Carrie Chapter Two

Im sure shell be all right, she verbalize. Carrie unaccompanied has to go everywhere to Carlin pathway. The odoriferous air will do her good.Morton gave the girl the yellow slip. You can go now, Cassie, he say magnanimously.Thats non my name she screamed suddenly.Morton recoiled, and Miss Desjardin jumped as if struck from behind. The heavy ceramic ashtray on Mortons desk (it was Rodins Thinker with his head sour into a receptacle for cigarette alonets) suddenly cash in ones chipspled to the rug, as if to take cover from the force of her scream. howeverts and flakes of Mortons pipe tobacco disperse on the pale-green nylon rug.Now, listen, Morton said, onerous to muster sternness, I know youre upset, provided that doesnt mean Ill stand for-Please, Miss Desjardin said quietly.Morton blinked at her and because(prenominal) nodded curtly. He tried and true to project the image of a lovable John Wayne convention while performing the disciplinary functions that were his ma in job as Assistant Principal, but did not survive very well. The administration (usually repre displaceed at Jay Cee suppers, P.T.A. functions, and American Legion award ceremonies by Principal hydrogen Grayle) usually termed him lovable Mort. The student body was more apt to term him that crazy ass-jabber from the office. unattackablely, as just ab break through students such as Billy deLois and Henry Trennant spoke at P.T.A. functions or town meetings, the administrations view tended to rescue a bun in the oven the day.Now lovable Mort, cool itness secretly nursing his jammed thumb, smiled at Carrie and said, Go along then if you like, Miss Wright. Or would you like to sit a spell and just collect yourself?Ill go, she muttered, and swiped at her hair. She got up, then looked most at Miss Desjardin. Her eyes were wide open and dark with knowledge. They laughed at me. Threw subjects. Theyve always laughed,Desjardin could only look at her helplessly.Carrie left.For a mome nt t here was silence Morton and Desjardin watched her go. Then, with an awkward throat-clearing sound, Mr Morton hunkered scratch off carefully and began to queer together the debris from the hark backen ashtray.What was that all ab step forward?She sighed and looked at the drying maroon peck-print on her shorts with distaste. She got her period. Her offset period. In the set uper.Morton cleared his throat again and his cheeks went pink. The sheet of paper he was sweeping with moved all the same faster. Isnt she a bit, uh-Old for her first? Yes. Thats what made it so traumatic for her. Although I cant understand why her fuck off The thought trailed off, forgotten for the moment. I dont think I handled it very well, Morty, but I didnt understand what was termination on. She thought she was bleeding to death.He jumper leaded up sharply.I dont believe she knew at that place was such a thing as menstruation until half an hour ago.Hand me that superficial brush at that plac e, Miss Desjardin. Yes, thats it. She handed him a little brush with the legend Chamberlain Hardware and Lumber Company NEVER Brushes You Off written up the handle. He began to brush his pile of ashes on to the paper. Theres still going to be whatever for the vacuum cleaner, I guess. This deep pile is miserable. I thought I set that ashtray back on the desk further. period of lay come forthny how things fall over. He bumped his head on the desk and sat up abruptly. Its hard for me to believe that a girl in this or any other high school could get through three divisions and still be alien to the fact of menstruation, Miss Desjardin.Its compensate more difficult for me, she said. barely its all I can think of to explain her reaction. And shes always been a group s crownegoat.Urn. He funnelled the ashes and butts into the wastebasket and dusted his hands. Ive placed her, I think. White. Margaret Whites daughter. Must be. That makes it a little easier to believe. He sat down behi nd his desk and smiled apologetically. Theres so many of them. afterward(prenominal) five years or so, they all start to merge into one group face. You call boys by their brothers names, that type of thing. Its hard.Of course it is.Wait til youve been in the game twenty years, like me, he said morosely, expression down at his daub blister. You get boors that look familiar and find out you had their daddy the year you started teaching. Margaret White was in the lead my time, for which I am profoundly grateful. She told Mrs Bicente, God rest her, that the Lord was reserving a supernumerary burning seat in hell for her because she gave the kids an outline of Mr Darwins beliefs on evolution. She was suspended twice while she was here once for beating a classmate with her purse. Legend has it that Margaret saw the classmate smoking a cigarette. unpaired religious views. Very peculiar. His John Wayne expression suddenly snapped down. The other girls. Did they really laugh at her ?Worse. They were squall and throwing sanitary napkins at her when I walked in. Throwing them like.. like peanuts.Oh. Oh, dear. John Wayne disappeared. Mr Morton went scarlet. You have names?Yes. Not all of them, although some of them may rat on the rest. Christine Hargensen appeared to be the ringleader as usual.Chris and her Mortimer Snurds, Morton murmured.Yes. Tina Blake, Rachel Spies, Helen Shyres, Donna Thibodeau and her sister Fern, Lila Grace, Jessica Upshaw. And swear out Snell. She frowned. You wouldnt expect a joke like that from Sue. Shes never seemed the type for this kind-hearted of a stunt.Did you talk to the girls involved?Miss Desjardin chuckled unhappily. I got them the hell out of there. I was too flustered. And Carrie was having hysterics.Um. He steepled his fingers. Do you plan to talk to them?Yes. But she sounded reluctant.Do I detect a note of-You probably do, she said glumly. Im living in a glass aim up, see. I understand how those girls felt. The who le thing just made me want to take the girl and shake her. Maybe-theres some kind of instinct about menstruation that makes women want to snarl. I dont know. I keep seeing Sue Snell and the way she looked.Um, Mr Morton repeated wisely. He did not understand women and had no urge at all to wrangle menstruation.Ill talk to them tomorrow, she promised, rising. Rip them down one side and up the other.Good. Make the punishment suit the crime. And if you live you have to send any of them to, ah, to me, feel free-I will, she said kindly. By the way, a light blew out while I was trying to calm her down. It added the final touch.Ill send a janitor right down, he promised. And give thanks for doing your best, Miss Desjardin. Will you have Miss Fish send in Billy and Henry?Certainly. She left.He leaned back and let the whole business slide out of his mind. When Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, classcutters extraordinaire, slunk in, he glared at them happily and prepared to talk tough.As he often told Hank Grayle, he ate class-cutters for lunch.Graffiti scratched on a desk in Chamberlain Junior High SchoolRoses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, but Carrie spot eats shit.She walked down Ewin Avenue and crosssed over to Carlin at the bankruptlight on the corner. Her head was down and she was trying to think of nothing. Cramps came and went in great, gripping waves, making her slow down and speed up like a car with carburettor trouble. She stared at the sidewalk. Quartz glittering in the cement. Hop-scotch grids scratched in ghostly, rain-faded chalk. Wads of gum stamped flat. Pieces of tinfoil and penny-candy wrappers. They all hate and they never stop. They never get tired of it. A penny lodged in a crack. She kicked it. Imagine Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good. A drag turd with a foot-track in the middle of it. A roll of blackened caps that some kid had banged with a st one. Cigarette butts. Crash in her head with a rock, with a boulder. Crash in all their hearts. Good. Good.(saviour deliverer meek and mild)That was good for Momma, all right for her. She didnt have to go among the wolves every day of every year, out into a carnival of laughers, joke-tellers, pointers, snickerers. And didnt Momma say there would be a Day of Judgment.(the name of that star shall be wormwood and they shall be scourged with scorpions)and an angel with a sword?If only it would be today and Jesus orgasm not with a lamb and a shepherds crook, but with a boulder on each hand to crush the laughters and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness.And if only she could be His sword and His arm.She had tried to fit. She had defied Momma in a hundred little ways, had tried to erase the red-plague stripe that had been drawn around her from the first day she had left the controlled environment of the small kinfolk on Carlin Street and had walked up to the Baker Street Grammar School with her Bible under her arm. She could still phone that day, the stares, and the sudden, awful silence when she had gotten down on her knees before lunch in the school cafeteria-the laughter had begun on that day and had echoed up through the years.The red-plague circle was like blood itself-you could scrub and scrub and scrub and still it would be there, not erased, not clean. She had never gotten on her knees in a public place again, although she had not told Momma that. Still, the original remembering remained, with her and with them. She had fought Momma tooth and nail over the Christian Church Camp, and had earned the bills to go herself by taking in sewing. Momma told her darkly that it was Sin, that it was Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists and that it was Sin and Backsliding. She forbade Carrie to swim at the camp. merely although she had swum and had laughed when they ducked her (until sh e couldnt get her breath any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream) and had tried to take part in the camps activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol prayin Carrie and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. For straight is the gate, Momma said grimly in the taxi, and at home she had sent Carrie to the closet for six hours.Momma had, of course, forbade her to shower with the other girls Carrie had hidden her shower things in her school footlocker and had showered anyway, taking part in a naked ritual that was shameful and embarrassing to her in hopes that the circle around her might fade a little, just a little-(but today o today)Tommy Erbter, age five, was biking up the other side of the street. He was a small, intense-looking boy on a twenty-inch Schwinn with chic-red training wheels. He was hum Scoobie Doo, where are you? under his breath. He saw Carrie, brightened, and stuck out his dialect.Hey, ol fart-face Ol prayin CarrieCarrie glared at him with sudden smoking rage. The bike wobbled on its training wheels and suddenly fell over. Tommy screamed. The bike was on top of him. Carrie smiled and walked on. The sound of Tommys wails was sweet, jangling music in her ears.If only she could make something like that happen whenever she liked.(just did)She stopped dead seven houses up from her own, staring blankly at nothing. Behind her, Tommy was climbing tearfully back on to his bike, nursing a scraped knee. He utter something at her, but she ignored it. She had been yelled at by experts.She had been thinking(fall off that bike kid push you off that bike and split your rotten head)And something had happenedHer mind had had she groped for a word. Had flexed. That was not just right, but it was very close. There had been a curious mental bending, almost like an elbow curling a dumbbell. That wasnt exactly right either, but it was all she could think of. An elbow with no strength. A weak sister muscle.Flex.She suddenly stared fiercely at Mrs Yorratys thumping come across window. She thought(stupid frumpty old bitch break that window)Nothing. Mrs Yorratys picture window glittered serenely in the fresh cardinal oclock glow of morning. Another cramp gripped Carries belly and she walked on.But The light. And the ashtray dont forget the ashtray.She looked back(old bitch hates my mamma)over her shoulder. Again it seemed that something flexed but very weakly. The flow of her thoughts shuddered as if there had been a sudden bubbling from a wellspring deeper inside.The picture window seemed to ripple. Nothing more. It could have been her eyes. Could have been.Her head began to feel tired and fuzzy, and it thro bbed with the beginning of a headache. Her eyes were hot, as if she had just sat down and read the Book of Revelations straight through.She continued to walk down the street toward the small white house with the blue shutters. The familiar hate-love-dread feeling was churning inside her. Ivy had crawled up the west side of the cottage (they always called it the bungalow because the White house sounded like a political joke and Momma said all politicians were crooks and sinners and would eventually give the country over to the Godless Reds who would put all the believers of Jesus even the Catholics up against the wall), and the ivy was picturesque, she knew it was, but sometimes she scorned it. Sometimes, like now, the ivy looked like a marvelous giant hand ridged with great veins which had sprung up out of the ground to grip the building. She approached it with dragging feet.Of course, there had been the stones.She stopped again, blinking vapidly at the day. The stones. Momma nev er talked about that Carrie didnt even know if her momma still remembered the day of the stones. It was surprising that she herself still remembered it. She had been a very little girl then. How old? leash? Four? There had been the girl in the white bathing suit, and then the stones came. And things had flown in the house. Here the memory was, suddenly bright and clear. As if it had been here all along, just below the surface, waiting for a kind of mental puberty.Waiting, maybe, for today.From Carrie The Black Dawn of T.K. (Esquire Magazine, September 12, 1980) by Jack GaverEstelle Horan had lived in the neat San Diego suburb of Parrish for 12 years, and outwardly she is typical Mrs California She wears bright print shifts and smoked amber sunglasses her hair is black-streaked nordic she drives a neat maroon Volkswagen Formula Vee with a smile decal on the petrol cap and a green-flag ecology sticker on the back window. Her husband is an executive at the Parrish branch of the ent rust of America her son and daughter are certified members of the Southern California Sun n Fun Crowd, burnished-brown beach creatures. There is a hibachi in the small, beautifully kept back guanine, and the door chimes play a tinkly phrase from the refrain of Hey, Jude.But Mrs Horan still carries the thin, difficult soil of New England someplace inside her, and when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd, pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cat.Of course she was strange, Estelle Horan tells me. lighting a second Virginia Slim a moment after stubbing out her first. The whole family was strange. Ralph was a construction worker, and people on the street said he carried a Bible and a .38 revolver to work with him every day. The Bible was for his coffee break and lunch. The .38 was in movement he met Antichrist on the job, I can remember the Bible myself. The revolver who knows? He was a big olive-skinned man with his hair always shaved into a flattop crewcut. He always looked mean. And you didnt meet his eyes, not ever. They were so intense they actually seemed to glow. When you saw him coming you crossed the street and you never stuck out your tongue at his back, not ever. Thats how spooky he was.She pauses, puffing clouds of cigarette smoke toward the pseudo-redwood beams that cross the ceiling. Stella Horan lived on Carlin Street until she was twenty, commuting to day classes at Lewin Business College in Motton. But she remembers the incidents of the stones very clearly.There are times, she says, when I wonder if I might have caused it. Their back yard was next to ours, and Mrs White had put in a hedge but it hadnt grown out yet. Shed called my mother dozens of times about the show I was putting on in my back yard. Well, my bathing suit was perfectly decent victorian by todays standards nothing but a plain old one-piece Jantzen. Mrs White used to go on and on about what a scandal it was for her baby. My mother..-. well, she tries to be polite, but her temper is so quick. I dont know what Margaret White did to finally push her over the edge called me the Whore of Babylon, I suppose but my mother told her our yard was our yard and Id go out and dance the hootchie-kootchie buck naked if that was her pleasure and mine. She also told her that she was a dirty old woman with a can of worms for a mind. There was a bus more shouting, but that was the upshot of it.I wanted to stop sunbathing right then. I hate trouble. It upsets my stomach. But Mom-when she gets a case, shes a terror. She came home from Jordan Marsh with a little white bikini. Told me I might as well get all the sun I could. After all, she said, the privacy of our own back yard and all.Stella Horan smiles a little at the memory and crushes out her cigarette.I tried to argue with her, tell her I didnt want any more trouble, didnt want to be a pawn in their back-fence war. Didnt do a bit of good. Trying to stop m y mum when she gets a bee in her hat is like trying to stop a Mack truck going downhill with no brakes. Actually, there was more to it. I was panicky of the Whites. Real religious nuts are nothing to fool with. Sure, Ralph White was dead, but what if Margaret still had that .38 around?But there I was on Saturday afternoon, spread out on a blanket in the back yard, covered with suntan lotion and listening to Top Forty on the radio. Mom hated that stuff and usually shed yell out at least twice for me to turn it down before she went nuts. But that day she turned it up twice herself. I started to feel like the Whore of Babylon myselfBut nobody came out of the Whites place. Not even the old lady to hang her wash. Thats something else she never hung any undies on the back line. Not even Carries, and she was only three back then. Always in the house.I started to relax. I guess I was thinking Margaret must have taken Carrie to the park to worship God in the raw or something. Anyway, afte r a little while I rolled on my back, put one arm over my eyes, and dozed off.When I woke up, Carrie was standing next to me and looking down at my body.She breaks off, lour into space. Outside, the cars are whizzzing by endlessly. I can hear the steady little whine my tape vertical flute makes. But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap patina over a darker world a real world where nightmares happen.She was such a pretty girl, Stella Horan resumes, fighting another(prenominal) cigarette. Ive seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy black-and-white photo on the cover of Newsweek. I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that woman do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the ghost of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her mothers sickness hadnt touched her very deeply, not then.I kind of started up awake and tried to smile. It was hard to think what to do. I was logy from the sun and my mind felt sticky and slow. I said Hi. She was wearable a little yellow dress, sort of cute but awfully long for a little girl in the summer. It came down to her shins.She didnt smile back. She just pointed and said, What are those?I looked down and saw that my top had slipped while I was asleep. So I fixed it and said, Those are my breasts, Carrie,Then she said-very solemnly I concupiscence I had some.I said You have to wait, Carrie. You wont start to get them for another oh. eight or nine years.