Флетчер Флора - Strange Sisters

“No,” she said. “I’ve been all right.”

“Are you sure? Sometimes, my dear, we have these difficulties without being fully aware of their nature.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t know that I mean anything definite. I’m merely suggesting that it might be wise for you to see Dr. Sandstrom.”

“The psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“No. I don’t want to see her.”

“Is that a reasonable attitude, my dear? Surely you’re not afraid of seeing a psychiatrist. Dr. Sandstrom will be your friend. You will have some friendly chats, and perhaps she will be able to make some suggestions that will help you.”

“I don’t want to see her.”

Again the swift sequence of irritation, expunction, labored patience. “I’d be doing less than my duty if I didn’t urge you very strongly to reconsider. Your initial tests here show you to be a person of superior intelligence. You should be doing superior work. That you are not doing so, that you are, quite the contrary, failing to do even acceptable work, is an indication that you may need professional help. This is no disgrace, my dear, nothing to feel humiliated about. We must simply be realistic enough to take the proper corrective measures. You would find your chats with Dr. Sandstrom to be quite pleasant, very therapeutic. She has worked wonders with many other students here.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need to see Dr. Sandstrom. I don’t want to talk with her.”

“You’re making it very difficult for me, my dear. Indeed, you are leaving me only one alternative. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes. I’ll be dismissed.”

“Temporarily, at least. You will have to miss a semester.”

“All right. I’ll move out of the dormitory tomorrow.”

“We don’t wish to be harsh. If it is inconvenient for you to leave immediately, you are perfectly welcome to stay on a few days.”

We. The comforting plural. The subtle, strategic retreat to dominant numbers and the incidental renunciation of personal responsibility. We do this, my dear, not I. I am merely an agent.

For already in her life, in Kathy’s life, though the issue was not overt and was given substance only by her own recognition of it, there was They and there was I, the antithetic orthodox and aberrant, and in the recognition of it, the ancient and evil conflict of it, there was a way of thinking and a loneliness and a depression that would come and go and come again so long as she lived.

“It’s no inconvenience,” she said. “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“As you wish.” The dean stood up behind her desk, a dark, blocky woman with heavy breasts bunched and bound so tightly that they gave to her torso the solid, overdeveloped look of a male physical culturist. She extended a hand in a mannish gesture. “Good-bye, my dear, and believe me when I repeat that we’re all most sorry. We hope that you’ll come back to us next fall better prepared to meet our requirements.”

Kathy took the hand and found it strangely damp and limp to belong to such an aggressive woman. She dropped it quickly and said, “Thank you,” and left the office. Outside, the abbreviated day was in its precipitate descent to darkness. Shadows climbed among the branches of trees in pursuit of the icy light. The glitter was gone from the river. The cold was apparently in inverse ratio to the light, and she turned the plain collar of her coat up around her neck. She wasn’t sorry to be leaving Burlington College, but there was in her, nevertheless, an intense sadness. Partly it was because she would be leaving Vera, but mostly it was a sadness she couldn’t explain, couldn’t associate specifically with anything that had happened. And she felt it, of course, because she had come so definitely to a minor end and a minor beginning between the major beginning and the major end, and she felt but did not recognize that neither the end nor the beginning were good things, things that she would have chosen if she had been free to choose.

She was going to Vera’s. She crossed the campus in the gathering darkness, pooled and thickened beneath the trees, her feet making crisp sounds on the dead grass. Past the building that housed the chemistry lab. Past the Fine Arts building with one window illuminated on the second floor to form a screen for the grotesque, antic shadow of someone sawing a bow across the strings of a fiddle. Past the library and the Museum of Natural History and the gymnasium and so off the campus and up the street to Vera’s. She rang the bell, and Vera answered immediately, and there was something wrong between them, a subtle ugliness that was less distortion of reality than the exposure of it.

Kathy went in and sat down. Not on a pillow this time, but on a chair, assuming the primness that was a kind of automatic defense against any felt threat. Not relaxed in warm and delicious atmosphere of intimacy, but tense and wary, like a rejected child, though there had been as yet no expression of rejection. She didn’t understand the atmospheric change, not at first, but after a while she knew that it was fear, Vera’s fear, the bitter, corrosive fear of the especially vulnerable.

“Did you see the dean?” Vera said.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I’ll have to leave school.”

“I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do for you.”

It was a little too quick, too fervent, the disavowal of capacity to help. Kathy had come only to report and say good-bye, but the vulnerable see shadows behind every innocence, and she was suspected of having come to force intervention, to practice a kind of blackmail. She was conscious of this at once, and the knowledge stimulated in her a sly and malicious desire to capitalize on it, to fan and feed the ugly fear in this woman, this Dr. Telsa, who had been one thing and was now, almost in an instant, becoming something quite different. She was even changing physically, it seemed, growing thinner and older, all dry skin and projecting bones. The skin was flaky and the pores were large. In her eyes was the reflection of her fear and an incipient hatred for the stupid girl who, by exposing herself to curiosity and inspection, however routine, had become a source of jeopardy. It was perfectly clear that her paramount wish was to have Kathy gone from school as quickly and as quietly as possible.

“The dean wants me to see Dr. Sandstrom,” Kathy said.

“Dr. Sandstrom! My God, you aren’t going to do it, are you?”

“I don’t know. I could probably stay on here if I did.”

She had no intention of seeing the psychiatrist, of course. Nothing on earth, at that time, could have prevailed upon her to do so. But she derived a sadistic pleasure from the flaring fear in Vera Telsa’s eyes, and she derived a concurrent pleasure equally intense from the inversion of hatred, the sickness within herself that came from the cruel exposure of ugliness where she had thought there was beauty. She sat quietly, looking up at Vera with a demure expression, and across the room on a spindle, trapped in a black disk, Chopin was silent.

“You little fool!” Vera said. “Do you want to ruin yourself? Do you have any idea of what that woman may do to you, may make you say?”

Kathy sat quietly for another moment, her head held a little to one side and the faint demure smile on her lips, as if she were listening for a small sound that might come to her from a great distance, and then she stood up and said, “You’re very frightened, aren’t you? It makes you hate me very much. You’re afraid that I may ruin you, not myself. But you needn’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I wish you no harm now. I only wish that you’d died before I met you.”

Then she turned and let herself out of the house and went back up across the campus past the administration building and down the long slope among the trees to the bank of the river. She had been remembering the river as she had seen it through the dean’s window all the time she had been in Vera’s house, and she had thought that she would return to it as soon as she was free. It was very cold. The wind crossed the water and knifed through her thin, plain coat. She could feel over all her body a roughening of skin, and her blood seemed to sing in her veins a strange, sad song. Later she would have regrets, very grievous ones, but she had none now, and the predominant quality of her temper was the great sadness that was somewhat like the emotional equivalent of the sound of the river whispering past her in the night between narrow margins of ice.