Here the cruelty of girls at school had been useful: I was already quite skilled at self-exile. My old friend Natalie and I never spoke again.
In the second week of June, Dr. Kerrow called my house. The culture from my throat had tested positive for herpes simplex virus. She was very sorry.
My mother put her back to the kitchen cabinets and slid to the floor, like her bones had gone to powder. I looked at her down there, and then I took the phone from her hand and talked to Dr. Kerrow myself. We had a cordless phone in the kitchen, so I could carry the handset into another room. I walked quickly and with purpose.
“Please, could you tell me?” I asked the doctor.
Dr. Kerrow explained. It would never go away, but after ten or twelve years, most patients found that their outbreaks ceased. I could learn over time how to stay healthy and have the least chance of discomfort. The good news was that everything else was negative, so we didn’t have to worry anymore.
“Is that why I had a fever?” I asked her. “Why I couldn’t eat?”
All of those things, she said. But my body would rarely be that sick again. That was just the initial onset of the infection. The virus would hide in my nerve endings and be reactivated periodically, but never systemically like that, and probably not as painfully.
I was pacing the border of my great-grandmother’s dining room carpet, boxing the room: wall, wall, wall, window. Wall, wall, wall, window. I asked the doctor, “Can I give it to other people?” What I was picturing when I asked this was Scotty and an ice cream spoon.
She waited a long moment. “It is contagious, yes, of course. But honestly, your infection is so far out of the way, I’m not sure how you could transmit it to someone. You’d have to really work at it, I mean, to get that deep. And I can’t imagine…”
Wall, wall, wall, window—
She said, “I don’t think you need to worry about that right now.”
“Do I need to tell people?”
Again she waited. “The only person you might tell about it, I think, is your husband.”
My eyes filled at the thought. The simple certainty the doctor evinced in saying the word.
“But,” she continued, “I need to tell someone, I’m afraid. I have to call and add this to my report.”
“The school?” I squeaked.
“No, no. The police. It’s up to you what you want to tell the school about your own health. That’s private. But I really don’t think you should hide this from them. They ought to know what’s going on on their campus.”
The disgust in her voice at the words school and campus would become familiar to me. For a long time I didn’t understand why people intoned the words this way, and I assumed it was because they thought St. Paul’s was full of snobs. Which of course it also was.
But for now, I thought it was in my control what to say about my throat. Because Natalie’s call had been simply too awful, and too extraordinary, to consider, I removed it from my consciousness, setting it aside as a curiosity, like a museum diorama: What if everyone in the world of New England boarding schools knew about this? What if saber-toothed tigers had survived? Shiver. But here in the real world, no one could know, because I myself had only just found out! Dr. Kerrow offered to see me again to discuss my throat further, if I wished. She called in a prescription to prevent future outbreaks. She told me to take good care of myself and call her anytime.
I went back into the kitchen, where my mother was still on the floor. Her face was streaked with red.
“Give me the phone,” she said, staring straight ahead. “I need to call your father. The shit is about to hit the fan.”
But my parents’ version of shit was not all that impressive, or else they didn’t have much in the way of a fan. We didn’t even have a lawyer. My father walked down the hall to the den where he kept his home office to call the vice rector and tell him this latest news.
Bill Matthews responded calmly: “How do we know she didn’t give it to the boys?”
I didn’t hear these words the moment they were spoken, but I saw my dad hearing them. His body seemed to pause in its animation, and he wore a look I had never seen before. His mouth funneled down into jowls previously invisible, and his eyes shrank not by narrowing but by deepening into his skull. I saw this look once again a few decades later, when my father was trying to handle a large and terribly anxious dog. Dad was enormously fond of this dog, had raised it, and without provocation it came back up the leash and sank its canines into Dad’s hand. I watched my father curl in pain. He made no sound. He did not discipline the dog or defend himself or even look angry. This was the way he looked after Bill Matthews said what he said.
Matthews went on. “You don’t want to go digging, Jim,” he told my father. They had not previously been on a first-name basis. “Trust me. She’s not a good girl.”
Dad ended the call.
Up in my room I wrote longhand letters to Scotty, at home in Pennsylvania. I had always wanted a love interest I could write to, and it didn’t matter to me that Scotty wasn’t the epistolary sort; there was a fair chance my envelopes were stacked up somewhere on his mother’s kitchen counter, collecting toast crumbs. I suspect I even
