Naturally, they wanted to know what interested someone as offbeat as I was. What does she like? Does she have a boyfriend? Did she ever have one? Is she gay? What makes her so quiet most of the time? What does she really think of the rest of us? Is she just a rich snob? Does she do anything strange, anything at all that frightens you?
Most of all, they wondered why Ellie didn’t ask to be transferred to another room. Of course, I wondered about that myself, but it wasn’t long before I thought I knew the answer. I never did anything to make her feel uncomfortable. I didn’t take up more room than I should. I didn’t dominate our closets or dressers or bathroom cabinets the way some of the other girls did to their roommates. I was willing to share anything of mine with her. I certainly didn’t keep her up at night talking in my sleep or complaining about the school and the other girls, which was what many of the girls suspected.
“After all, she’s mental,” I actually overheard a girl named Pamela Dorfman tell Ellie. “She confessed that she had and probably still has deep-seated psychological problems, didn’t she? She’s scary. Maybe she’ll smother you in your sleep one night. I’d be afraid to room with her.”
Natalie Roberts went so far as to nickname me Norma Bates, a play on the name Norman Bates from the movie Psycho. To her credit, Ellie always came to my defense, but not so strongly as to alienate herself from the other girls on my behalf. There was a limit to loyalty, especially loyalty to someone she had only met here and probably would never see again after graduation, which was now only a few months away.
There were other reasons she didn’t desert me. Ellie was the youngest in a family with three other children, another girl and two boys. From the way she described her siblings, I understood that they usually overwhelmed her. “Trampled me,” was the way she put it. She had had to fight to get a word in at dinner, had often been teased and criticized, and had always been the recipient of hand-me-downs.
“My sister would get new things, and I always got what she no longer wanted or what no longer fit her perfectly,” she told me with bitterness. “‘Nothing should be wasted’ meant I got the used stuff.”
Ellie came right out and confessed to me that she saw herself as Cinderella without the pumpkin and especially the glass slipper. “How would you like growing up in a family like mine?”
She claimed her parents always favored her older sister, Laura, and her two brothers, Jack and Ray.
“I was at the bottom of the totem pole when it came to anyone in my family caring about what made me happy,” she said. “Sometimes I felt invisible. You know what I mean? I’d talk, but no one would pay attention. Actually,” she added in a whisper, “I think I was the only one of us who was not planned, and you know what happens then.”
“What?” I asked, interested in the answer for obvious reasons.
“The man blames the woman, and the woman resents it and the child as well.”
I didn’t openly disagree with her, but I didn’t believe that was always the case.
Because I talked so little about my family and because she thought asking too many questions would only stir up my sorrow, Ellie talked for hours about herself and her family. In a few short months, I knew whom she’d had crushes on as far back as grade school, including teachers; what her first sexual experiences had been like; and a list of her favorites from ice cream to movie stars and singers. I quickly understood that I had become her longed-for audience. In our room, she did not have to fight to get a word in or dominate a conversation. In fact, she soon felt very comfortable spewing out her anger at and her unhappiness with her parents and her brothers and sister. We hadn’t been together a full week before she revealed her secret, the reason her parents wanted her in a well-supervised school.
Ellie had been a kleptomaniac and had been arrested a number of times, but her secret mental diagnosis concluded that her compulsive behavior was not because of some uncontrollable obsession with stealing but because of her deep-seated need for attention.
“My parents were told they were lucky I hadn’t turned to nymphomania instead,” she said with that thin, evil little laugh she sometimes used to punctuate the ends of sentences. “Little do they know.”
“I’m glad you don’t live in Kentucky and frequent the Heaven-stone Department Stores,” I told her. “We’d be bankrupt.” She loved that. I hadn’t ever thought I was good at dry, sarcastic humor, but Cassie was at my ear prompting me. It was as if she had gotten into my head somehow and, like some traffic cop for thoughts, could direct and redirect ideas. Why I was so good at it didn’t matter. I simply was, and Ellie enjoyed my biting remarks, especially when directed at some of the other girls.
So, with my unselfish manner, my willingness to be her audience and her sounding board, and my occasional witty remarks, Ellie was quite comfortable. As it turned out, that was fortunate for me in another, bigger way, too. She would point me at the first boy who sparked any romantic interest in me since my tragedies, but that wasn’t to come without cost. Nothing came to me without cost, despite what everyone thought abo
ut my being from such a wealthy, powerful, and famous Kentucky family. In this case, the price was the end of my relatively close relationship with Ellie, the only person other than my uncle Perry and my father with whom I had become in any way close. I should have anticipated it. Cassie had warned me.
Feminine Gunslingers
ONE OF THE many lessons my sister, Cassie, had taught me related to what she called feminine gunslingers.
“Don’t believe in this myth about your best girlfriend, Semantha. I’m your best girlfriend, because I’m not in any competition with you for any man and never will be. I’ll never be jealous of your beauty, but every girl you meet will see you as a threat. When you walk into a room, they’ll eye you up and down just the way gunslingers eyed their competition.”
“Why?” I asked. “I won’t try to steal away their boyfriends. I would never do that.”
Cassie laughed. She loved to laugh and raise her arms as if we were having these conversations in front of a big audience, and she could turn to them and say, “Do you all see this? See how much she needs me?”
“You don’t have to want to steal away their boyfriends, Semantha, but that won’t stop their boyfriends from looking at you with more interest and excitement than they look at their girlfriends. You’re beautiful. But more important, the girls won’t believe you’re not trying to steal their boyfriends away. They’ll watch every move you make, and I mean every move—the roll of your eyes, the swing of your hips, and the softness in your voice. They’ll compare themselves to how you wear your makeup, what outfit you have on, shoes, jewelry, everything!”
“Well, what should I do?” I asked her.
“Nothing. There’s nothing to do. I’m telling you all this so you won’t expect any real favors from any so-called best friend, Semantha. Just don’t be naive, and above all, never trust any other girl but me.”
I had swallowed what she told me and reluctantly digested it because I didn’t want to believe these things. Surely, there was someone out there, maybe a number of girls, who would be like a sister to me someday, a girlfriend I could trust and who really cared about me. The world Cassie was describing was far too lonely for me. She was comfortable in it, but I knew I would never be.
However, in my private high school, Cassie’s warnings seemed justified. I did seem to be threatening to some girls, and not only because of any psychological history. I’d really never had a best friend in the public high school I’d attended. I suppose I could easily explain my low level of popularity now by saying I was still fresh from all the tragedy and still quite emotionally wounded. Dr. Ryan said I was simply and clearly terrified of any relationships. Cassie’s betrayals had wounded me too deeply and left large scars. A friendly word, a soft touch or smile, actually frightened me. I fled from friendships and especially avoided relationships with boys.
“None of this will ever completely go away, Semantha,” Dr. Ryan said. “What we have to work on with you are ways to help you live with it so that you can assume a somewhat normal life.”
I always wondered what he meant by “somewhat.” How far from normal would I be? And who would want to be with someone who could never be completely normal? Who would put up with my introverted ways, my fears, my unexpected and unexplainable cloudbursts of tears? What man would want someone who never held his hand as tightly as he held hers or returned a kiss without some skepticism? I would surely grow old wearing the invisible banner that read: Teddy Heaven-stone’s Emotionally Crippled Daughter. If you know what’s good for you, stay away.