The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

The months passed, the years. The stream rose, worried the bank, sank back. Summers it thinned to a shimmer. I was no longer the new girl. I became, if not liked, accepted. I even forged a combative sort of friendship with Dixon, often arguing with her in private over points of doctrine. It was a relief, I think, for both of us. By unspoken agreement, we took turns arguing the side of the Headmistress, so that the other might give her skepticism vent, and so stropped our tongues to a razor’s edge, which stood us in good stead in class. From time to time we broached again the topic of the racial typology of the dead, without reaching any great conclusions, except to agree that it was strange that white folk were not more fearful of the ghosts of those they had wronged. Wasn’t channeling the dead about reckoning with the past? Did they never consider, those earnest seekers who engaged our graduates, that the dead might come not in benevolence but in wrath, and shouldering aside the deceased daughters in their winding cloths, the fathers, sons, and mothers, seek the vengeance they were due? We did not acknowledge what is obvious enough in retrospect, that we took in these speculations a fearful pleasure.

(The one time I tried to raise these questions in class: “Grandison, I am grieved to find that you have adhesions.”

“Adhesions?”

“You are clinging to the small potatoes of self. Put them aside, girl.”

“Potatoes?”)

A filmmaker arrived for a visit, then moved in, bunking uncomplaining with the boys. The doctor began to dodder and acquired a protégé. We all admired Dr. Peachie, who was young and keen and flatteringly attentive to us kids. The girls in particular fluttered around him, and though his manners were unfailingly correct, I saw how his throat flushed and one knee jittered when Marigold perched on the arm of his chair, or laid a daring hand on his sleeve. Whenever he made his rounds, a group of girls would troop around after him asking questions and taking it in turns to try on his stethoscope and peep through his magnifying glass. Does it sound like I was indifferent? I was not, though both too reticent and too proud to play the coquette. One day he met my eyes where I stood on the fringe of the group, and ignoring the hands already reaching for the instrument, extended it toward me. “Would you like a try?”

Frowning, I held his gaze, trying to identify what it was I saw in it, as my hand drifted toward him. A dark space seemed to have opened up under my ribs, as though a malign sorcery had conjured away my organs. In this hollow an unfamiliar knowledge coiled and snapped.

Then the Headmistress came around the corner. “What are you doing, Grandison?” she snapped. “Let us get to work.” After that, when I saw the doctor, though my eyes tried to jump to his, I turned away. But I always knew where he was, without looking. I thought he was aware of me in the same way and that the distance we kept between us was like the space between two cupped hands that shelter a tiny flame.

Sometimes when I lay alone I allowed myself the thought of Dr. Peachie and the look he had leveled at me, and I imagined various maladies that might require me to undress myself before those eyes and take shameless positions with an inventiveness I recalled later with hot disbelief. Once I dreamed that he was capering in a scarlet union suit with a giant pair of tongs, and wagging his pointed tail at me, and that I opened my mouth willingly for the tongs. When with a yank that throbbed through my whole body he pulled out my tongue, I woke up in the thought that I had pissed myself, but it was not urine that wet my thighs.

Europe went to war; “I knew it,” said the Headmistress, when the news was brought to her, “by the souls flooding into death.” Dr. Peachie began his study of ectoplasmoglyph production, and often pulled expecting pupils into the room he called his office—though not without a wary look around, for the Headmistress regarded every glyph as a telegram from some metaphysical front, and resented any delay in its delivery. A tall, sleek girl with glossy, protuberant eyes—I think her name was Candace—got pregnant by someone she refused to name (a revolting hypothesis came to me, but I shooed it away), miscarried, and either was possessed by that tiny, speechless ghost or went mad, no one was sure. A car took her away. Another car came for a shy boy with leukemia who returned six months later, no longer shy, as a particularly plaintive and persistent ghost, availing himself of every open mouth to complain monotonously about a cold draft for a period of some months before at last falling silent.

One day the ghost of a foul-mouthed Scottish stonemason whom Chin-Sun was cultivating advised a small group of us of the exact whereabouts in nearby Greenfield of a buried boot full of money, which we duly located on one of the days off allowed to trusted senior students. Its contents, $1.83 in small change, we spent on ice cream sodas and candy.

One day Ramshead, possibly sleepwalking, drifted spectrally up the length of the dormitory to the side of my bed as I watched, then plopped on top of me, groping me here and there, and tried to put her tongue in my mouth. After a dumbstruck minute I pushed her away.

More often it was Bernadette who came, she who had struck against me in the driveway the day I came. She had grown into a long broad-shouldered girl with white eyelashes and perpetually chapped lips who produced more mouth objects than anyone. She’d sit astride me, knees pinning my nightgown to the bed, and talk in a rasping whisper as tiny wet objects fell out of her mouth onto me and I’d laugh and build stacks of them on my chest while she whispered on, a dark swaying shape, and more things dropped and knocked down my fortifications. Without knowing exactly what I was doing, I was feeling my way along a line of inquiry that seemed threaded through the pit of my stomach and thrummed tightly there. An investigation that had begun, perhaps, with that glance from the doctor. Sometimes I allowed myself to imagine that it was he who sat over me thus, and then the two figures, male and female, seemed to mingle and vie, so that it was sometimes one of them, sometimes the other, and sometimes two in one that straddled me, while I was myself but also Marigold and for fleeting moments, even the disgraced Candace. The excited ghosts shushed and tittered and whirled through and around our mouths, but oh, we living, were we not already as good as ghosts?

One day she leaned over and brought her face so close to mine that our noses bumped. Her breath was in my mouth and it made me feel fizzy and at the same time serious. Then she said something. I couldn’t hear what it was, but I felt it, a tiny object dropped into my mouth. My tongue found out the shape of it. It was only a little bigger than a tooth, but more complicated. Having it in my mouth was also complicated.

Bernadette got off and lay down beside me on her back. I sucked and wondered. The object—ectoplasmoglyph—word?—tasted salty, bready, internal. Sucking it was like being about to speak, but not knowing what you were going to say. I said to myself, It’s on the tip of my tongue. It in this case being Bernadette, but a part of her she didn’t know any better than I did. That was a different angle on knowing someone than I was used to, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. What if you knew someone’s insides so well that you forget their outside? And what if their outside was what made you want to know them in the first place? I saw the Headmistress shaking her head and saying, “Let us get to work,” and in the end I fished out the word and felt for Bernadette’s damp hand. I guess she thought for a moment that I wanted to hold hands and then felt the word there. She never came back to my bed and a month later she had graduated. On the whole, I was glad.

I pitched myself into my work. Gradually, insensibly, my Voice became my voice. In practicing hush and rueing speech, in courting trouble and shunning ease, I had built myself a home of stumbling blocks. No fiend could now pluck out my tongue, for I had plucked it out myself. But I used the absence of a tongue more ably than I had ever used the living organ.

One day, I was typing a clean copy of a letter when, without looking up from the handwritten page from which she was reading, the Headmistress said, “What do you want?”

“What do,” I typed, before I realized that the question was addressed to me. Sighing, I pulled the page out of the machine and started scrolling in a fresh one. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

Her head came up. “What nonsense. I mean what you think I mean. What do you want? To conquer death? Say bye-bye to Mama? Find yourself? Lose yourself?” Seeing my blank look, she added, “Let me make it simpler. To go home, or to leave home forever?”

Which answer would she herself give? To leave home, I thought. But hadn’t she made herself a home of the school, with herself in loco parentis?

“Both,” I finally said, because it was true. The two were even, I would later decide, the same thing. To run away from everything, even my own self, was to find a home I could never lose, because it was loss itself.