Catherine House Read online

  “If you’re so scared, get rid of him,” I said. “Put him out on the lawn. No one cares.”

  Baby was breathing hard.

  “Or don’t.” I twisted on the bed, pulling the blanket up and over my head. “We could run away, you know. Us and Billie Jean. Climb over the gate, jack a car, head down to Miami Beach. Sun and sand. Nightclubs. Casinos. How about it?”

  “I’d rather die,” Baby said. “Anyway, we could never make it past the gate. We’d just end up in the tower.”

  “The what?”

  “The Restoration Center. From the video. ‘The tower’—that’s what everyone calls it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Baby was still staring at Billie Jean.

  “It was mentioned in that article last year,” she said. “The one in New York magazine, about Catherine graduates in government?”

  “I don’t know what article you’re talking about.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. Seriously.”

  Baby sat down on her bed.

  “I read everything I could about Catherine,” Baby whispered. “I always did, ever since I was a little girl. Every little newspaper article, every stupid exposé. Even the mean ones—the ones after Shiner. Those writers didn’t know anything, I could tell. I didn’t know anything, either. But I wanted to.” She lifted her chin. “No one thought I would get in, but here I am. The only girl from Lubbock admitted in years.”

  “I thought we’re not supposed to say where we’re from,” I said.

  Baby shot me a peevish look I barely noticed. A strange calm had settled over me.

  We could never make it past the gate, Baby had said. Of course we couldn’t. That was the Catherine experiment: give the house three years—three profound, total years—then become anything or anyone you want to be. Watch all your dreams come true.

  So what had M. Day called the house? A cloister—an environment of total concentration and retreat. Meaning nothing and no one was getting past that gate. No one in, and no one out.

  Three years trapped in this house.

  “Do you know what you’re going to concentrate in?” Baby said.

  I rubbed at the dry skin on my lips.

  “Ines?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what you’re going to concentrate in?”

  “Oh. No.”

  I didn’t have any dreams. Not anymore. Maybe I did before I applied to Catherine, but that was during junior year of high school. I’d been a completely different person back then. Someone much better behaved.

  Baby was still watching me with shrewdly narrowed eyes. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  “I,” Baby finally said, “am going to concentrate in new materials. You know—plasm studies?”

  I put a hand to my throat. My heartbeat was dull and low. I couldn’t tell if I was relaxed or panicking.

  “You’re probably wondering how I know I’ll get in, if it’s so selective,” Baby continued, her voice higher now. “It—has a pretty hard application process, obviously. They’ve had enough trouble with people who don’t respect the work. But my second interviewer said I’d be perfect for it. She even said she’d recommend me to the department. So.”

  “Flowers,” I said.

  Baby blinked. “What?”

  “Flowers,” I said. “Botany. I’m going to concentrate in botany.”

  “Botany?” Baby said. “Are you serious? Why?”

  I didn’t know why. I’d suddenly thought of an illustration from a book I’d read as a child. In the illustration, a fairy princess bride with glimmering white wings stood barefoot in a garden. She wore a white lace dress and a white lace veil and carried a big bouquet of gardenias, roses, and freesias. A wisteria bower arched overhead.

  I hadn’t thought of that illustration in such a long time. I couldn’t believe I even remembered it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like a nice thing.”

  “Well,” Baby said with disinterest, “too bad, because there’s no botany concentration.”

  She was staring at Billie Jean again.

  I stood up. “Let’s go to dinner.”

  She continued to stare. I touched her shoulder.

  “We’re going to be okay,” I said. “We’re going to dinner.”

  She nodded at me. I took her hand and walked her out of the room.

  *

  The next Monday, I woke up stale-mouthed and hungover in a silent bedroom. The tea tray that was delivered every morning had already been placed on our table, and one of the cups had been used. Baby’s bed was made, its thin, sun-bleached coverlet tucked in tight and the pillow fluffed. She was gone.

  I hated waking up alone.

  I got up and looked out the window. The house was too quiet today. I tapped the glass.

  Our windows faced the Molina courtyard, which was vaguely Mediterranean in design. Overgrown fig trees with broad, sallow leaves shaded potted shrubs and herbs, and tangles of weeds choked the paths. Glazed mosaicked tiles flashed eerie tones of ruby, amber, and peacock-green. In the center of the courtyard stood a long-dry fountain with a stone sculpture of a little boy cradling a turtle. His eyes were empty. Nothing moved in the windows of the surrounding buildings. No one stood on any of the green-shuttered balconies. No one was here.

  Far above Molina’s walls, the Ashley tower loomed, battlemented and black as a rook. Six black birds flew past it toward the sun.

  I tapped on the glass again, then turned from the window.

  The tea tray had already become familiar to me. It was hand-painted oily green and laden with a dull silver kettle, two mismatched porcelain cups, a canister of gray-brown coffee powder, and two tea bags in a glass jar. Some days the tray held a small blue dish of crumbly yellow cookies that tasted like margarine. There were no cookies today, but there was something else. An envelope tucked underneath the clean teacup. It was addressed to me.

  I opened it with my thumb.

  I must have registered for classes one day over the summer. I could picture that afternoon: a rumpled motel bed and muddy sneakers by the door, footsteps in the hall, my dirty hands folding open a brochure. But now I didn’t recognize any of the class names on the sheet in the envelope: Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to World Religions, Calculus I, First-Order Logic. They were listed with room numbers like AT46 and HW15 that also meant nothing to me.

  I glanced out at the rising sun. It looked to be about midmorning. Introduction to World Religions had probably started a while ago.

  I got dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and white Keds. Though we had been allowed to bring a small amount of outerwear from home, casual clothes were the same for everyone at Catherine. Our dressers had already been stocked with the Tshirts and jeans when we’d arrived, along with three identical pairs of Keds lined up in the closet, beneath a yellow slicker, a wool coat, and one black satin dress.

  I eventually worked out that AT meant the Ashley tower, and found Room 46 up four flights of dim, dank stone stairs, at the end of a skinny hallway, and through a crooked door that ached and creaked as I pushed it open. I slid into one of the empty seats in the back of the small lecture room.

  The professor glanced my way, then turned back without a reaction. She was writing on the blackboard.

  “The atman,” she was saying as she wrote, “is the individual self. The essential. That which travels through cycles of birth and rebirth. The brahman, that is, the Godhead, the ground of all being, the Universal absolute—Yes?”

  She was looking a girl in the front row who had raised her hand.

  “I thought Hinduism had, like, hundreds of gods,” the girl said. “I used to know this guy—”

  The professor raised a halting hand. The girl stopped.

  “I’d like to take this time to remind you that here at Catherine, speaking of our past lives is discouraged,” the professor said in a low voice. “This experience is about moving forward. Becoming new. We ar
e informed by our pasts, of course. But we must also learn to let these things go.”

  The boy in front of me was eating a sandwich. A ham sandwich with mayonnaise, lettuce, and cucumbers, crusts cut off. He took a crisp, crunching bite.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. He twisted around to look at me, wiping mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth.

  “Can I have a bite?” I whispered.

  He gave me a long look up and down. He handed me the sandwich.

  I took a bite. The ham was salty and deliciously cool.

  The professor was writing on the board again.

  “Hey,” the boy hissed, “give it back.”

  I took one more bite, a big one, and handed it back to him.

  “We’ll continue with Hinduism over the next couple of weeks,” the professor was saying, “before moving on to Buddhism. Please pick up your packets from the library by noon tomorrow and do remember, the first essay—”

  The girl in the front row had raised her hand again.

  “Yes?” the professor said.

  “Which of these articles are we supposed to read?” she said, gesturing to the list.

  The professor blinked. Then she said, louder, to everyone: “I realize that for some of you this is your first class at Catherine. Until today, your time in this house has been one of unending revelry.”

  She twisted the chalk between her long fingers.

  “Revelry does have a place in your education. This house may have been founded as an experiment in discipline, but that was a long time ago. We know now that if we want our students to learn and grow, and come to understand themselves in any real, happy way … we have to give you some degree of freedom. But artists and poets and presidents and justices are not born out of three years of partying. This school will teach you how to think. How to make well-considered, rigorous associations between peoples, objects, and cultures, across centuries and across the cosmos. Associations that occur not just because the drunken mind sees associations everywhere, but because our world is one of patterns. We are here to find ourselves, but ourselves as one with everything. This is what we believe in this house. This is what you will learn and trust and love for its sublime truth. But in order to understand this truth … you are going to have to work.”

  She turned to the girl who had raised her hand.

  “I expect you to have read all of those articles by our next meeting,” she said. “And I look forward to hearing your thoughts on them. After that, I will assign a new list.”

  She straightened.

  “Welcome to Catherine,” she said.

  I tapped the boy on the shoulder.

  “Can I have some more?” I whispered.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  *

  In those first weeks at Catherine, as fresh September days turned into bitter black October nights, I would lie in bed for hours memorizing our room. The maple beds with their sagging mattresses and chipped, stained headboards; the mismatched dressers; the desks, Baby’s covered with insane piles of notes in strict rectilinear piles, mine strewn with hair ties and socks. The windows with their ripped screens, the yellow tea table. My clothes, tossed on the floor, and the closet full of Baby’s neat Tshirts and coats, all hung like ghosts.

  “Why do you have a Brandeis sweatshirt?” I asked once, staring into her closet as I munched on a pear. Billie Jean was eating his snack, too. He slimed up the cabbage leaf in his tank with merry little chews.

  Baby didn’t look up at me. She was folding her laundry and stacking it in the dresser. She hesitated before saying, “It’s my sister’s.”

  “Do you like your sister?” I mumbled through the bite.

  “She’s dead.”

  I swallowed. “Sorry.”

  Baby kept folding her Tshirts. Our laundry was already folded when we picked it up, but she always redid hers.

  After a long moment, Baby said, “Do you want to know how she died?”

  “Sure.”

  She straightened her stack of shirts.

  “It was a car accident,” she said. “A really awful one. She was driving back to her dorm at Brandeis and got hit by a drunk driver. When the rescuers came, she was already dying. The last thing she said was that she’d been missing me.”

  Baby’s face was expressionless as she slipped the shirts into her drawer.

  I took another bite of pear.

  *

  One day, over a lunch of anchovy salad, I overheard a third-year trying to impress a pretty girl with his knowledge of Catherine’s history. According to his whispers, the original mansion had been built as a home for the eccentric magnate who founded the school. The grim, baroque fantasy rooms of that man’s home now made up Harrington, which housed most of Catherine’s common spaces: the great hall, auditorium, main library, and classrooms, and in the basement, the aides’ warren of operations.

  Since its founding, the house had grown like a disease, and now there were three residential halls—Harrington, Molina, and Ashley—all interconnected but distinct in architectural style. I always knew when I had crossed the threshold back into my hall, Molina. I recognized its aspects: its lacy wrought-iron balconies, Spanish red-clay roofs, shutters painted slick, theatrical green. The cavalcades of marble urns lining the corridors. I found myself wandering its distorted landscape even in my dreams. I would follow our bedroom hallway to the left, down a creaking spiral stairway, which wound down to the dank, cobwebbed laundry and cellar; to the right, the hallway led me to the parlor and morning room, and onward to a broad, liver-red travertine staircase. That staircase guided me up to a series of dusty atriums and upperclassmen bedrooms and farther, to the pavilion of windows that led to Ashley.

  Ashley was by far Catherine’s biggest hall; every time I found myself wandering its labyrinthine corridors, I felt like I might never escape. Its crooked rooms echoed with the noise of creaking panels and radiators and insane buzzing lights. But I liked making my way to the top of the seven-story Ashley tower, where I could look out over Catherine’s yard. In the northeast, browning grass rolled down to the aides’ and faculty’s towers. To the southwest were the Catherine gardens, concealed by a crumbling brick wall. Supposedly, there were storage silos and a loading dock hiding farther southeast, but that was too far for me to see.

  In every direction, everywhere, we were surrounded by woods of dense black maples and pines. The woods obscured the gate.

  I had an idea of the house. But I still didn’t see it clearly. The rooms left only hazy impressions as they sequenced one into another, parlor to dining room to stairwell to yard. I got lost. I lost things, too, like my umbrella and my class schedule. I tried to make my way to First-Order Logic and instead found myself on a bench in some blue hallway, staring out the window, feeling the house’s architecture dividing and subdividing all around me. I was haunted by the monster spread of spaces, hallways, and doors.

  Baby and I had very different schedules. Her classes, in advance of the new materials concentration, kept her in labs all day, whereas I had lost track of when and where my classes met. I spent most days in bed deliciously bored, reading Betty and Veronica comics from the Molina library, waiting for Baby to come home. When she opened the door those afternoons to find me still nestled underneath my coverlet, she would look me up and down, lips firmly pursed, but say nothing. She set to studying or brushing her hair or rearranging her collection of pencils without a word.

  The two of us, we liked not talking together.

  During the day, Baby worked hard, really hard. I had never seen anyone study so much. And at night, she cried, a lot. I wondered if she was thinking about her sister.

  Once, when Baby was crying, I crawled into bed with her. I held her as she sniffled and wept. Her body felt very human in my arms, warm and damp, but she didn’t react to my touch. It was like she didn’t feel me at all.

  *

  I could see myself in the mirror hanging on the wall in the doctor’s examination room. I was slouched a
nd skinny, yellow-skinned and bruise-eyed, my lips swollen and bitten-up raw. My hair slunk over my shoulders in slutty waves that were dark with grease; I hated washing my hair in the tub, so I didn’t. I looked beautiful. Like a rotting fruit.

  The doctor opened the door and closed it behind herself with a click. She wasn’t wearing a doctor’s coat but a black dress and black pumps, her hair wrenched into a strict chignon.

  “So,” she said as she flipped a sheet on her chart. “Ines Murillo de los … are all these names yours?”

  “You can just call me Ines.”

  She snapped the folder shut. “All right, your first annual. Any particular questions or complaints? How are you feeling?”

  “Really great,” I said. “Fantastic.”

  “How are your classes going?” She looked at me with cold, dispassionate eyes. “Are you studying?”

  Our midterm grades had come in. I didn’t even remember taking the tests. “Yes. I’m acing everything. I’m a star.”

  The doctor unwound the stethoscope from her neck and breathed on its head.

  I examined her face as she moved the stethoscope over my back. Her nose was sprinkled with pale freckles.

  She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. Its squeeze felt warm and dear, and I had the sudden embarrassing urge to cry.

  “Feeling okay?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She unwrapped the cuff and jotted down some notes. “One-oh-five over eighty. Did you smoke before coming here?”

  “Just now?”

  “No, before you came to Catherine.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have you had trouble, with the quitting?”

  “No.”

  “How are the meals treating you? Have your bowel movements been good?”

  “Yes. Really great.”

  “Sex, protected?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lean back.”

  I did.

  She palpated my lower stomach. The pain there felt like dread.

  “So, aren’t you happy to be here?” she said.

  “At the doctor?”