Sourland

I was sitting very still as if paralyzed. I was listening to the buzzing in my head. Remembering how, in the late winter of our first year of living with my aunt Georgia, Lyle and I had heard a low, almost inaudible buzzing in the plasterboard wall in our room. Above the furnace vent where, if you pressed your ear against it, you could hear what sounded like voices at a distance. My brother had thought it might be tiny people inside. I’d thought it had something to do with telephone wires. It was a warm dreamy sound. It was mixed in with our warm cozy room above the furnace, that Sonny had given up for us. Then one day Aunt Georgia told us with a look of amused disgust that the sound in the wall was only flies — “Damn flies nest in there, hatch their damn eggs then start coming out with the first warm weather.” And so it had happened one day a large black fly appeared on a windowpane, then another fly appeared on the ceiling, and another, and another until one balmy March morning the wall above the furnace vent was covered in a glittering net of flies so groggy they were slow to escape death from the red plastic swatter wielded in my aunt’s deft hand.

“You were one of them, Aimee. Weren’t you.”

This wasn’t a question but a statement. There was no way to defend myself except to shake my head, no. Dean Chawdrey said in the way of a lawyer summing up a case, “How would you know, otherwise? And until now, for some quaint reason, you haven’t come forward as you’d pledged you would do. What you’ve alleged, because it’s unprovable, is dangerously akin to slander. Mr. Werth will have to be informed. His integrity has been impugned, too.”

I said, faltering, “But, Dean Chawdrey — ”

“The only person who has reported cheating at midterms is you, Aimee,” Dean Chawdrey paused, to let that sink in. “Naturally, we have to wonder at your involvement. Do you claim that, since coming to the Amherst Academy, you have never participated in ‘cheating’? — in any infraction of the honor code?”

It was as if Dean Chawdrey was shining a flashlight into my heart. I had no defense. I heard myself stammer a confession.

“…sometimes, a few times, freshman year, I helped other girls with their term papers. I guess I helped my roommates earlier this fall, with…But I never…”

“‘Never’ — what?”

I lowered my head in shame, trying not to cry. I could not comprehend what had gone wrong yet I felt the justice of it. Honor was a venomous snake that, if you were reckless enough to lift by its tail, was naturally going to whip around and bite you.

The rest of the visit passed in a blur. Dean Chawdrey did all the talking. You could see that the woman was skilled in what she was doing, other girls had sat in the chair in which I was sitting and had been severely talked-to, many times in the past. Behind the rimless bifocals, Dean Chawdrey’s eyes like watery jelly may have glittered in triumph. Her flat, nasal voice may have trembled with barely restrained exhilaration but it was restrained, and would remain restrained. I heard myself informed that I would be placed on “academic probation” for the remainder of the term. I would be summoned to appear before the disciplinary committee. More immediately, Dean Chawdrey would notify the headmistress of the Academy about my allegations and the confession I’d “voluntarily made” to her, and the headmistress would want to speak with me and with a parent or legal guardian, before I could be “reinstated” as a student. The buzzing was subsiding in my head, I knew the visit was ending. The terrible danger was past now that the worst that could happen had happened. I saw Dean Chawdrey’s mouth moving but heard nothing more of her words. Behind the woman’s large head an oblong-shaped leaden window glared with the sullen rain-light of October. It was no secret that the Dean of Students wore a wig that fitted her head like a helmet: the color of a wren’s wet feathers, shinily synthetic, bizarrely “bouffant.” Her right hand lay flat on my letter, that incriminating piece of evidence, as if to prevent me from snatching it away if I tried. I gathered my things, and stood. I must have moved abruptly, Dean Chawdrey drew back. I tried to smile. I had seen Momma smiling in a trance of oblivion not knowing where she was, what had been done to her or for her sake. I seemed to be explaining something to Dean Chawdrey but she did not understand: “It was a test, wasn’t it — ‘promtly.’ To see if I would say something. The misspelling. ‘Promptly.’” Dean Chawdrey was staring at me in alarm, with no idea what I meant. I turned and ran from the room. In the outer office, the Dean’s secretary spoke sharply to me. Under my breath I murmured Get the fuck away. In my stocking feet (I’d had to kick off my muddy boots in the vestibule of the administration building, all this while I’d been facing the Dean like a child in dingy white woollen socks) I ran down a flight of stairs, located my fallen boots covered in mud and bits of hay and kicked my feet back into them. I ran outside into the rain, across a patch of hay-strewn muddy lawn that sucked at my feet with a lewd energy. Somehow, it had become dusk. The edges of things were dissolving like wet tissue. A harsh wind blowing east from Lake Erie tasted of snow to come that night but for the moment it continued to rain as it had rained for days. Raveling-out was my word for this time of day, after classes, before supper. Neither day nor night. I thought of my aunt Georgia in the days before her son had been taken from her humming to herself as she’d unraveled knitting, cast-off sweaters, afghans, energetically winding a ball of used yarn around her hand. My aunt would use the yarn again, nothing in her household was discarded or lost. I would pack my things while the other girls were in the dining hall. What I wished to take with me of my things, my clothes, a few books to read on the bus, not textbooks but paperbacks, and my notebooks, my journal to which I trusted the myriad small secrets of my life in full knowledge that such secrets were of no more worth than the paper, the very ballpoint ink, that contained them. In a flash of inspiration I saw that I would leave a message of farewell on the pillow of my neatly made bed for my roommates and I would leave the residence hall by a rear door and no one would see me. I would never see them again, I thought. Aloud I said, preparing the words I would write: “I will never see any of you again.”

No time to dawdle! This is an emergency.

I had money for a bus ticket, even a train ticket. I had money to escape.

This was money scrupulously saved from the allowances my aunt Agnes sent me to cover “expenses” at the Amherst Academy. And money from Momma, five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills enclosed as if impulsively in jokey greeting cards. Lyle & I say hello & love & we miss you. Your MOMMA. I’d hardened my heart against my mother but I’d kept the money she sent me, secreted away in a bureau drawer for just such an emergency.

It was my cousin Sonny I wanted to see. Somehow, I’d become desperate to see him. Not my aunt Agnes who loved me, not my mother who claimed to love me. Only Sonny whom I hadn’t seen in almost five years and who never replied to my letters and cards. I’d been told that in September, when he’d turned twenty-one, Sonny had been released into a probationary work program and was living in a halfway house in Chautauqua Falls. Momma had sent me the address and telephone number of Seneca House, as the place was called, saying she hadn’t had time to see Sonny yet but she meant to take the trip, soon. Sonny’s work was something outdoor like tree service, highway construction — “That boy was always so good with his hands.”

Momma was the kind of woman who could say such a thing in utter unconsciousness of what it might mean to another person. And if you’d indicate how you felt, Momma would stare in perplexity and hurt. Why, Aimee. You don’t get that sarcastic mouth from your mother.

The Greyhound bus that passed through Chautauqua Falls didn’t leave until the next morning so I hid away, wrapped in my raincoat with the hood lowered over my face, in a corner of the bus station. This night unlike any other night of my life until then passed in a delirium of partial sleep like a film in which all color has faded and sound has been reduced to mysterious distortions like waves in water. In the morning it was revealed that a gritty snow had fallen through the night, glittery-white like scattered mica that melted in sunshine as the bus lumbered into the hilly countryside north and east of Buffalo. Repeatedly I checked the address I had for Sonny: 337 Seneca. I hadn’t yet written to Sonny at this address, discouraged by his long silence. It was sad to think that it was probably so, as my mother had said, Sonny’s writing skills were crude and childlike and he’d have been embarrassed to write to me. I had the telephone number for the halfway house but hadn’t had the courage to call.

My fear was that Sonny wouldn’t want to see me. There was a rift between Momma and the Brandts, I didn’t fully understand but knew that I had to share Momma’s guilt for what she’d caused to happen in Sonny’s life.

I stored my suitcase and duffel bag in a locker in the Chautauqua Falls bus station. I located Seneca Street and walked a mile or so to the halfway house address through an inner city neighborhood of pawnshops, bail-bond services, cheap hotels, taverns and pizzerias and X-rated video stores. In the raw cold sunlight everything seemed heightened, exposed. I felt the eyes of strangers on me, and walked quickly, looking straight ahead. Seneca House turned out to be a three-story clapboard house painted a startling mustard yellow. Next door was Chautauqua