit the rock hard with my stomach and make a sound like “ooof.” Olivia hears me and turns. For a moment I see fear in her face, but then it dissolves into giggles.

“Mommy, why are you swimming in your clothes?”

I crawl over to her and pull her down to the rock before answering. “Well, Miss, I could ask you the same question.” I try to make my voice sound light, a gentle reprimand for getting her good clothes wet, but when I pick up the hem of her dress I notice that her dress—and her sneakers and white ankle socks—are bone dry.