Carthage (44 page)

But often it was people who knew her name—or worse yet knew her as the younger Mayfield daughter—
the ***** one.

Sometimes, her own family.

Slamming out of the house so she wouldn’t
scream.

In khaki shorts, long-sleeved T-shirt, sneakers. Loose-fitting boy-clothes, that disguised her (boy)-figure. And her hair that needed washing, brushed back carelessly behind her ears.

She was angry. But mostly, she was ashamed.

What she’d done to hurt Juliet! Ashamed.

It was a Saturday in April. A week or so after Cressida’s fifteenth birthday.

Confined inside the house practicing piano. Compulsively and without joy at the piano in the living room, in a corner of the room in which natural light rarely fell and so even at midday she had to have a lamp burning, and this too she resented. The previous afternoon she’d had her weekly piano lesson that had been a disappointment to her as—(she knew)—to her instructor Mr. Goellner; she was determined to play the Beethoven sonata smoothly, rapidly, and without errors, to surprise Mr. Goellner the following Friday, and to refute the man’s (probable) estimate of her musical skill; yet despite her ferocious concentration, and her willingness to repeat, repeat, repeat those passages of sparkling arpeggios, she kept making mistakes—striking wrong notes, losing the beat—blundering, slip-sliding, disgusting. For this was the Sonata no. 23
—
the great
Appassionata
. It was wounding to Cressida’s pride that she would never play this sonata except as a mediocre girl-pianist in Carthage might play it, though each time she struggled through it—if Zeno or Arlette were anywhere within earshot—her effort was rewarded with a wild outburst of applause.

“Cressie!
Terrific
.”

Her parents meant well of course. Her parents made a show of
loving her.

Yet she knew: their love for her was a kind of pity, like love for a crippled child, or a child dying of leukemia.

Slammed out of the house. No need to tell anyone where she was going.

Vaguely she recalled she’d promised to do something with her mother, or with her mother and Juliet—sometime that afternoon.

No one observed her bicycling out the long driveway to the street. As always when she climbed onto her bicycle Cressida took pleasure in moving so swiftly, and with so little effort.

Her legs were strong, hard-muscled. It was her chest, her shoulders, her upper body that were weak, and thin; her collarbones that showed through her skin the hue of watery milk.

At Cumberland Avenue she turned east, bicycling to the Episcopal church at the end of the block, and the beautiful old cemetery.

The cemetery was one of Cressida’s
places
. Since she’d been a child needing to slip away from her family, and hide.

Always in the cemetery she visited the old, familiar grave markers. By heart she knew the “historic” names on gravestones so very old and smooth-worn, the letters and numerals were scarcely legible.

There were
Mayfelds
in the oldest part of the cemetery, dating to the 1790s. But Zeno was convinced these were not ancestors of his since his great-grandfather Zenobah Mayfield had emigrated from northern England in the 1890s, as a young child; also, no Mayfield had ever attended the Episcopal church, so far as Zeno knew.

Cressida’s hot-beating brain slowed a bit, in the cemetery. For it was peaceful here, a secret sort of place.

She hadn’t been drawing so much, lately. Since that idiot Rickard had insulted her.

These are impressive, but—why repeat what Escher did so well?

Her mistake had been to trust her geometry teacher. Because he seemed to like her, often praised her in class and smiled at her; and laughed at her ironic remarks, murmured out of the corner of her mouth.

Because he was one of the few teachers she’d ever had, she’d thought, capable of appreciating her.

And maybe, she’d thought, he had
liked her
.

Now, that had ended. Now, she hated him.

And now, she hated geometry. She would fail to hand in homework assignments through the remaining weeks of the term, she would miss classes. Slumping in her seat staring out the window indifferent to Mr. Rickard clicking chalk against the board and asking questions which the brighter students would volunteer to answer but not Cressida Mayfield, any longer—not ever.

Curious it seemed to Cressida, in the cemetery: death was so general, and so unexceptional—death was everywhere.

And yet, death in actual life was terrible, unspeakable. Nothing mattered more than individual, unique deaths.

She found herself staring at an awful sight—a large green insect, a grasshopper, trapped and thrashing in a gigantic spiderweb, in which the carcasses of other insects were visible. How ugly! This was the sort of “biological” imagery you were spared, in the cerebral and paradoxical art of M. C. Escher.

Cressida took up a stick and smashed the spiderweb, in disgust. Where the grasshopper ended up, broken against a grave marker, still trapped in the remnants of the spiderweb, or liberated, she didn’t know.

Their mother’s mother, who’d wanted her granddaughters to call her
Grand’mère Helene
,
had died just before Christmas. Cressida had had nightmares after her death and could not now look at older, white-haired women without feeling a stab of loss. Yet, she hadn’t been able to love
Grand’mère Helene
as Juliet had loved her, and felt sick with guilt afterward; she hadn’t been able to cry, as Juliet and Arlette had cried, but, at the funeral, had gnawed at her knuckles in resentment that she had to be where she was, so confined. But
Grand’mère Helene
hadn’t been buried in the Episcopal cemetery.

Cressida could not bear to think of the circumstances of her grandmother’s death. She could not bear to think of the (future) death of her parents—Zeno, Arlette. Her brain just stopped like a garbage disposal into which a spoon has fallen. (When sulky Cressida helped clean up after mealtimes, often it happened that spoons, forks and knives slipped into the whirring blades of the garbage disposal, which wrecked them.)

She thought
It’s so far off, it will never happen. Don’t be silly!

Amid the familiar, old part of the cemetery she stood on a gravel path. She liked the newer parts of the cemetery less, though they were on higher ground, beneath tall chestnut trees at the edge of the churchyard.

Newer
meant the likelihood of seeing a surname she might recognize.

Now she spied a funeral party in the newer section, in dressy clothes.

They appeared to be strangers, which was a relief.

Hesitantly she followed the gravel path. She did not want to turn around abruptly to avoid the mourners, but she did not want to attract their attention, either.

Feeling ill-at-ease in khaki shorts, baggy T-shirt in the churchyard. Yet there was the thrill of believing herself unknown and unnamed, unrecognized.

Someday, she would go out into the world: anonymous.

But then, as if to mock her, one of the women mourners looked pointedly at her, and nodded to her.

Lifting a gloved hand, and not quite a smile.

Of course, the woman was known to Cressida: Mrs. Carlsen.

Ginny Carlsen, Patrick Carlsen’s wife. Mr. Carlsen was a business associate of Zeno Mayfield.

The Mayfields and the Carlsens were friendly acquaintances. Though the Carlsens were older than the Mayfields. Very likely, it was an older parent who’d died and whose coffin was being lowered into the earth.

How like a netted animal she felt, for a moment breathless as several other mourners looked over at her, lifted their hands in greeting.

Who is it?—the Mayfield girl. The younger one . . .

Soon then she left the cemetery, pushing her bicycle roughly along the gravel paths. Though the sky was darkening with rain clouds yet she didn’t return home but descended Cumberland Avenue in a series of hills. Much of the residential neighborhood was still undeveloped, vacant lots and woodland between properties of several acres. She knew the names of the families who lived in most of these houses but her mind had gone blank. She was feeling strangely light-headed, mildly anxious, as if she’d narrowly escaped—something.

Several of the hills were steep, glacier-hills. She had to get off her bicycle to walk it downhill. A voice like nettles in her brain—
Arlette! I saw your daughter the other day—we were at the cemetery. What a strange wild-looking girl alone and not with friends on a Saturday afternoon.

There was a phobia—
autophobia
—which meant a terror of being alone. And
isolophobia—
a terror of solitude, which came to the same thing.

Such peculiar phobias, she’d discovered:
spectrophobia
(a terror of seeing yourself in a mirror),
ornithphobia
(a terror of birds). And there was
zoophobia
(a terror of animals), and
anthrophobia
(a terror of people).

More common phobias, with which most people could identify, were
claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia
(a terror of heights).

Her heart was beating quickly, like a trapped bird’s wings. It was a kind of claustrophobia, conjoined with anthrophobia—her fear of other people, trapping her with their eyes, making a claim upon her.

Zeno had joked the other evening about the common and yet “utterly bizarre” phobia—
triskaidekaphobia—
a terror of the numeral thirteen.

Zeno liked to boast that he was without superstition as he was without any “supernatural” benefactor but most other people, including even Cressida herself, in a weak mood, were fearful of
something.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?

Worse yet: a fear of the
known
.

Cressida laughed, this was all so absurd.

Her brain was tangled and snarled like loose thread in a carpet, sucked into the spinning, wooden wheels of the vacuum cleaner.

Oh Cressida!—have you messed up the vacuum cleaner again?

One after another household task, Cressida was excused from.

It wasn’t her fault—truly! Until finally, Arlette assigned her to tasks that didn’t require close concentration but allowed her to daydream freely without disastrous results, like folding towels out of the dryer and carrying them to the upstairs closet.

Cressida climbed back on her bicycle, though the hill was still fairly steep. She’d gone out without a safety helmet: her parents would scold, if they knew.

Careless about hurting herself. Since she’d been a toddler, often she bumped into things, bruised and cut her legs. The thought came to her of a need to punish herself, for her bad behavior with Juliet, and Juliet’s friend Carly Hempel.

Shame! Shame on you Cressida Mayfield.

Your punishment is: splattered brains.

Yet a better escape would be simply to vanish.

For, if she disappeared, just never returned from this bicycle ride, who would miss her?

She’d heard them—her family—talking and laughing together, their words muffled, at a little distance, many times. When abruptly she’d gone upstairs to her room and shut the door to be alone—with her books, with her “art”—knowing that her parents and her sister were baffled by her rudeness; yet knowing that soon, within minutes, they would cease to miss her, they would forget about her, Zeno, Arlette, Juliet—relaxed and happy together.

They’d become accustomed to Cressida’s behavior, within the family. Relatives and friends understood. Allowances were made for Cressida. You wouldn’t expect Cressida to answer with a smile when she was greeted, or make eye contact with most people; you wouldn’t expect Cressida to jump up, with others, to offer to prepare a meal, drag picnic tables and benches into the backyard, set a table or clear a table.

You’d hardly expect Cressida to sit still for long enough to eat—to try to eat—a meal; you’d hardly expect her to linger after a meal, as others did, not out of obligation but because they wanted to, because they enjoyed one another’s company, and took pleasure and not pain in the presence of others.

Needing desperately to get away, and be alone. And when alone, her thoughts turning against her like maddened hornets.

Recklessly she’d bicycled downhill, into the city of Carthage. Her nostrils pinched at a smell of chemical waste, organic rot and smoldering rubber borne by the wind in this old, semi-deserted part of the city bordering the Black Snake River, that had once been an area of small factories, mills, and active warehouses. Now what remained were scattered businesses looking as if they were on the brink of bankruptcy, or beyond—gas stations, fast-food restaurants, taverns, pawnshops, bail-bondsmen,
NO WAIT CHECK CASHING OUR SPECIALTY
.

How like Cressida Mayfield, they would say, to have made her way, downhill, steeply downhill, unthinking and stubbornly,
here.

She’d made a mistake, maybe—she wouldn’t be able to bicycle back up those hills but would have to walk her bike, much of the time.

But she wouldn’t call home to ask for someone—(it would be Mom of course)—to come in the station wagon and rescue her.

Big deal if they missed her at home—if she missed whatever it was she’d miss, by not being home.

Cressida honey where were you for so long?—we were worried about you!

Did you tell me you were going for a bike ride? Did you even say good-bye?

We looked in your room, honey—we called you—I even called Marcy Meyer thinking maybe . . .

On Waterman Street there was traffic: trucks, delivery vans, rust-flecked vehicles careening along with conspicuously less concern for the well-being of a lone girl bicyclist than in the residential hills of north Carthage. Yet Cressida liked it here: this mild sensation of risk, danger, alarm as traffic passed close beside her and her bicycle jolted over railroad tracks, quick and unexpected, so that she nearly lost control of the handlebars. (She wasn’t the only bicyclist on Waterman Street: some distance ahead were several boys, lanky teenagers, who hadn’t noticed her. Maybe one of them was Kellard.)