Shivering Mind

Chapter 5

Anyway, Miss Reillen is a little on the fat side, but that doesn’t

stop her from wearing these tight skirts which make her nylon

stockings rub together when she walks so she makes this

scraaaaaaatchy sound. That’s why the kids call her the Cricket. If

she taught wood-shop or gym, nobody’d really know she makes that sound—but she’s the librarian, and it’s so quiet you can hear

every move she makes.

Lorraine is panting to get at the typewriter now, so I’m going to

let her before she has a heart attack.

Chapter 2

I should never have let Derek write the first chapter because he

always has to twist things subliminally. I am not panting, and I’m

not about to have a thrombosis. It’s just that some very strange

things have happened to us during the last few months, and we

feel we should write them down while they’re fresh in our minds.

It’s got to be written now before Derek and I mature and repress the

whole thing.

Derek doesn’t really curse that much, and I don’t think he needs his

system. But even when we were in Miss Stewart’s typing class, he

had to do something unusual all the time—like type a letter in the

shape of an hourglass. That’s the kind of thing he does. And as

you probably suspected, the reason Derek gets away with all these

things is because he’s extremely handsome. I hate to admit it, but

he is. An ugly boy would have been sent to reform school by

now.

He’s six feet tall already, with sort of longish brown hair and blue

eyes. He has these gigantic eyes that look right through you,

especially if he’s in the middle of one of his fantastic everyday

lies. And he drinks and smokes more than any boy I ever heard

of. The analysts would call his family the source problem or say

he drinks and smokes to assert his independence. I tried to explain to him how dangerous it was, particularly smoking, and even

went to the trouble of finding a case history similar to his in a

book by Sigmund Freud. I almost had him convinced that

smoking was an infantile, destructive activity when he pointed out

a picture of Freud smoking a cigar on the book’s cover.

“If Freud smokes, why can’t I?”

“Freud doesn’t smoke anymore,” I told him. “He’s dead.”

Another time I got my mother to bring home a pamphlet about

smoking in which they showed lungs damaged from tobacco

poisons. I even got her to borrow a book from a doctor, which had

large color plates of lungs that had been eaten away by cancer.

She’s a nurse and can get all those things. But nothing seems to

have any impact on Derek, which I suppose brings us right back to

his source problem. Actually, we both have families you wouldn’t

believe, but I don’t particularly feel like going into it at the

moment because I just ate lunch in the cafeteria. It was Swiss

steak. That is, they called it Swiss steak. Derek called it filet of

gorilla’s heart.

Also, you’ll find out soon enough that Derek distorts—when he

isn’t out-and-out lying. For example, in Problems in American

Democracy the other day, Mr. Weiner asked him what kind of

homes early American settlers lived in, and Derek said tree huts.

Now Derek knows early American settlers didn’t live in tree huts,

but he’ll do just about anything to stir up some excitement. And

he really did set off those bombs when he was a freshman, which

when you stop to consider sort of shows a pattern—an actual pattern. I think he used to distort things physically, and now he

does it verbally more than any other way.

I mean take the Cricket for instance. I mean Miss Reillen. She’s

across the library watching me as I’m typing this, and she’s

smiling. You’d think she knew I was defending her. She’s really a

very nice woman, though it’s true her clothes are too tight, and

her nylons do make this scraaaaaaatchy sound when she walks.

But she isn’t trying to be sexy or anything. If you could see her,

you’d know that. She just outgrew her clothes. Maybe she doesn’t

have any money to buy new ones or get the old ones let out. Who

knows what kind of problems she has? Maybe she’s got a sick

mother at home like Miss Stewart, the typing teacher. I know

Miss Stewart has a sick mother because she had me mark some

typing papers illegally and drop them off at her house after school

one day. And there was her sick mother—very thin and with this

smile frozen on her face—right in the middle of the living room!

That was the strange part. Miss Stewart kept her mother in this

bed right in the middle of the living room, and it almost made me

cry. She made a little joke about it—how she kept her mother in

the middle of the living room because she didn’t want her to think

she was missing anything when people came to visit. Can you

imagine keeping your sick mother in a bed right smack in the

middle of the living room?

When I look at Miss Reillen I feel sorry. When I hear her walking

I feel even more sorry for her because maybe she keeps her

mother in a bed in the middle of the living room just like Miss

Stewart. Who would want to marry a woman that keeps her sick mother in a bed right in the middle of the living room?

The one big difference between Derek and me, besides the fact that

he’s a boy and I’m a girl, is I have compassion. Not that he really

doesn’t have any compassion, but he’d be the last one on earth to

show it. He pretends he doesn’t care about anything in the world,

and he’s always ready with some outrageous remark, but if you

ask me, any real hostility he has is directed against himself.

The fact that I’m his best friend shows he isn’t as insensitive to

Homo sapiens as he makes believe he is, because you might as

well know I’m not exactly the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m

not Venus or Harlow. Just ask my mother.

“You’re not a pretty girl, Lorraine,” she has been nice enough to

inform me on a few occasions (as if I didn’t remember the first

time she ever said it), “but you don’t have to walk about

stoop-shouldered and hunched.” At least once a day she fills me

in on one more aspect of my public image—like “your hair would

be better cut short because it’s too kinky,” and “you’re putting on

too much weight,” and “you wear your clothes funny.” If I made a

list of every comment she’s made about me, you’d think I was a

monstrosity. I may not be Miss America, but I am not the

abominable snowwoman either.