Carrie (10 page)

“It would be uplifting if we could believe that adolescent human nature is capable of salvaging the pride and self-image of the low bird in the pecking order with such a gesture,” Jerome has said in a recent issue of
The Atlantic Monthly,
“but we know better. The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.”

Jerome, of course, is absolutely right—about birds, at any rate—and his eloquence is undoubtedly responsible in large part for the advancement of the “practical joker” theory, which the White Commission approached but did not actually state. This theory hypothesizes that Ross and Christine Hargensen (see pp. 10-18) were at the center of a loose conspiracy to get Carrie White to the Spring Ball, and, once there, complete her humiliation. Some theorists (mostly crime writers) also claim that Sue Snell was an active part of this conspiracy. This casts the mysterious Mr. Ross in the worst possible light, that of a practical joker deliberately maneuvering an unstable girl into a situation of extreme stress.

This author doesn't believe that likely in light of Mr. Ross's character. This is a facet which has remained largely unexplored by his detractors, who have painted him as a rather dull clique-centered athlete; the phrase “dumb jock” expresses this view of Tommy Ross perfectly.

It is true that Ross was an athlete of above-average ability. His best sport was baseball, and he was a member of the Ewen varsity squad from his Sophomore year. Dick O'Connell, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, has indicated that Ross would have been offered a fairly large bonus for signing a contract, had he lived.

But Ross was also a straight-A student (hardly fitting the “dumb jock” image), and his parents have both said that he had decided pro baseball would have to wait until he had finished college, where he planned to study for an English degree. His interests included writing poetry, and a poem written six months prior to his death was published in an established “little magazine” called
Everleaf.
This is available in Appendix V.

His surviving classmates also give him high marks, and this is significant. There were only twelve survivors of what has become known in the popular press as Prom Night. Those who were not in attendance were largely the unpopular members of the Junior and Senior classes. If these “outs” remember Ross as a friendly, good-natured fellow (many referred to him as “a hell of a good shit”), does not Professor Jerome's thesis suffer accordingly?

Ross's school records—which cannot, according to state law, be photostated here—when taken with classmates' recollections and the comments of relatives, neighbors, and teachers, form a picture of an extraordinary young man. This is a fact that jells very badly with Professor Jerome's picture of a peer-worshiping, sly young tough. He apparently had a high enough tolerance to verbal abuse and enough independence from his peer group to ask Carrie in the first place. In fact, Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity: a socially conscious young man.

No case will be made here for his sainthood. There is none to be made. But intensive research has satisfied me that neither was he a human chicken in a public-school barnyard, joining mindlessly in the ruin of a weaker hen . . .

She lay

(i am not afraid not afraid of her)

on her bed with an arm thrown over her eyes. It was Saturday night. If she was to make the dress she had in mind, she would have to start tomorrow at the

(i'm not afraid momma)

latest. She had already bought the material at John's in Westover. The heavy, crumpled velvet richness of it frightened her. The price had also frightened her, and she had been intimidated by the size of the place, the chic ladies wandering here and there in their light spring dresses, examining bolts of cloth. There was an echoing strangeness in the atmosphere and it was worlds from the Chamberlain Woolworth's, where she usually bought her material.

She was intimidated but not stopped. Because, if she wanted to, she could send them all screaming into the streets. Mannequins toppling over, light fixtures falling, bolts of cloth shooting through the air in unwinding streamers. Like Samson in the temple, she could rain destruction on their heads if she so desired.

(i am not afraid)

The package was now hidden on a dry shelf down in the cellar, and she was going to bring it up. Tonight.

She opened her eyes.

Flex.

The bureau rose into the air, trembled for a moment, and then rose until it nearly touched the ceiling. She lowered it. Lifted it. Lowered it. Now the bed, complete with her weight. Up. Down. Up. Down. Just like an elevator.

She was hardly tired at all. Well, a little. Not much. The ability, almost lost two weeks ago, was in full flower. It had progressed at a speed that was—

Well, almost terrifying.

And now, seemingly unbidden—like the knowledge of menstruation—a score of memories had come, as if some mental dam had been knocked down so that strange waters could gush forth. They were cloudy, distorted little-girl memories, but very real for all that. Making the pictures dance on the walls; turning on the water faucets from across the room; Momma asking her

(carrie shut the windows it's going to rain)

to do something and windows suddenly banging down all over the house; giving Miss Macaferty four flat tires all at once by unscrewing the valves in the tires of her Volkswagen; the stones—

(!!!!!!! no no no no no !!!!!!!)

—but now there was no denying the memory, no more than there could be a denying of the monthly flow, and that memory was not cloudy, no, not
that
one; it was harsh and brilliant, like jagged strokes of lightning: the little girl

(momma stop momma don't i can't breathe o my throat o momma i'm sorry i looked momma o my tongue blood in my mouth)

the poor little girl

(screaming: little slut o i know how it is with you i see what has to be done)

the poor little girl lying half in the closet and half out of it, seeing black stars dancing in front of everything, a sweet, faraway buzzing, swollen tongue lolling between her lips, throat circled with a bracelet of puffed, abraded flesh where Momma had throttled her and then Momma coming back, coming for her, Momma holding Daddy Ralph's long butcher knife

(cut it out i have to cut out the evil the nastiness sins of the flesh o i know about that the eyes cut out your eyes)

in her right hand, Momma's face twisted and working, drool on her chin, holding Daddy Ralph's Bible in her other hand

(you'll never look at that naked wickedness again)

and something flexed, not flex but
FLEX,
something huge and unformed and titanic, a wellspring of power that was not hers now and never would be again and then something fell on the roof and Momma screamed and dropped Daddy Ralph's Bible and that was
good,
and then more bumps and thumps and then the house began to throw its furnishings around and Momma dropped the knife and got on her knees and began to pray, holding up her hands and swaying on her knees while chairs whistled down the hall and the beds upstairs fell over and the dining room table tried to jam itself through a window and then Momma's eyes growing huge and crazed, bulging, her finger pointing at the little girl

(it's you it's you devilspawn witch imp of the devil it's
you
doing it)

and then the stones and Momma had fainted as their roof cracked and thumped as if with the footfalls of God and then—

Then she had fainted herself. And after that there were no more memories. Momma did not speak of it. The butcher knife was back in its drawer. Momma dressed the huge black and blue bruises on her neck and Carrie thought she could remember asking Momma how she had gotten them and Momma tightening her lips and saying nothing. Little by little it was forgotten. The eye of memory opened only in dreams. The pictures no longer danced on the walls. The windows did not shut themselves. Carrie did not remember a time when things had been different. Not until now.

She lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, sweating.

“Carrie! Supper!”

“Thank you,

(i am not afraid)

Momma.”

She got up and fixed her hair with a dark-blue headband. Then she went downstairs.

From
The Shadow Exploded
(p. 59):

How apparent was Carrie's “wild talent” and what did Margaret White, with her extreme Christian ethic, think of it? We shall probably never know. But one is tempted to believe that Mrs. White's reaction must have been extreme . . .

                  *                  *                  *

“You haven't touched your pie, Carrie.” Momma looked up from the tract she had been perusing while she drank her Constant Comment. “It's homemade.”

“It makes me have pimples, Momma.”

“Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you. Now eat your pie.”

“Momma?”

“Yes?”

Carrie plunged. “I've been invited to the Spring Ball next Friday by Tommy Ross—”

The tract was forgotten. Momma was staring at her with wide my-ears-are-deceiving-me eyes. Her nostrils flared like those of a horse that has heard the dry rattle of a snake.

Carrie tried to swallow an obstruction and only

(i am not afraid o yes i am)

got rid of part of it.

“—and he's a very nice boy. He's promised to stop in and meet you before and—”

“No.”

“—to have me in by eleven. I've—”

“No, no,
no!”

“—accepted. Momma, please see that I have to start to . . . to try and get along with the world. I'm not like you. I'm funny—I mean, the kids think I'm funny. I don't want to be. I want to try and be a whole person before it's too late to—”

Mrs. White threw her tea in Carrie's face.

It was only lukewarm, but it could not have shut off Carrie's words more suddenly if it had been scalding. She sat numbly, the amber fluid dripping from her chin and cheeks onto her white blouse, spreading. It was sticky and smelled like cinnamon.

Mrs. White sat trembling, her face frozen except for her nostrils, which continued to flare. Abruptly she threw back her head and screamed at the ceiling.

“God! God! God!” Her jaw snapped brutally over each syllable.

Carrie sat without moving.

Mrs. White got up and came around the table. Her hands were hooked into shaking claws. Her face bore a half-mad expression of compassion mixed with hate.

“The closet,” she said. “Go to your closet and pray.”

“No, Momma.”

“Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is.
That
. . .
smell!”

She swung her whole arm into the blow, and the sound of her palm against Carrie's face

(o god i am so afraid now)

was like that flat sound of a leather belt being snapped in air. Carrie remained seated, although her upper body swayed. The mark on her cheek was first white, then blood red.

“The mark,” Mrs. White said. Her eyes were large but blank; she was breathing in rapid, snatching gulps of air. She seemed to be talking to herself as the claw hand descended onto Carrie's shoulder and pulled her out of her chair.

“I've seen it, all right. Oh yes. But. I. Never. Did. But for him. He. Took. Me . . .” She paused, her eyes wandering vaguely toward the ceiling. Carrie was terrified. Momma seemed in the throes of some great revelation which might destroy her.

“Momma—”

“In cars. Oh, I know where they take you in their cars. City limits. Roadhouses. Whiskey. Smelling . . .
oh they smell it on you!”
Her voice rose to a scream. Tendons stood out on her neck, and her head twisted in a questing upward rotation.

“Momma, you better stop.”

This seemed to snap her back to some kind of hazy reality. Her lips twitched in a kind of elementary surprise and she halted, as if groping for old bearings in a new world.

“The closet,” she muttered. “Go to your closet and pray.”

“No.”

Momma raised her hand to strike.

“No!”

The hand stopped in the dead air. Momma stared up at it, as if to confirm that it was still there, and whole.

The pie pan suddenly rose from the trivet on the table and hurled itself across the room to impact beside the living-room door in a splash of blueberry drool.

“I'm going, Momma!”

Momma's overturned teacup rose and flew past her head to shatter above the stove. Momma shrieked and dropped to her knees with her hands over her head.

“Devil's child,” she moaned. “Devil's child, Satan spawn—”

“Momma, stand up.”

“Lust and licentiousness, the cravings of the flesh—”

“Stand up!”

Momma's voice failed her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war. Her lips moved. To Carrie she seemed to be reciting the Lord's Prayer.

“I don't want to fight with you, Momma,” Carrie said, and her voice almost broke from her and dissolved. She struggled to control it. “I only want to be let to live my own life. I . . . I don't like yours.” She stopped, horrified in spite of herself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word.

“Witch,” Momma whispered. “It says in the Lord's Book: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Your father did the Lord's work—”

“I don't want to talk about that,” Carrie said. It always disturbed her to hear Momma talk about her father. “I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma.” Her eyes gleamed.
“They
better understand it, too.”

But Momma was whispering to herself again.

Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in her throat and the dismal roiling of emotional upset in her belly, she went to the cellar to get her dress material.