Virtual Silence Read online

  Virtual Silence

  Joan Schweighardt

  New York

  for Adam and Alex

  Prologue

  Even before the killings my disposition toward the opposite sex was something less than favorable, in part because of my father leaving, and in part because of the company I kept.

  Sharon was a big girl with tiny brown eyes set deep into a pale fleshy face. Her father had died when she was three, and some years later she discovered his clothes in a trunk in the basement and took them over. By the time she was twelve, she was wearing his shirts over her jeans regularly in an effort to conceal her breasts, which were larger than she would have liked. Likewise, on all but the hottest days, she hid the rest of herself beneath the generous fabric of his old brown raincoat. She walked with a slight forward tilt, sliding her feet instead of lifting them. She was clumsy—the sight of her own shadow was enough to throw her off balance—and so eager to get where she was going that she could hardly round a corner without bumping into something. When she spoke, she threw her hands about, so that Terri and I were constantly moving her soda cans and milk cartons away from the edge of the table.

  You could argue, I suppose, that her bias was a reaction to the fact that the opposite sex took virtually no interest in her, but that would be to imply that Sharon was somewhat shallow (a quality which she and Terri were fond of attributing to men), and that was anything but the case.

  Sharon Michener was the most analytical person I had ever known; she was an investigator of procedure, a prober of the essential. On the pretext of having to do research for school projects, for instance, she visited wineries (we had several in the area), saw mills, butchers’ shops, hospitals, chemical companies, waste disposal plants, and, on a regular basis, our local UFO support group (though she had never had an encounter herself). She made frequent excursions into Manhattan to chat with the homeless. She visited convents, local prisons (of which we also had our share), nursing homes, dowsers’ conventions—the list goes on. Sometimes she would invite Terri or me to accompany her, but more often she proceeded all on her own, by cab or bus if she could not get her mother’s car, and we only heard about it later.

  She had no time for “boys,” she said. She had come to one school dance in our junior year, but that was only to see the headbangers in action, one of the few phenomena that did not hold her interest for long.

  Terri was a voracious reader, particularly of philosophy, and whenever the subject of dating came up, she claimed, only half jokingly, to be saving herself for someone who fit Plato’s description of the philosopher king—and we had no such creature in our high school. She was a small girl, not much bigger than myself, and she had to sit on a cushion when she drove her mother’s huge Buick. She wore glasses, which she was constantly adjusting on her pert oily nose, and she had a way of drawing back her lips when she spoke so that you saw more teeth than you might have cared to. Her face was pleasantly freckled, and unlike Sharon, whose hair was stringy and unstyled, she used a blow-dryer each morning to discipline her otherwise unruly auburn curls. Boys were not particularly attracted to her either.

  My acceptance of Sharon and Terri’s conviction that men were shallow was based not on any direct observation but on Sharon and Terri themselves, for they were, in my opinion, the two most interesting people in our little hamlet of Rock Ridge, New York, and if the opposite sex failed to realize that, it could only be because they were content with surfaces. Terri was warm and gentle and had a contagious laugh, a kind of hee-hee-hee that she was able to negotiate with her teeth clamped together. She took a childlike delight in horses, sunny days, and animated Disney films. She was even-tempered, and always an earnest listener. (I can’t tell you how supportive she was when my parents first separated.) Sharon was darker, sometimes grim, sometimes even confrontational. An avid Star Trek fan, she was more likely to greet people with Spock’s hand salute than with a smile, but her mind was as full and as diverse as the Smithsonian.

  What, you might wonder, did these two inwardly exquisite creatures see in me? Well, as Terri’s mother, who was a Realtor, used to say, location is everything. (Sharon would argue that it was memory, while Terri said it was art. I had no opinion at the time, but now I would say that timing is; timing is everything.)

  Rock Ridge was located in the foothills of the Catskills, and at one time its heavily wooded acres were broken up only by an occasional vacation cottage or dairy farm. But when the profit went out of farming, the owners subdivided both the farms and the land surrounding them, and the resulting lots were purchased by folks from New Jersey, like my parents, or from the City, like Terri’s and Sharon’s. Still, Rock Ridge remained quite rural, and unless you were living right in the village, the homes were spread out on winding back roads with acres of woods in between. Terri and Sharon and I were thrown together as children simply because we were the same sex, the same age, and within biking distance of one another.

  I amused them, if anything. They said I talked too much. I was still playing with dolls when Sharon’s mother began to teach them to play chess. In fact, my dolls were present at some of their earliest tournaments, and they watched the games with a perseverance which I could only admire. Not that Sharon didn’t make good use of my attention deficit. She would send me off to the kitchen for snacks when she got hungry, or to the radio to scan for a better station. I was useful; I kept track of their scores. And sometimes when their games were over, one of them would consent to play a game of checkers with me.

  Sometimes entire weeks passed without us getting together. Even before she got her license, Sharon’s investigations took up much of her time. If she had no money for a cab and couldn’t persuade her mother to take her where she wanted to go, she would set off on foot for the woods behind her house in search of deer and the small changes that occurred along the stream between storms.

  This didn’t faze Terri in the least—as long as she had something good to read, and her definition of “good” was expansive. (Although the Taylors had no pets, I once found her engrossed in a dog-training manual.) But I grew bored and lonely during those times. I would pace near the telephone, cursing my two friends for having minds in which they could actually live. On paper, which is to say report cards, you could not tell us apart, but that was only because I worked twice as hard as either of them. The truth was that my mind drifted as aimlessly as an abandoned boat. It was as content to peruse glossy magazine advertisements as it was to acknowledge brief moments of comprehension, or, less often, inspiration, when they came along. In my efforts at discipline, I took up my father’s suggestion and began violin lessons when I was twelve, but I was never very good. Then, thinking that a venture into the world of gymnastics might benefit me, I got my mother to buy me a small trampoline. I made good use of it over the years, but jumping did not strengthen my mind as much as relax it when it had been jumping.

  I might have made other friends. Unlike Sharon and Terri, I knew how to respond to the other girls in school when they showed me the little paintings on the tips of their fingernails or described the outfits they had seen at the mall. But I didn’t—not because I feared that Sharon and Terri would be upset with me for reaching out beyond our little circle, but because I feared that they might not.

  Strangely enough, it was Sharon who eventually made another friend.

  This was in our junior year. We had been studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in our honors English class, and the element of persuasion that runs through the play dominated much of our conversation even after we had had our test and moved on to Romeo and Juliet. “Do you see how Cassius proceeds?” Sharon asked Terri and me in the cafeteria one day. She had her text opened on the table beside her brown bag lunch and was so ani
mated that she even spoke with her mouth full, so that we were forced to consider, along with her words, the sight of her pink tongue probing her teeth for soggy lumps of white bread. “He flatters Brutus first, and then, when he sees how attached Brutus is to his ‘honor,’ he uses the word as a cloak beneath which both men can vent their petty grievances.” She looked aside for a moment, in disgust. “So here we have a basically good but shallow man who is flattered into thinking that Cassius’ cause and his honor are somehow linked.…”

  She loved the play, and so certain was she that our peers could learn a thing or two from it that she went to the drama department and asked Mr. Muddle to consider putting it on that spring in lieu of South Pacific. He agreed, reluctantly, to put it on in addition to the musical, but only if Sharon would rewrite, both cut and transform it into the vernacular, hence, mutilate it, Sharon said. But she consented, and the three of us spent most of that long, snowy winter in Sharon’s bedroom, which was wall-papered with maps from National Geographic, bickering over the project.

  Naturally, I was anxious to attend opening night. But Sharon, who by then was somewhat ashamed of our effort, had to be dragged, literally, from her house. Terri and I had to march in and take away her bowl of popcorn and pull her away from the documentary she had been watching on the TV and drape her ragged brown raincoat over her shoulders and lead her, not kicking and screaming but twisting to see the denouement on the TV screen, to Terri’s mother’s car.

  We sat in the back of the auditorium, away from the few others who had bothered to come, with Sharon slumped down in her seat between us. She was quiet and so preoccupied with her own thoughts that she didn’t even complain when Terri and I leaned in toward each other, commenting on the cast that Mr. Muddle had chosen. But then an incredible thing happened. Portia appeared on the stage, saying, “Brutus, my lord,” one of the few lines that we had left intact.

  Beverly Sturbridge was an earnest student, a hard worker like myself. We knew her; she was in our English class. But she had a frivolous side (always laughing, always smiling—you know the type), and I don’t think any of us was prepared for the elegance that she lent to the speech that followed. “You left my bed, Brutus,” she said, her dark eyes flaming. “And last night in the middle of dinner you got up and paced, sighing the way you do when you’re upset. And when I tried to talk to you, you lifted your hand.…”

  Sharon sat up and lifted her own hand, a warning for Terri and me to quiet down. By the time Portia pulled up her dress to reveal her wounded thigh, Sharon was literally hanging over the back of the seat in front of her, mumbling, “She’s very good, very good.”

  When the play was over, we went backstage, for the purpose, or so I thought, of congratulating Beverly on her fine portrayal. But before either Terri or I could open our mouths, Sharon began an apology that was more sincere than any of the speeches (excepting Beverly’s, of course) that we had heard in the play itself. “We were told to cut the play and change the language,” she cried, incriminating Terri and me with a backward sweep of her arm. “And we consented, because, well … we wanted to have some semblance of an audience. But now I realize we did you a great disservice. I can imagine how wonderful you would have been if you had been able to speak Shakespeare’s own words!”

  God only knows what Beverly had thought of us before. For my own part, I could not remember her ever having said more to me than, “What did you get on your paper?” She was an assertive girl, and as comfortable flirting with the jocks as she was reading her mediocre essays aloud in English class. She had a multitude of friends and couldn’t have needed three more. But she was also an aspiring actress, and as susceptible to Sharon’s flattery as Brutus had been to Cassius’. And so the courtship began.

  To please Sharon, Bev learned Portia’s true lines and delivered them the following week for us on the auditorium stage after school. “Riveting, absolutely riveting,” Sharon said. The week after that, the three of us were invited to her house, where we met her parents and her brothers and then spent an hour in her bedroom talking theater. Whenever the phone rang, which was approximately every three minutes, we took stock of our surroundings—Degas prints on lavender walls, lavender canopied bed, white teddy bear collection.

  She had a boyfriend, Jack the Jock, she called him (Sharon called him Jack the Joke behind her back), who played quarterback for the Rock Ridge football team. And because she saw him every weekend, we could not spend as much time with her as Sharon would have liked. Sharon, however, was as persevering as a puppy, and when Bev invited us to sit at her table in the cafeteria, she agreed wholeheartedly.

  Previously, the three of us had always sat at a table in the back of the cafeteria near the trash cans. Because of the smell, no one else sat in the area. Yet everyone had to pass the trash cans, and thus our table, on their way out. Sharon liked to point out that this afforded us the opportunity to speak with our classmates when we wanted to without the burden of committing ourselves to an entire lunch period with them.

  Bev’s table, and that was what it was always called, was right in the middle of the cafeteria. Every seat was filled, and the spillover sat at the tables before and behind. The first time Bev brought us over there, saying, “You all know Sharon and Terri and Ginny,” her friends, both male and female, nodded and then pretended that we weren’t there for the duration of the meal. But after a week or so, they grew accustomed to our presence and even began to make eye contact with us as they gossiped or told their amusing anecdotes. I fit right in, I found, and before long I was telling my own amusing stories. One of the boys, a little too loud for my tastes, even asked me out, and another, who I would have gone out with had he asked, hinted that I was next in line when he and the girl he was currently dating broke up.

  Terri did not fare as well. She smiled a lot, but she was shy, and if someone spoke to her directly, a blush arose from her collar, which she seemed to think she could subdue by blinking a lot. Sharon said little too, but this was not from awkwardness. She was content to listen to Bev talk, to watch her laugh, to see her mouth fall open in surprise or horror. In short, Bev’s existence had become the object of Sharon’s acute analysis.

  Except for that one time in her bedroom and the one afternoon when Bev delivered Portia’s true lines, we never saw her alone again until the day of the killings. But we accompanied her and her entourage to several after-school events—baseball games, pep rallies, casual gatherings in the town park. And I was happy, for I felt I had attained the best of both worlds. I had a large circle of, if not friends, at least acquaintances, and I had not had to give up Sharon and Terri in the bargain. Then summer came, and it was just the three of us again.

  Bev’s parents had a vacation home up in Maine, on the coast. Before she left, Bev gave Sharon the number, and Sharon called her weekly. Whenever Terri and I asked for a report on her activities, Sharon would look aside for a moment and smile dreamily before answering, as if to savor the emotion her name evoked. Bev was swimming, shelling, hiking, working on her tan. In the evenings she attended parties. On the weekends, Jack came up to visit her in the little red Honda his parents had bought him for his birthday.

  We heard from one of Bev’s friends at the beginning of the summer. Heather called, me specifically, to invite us to a party, but of course Sharon didn’t want to go. I might have argued with her, insisted that a healthier rapport with Bev’s friends could only enhance our reunion with her in the fall, but I knew that Sharon would fail to see the logic in that. She was working on a one-woman play, which, she felt certain, Bev would ultimately perform. It was a sort of female version of the Faust legend in which Mephistopheles would be invisible to all but Bev—or Corina, the name that Sharon had chosen for her character. She wouldn’t let us see it, but she assured us that Bev was very excited about it.

  With Sharon writing and Terri reading—Faust and Doctor Faustus, for Sharon’s project had got her interested too—our get-togethers were not only infrequent but as gloomy as yo
u might expect. Sharon and Terri could discuss the notion of selling one’s soul to the devil quite objectively, but these conversations frightened me, and there were many nights when I woke up sweating and thinking that some thing was in my room, in addition to Surge, my dog, who shared it with me. For once, I was happy not to be in their company. I had just got my driver’s license, so I spent time driving my mother’s ridiculous Yugo around, but as she needed it for work, it was not as often as I would have liked. In the hope of getting my own car, I sought employment, but had no success. I visited my father, read a few books from our summer reading list, and lay around the house—on the sofa or out in the back on my mother’s chaise longue—wondering what would happen in the fall when Bev returned and our senior year began.

  Had I had a crystal ball, I would have packed my bags and gone as far away from Rock Ridge as I could possibly get.

  1

  My mother was on the floor, rummaging through the laundry basket. She was wearing only underwear—green cotton panties and a purple athletic bra—with one pink sock draped over her shoulder like a dish towel. She located its mate, examined the two together, and muttering something about destitution, threw both socks aside disgustedly. I could see that my timing wasn’t very good, but then that is the essence of my story. “Ma,” I began.

  Without turning, she withdrew her hands from the basket just long enough to flutter them at the sides of her head. “Not … now,” she advised, leaving a gap between the words for emphasis.

  I went to my room and dug out a pair of good woolen socks that I’d been saving for winter—a major sacrifice, because when she returned from her Tai Chi class, where they trained in stockinged feet, the socks would be in as bad shape as all of hers. When I came back to the kitchen, the floor was littered with threadbare socks, one of which Surge had begun to chew. “Ma,” I said again.