The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

  In desperation running ahead of Helen, who could not keep pace with me. Leaving Helen behind, abandoning Helen.

  I told Cynthia that the most dangerous abuse hadn’t been directed toward me or the other young girls but toward a boy a few years older named Hendrik who had weak eyes and wore glasses: they’d rolled him in the leaves so that the leaves would get in his eyes. I told her that because I could run faster than the other girls, the boys sometimes chased me in particular—“But it was more like ‘teasing’ then. I think you would call it that.”

  How pathetic this sounded. More like teasing. I think you would call it that.

  My voice was trembling. I had never told anyone these things before and seemed unable to stop as if my words were a way of helpless sobbing. As I spoke in the darkness of this unfamiliar bedroom—to a girl whom I did not really know, and could not really trust—I realized how astonished I was that this harassment of my childhood, protracted over months and even years, had actually happened to me, and that in some way I had learned to accept it, with the fatalism of a child who sees no way to alter things and so must alter her perception.

  Cynthia was indignant on my behalf. She asked what on earth the teacher had been doing—or had not been doing—to allow such bullying and abuse in the school yard, and I said that the boys attacked us along the road, on the way home from school mostly, not usually in the school yard within view of the windows. She asked if I’d told my parents and I said yes. And my parents came to speak with our teacher Mrs. Dietz. And possibly, following that meeting, the harassment abated—for a while. But the problem was that Mrs. Dietz herself was intimidated by the older boys who were essentially unteachable. And several were taller than she, heavier, and physically threatening. How the poor woman had managed to confront such antagonism in the classroom, week following week, for years, I have no idea. By the time I’d enrolled in the school, Mrs. Dietz had been teaching there for at least fifteen years. I can shut my eyes and see her tall sturdy figure, flushed face and disheveled hair, but when I try to hear her voice there is only a muffled murmur.

  Forgive me but I tried. I tried to do my best. Tried to be the best teacher in those terrible circumstances that I could be.

  When the harassment began again, and became more physical and threatening, I could not bring myself to tell my parents a second time. Instead, I lingered inside the schoolhouse with Mrs. Dietz, until (sometimes) the danger was past. (For the older boys could not linger after school long, they were expected to return home to work.) I learned to run—very fast. I learned to run faster than other children like Helen Judd, who could not so easily escape our tormentors. I learned to run and to feel the intense excitement of such running which may become identical with exhilaration. Nor was the bullying constant, rather only intermittent. You learned to rejoice that another, more vulnerable and more accessible victim might appear. There are stratagems of survival we discover young that become so second-nature to us it is possible to forget that they are stratagems of survival at all.

  Cynthia marveled that I’d gone to a one-room schoolhouse at all—“Like something on the frontier. Eight grades in one room!”

  I told Cynthia of other girls in the school. Of Helen Judd and her sisters whose father had (allegedly) abused them. And possibly oth ers had abused them—the older brothers, the father’s friends. I told Cynthia of the house fire, the arson. I did not tell Cynthia that Helen Judd had once been my friend but referred to her as a “neighbor girl.” (I no longer saw Helen, for she lived in Lockport and must have attended Lockport High School.) Helen Judd had never “told”—not anyone. As her mother had never told police of what her husband had done to her and the children. No one could accuse Helen Judd of trying to get anyone in trouble, blaming others, snitching on others for something that had happened to her.

  “Was she pregnant? The girl? Did they—make her pregnant?”

  This was an unexpected question. I had not ever thought of the possibility of Helen Judd pregnant.

  “N-No.”

  “No? But how would you know—absolutely?”

  Absolutely? I had no idea what Cynthia meant.

  Later I would surmise that she was referring to an abortion, or a miscarriage. The neighbor-girl might have been pregnant and the pregnancy ended and I could not have known, for how could I have known.

  “Things like that could be reported to the police,” Cynthia said, thoughtfully. “If they happened to someone here . . .”

  She was thinking of how, in the rural north country, different and cruder standards prevailed. In her genteel suburban village no girl could be so badly treated.

  “What did she look like—‘Helen Judd’?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Why do you say you don’t know?”

  Cynthia was becoming impatient with me. It was inevitable, Cynthia often became impatient with her girl friends—even Lee Ann Krauser whose way of contending with Cynthia’s ill humor was to laugh at her and call her Heik-ee with a pronounced Germanic accent. But I could not laugh at Cynthia. I had not that power.

  I could not think how to reply. It did not seem relevant to me what Helen Judd looked like, only what Helen Judd had endured. But I could not tell Cynthia this, for Cynthia seemed angry with me.

  My hesitancy, my indecisiveness—others interpreted as obstinacy. My occasional shyness, others misinterpreted as aloofness.

  Cynthia persisted: “She wasn’t freaky-looking, was she? Like me?”

  “No! She was not.”

  “And me? What about me?”

  “For God’s sake, Cynthia. You are not ‘freaky-looking.’”

  In the darkness Cynthia laughed loudly. She was making no attempt to keep her voice down. I was in dread of her parents hearing her through the walls, in their bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Mrs. Heike would come to the door, and knock softly. Mrs. Heike would murmur through the door—Cynthia? Joyce? Is something wrong?

  Or rather, she would not come to the door. Cynthia’s mother was wary of Cynthia, I’d noticed. A tense veiled gaze, a hesitant smile—Mrs. Heike was conditioned not to press her high-strung daughter too far.

  Before I’d known Cynthia Heike well, when I’d seen her from a little distance I had wondered if her back were somehow misshapen; one of her shoulders appeared to be higher than the other, and she walked just slightly oddly, dragging one of her feet. And her left eye seemed not quite in focus so that you looked from one eye to the other, disoriented, uncertain where to look. In gym class Cynthia was one of those girls last-chosen for teams for she lacked what is called hand-eye coordination: where another girl might snatch a basketball out of the air, or strike a volleyball with just enough force to propel it across the net at a shrewd angle, Cynthia would fumble the ball hopelessly, as a young child might do, biting at her lower lip and flushing with embarrassment and frustration.

  But when I’d come to know Cynthia better, I seemed scarcely aware of her “twisted” spine. When I spoke to Cynthia I knew to look into her right eye, not her left eye. Her strong personality, her presence among others, her quicksilver wit and sardonic smile so dominated, you would not think—That poor girl! There is something wrong with her.

  It is true that in gym class as in the school swimming pool I managed to avoid Cynthia Heike. This was not difficult, for Cynthia herself held back, reluctant to be involved, resentful. Often she did not attend swim classes at all, with an excuse from her mother. In such circumstances there is invariably a small cadre of girls for whom athletics is anathema as there is a small cadre of girls for whom athletics is a great pleasure, and competition exciting and not fraught with anxiety, and these cadres rarely overlap.

  I tried to convince Cynthia that she was mistaken about herself, and should not say such things. And Cynthia said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “Would you change places with me, then?”

  The possibility filled me with anxiety. Of course not! No.

/>   “I—I would change places with you—of course. Your life, your parents—your musical talent . . .”

  “But you’d have to be in my body. What about that?”

  It was a rude unanswerable question. I was too young and too intimidated by Cynthia to think of a witty rejoinder, as Lee Ann Krauser might have in my place.

  Cynthia could not know that the fantasy often came to me, that I might change places with another girl my approximate age: the next girl who came into my line of vision, the next girl who turned a corner. If I entered a room at school—if I hurried up a flight of stairs. If, closing my locker, I turned to see . . .

  Of course, I didn’t mean it. The thought of losing my parents and my grandmother whom I loved, and who loved me, filled me with horror.

  And yet. The fantasy of becoming another was fascinating to me at this uncertain time in my life.

  By the time I managed to stammer a reply to Cynthia’s accusation I had waited too long. She said, “Thank you for not lying to me, Joyce. You’re the only damn one who doesn’t.”

  With a snort of derision Cynthia turned over in her bed.

  12.

  IT WAS TRUE, CYNTHIA Heike was afflicted with a curvature of the upper spine severe enough to require (as she told me, with a bitter laugh) a brace. She’d worn a “goddamned brace like a harness” prescribed by a Buffalo orthopedist, intermittently for years, for part of each day; it had been her father who’d insisted, and who had taken her to a number of specialists; for a while, he’d considered the possibility of surgery.

  “He knows a freak when he sees one. ‘A. Emmet Heike, M.D.’”

  Once, I’d had a glimpse of Cynthia’s naked back. It looked as if the upper spine had melted beneath the skin and fallen back upon itself. Cynthia had learned to compensate for the deformity by favoring her right side and by wearing oversized, boxy clothing that hid too her flat chest, thick waist and thighs. Her arms and legs were covered in coarse dark hairs. On her upper lip was a faint dark mustache. Her left eye was weak-muscled and “wandering.” Her eyelids were prominent, giving her a languorous, sleepy look at odds with her sharp eye and sharper tongue; in the proper lighting, Cynthia was very handsome. Her mouth was small, perfectly chiseled. Her nose was wide at the tip, and her nostrils flared. Memorably Cynthia said, with a mock pout to make us laugh: “If I were a guy I’d be good-looking. But I’m not a guy. I guess.”

  One day in swim class something terrible happened. A silly girl swam beside Cynthia in the shallower end of the pool and tried to “ride” her—pulling herself onto Cynthia’s twisted back in a foolish prank that precipitated a panic attack in Cynthia causing her to swallow water, choke, nearly drown.

  Why would anyone do such a thing, it was asked. Not in malice, not to be cruel, just “playful”—mistaking Cynthia Heike for a girl without a handicap, as Cynthia Heike took such pains to disguise her condition. (Cynthia could not swim except by placing her feet on the bottom of the pool and pushing off for brief, fluttering seconds when her strong arms flailed like windmills and her legs kicked frantically. Almost you would think, witnessing this, that Cynthia was “swimming.”)

  Was I there that day? I think that I was, in the deeper end of the pool. I was one of the tireless divers in my high school swim classes for I’d learned young to swim and dive, at Olcott Beach. To keep in motion has always been an ideal. The commotion in the shallow end of the pool had been distracting but it hadn’t been until afterward that I learned what had happened. My first reaction had been resentment, that that girl (who was not a friend of Cynthia Heike) could have presumed such familiarity with my friend.

  13.

  ASSIDUOUSLY WE PRACTICED THE Bach/Schumann piece vfor the spring recital. Each alone, and at Cynthia’s house after school. Weeks in succession.

  At home on our dull-toned upright piano that made me impatient, its tones were so dull and shallow. Several keys stuck. I complained that the piano needed tuning and my father said affably that that was so, the piano needed tuning.

  The implication being So much else in our lives need tuning. And—so what?

  Mrs. Heike sometimes listened to Cynthia and me practicing, for a few minutes at least; Dr. Heike, rarely. For Dr. Heike came home late, sometimes missing dinner. (That is, dinner at home. Obviously Dr. Heike was not missing dinner elsewhere.) Cynthia played the violin with a kind of anxious ferocity, biting her lower lip. She was impatient with me when I faltered at the keyboard striking a note too hard or too softly or hesitating, missing the beat. A true musician never “misses a beat”—an essentially untrainable musician has but a blind (or deaf) notion of what a “beat” is. Under the pressure of such practice, I’d begun to sweat inside my clothes. I had come to dread the practice sessions with my friend even as I yearned to please her. For Cynthia could be generous with praise—“That was perfect! Just the right tone, and volume. Thank you.”

  Impulsively Cynthia hugged me. Her grip was hard, her breath against my face. I could not embrace her in turn, I was too taken by surprise. Yet I recall her twisted spine against my hands, so strangely. I am sure, I recall this.

  Both my parents and my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern planned to attend the recital. My grandmother would take the Greyhound bus to our house in Millersport, and from there my father would drive us to the high school. Grandma, who was a skilled seamstress, was sewing a navy blue jumper and a white silk blouse for me from a Butterick pattern.

  In anticipation of the audacity of what I was undertaking to do, playing piano in front of an audience, I had begun to sleep poorly. I would wake in the middle of the night and lie with my eyelids shut tight and trembling. My fingers ached for I’d been playing the Schumann composition in my sleep like a frenzied automaton, unable to stop. My fingers were claws, cramped with pain. Just the other side of an assiduously executed piano piece by any young person lies madness.

  At the piano, a mist came over my brain. I had difficulty focusing my eyes. My fingers were damp and numb; desperately I rubbed them together to restore heat and agility. The cruel thought haunted me—You will make the same mistake you made in sixth grade. You will forget the ending and will just play and play like a robot. And they will all laugh at you.

  I tried to take solace in the fact (many times told me) that an accompanist need only be adequate—“No one will hear if you make a mistake, Joyce.”

  A mistake! In the singular?

  “HEL-LO! IS IT—JANICE?”

  “Joyce, Daddy! You’ve met.”

  “Yes! Yes indeed, we have met.”

  Merrily Dr. Heike extended his hand to shake mine. His grip was hard, punishing. He seemed to take pleasure in making me uncomfortable as a way of teasing his daughter.

  Dr. Heike was the first person with whom I’d shaken hands. The first adult. The handshake had been unavoidable.

  Tonight Dr. Heike came to the dinner table a half-hour late. He had been expected at seven o’clock, now it was seven-thirty. He was a large man, jolly, hearty, but absentminded, smiling and indifferent. When he was in a good mood, he laughed. But when he was annoyed and irritated, he also laughed. A gold pin of some kind, small, sword-shaped, glittered in his left lapel.

  A money person. What would he want with you?

  There appeared to be some tension between Dr. Heike and Mrs. Heike which no one wished to acknowledge for when Dr. Heike stooped to kiss the cheek of his wife, who was seated, Mrs. Heike turned her head away with pained pursed lips; but Dr. Heike merely laughed, and rubbed his hands together. Cynthia had said that her father was an oncologist: cancer? Those eyes gleaming with merriment, those fat hands—cancer? How was this possible? Invariably when Dr. Heike entered a room the air was stirred and roused as with many small whirlwinds. You understood that Dr. Heike was the father of the family and much adored. You had always to acknowledge the father at the center of the room for even when you avoided his moist merry staring eye, you were acknowledging him. And there was a woman helper in the Heike household with whom Dr.
Heike was on teasing terms that made her blush and stammer in confusion: “Jad-wiga, please say hello to our guest, too! In English, please—‘Hel-lo.’” A Polish girl, thick-thighed, about twenty-nine years old, Jadwiga was the first household servant I’d seen in actual life though servants were commonplace in Hollywood movies where they were invariably black.

  I had not told my parents that the Heikes had a servant. I knew that my father would make a cutting remark about this and that my mother would recall how before I’d been born she’d done housework for a well-to-do family on Washburn Street, Lockport.

  “Jad-wiga” was a name that seemed to amuse Dr. Heike for he used it several times, always enunciating it carefully. You would think that Jadwiga had no last name.

  This was the evening when Dr. Heike asked me what was happening in the “north country” and when I told him that not much was happening he’d shocked me, and others at the table, by saying, “Hell, no. That is not true, my girl. There is much going on in your part of the county. In the Buffalo Evening News I read an article about a fire in Clarence, and two small children killed. And arson is suspected.”

  I was so surprised by Dr. Heike’s hostile tone that I sat unmoving at the dinner table, unable to reply.

  Out of nowhere had come this attack. As soon as Dr. Heike had settled into his dinner, conversation had seemed ordinary, even dull; the Heikes had been talking together about some domestic incident, and I had scarcely listened. But now, I was stricken to the heart.