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'mere 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'mere 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'mere 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.) (Cressida wouldn't easily forget Kellard. Foolish to say so, but the boy had broken her heart.) (Certainly she knew: it was all so petty! It was utterly trivial, forgettable. But she would not forget.) The sharp chemical odor was becoming stronger, as Cressida made her way along Waterman Street. She was passing, on her right, a derelict railroad yard and in this yard, stretching along the river, sprawling for a quarter-mile, were abandoned box cars, a scrap heap of metal debris, piles of sinister-looking grayish gravel, or powder-a smell of nitrogen? And something sulfurous beneath.
She passed Fisher Avenue-(Booker T. Washington Middle School was a block or two away)-and now, at 200 Waterman, the beige-brick facade of Home Front Alliance-a community-service organization which operated a soup kitchen and a "store" in which impoverished, homeless individuals and entire families-("clients," as Zeno carefully called them)-were invited to shop once a month, moving along the aisles as in a grocery or a discount store, filling up a designated number of carts: one for each adult, plus another for "family." Zeno Mayfield had helped to initiate Home Front Alliance when he'd been mayor of Carthage and on the city board; he was still involved in the administration of the organization, lobbying for funds, hosting fund-raiser evenings. Of course, the Mayfield family had been involved in a number of the programs at Home Front Alliance; particularly, Arlette and Juliet continued to participate in the soup kitchen and in the store-Cressida wasn't sure how often, for Cressida had little interest in such things.
Though, initially, she'd allowed herself to be talked into coming with her family to a Home Front Alliance activity-some sort of fund-raiser involving volunteers, community organizers, church-related members, and "clients." She'd helped ladle baked ziti, covered in a molten crust of mozzarella cheese, onto paper plates, at a buffet; she'd even helped, in a trance of misery and boredom, with the massive cleanup that followed. (Noting that Zeno, MC of the evening, avoided the kitchen as if it were a place of contagion.) Then she'd slipped away to wait for her parents in their car, relieved that so many volunteers had turned out, predominantly white, educated, well-to-do women acquaintances of her parents.
Cressida teased her social-activist parents by paraphrasing a remark of W. H. Auden-"We're here on earth to help other people. But what the other people are here for, nobody knows."
Still, despite her lack of interest in Home Front, and her heartbreak over Math Literacy, Cressida hoped to do Good. She would think of the Good as a high mountain to be climbed. But a distant mountain, not in the southern Adirondacks.
Pedaling past Home Front she saw a line of people straggling into the entrance to the soup kitchen. The majority were men, probably homeless. Cressida bicycled quickly past.
Was she ashamed of herself, or-defiant? Guilty-feeling or contemptuous?
Don't care about any of you, any more than you care about me.
Why should I?
I am the ugly one.
What she'd done to Juliet's cashmere sweater, the beautiful heather-colored cardigan Grand'mere Helene had given Juliet for a birthday two years ago-she did feel ashamed of this.
With a nail scissors, cutting just a few crucial threads in the sweater, on the inside. Shivering with elation, for who would know?
Other times, Cressida erased phone messages for Juliet, if they were recorded on the family phone.
Other times, Cressida appropriated items of Juliet's-including Juliet's new, shiny little cell phone that had been a gift from their parents-and tossed them away.
Oh damn! I'm losing every-damn-thing I own, I could just cry.
And Cressie the younger sister said teasing, with her particular tormenting smile Poor Julie! Maybe you caught chemo-brain from Grandma.
(A truly nasty remark, which Juliet deflected with a startled little laugh.) (Which, if their mother had overheard, would have been shocking to her.) So frequently sick with spite, jealousy, envy of her popular-pretty sister whom all adored, and whom Cressida herself adored, Cressida found herself entering Juliet's bedroom in stealth to sit at Juliet's computer. Juliet rarely turned off her computer or quit email and so there was no difficulty getting into Juliet's computer to delete email including new messages in her in-box from friends; Cressida read her sister's correspondence with her numerous girlfriends and her boyfriend Elliot Keller-(and other boys as well, which had to be a secret from Elliot)-deleting at will, with childish satisfaction. Why should her sister have so many friends, even these shallow, silly friends, while Cressida had so few friends?-it was unjust. Particularly, Cressida resented the letters that ended with Love-for she herself rarely received emails from classmates, only just one or two girls, and in all of these there were no Loves.
A few times, Cressida employed her limited-but-lethal computer skills to muck up Juliet's files.
With the result that poor Juliet came pleading to her-Oh Cressie! Can you help me? I'm so stupid-I must have done something wrong-clicked something wrong-you won't believe it, all of my "desktop" is gone!
So Cressida took pity on her older sister. OK, hey I guess I'm the "smart one." I'll try.
Now at the intersection of Waterman and Ventor in a derelict neighborhood of warehouses fronting on the river Cressida became aware of a delivery van uncomfortably close beside her, in the street; though she was bicycling as close to the curb as possible, still the van seemed to be pressing inward, to frighten her; the driver had slowed his speed to keep pace with her, unmistakably. For, after the traffic light turned green, the delivery van didn't surge forward and leave her behind but lingered, just slightly behind her.
Was a radio turned up high, in the van? Or-was that the driver's voice Cressida was hearing, a soft low mock-caressing voice, words she couldn't decipher?
Words she didn't wish to decipher.
Cressida was so frightened, she turned the bike's handlebars sharply, and was nearly thrown from the bike as it hurtled over a curb onto a vacant lot covered in cracked and crumbling concrete, an abandoned gas station property. Scattered across the pavement were shards of broken glass, scrap metal and trash, tough little weeds poking through cracks like sinister fingers. The van driver had braked his vehicle to call after Cressida more distinctly. Hey-you li'l cunt-where're ya goin so fuckin fast li'l cunt know what?-somebody's gonna tear up ya sweet li'l ass.
Halfway Cressida had been thinking, pedaling her bicycle along Waterman, that she'd be attracting the attention of men-and of boys-and that they might be "interested" in her; as, bicycling on Cumberland Avenue, or in the vicinity of Convent Street School, she aroused the "interest" of no one. And now-a rude rebuke of her fantasy.
Maybe the man was joking. Or maybe, threatening.
In any case it was hardly flattering, this attention from a man-it was an insult, obscene and hateful.
He could see that Cressida was young. He could see that Cressida was very frightened. Trying to ignore him but increasingly nervous and self-conscious as boldly he turned his vehicle into the lot, jolting over the curb and careening through trash, leering at her through the windshield. She had a confused impression of a youngish man with a low, furrowed forehead, unshaven jaws, mocking smile-and in a panic she lost her balance, pitched forward from the bicycle and fell, hard.
On the broken and oil-stained pavement she lay sobbing, shuddering. She knew she'd cut her knee, she hoped she had not sprained or broken any bones. Her head had struck something hard. The bicycle handlebars were beneath her, jabbing her ribs. She heard a man's voice-another man?-and saw another driver braking his vehicle to a stop, on Waterman Street. A young man threw open his door, climbed out and ran toward her even as the van driver wheeled his vehicle around, in a semi-circle, to escape.
The young man called after the van driver, raising his fist.