The Society of S (5 page)

But I learned the truth gradually, not in one moment of blinding revelation — which I would have preferred, dramatically. That’s the trouble with writing about your life: somehow you have to deal with the long boring bits.

Thankfully, most of those are in Chapter One. My childhood was by and large so uneventful that, looking back, I seem to have been sleepwalking. Now I want to move more into the wakeful moments, the real time of my thirteenth year and what followed.

It was the first year I had a birthday party. In other years, my father would give me a present at dinner, and Mrs. McG would make a sodden cake with runny icing. Those events happened this year as well, but in addition Mrs. McG took me home with her on July 16, the day after my birthday. I was to have dinner and spend the night: another first for me. I’d never slept anywhere but home.

From the living room I’d overheard my father discuss the plans with Mrs. McG. He’d had to be convinced that I’d be all right in a strange house.

“The child needs friends,” Mrs. McG had said firmly. “She’s still brooding over the death of the neighbor’s cat, I think. She needs to be distracted.”

My father said, “Ari is fragile, Mrs. McGarritt. She’s not like other children.”

“She’s overprotected,” Mrs. McG said, with a strength I hadn’t thought she possessed.

“She’s vulnerable.” My father’s voice was quiet, but authoritative. “I can only hope that she won’t share my affliction, since we lack the means to know for certain.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Mrs. McG said, her voice contrite. “I’m sorry.”

After a pause, my father said, “I’ll consent to Ari spending the night, so long as you promise me you’ll keep watch and bring her home if anything happens.”

Mrs. McG promised. I quietly shut the living room door, wondering what my father was so worried about. In his excessive concern he reminded me of the princess’s father in
The Princess and the Goblins
, terrified that his daughter would be kidnapped by beastly things that stole into her room at night.

Michael was playing loud rock music when we arrived, and Mrs. McG’s first words were “Turn it down!” Kathleen came dancing down the stairs to greet me. She still wore her school uniform: a dark green plaid jumper over a short-sleeved white blouse, white knee socks, and penny loafers. She had to attend summer school because she’d failed World History.

“Look at you!” she said.

For my birthday I had requested, and received, a new outfit, which I was wearing: a pale blue t-shirt and matching corduroy jeans; both fit more tightly than my usual clothes. And I’d been growing out my hair, which before had been cut by Dennis into a chin-length bob.

“What do you think?”

“Sexy,” she said, and her mother said, “Kathleen!”

But I knew she wasn’t lying when Michael came into the room. He took one glance at me and fell backward onto a sofa, in a mock swoon.

“Ignore him,” Kathleen said. “Come up while I change.”

Upstairs, I lay on Kathleen’s bed while she put on jeans and a T-shirt. She rolled her uniform into a ball and kicked it into a corner. “It was my sister Maureen’s,” she told me. Maureen was the oldest, and I rarely saw her because she attended business college in Albany.

“Who knows who wore it before her? I wash it every other day, and it still smells funny.” Kathleen made a face.

“I’m so lucky I don’t have to wear a uniform,” I said, beating her to it, because she told me that two or three times a week.

We’d taken to talking on the phone each night for an hour, more if no one complained, and the curse of the uniform was a regular topic. So was a game we played called “Gross out,” in which we tried to outdo each other in imagining doing the nastiest possible things in the name of love; the winner so far: “Would you eat your lover’s used dental floss?” Kathleen had come up with that one. She was also very interested in my father’s lupus, which her mother had told her about. At one point she’d asked if I thought I had it, too.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Apparently they can’t test for lupus.” Then I’d told her I didn’t want to talk any more about it, and she’d said she understood.

“So what did you get for your birthday?” She sat on the floor, unplaiting her hair.

“These new clothes,” I reminded her. “And shoes.” I lifted my pants leg and extended my ankle.

“Converse All-Stars!” Kathleen picked up one of her penny loafers and threw it in my direction. “You’re cooler than me now.” She pretended to sob into her arms, then looked up and said, “Not really.”

I tossed a bed pillow at her.

“And what else?” she asked.

“What else did I get? Um, a book.”

“About?”

I hesitated, because I suspected that her mother was behind the book. “It’s sort of a guide to womanhood.” I said it fast to get it over with.

“Not
On Becoming a Woman
?” I nodded, and she let out a yip of laughter. “Oh, poor Ari. Poor us.”

I’d already skimmed the book, a paperback with an aqua cover published by a manufacturer of “women’s hygiene products” (a free sample of which came in a plastic bag taped to its cover). It had sentences like this one: “Your body is very unique, a real miracle, deserving to be treasured and protected every day.” And this: “You are about to enter the sacred realm of Womanhood!” Its tone, relentlessly cheerful, worried me. Would I have to assume a similar attitude in order to enter the sacred realm?

“So have you started yet?” Kathleen peered at me through a curtain of hair.

“Not yet.” I didn’t say it, but I couldn’t imagine experiencing the monthly ordeal that the book tried to make sound so worthwhile. What with the cramps and the general mess, I felt I’d rather avoid the whole business.

“I started five or six months ago.” Kathleen pushed her hair back, and suddenly she seemed older to me. “It’s not so bad. The cramps are the worst. Mom told me what to expect, and she was a lot more honest than that dumb book.”

I thought of my mother, and Kathleen looked closely at me. “Do you miss your mom?”

“I never knew her,” I said. “But I miss her anyway. She disappeared when I was born.”

“Mom told us,” Kathleen said. “She said she went into the hospital and never came out again. You know, Ari, sometimes women go a little crazy after they have babies.”

This was news to me. “Are you saying my mother went mad?”

Kathleen came over and touched my arm. “No, no. I have no idea if that’s what happened. But it’s a possibility. It happened to Mrs. Sullivan down the street. She had a baby and a few days later they took her away to Marcy. You know, the mental asylum. Once you go in, you never come out.”

Mrs. McG shouted for us to come to dinner, and I felt more than ready. But Kathleen had given me a new image of my mother, a most unwelcome one: a faceless woman wrapped in a straitjacket, locked in a padded cell.

They’d laid the table in a special way, setting at my place a cream-colored plate painted with tiny green leaves, instead of the chipped white china the others had. And next to the plate were presents: five or six small wrapped packages with foil bows on top. Several of the bows had been chewed slightly by Wally the dog.

I’d never expected anything like this. At home we had no gift-wrap, no special china. Even at Christmas (which Dennis made us celebrate, with indifferent participation by my father and Root), we didn’t bother to wrap gifts, and each person received one thing, always practical.

“Open them now,” Kathleen said, and the others urged me on. I ripped through the paper to find barrettes for my hair, scented soap, a votive candle inside a blue glass flower, a CD (the Cankers, of course), and a disposable camera.

“For you to take pictures of your house, to show us,” Michael said.

“But you can come and see it for yourself,” I said.

He shook his head. “Mom said no.”

Mrs. McG was in the kitchen, so I couldn’t find out why she’d said that. I told myself I’d ask her later.

“Thank you all so much,” I said.

When they lit the birthday candles and sang to me, I nearly cried — but not for reasons you might think. Standing behind the heat of the small pink candles, watching them, I was struck by how united they were, how they all, down to the mongrel dog, belonged together. For the first time in my life I did feel lonely.

After dinner, the McGarritt family congregated in the living room to watch TV. They squabbled about what to watch, then compromised: first, a documentary for everyone; then the adults would take the younger McGarritts to bed and leave the three of us to watch what we liked.

An odd experience, watching television for the first time at the age of thirteen. The enormous screen flickered with colors and forms; it seemed alive. The sound didn’t seem to come from the screen, but from the walls around us. When a lion fought with a hyena, I had to close my eyes; the images were too vivid, too real.

The sound that broke the spell of the TV was Michael’s voice. He sat behind me (Kathleen and I were on floor cushions), and he had the habit of interjecting comments, as if the animals themselves were speaking. A soulful-looking lion on a hill gazed down on grazing antelope said, “Can I have fries with that?”

We all laughed, Even when I didn’t get the joke, I laughed. But Michael’s father found it annoying and made him stop.

When the documentary ended, Mr. and Mrs. McG gathered up the young ones and left the room. I sat up.

“Where’re you going?” Michael said. “The fun is about to begin.” He took the control mechanism and made the TV change images. Next thing I knew, we were watching my first vampire movie.

Maybe it was the closeness of the room, or the dominance of the enormous screen, or the large slice of cake I’d had after a large dinner. Or maybe it was the movie itself: the pale creatures with fangs who slept in coffins, rising at night to drink human blood. Whatever the cause, about ten minutes into the movie a wave of nausea came over me.

I ran to the bathroom and had shut the door when the second wave hit. Clutching the sides of the toilet, I shut my eyes as I retched. I didn’t open them until my stomach was empty, and the spasms subsided.

The tap water was cold, and I splashed some onto my face. In the mirror over the sink I saw a wavering image of my face, white, beaded with perspiration, my eyes dark and large. I opened my mouth and splashed water over my teeth and tongue to take away the sourness, and when I looked again, the face in the mirror wasn’t mine.