The Noise of Infinite Longing (20 page)

There was a strict schedule to the days, school weeks filled hour by hour—chapel at 9:40
a.m
., biology at 12:25
p.m
., study hall at 7:30
p.m
., lights out at 10:00
p.m
.; candy bars in the canteen at 3:00
p.m
.; Saturday afternoons at the ice cream parlor and matinees

in town; church on Sunday. We had a couple of scandals that year: One senior was expelled (the girls said she was pregnant), and a freshman was kicked out (caught smoking). But mostly no bad news entered our world, only occasional stories of parents divorcing and breakups with boyfriends. I sent my mother pages filled with stories of my daily life, my classmates appearing like stars, taking on such importance, especially the girl who joined our class after the school year had started.

We were on the hockey field the day she arrived. I was sitting in the bleachers, bored, forcing myself to watch the team play, when the roar of excitement broke above the clack of hockey sticks.

She’s here! She’s here!

The girls broke into a run down the field to the dorm. There she was, a reedy girl no more than five-foot-three wearing a light brown wool suit. A dozen girls crowded around her, jumping up and down, calling out her name, Jean, Jean. She was trying to talk, laughing. Her suitcases and trunks lay half opened on the floor. She had been in boarding schools most of her life, at Linden Hall since she was thirteen. She had grown up traveling, living in foreign countries, and now her family lived in Buenos Aires, where her father ran an American com- pany. She spoke French and Spanish, the Castilian Spanish of textbooks, had fluffy reddish brown hair cut short, a smooth face she lathered in cold cream at night, freckles on the tip of her nose, and wan skin.

For days I watched her, the way she made notes with her pen, her shoulders bent under her desk lamp.

The snow came in November, crystal light and tender, melting instantly when it brushed the ground, the roof, the windows. The girls were calling for me, and I ran to the porch and stood bare- headed under the flakes, wiping them off my face. I remember everything in slate gray and vanishing flecks of white. My first snow lasted late into the night, and for days the campus was a gentle watercolor, draped in white, covered in ice. I walked through two- foot piles of snow, following no tracks. I stumbled into ice holes, my mittens crusted, my overcoat freezing wet, my long scarf flying off my neck in a wind that came raw through brittle tree limbs. I threw myself against the boulders the snow had made, and the girls bap- tized me, pushing me down in the snow and laughing.

My eyes followed Jean, tramping ahead of me in earmuffs and furry hat, moving easily in her black boots. She pulled me along, her

hand gripping mine, her face blistering in the cold wind.We walked huddled across the hockey field and down to the dorm, stomping the crust of ice and snow off our boots, throwing our coats and gloves on the floor, her hand playfully rubbing the damp from my hair.

She used to tell me about the houses where she had lived, the lawns and swimming lakes in Connecticut, the river where she learned to dive, throwing herself from a broken-down pier; and when she was older, ten or so, the apartments she lived in abroad, drafty places of tall French doors looking out balconies on cobblestone streets.

We have places like that, streets like those, I told her.

We have cobblestone streets—Calle del Cristo, San Justo, Caleta de las Monjas, Fortaleza—streets of narrow sidewalks where my mother walked behind me, pushing me along, telling me to straighten my back; where we stopped for susurritos in the afternoon at La Mallorquina and shopped at the Padín department store; where we went to the ballet at theTeatroTapia; whereTití’s newspaper stood gray and tall on a corner, a view of San Juan harbor below it, below the fortress walls.These were streets of blue stones, made from the ballasts of Spanish ships, streets bearing the hooves of horses that walked on them when San Juan was a garrison, before the garrison was a city, when it was nothing much more than a mosquito swamp surrounded by forested mountains.

Jean liked my stories and each time I embellished them more.

T

he houses my classmates lived in (so silent, I thought) had lawns—flat lawns, short lawns, narrow lawns, sloping lawns, rolling lawns—but no drafty windows and tall arched glass doors opening on grilled balconies. There were no cobblestone streets, no vendors of piraguas. No one came out on the roads, and there was no noise, no clattering of wooden cart wheels on pavement, or the

scraping of leather soles on sidewalk.

Everything seemed enclosed in glass.

The town where I spent Christmas was built in the coal foothills, crouched under the perennial hanging cloud of a steel mill’s steam, soupy yellow in the morning, sunburned orange at sundown, but mostly watery gray. Even in the spring, even when the rain washed off the sky, there was a film of gray. It was not a pretty town.

In the old parts of town, where the steelworkers lived, the houses had aluminum awnings, small scrubby yards, tarpaper roofs, fake brick fronts. The steel mill’s executives lived on the hills, up a nar- row road that twirled and dipped high above the town. Judy lived up there, on the side of a hill, in a beige-trimmed brick house built on several acres bordered at the bottom of the hill by a thicket of trees and a trickling creek. Nearby there were colonial-style homes and multilevel ranches made of brick and wood siding painted in dawn blue, gray-blue shades with occasional green and marigold shutters. Drapes were hung at the windows, blocking the light.These were big places with big cars and big garages, houses with carpeted stairs and parquet floors, wood-paneled basements with liquor cabinets, bar counters, dartboards, and pool tables.

Scotch was what they drank at these houses.

Judy was a senior, three years older than I, with a little girl’s voice and protruding upper teeth that had been strapped into braces since she was a child. She had a long frame, slightly swaybacked, as if she had learned to walk balancing trays in each hand. But she stooped a little, conscious of her height. A run-of-the-mill student, straight C’s and B’s, she called herself a daddy’s girl, spoiled like girls who are the only daughters of men of power and money; and she was madly in love with the six-foot, red-haired navy cadet who wore dress whites and a buzz cut in the picture she kept at her desk.

I saw right away she had a plain turn of mind, small ambitions, a warm, disarming femininity, the sparkling eyes of the airline stew-

ardess she would one day become.

I barely knew her when she invited me to her home for Christ- mas. I had known that I couldn’t go home—it was too expensive a trip—but I had no idea where I would go. I had envisioned garlands of lights, the church bells, and the feasts of my Christmases in Puerto Rico—and dancing all night, drinking Cuba libres and going to mid- night Mass.

Strings of Christmas lights framed the brick buildings of Judy’s steel town, but there was no dancing all night, Cuba libres, or mid- night Mass. We went to Methodist church services and choir pro- grams in school auditoriums filled with parents and children singing “Joy to the World.”We went caroling in the hills, and went shopping in stores loud with the jingles of Christmas.

On Christmas Day, under the ceiling-high fir tree Judy and her mother had trimmed with popcorn and cranberries, draping lights around it and throwing angel hair over the branches, Judy’s parents had stacked gift boxes wrapped in shiny paper with big red and green bows. On the mantel, they had hung Christmas stockings with each of their names. The swanky silk drapes in the living room had been pulled open, and the wind hissed and lashed at the windows. Judy’s father, in a plaid flannel shirt, carried fire logs up from the garage, poked at the ashes, rubbed his hands, letting splinters fall on the rug. He was a tall man, in his fifties, I thought, with sunken cheeks and a professorial look in his black-rimmed glasses. Judy adored him, going up to him and kissing him lightly on the lips. He sat in his lounging chair, in stocking feet, smoking a pipe, with a glass of Scotch at his side, two fingers, no more. I never saw him angry, never saw him drunk, never heard him arguing with his wife.The first time I met him, that Christmas, he kissed me on the cheek and kept his arm around me. He wanted me to know that this was my home and asked me to call him uncle.

That was a Christmas different from all others I had known, quiet in the house and outside the house, as if we were inside a snowball, with a fire crackling in the fireplace and a football game on TV.

After the holidays, we went back to the routine of school. The winter settled in, with the ugly months of January and February. I cried a lot that winter. I was not crying out loud so much as stopping myself from crying. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t homesick the way the girls talked about it, longing for their mother’s cooking and friends back home. Jean would ask me if I missed home, like she did, like all the others did.

No, I lied. I was trying to push the island away. It was becoming smaller, the noise fading, the voices muted. I wrote to Roland, but my letters were an obligation. His letters to me seemed very distant, the words meaningless. I couldn’t see what he was seeing.

You are changing, he kept saying. No, I said, I’m not. But I wasn’t telling him the truth either. I told no one the truth.

E

aster finally arrived and with it the first signs of spring. Flowers poking through the cold earth, birds on the branches of trees

still barren of leaves.The school went on holiday, everyone scattering. The train from Lancaster rattled to a stop at Penn Station in Philadelphia. Our car was filled with schoolmates going away, to see boyfriends and parents, to the Caribbean, to Florida on spring break. Judy was on the train, on the way to Bermuda with the other sen- iors. This was her last spring at Linden Hall, two months before graduation, before she signed up with Delta and packed up for West Palm Beach, where she would rent a poolside apartment with slid- ing glass doors and a barbecue grill. On this day, on the train, she had no idea that in a few months her navy cadet would leave her for another girl. She had no way of knowing that her father was having

an affair with the woman next door, and that her mother, fleshy but prim in her blousy dresses and weekly hairdos, would have a breast cut out.

That spring, at nineteen, Judy was the happiest girl, in love and engaged to her navy man, blowing kisses at me as she stepped out of the train car with the herd of seniors running up to the Thirtieth Street taxi stand to catch a cab to the Philadelphia airport.They were going to Elbow Beach, the pink beach, doubling up in ocean-view rooms at the Princess Hotel, parading in new bikinis by day and low- cut cocktail dresses at night.

The train started up again, on the way to New York. I was going on to Long Island. I was staying with one of the girls in my class, in the two-story house where she’d grown up, a plain house with the stairs in the middle, parting the living room and den on one side from the dining room and kitchen on the other.They had a deck out back and a motorboat at a pier on the canal. Spring had not yet come to Long Island, and the wind off the ice blue Atlantic still carried the late-winter chill.

The first couple of nights we went bowling with girls and boys she had known all her life, the kids she had grown up with, drinking beer, smoking. I said little, and I didn’t bowl.The ball was too heavy, the shoes too big. One night they fixed me up with a date, a bulky high school football player, who took me to the drive-in and put his arms around me and his hands around my waist and bent hard over me and opened his mouth on mine. I got sick that night and spent the rest of spring break in bed in the guest room.There was nothing any- body could find wrong with me, but I wouldn’t eat and I wouldn’t leave the bed. Alone for hours, I read and cried.

A week later I was back in school, and in the senior dorm, Judy was unpacking in her room, lobster red from the Bermuda sun, her

light hair sun-bleached blond. In the room next to hers, with her skin burned black from the day she fell asleep on the sand in Elbow Beach, Barbara was laughing, her laughter ringing down the hall.

I had met Barbara months before, in the infirmary. There were just the two of us on a floor of beds. I think it was Barbara’s voice I noticed first, before seeing her face. She was humming in her bed. She came around to me, barefoot, in baggy pajamas, her hair tousled. Who are you? she said. She was a senior and lived in Maryland. She seemed many years older than I, the lines on her forehead deeply marked. Her skin, darker than mine, a deep beige, had the infirmary pallor. She was ragged thin. She clutched a damp handkerchief in her hand. Her fingers were long, tapered, more graceful than she was.

She was not pretty. She was much too ancient in her face for that. One day, not long after we met in the infirmary, I was walking down a hall in the music department. I heard someone playing a piano and singing behind a closed door, the same chords gone over and over. Someone was practicing “Un bel di,” an aria I had heard on my grandmother’s radio. I had not heard such a voice, not so close to me, not so powerful and so sad. I stood outside the door for a long time, turned the knob, and tiptoed into the room. Barbara was at the piano, and stopped immediately when she heard my steps. She looked up at me, saying nothing, went to the record player, and slid down a disk. The needle jumped over worn grooves. She looked through sheets of music and with the scratched record playing, she began to sing. Her voice rose, fluttering, took hold, and spread out.

She was singing “Summertime.”

We began to talk every day. In the mornings when the students waited in the hallway to go to chapel, she walked by in her choir robe, stopping at my side. We talked in study hall, passed messages back and forth, pieces of paper doubled up and mashed inside our

hands.We ran into each other at the mailboxes, in the canteen, in the library. We talked in her room, a messy room with a view of the sooty furnace building.