Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

In her isolation, Bea felt absurd. She could say nothing without feeling she was lying. Her very being, the air she moved through, seemed to drip with falseness. Except when asked a direct question, she stopped talking. She did not join the clubs that met in the Yard. She did not join them because she did not talk and because the brace made it impossible to sit on the ground and because she was too hungry to listen anyway. Hungry yet fat. She had assigned herself a diet of fruit and cottage cheese but each night, when she removed the brace before bed — a finicky and covert operation undertaken beneath her robe, facing the wall, so that her roommate wouldn’t see — her stomach hung down her front like a third, misshapen breast.

A Harvard boy took an interest in her. Benjamin Levine. He learned Bea’s schedule and began showing up outside the Garden Street gate after her last class on Wednesday afternoons. “How do you do, Miss Haven.” Lifting his hat with a three-fingered squeeze, walking jauntily toward the square as if she’d agreed to follow. Bea found Benjamin Levine attractive. He had dark curls, olive skin, a mole on his right cheekbone. But she could see so little reason for him to like her — she barely spoke, she couldn’t play piano, if he were to touch her waist he would find a knuckle-hard casement there, pushing him back — that she started to suspect he must be unlikable himself. She looked for points of ugliness and found them, in his somewhat comical high-step walk, his hairy knuckles, his narrow shoulders, his too-long trousers. Faults followed. He didn’t like athletics. He’d never heard of Haven Shoes.

She stopped answering Benjamin Levine’s questions. Then she stopped walking with him. She avoided the Garden Street gate and walked another way to her dormitory, until Benjamin found her one day on Appian Way and took her by the wrists. “Is it that I’m poor?” he spat. “Or do you not like your own kind of people?” By this he meant Jews, she knew, and she giggled out of embarrassment. Benjamin’s face was warped with anger, and something more primal — was that desire? Students crossed the street to avoid them, whispering. Bea tried to pull away but Benjamin’s grip was firm and she had to get into it then, bending her knees, pulling harder, finally flapping her elbows and twisting herself free with a grunt that surprised her. She breathed heavily. Benjamin stood back, hands raised, a gloss of fear in his eyes. Bea felt a stab of sorrow. But she was distracted by the sweat that had sprung under her arms. She was heated through as if she’d been running, which she hadn’t done in so long, and this produced in her such a rush of rightness, a feeling that she had at last reentered her eighteen-year-old body, that her act of defiance (small as it was), her fighting off Benjamin (unthreatening as he was), overtook her regrets and was transformed into a point of triumph in her sea of failures, a declaration that solidified in the days that followed: Beatrice Haven was not susceptible to men.

That was a relief. A kind of stiffness settled over her. All the times Lillian had told Bea to “make something” of herself, as if she were unformed clay, and now it seemed one part of her at least was formed, decided, drying.

Her loneliness was great. In the dining hall, she ate even less. Her hips and breasts shrank, the skin shrivelly. She told Lillian nothing and Lillian had not visited. All her smushing and crowding seemed transparent now, a show. She had merely been waiting for Bea to go do and learn all that she herself had been denied, but she didn’t want to see it — she couldn’t bear it. They spoke once a week, Bea in the phone closet on her dormitory’s second-floor landing, answering Lillian’s questions ( And do you like Master B.? Is he as good as they say? And is the food too rich? Are you managing to lose the weight? ) in polite, short sentences.

In the evenings, which came earlier, the college following the city into dusk, a silent sobbing overtook her. She would sleep then, in the hours after supper, and often well into the night. But when she woke, it was into a profound disorientation. The bed was turned the wrong way, the pillow too soft, its smell changed — and where was the bassinet? Trees through the window, branches bare, shock in her gut, summer turned. She must have left it somewhere! She must have forgotten. She could hear it struggling, tensing as if to cry, but when she reached for the light the light had been moved.

Finally, Bea would stop flailing. She would sit up, and listen. The sounds were only Eliza, snoring. Always Eliza. Bea told herself to breathe. But just as she had been unable to stop listening to the baby make its strange, incessant noises in the middle of the night, now she couldn’t stop listening to Eliza’s snores and thinking of the baby, and in her desperation not to think of the baby, Bea would think of Vera. It was Vera’s fault that Bea had nursed the baby, roomed with the baby, absorbed the baby’s sounds into her memory. If not for Vera, Bea would have been sent to the House for Unwed Mothers up in New Hampshire, where they would have whisked the thing away as soon as it was born. Oh, but she missed Vera! Her delayed grief for Vera was so overwhelming (Vera was the one Bea needed now, the one Bea could tell anything to and know she would still be loved) and her fear of grieving the baby so sharp (she hadn’t wanted the baby, so why should she feel so bereft?) that she found herself locked in a kind of war, her need to cry and her fear of crying so powerfully opposed that she gagged. She covered her ears, trying to block out Eliza’s breathing, until, gripped by a need to hear what she didn’t want to hear in order to know that she wasn’t hearing it, she would uncover her ears and Eliza’s tender wheezes would once again erupt, pulling Bea back to the baby and Vera. On it went like this, Bea covering and uncovering, sucking great breaths through her nose to block out the sound, then holding her breath to hear it, holding her breath until she heard the thudding of her own blood, echoing the lieutenant’s finish, unh unh unh.

One night she went to sleep in her brace, hoping it might hold her together, fend off the shell as it did through her days. Instead her lungs restricted, the panic arrived more quickly, evolved newly, climbed into her throat. If Eliza hadn’t shaken her, Bea might not have recognized her own voice crying out — she might have gone on shrieking. But Eliza shook her, then switched on the light above Bea’s bed. Her face was pillow creased, childish. “It’s just a dream,” she said softly. “You’ve had a bad dream.”

It was never a dream. But she couldn’t tell that to Eliza, just as she couldn’t tell it to Nurse Lugton, who came quickly with the Luminal. The crying at Radcliffe had not lasted long: the third time, Eliza brought her to the infirmary and that was the beginning of the end of Bea’s time at college.

The whistle buoy cut into her remorse, its talons ringing through her body. Again she took up the cotton balls but could not stuff them in, for the party, too, rose into her room, beckoning and taunting: “… the land I love… the home of the free and the brave!”

Bea wanted desperately at that moment to be someone who could sing badly. But she had become a temperance lady. The songs could be sung only on key. She longed for Nurse Lugton’s hands on her shoulders — or her roommate’s hands, Eliza’s strong, horsey hands — these hands or those hands, shaking her from what they assumed were dreams. How Bea wanted to be held now. She rocked with this wanting, crying for Eliza Dropstone, who had sent to Fainwright a kind, apologetic letter to which Bea did not reply, and for Nurse Lugton with her tut-tut and her Luminal, and for Emma, who had left her, and for Julian, who had moved on, and for all the women in the Quarterly, for their hypothetical friendship, yes, but more so for their lives, for all the lives that might have been hers.