Someday you will remember what I have told you

 

Anne brings her a cup of chocolate and the small table lamp.  Catherine scratches the guitar as though off key, striking the high notes. Nobody dares to smile.  Anne is cruel to everyone, so vain, so sensitive to slights.  Nobody has the courage to offend her.  Catherine in very good humor tells her shyly, “I am tempted to forgive you for bringing me the chocolate.” Still, there are no smiles.  During these long evenings, they sit deep in their chairs, books on knees, resting eyes, and all of their remembered afflictions.  Their feelings of what life should be most of the time outweigh the contented rest available to them.

 

Sometimes she wishes to run away, longing to run down the narrow stairs into the streets where the houses like conspirators huddle together and steady themselves.  Instead, frankly and clearly, like a good child, her knees cling together nunlike under the white pages of the book.  She feels a chill. She is often fearful, sometimes hesitating before crossing the street.  Often she says that one day she shall be killed by an automobile.  She sits quietly.  She does not run, for you see, uninvited, she has promised herself to this place.

 

What is the nature of this devotion, its motives and obligations, its coy smiles on clay-colored faces?  During her leisure, she listens to the busy important voices of those that visit: politics, repenting, indiscretions.  They are composing their memoirs as she sits quietly.  She brings the phrases up to her third floor room to write them down, just as if she was disappearing into her cell.  If the prisoners confuse night and day, they will get little rest.  For her, time does not pass.

 

She does do this: she regularly borrows money from one of the visitors.  The favor is in disputed territory and he holds the balance and kindly waits.  His exploit is his secret which one day he wants to reveal.  However, he also gives her misinformation which he begs her to repeat to certain persons.  He is generous with his money yet lies to her with candor as if he were her good friend.  Often he will go up to her with a smile that looks nice and asks, “May I sit with you?”  Or when leaving reminds her, “But you shall see me again,” and grabs at her hand.

 

She tells her nothing about any of this. She is accustomed to him; it means nothing except that he is nineteen years her senior.  He is even beginning to write poems.  She is pleasantly disturbed by the watchfulness of his hazel eyes.  She is gradually perfecting that disaster she fears even though she feels she cannot name it.  The fact is that no matter what the stranger says to her, it feels like either amazement or evil and she cannot tell the difference.

 

From all the girls—the married women, the girls in the cigarette factories, and in the picket lines, and even in the Bible meetings—she feels like the handful of small coins from a pocket.  She cannot be brought to acknowledge the benefits of freedom.  They march until they never meet. The rest depends on nothing but a faintness rising and subsiding, softly smothering the music out of it.  Someday, now seemingly distant, the edges of the sea shall be merely crashing into a separate identity.  Nothing shall survive except for the restless resistance of their own words, pale and businesslike. 

 

“Every one goes away.  He is a fool and we are well-rid of him,” she says reaching for her hat as she is about to go to the market.  She, on the other hand, goes upstairs, puts on a linen nightgown and goes to bed.  She turns her head to one side and lying perfectly still begins counting, one – two – three – four – five and so on.  Slowly she is gone and she begins to see a new country and decides to never wake up.