Whisper Their Love (22 page)

She knows, Joyce thought. "I'm busy." It was partly the quick defense of one caught unprepared, partly the mean pleasure of getting even. I really am busy, she thought. Practice at ten, last one before dress rehearsal, and an Art exam after that. She smiled thinly, feeling the muscles of her face stretch. "Whatever it is, it'll have to wait."

Mary Jean's face was like that of a slapped child. It had been white; now the white turned a sick gray. "It's all right," she said in a low voice. She hesitated a moment, then picked up her books and walked away, her soft moccasins making a dragging sound on the hall rug. Joyce stood looking after her. She wanted to run after her and call: come back, I'll listen, you can tell me. But she stood there with a set face, and then a group of girls came out of the bathroom and shut Mary Jean out of her sight.

She went down, feeling guilty and ashamed for no reason. Probably wasn't anything, she comforted herself. Probably wanted to borrow a dollar or a pair of shoes. But the feeling didn't go away, or the conviction that Mary Jean knew about the motel.

She might have been there herself. I wouldn't put it past her.

The auditorium was a scramble of girls in jeans and dirty shirts, milling around, moving extension cords that writhed across the floor like rubber snakes, scraping chairs. The floor in front of the stage was littered with lipstick-smeared cigarette butts, although it was against the rule to smoke anywhere in the building. Molly Andrews was down on her knees painting flats, with gilt in her hair and a cerise smear across the seat of her pants. Ellin, as the blasé English divorcee, sat hunched over in a folding chair gabbling lines she should have known two weeks before. Joyce felt it was an almost professional mess, with all of the racket meaning something. She fished the prop list out of her skirt pocket and went backstage, more to be a part of the clatter back there than because there was any more doubt about where things belonged.

She was tired. In eighteen years she couldn't remember ever having been this tired before. There was the time the girl from Derwent High socked her during the second quarter of a basketball game, and she finished the game and then went to the nurse and had two cracked ribs taped up. There was the summer she worked detasseling hybrid corn; the second morning she'd been so stiff she couldn't walk, had crawled to the bathroom and soaked in a tub of hot water till her locked muscles loosened. But those where physical things. This was an all-over fatigue that left her feeling heavy, dead and blank. "I feel blah," she thought. She must have said it out loud because Linda Garrick slapped her on the back and said, "It's the cheap liquor that does it"

Either all of her props were where they belonged, or she was too gone to know the difference. She went down again and sat on the edge of a folding chair, right in front of the stage. There were regular theater-type chairs with arms between, used for compulsory chapel and whatever outside entertainment the college could book, but it was supposed to be more knowing to sit well forward and criticize the performance, or pull a funeral-parlor chair to the back of the auditorium and test the acoustics. Today she kept losing the thread, although she'd sat in on so many practices that she knew most of the parts. She got up and walked out in the middle of the love scene, restless in spite of her fatigue.

Something was wrong. You don't ask help from someone you've quarreled with, not if you can help it. She looked sick, too. I'll find her the first thing after Art, Joyce decided, and see what's the matter. The decision made her feel better; it answered some demand in her. She headed for the semi-basement, full of good nature. I won't hold anything against her; I’ll do what I can to help her.

Perhaps it was the virtuous feeling that made the test so easy in spite of her fatigue. Her headache was going away, too. The pen scurried over the pages of the Blue Book, her mind picked the right answers out of the air. Manet, Monet, Seurat, Renoir, picking answers for mix-match.

She finished the second book and sat looking out the window, waiting for someone who didn't mind being an eager beaver to turn in her test first.

The hall telephone rang. Miss Wilkes got up quietly and went to answer it, leaving the door open so she could at least hear what was going on. Our girls are refined and well-bred, Miss Wilkes reminded herself with grim pleasure, our girls do not cheat in examinations. Not unless they sit more than one row from the front and the teacher's near-sighted.

Molly Andrews stopped chewing her pencil and copied briskly from her neighbor's book, word for word and X for X. There was paint across her knuckles.

Miss Wilkes came back on rubber soles. She looked sharply over all the meek, bent heads—light, dark, red, with little chiffon bows tied into the ponytails or jewelled pins set among the curls, this season's fad. The innocent little darlings, she thought grimly. She walked flatfooted to Joyce's chair. "Will you report to the dean at once? You can finish your test later."

"Oh—I'm done." Joyce handed in her book and left. There was a little buzz. Eyebrows were raised and smiles spread over faces,

"Quiet, please," Miss Wilkes said. She had been young once herself. She was only forty-two now, she sometimes reminded her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and forty-two isn't dead by a long shot. There was a man back home, department manager in a store, she was keeping in reserve. "Anyone I see talking will fail this test," Miss Wilkes said, rapping her desk with a pencil.

Edith Bannister was standing in the middle of the study, tapping one foot like a woman who's tired of waiting. Her face was a mask Joyce had never seen before. Narrow vertical wrinkles between her eyes matched the thin pinched lines at the corners of her mouth. Her lipstick was blurred at the edges and a bit of hair hung down over her forehead. "Where were you last night?" she demanded.

Joyce had to stop and think. Between last night and this morning there was a great gulf, a stretch of not-sleeping followed by restless, half-conscious sleep. Already the hours with John had the unchanging, fixed look of something that is over and past. She lifted her eyes carefully to Edith's face, and what she saw there warned her to be careful. "I went downtown with a boy I know, a town boy. We had hamburgers and coffee."

Edith said nothing.

"It was Dr. Prince's nephew," Joyce said nervously. "You know Dr. Prince, he gave the typhoid shots last fall." You're talking too much, she warned herself.

"I know Dr. Prince, all right," Edith said. "I asked you where you were last night."

"Did I forget to sign out? If I did, I'm sorry. You're always saying I should go out with boys because it keeps people from getting suspicious."

"Oh, shut up!"

Joyce had never heard Edith shout before. She stepped back. Edith leaned ahead, her neck stretched out—she had a skinny neck, Joyce thought—her lips fixed in a dreadful smile. "Do you want me to tell you where you were last night, you cheap little sneak? You were at the Sunset Motel with this doctor or whatever he's supposed to be, and you were there from around eight till almost one this morning. One of the board members saw you leaving and phoned me this morning." What in hell was he doing there? Joyce thought; as if I didn't know. "A blonde in a yellow coat, he said, and you've got the only yellow coat in school."

Joyce put her hands behind her and watched Edith's face intently, afraid to look away.

"Till one o'clock, my God, in a cheap motel, with a man, like a common whore. Oh no, you don't have to tell me what you were doing, I know what you were up to all right. It's been three weeks—" Her voice cracked. Joyce took another step back, measuring the distance to the door. The air was charged with danger.

"No wonder you haven't wanted me lately! No wonder you looked down your snooty little nose at Anitra and her friends, after she welcomed you into her house! I saw you making fun and acting superior. You haven't got the guts for a real honest relationship." Her hand groped toward the desk. Joyce watched, fascinated. "No, oh, no, you have to go to bed with men. Any man that comes along, I suppose. You're no better than a common streetwalker."

"That's a lie."

Edith's smile broadened. Her teeth glittered. There was saliva on the edge of her lower lip; she wiped it off on her sleeve and that was the most shocking thing she could have done. "You'll catch a disease. You'll get in trouble and have to have an operation like your nymphomaniac friend. And then I'll laugh at you, do you hear me, I'll laugh at you."

She's crazy, Joyce thought. The walls of the room seemed to shrink, penning her in. She reached behind her for the doorknob. The crystal ashtray whizzed past her head. She felt the air stir her hair, and then there was a crash and a thump as the ashtray hit the door and fell to the floor.

A hot, reviving anger poured through her. She took two long steps and slapped Edith across the cheek.

Edith burst into tears.

"Oh God," Joyce said. She looked at this disheveled wreck of a woman standing with her hand to her red and smarting face, and there was neither fear nor love left in her, but only a deep strength. I hope to God nobody's out in the hall listening to this rumpus, she thought; they're sure hearing plenty if they are. The assurance that swelled her chest was like the feeling that had gripped her at Mary Jean's crisis. She could do anything she had to do. Somebody had to take hold and straighten things around. It was Aunt Gen's phrase. Her voice was like Aunt Gen's too, sure and quiet. "Oh, stop it. You're making a fool of yourself. It's none of your business where I go or what I do. You're not my mother."

The words hung on the air of the room. It's true, she thought wonderingly. "I don't need a mother any more," she said. "I've grown up."

Edith bent her head. "It's only that—I love you."

"I guess maybe you do," Joyce admitted. "I thought I loved you too, but I didn't. I'm sorry. I never meant to lie to you, though."

"You—"

"You want me to tell you where I was last night? I was out at the Sunset Motel with John Jones. I thought maybe if I acted like a normal decent person just once, if I went to bed with a man the way I'm supposed to, maybe I'd understand things better. It wasn't any good, though."

"You did that!"

"Yes. It wasn't any good. I couldn't do it." Joyce reached out and picked up the African figurine. Full sagging breasts, distended belly, full thighs. Woman, unthinking and fulfilled. She stroked it absently. "I'm one of those frigid females you read about. I haven't got it in me to love anyone."

Edith lifted her head. Her shoulders straightened. "I could make trouble for you," she said. A thin smile touched her lips. "I can get you expelled. All I have to do is tell everybody what you are, what you've been. A pervert. They'd make it really bad for you." Her lips curled back so the teeth showed. The red patch on her cheek glowed dully. "There's nothing people enjoy more than hurting someone different. I could fix it up so you'd never get a job or an education, either."

"I guess you could." The warmth still upheld her, and a mind not her own had taken over. She felt clearheaded; she felt fine. "Of course that works two ways. I can talk too. In court if it comes to that. I was eighteen when I came here," she pointed out, "a young girl from the country, and you taught me all those things. That would look fine in the papers, wouldn't it?"

"Joy-"

"Everybody knows about you. The girls." She didn't know where that piece of information came from, but she had no doubts about it. "There must have been others. I wouldn't make any charges, if I were you, or even start any gossip."

Edith's knees caved in. She stumbled backward and landed on the desk chair, staring at Joyce with her mouth open.

"Do anything you want to," Joyce said- "Tell anybody you please. It doesn't matter any more. I'm getting out of here."

"Where?"

She shrugged. A gesture borrowed from Mary Jean, who .used it to mean many things. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Can I go now?"

"Joyce, for heaven's sake!"

Joyce went out quietly, shutting the door without a sound. Her knees felt stiff. She realized that she was holding her breath, and exhaled deeply. She felt hollow, like someone who has borne up bravely under a long illness in the family and now, the funeral over, has to go back to an empty house.

Hungry, too. She remembered not eating anything last night, and this morning she'd skipped breakfast. I'll go and wash up, she thought, then beat it downtown and have a sandwich and find out about train times. Maybe looking at schedules will give me an idea where to go. I'll get my money from the bursar's office. She hadn't known she had any plans, but there they were, all shaped and ready to be put into action. This is the time. Get a job in a store—no, an office. Find a room. Maybe if I can be alone for a while…

One sure thing, she thought climbing the stairs, I can't go back to the farm. Can't face the folks till I get this worked out. Aunt Gen would never forgive me. Aunt Gen's face rose in her mind, the forehead knit in disapproval, the lips thin. No mercy there for anyone who transgressed her unchanging code of right and wrong. No, Joyce thought, I have to do this for myself. Nobody else can help me with it.

The need for confession was urgent. Telephone John? No; he was probably hating me already. She felt, suddenly, a sharp realization of loss. There's nobody I can talk to any more. It was crazy, it didn't make sense, but already John had come to be that rare thing—a friend who could be counted on.

Have to get the trunk out of storage; thank goodness I have enough clothes for a long time, she thought. She mounted the stairs, feeling at once competent and bereaved.

The bathroom door was shut. Why, this time of day? She pushed it open and went in.

A cold wind funnelled through the room. She stepped forward to shut the window, and stopped.

The blood in the bottom of the bathtub was dark-red and sticky-looking, but what lay on the sides, splashed up in uneven scallops, was thinner and lighter. As if, finally, Mary Jean had bled herself dry—as if this was the last thin drainings of her life. The white of her bare arms was streaked with runnels of blood and there were flecks of it on her pink housecoat. Her fingers hung down, helpless. How could you push a blade through all the vein and gristle of a human wrist, and where had she found the old-fashioned straight razor that lay on the floor beside the tub?