Mrs. Kimble (21 page)

C
alvary High, named for the mountain where Christ was crucified. Dinah was tortured there, mocked and mortified. Only years later did she realize that the school was aptly named.

During her final year at Calvary, the senior English class read
Beowulf;
afterward, a boy named Ted Nally nicknamed her Grendel. The name caught on. By springtime even freshmen, who’d never read about the hideous monster, were tormenting her with the name.

Grendel. Grendel.

It stalked her in the hallways, on the school bus; it passed through the cafeteria line like an evil rumor. At school assemblies she calculated the length of the stage. Forty feet, she guessed; she wondered how quickly she could walk across it to receive her diploma. At Calvary, graduating seniors endured a full week of festivities: a day-long religious retreat, an awards banquet, a traditional commencement ceremony, and a baccalaureate dance. A smorgasbord of public humiliations, it seemed to Dinah.

The night of the banquet she rode to the school with her parents. Her mother’s heels clacked against the tile floor, echoing through the empty corridors. She had made them identical dresses, pale yellow with full skirts and voluminous sleeves. They looked, Dinah thought, like backup singers from
The Lawrence Welk Show.

The cafeteria was decorated with crepe-paper streamers; a banner across the back wall congratulated the class of ’73. The overhead lights had been extinguished, the cafeteria tables hidden under silky fabric. Handwritten place cards seated the families alphabetically, the Whitacres next to the Warrens and the Welds. Sue Warren and Carolyn Weld were best friends; for four years Dinah had sat behind them in class, listening to them laugh and whisper.

Dinah sat closemouthed as the salads were served. Candelabra flickered at the tables; in the dim light the cafeteria looked like a different place. Only the smell was the same, a sickening blend of floor cleaner and fried fish. Dinah’s mother chatted with Mrs. Weld:
What lovely decorations,
and
Thank goodness it stopped raining,
and
Don’t the girls look beautiful?
Listening, Dinah hated her ease and cheerfulness, her ability to invent conversation with strangers. At the same time she was proud, glad her classmates could see that her mother, at least, was normal.

Across the table Sue and Carolyn sat with their heads together, whispering. Dinah’s mother smiled.

“What are you girls giggling about?”

“Look at Dinah,” said Carolyn. “She’s the same color as the tablecloth.”

It was true: her foolish dress and her lank hair were the same pale shade of yellow. Only her birthmark stood out, purple-red. A
color that belonged on the inside of a body, not fit for public viewing.

“Why, she is, isn’t she?” said her mother, still smiling like an idiot. “What do you know about that?”

Dinah picked at the stringy roast beef, the overcooked green beans. Her father spoke in a low voice to Mr. Warren; a moment later they went outside to smoke.

At the podium the vice-principal announced the chemistry prize, the awards for history and Spanish and math; then the Most and Best awards. A week before, in homeroom, they had voted for the boy and girl with the nicest smiles and the most pleasing personalities; the smartest and best-looking; the likeliest to succeed. In Dinah’s opinion, none of her classmates had pleasing personalities; she filled out her ballot in under a minute. (Her pick for cutest couple: Nixon and Brezhnev. Secretariat, most likely to succeed.)

The winners were announced; at each name Sue and Carolyn applauded and laughed. Carolyn wore a nervous smile; she was a shoo-in for Best Looking. Dinah’s mother clapped too, though she didn’t recognize the names. She applauded warmly as Ted Nally accepted his award for Class Clown. Don’t clap for him, Dinah thought. He’s ruined my life.

“And now the award for Most Athletic,” said the vice-principal. “In keeping with the times, we’re now presenting this award to both a boy and a girl.” He smiled. “For those of you who don’t know, the Calvary girls’ tennis team has just wound up its inaugural season. And let me tell you, those ladies can play.”

It was a bald-faced lie. Only six girls had signed up for the team; three had never held a racquet before. To Dinah’s knowledge, the vice-principal had never attended a match.

“The award goes to Paul Ackerman—” said the vice-principal.

A large, neckless boy lumbered to the podium.

“—and Dinah Whitacre.”

Dinah froze. A hundred heads swiveled in her direction. No, she thought. This isn’t happening.

“Dinah!” her mother cried. “Isn’t that wonderful!”

She glanced helplessly around the room. Ted Nally sat two tables away, his beady eyes watching her. Her face warmed, a wash of heat radiating outward from her left eye. She knew she blushed oddly, her birthmark darkening to a deep blue.

Her mother touched her shoulder. “Honey, go up there and get your award.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“Of course you can.” Then Dinah’s mother did a horrible thing. She stood and offered Dinah her hand.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk up there with you.”

“Mom,” Dinah hissed. The room seemed very loud; blood pulsed furiously in her face.
“Please. Sit. Down.”

She got to her feet, thinking
Soon, whatever is going to happen will already have happened.
Her legs shook as she made her way through the tables. When she reached the front of the room, the chant began. Softly at first, then with increasing urgency.

“Grendel. Grendel.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father standing in the doorway, pipe in hand, a confused look on his face.

At the podium, the vice-principal shook her hand and handed her a small trophy. She smiled mechanically.

“Grendel. Grendel.”

“That’s enough,” the vice-principal said sharply into the microphone.

The chanting stopped, but the laughter only escalated. At the
back of the room, Ted Nally clapped loudly, his fat face flushed and triumphant.

Dinah returned to her seat. Across the table Sue and Carolyn were red from laughing. Dinah did not look at her mother; she sat holding her trophy, waiting. Finally the graduates were dismissed to the auditorium to don their caps and gowns; the parents were to stay behind for coffee and dessert. Dinah followed her classmates into the hallway. Then she turned down a corridor and ran.

She ran past the library, the school nurse’s office, the classrooms for algebra and English and Bible study and French. Never again, she thought. I will never see any of them, ever again.

At the end of the corridor was the entrance to the gymnasium; opposite it, a glass case full of trophies won by boys who played sports. Dinah’s own small trophy felt heavy in her hand. She threw it at the display case with all her strength.

The glass shattered loudly, an exquisite sound, random and musical, like an orchestra tuning. She wondered if her classmates heard it in the auditorium, Sue and Carolyn and Ted Nally; she hoped, fervently, that they had. She picked up her trophy and went out the front door.

The act of vandalism made the local papers; the culprit was never found.

Dinah never saw Calvary High again. In August, her father drove her to Washington, D.C.; together they carried cratefuls of records into her dorm room at American University.

In September, Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in a tennis match people called the Battle of the Sexes.

In October, tired of being stared at as she applied makeup in the dormitory bathroom, Dinah Whitacre quit school and went to work at Emile’s.

T
he Friday lunch crowd was voracious. At one o’clock Dinah ran out of the special, tomatoes stuffed with seafood salad. She peered into the dining room. To do a head count, she told herself. To see if the crowd had thinned.

Reverend Kimble wasn’t there.

In the cold kitchen she mixed cooked squid and capers and cherrystone clams, enough for a second batch of salad. From the walk-in she took a tray of hollowed-out tomatoes, expertly carved by the prep cook. The tomatoes were wet and ripe, easily torn if you crammed in too much seafood. It was the sort of task she usually loved—at culinary school she’d excelled in presentation—but that day it seemed futile. In five minutes the salads would be eaten and forgotten; the customers would move on to the main course. Why not just put the seafood on a plate?

The tomatoes stuffed, she went into the walk-in to check on her salmon. As garde-manger, she was responsible for all cold foods served at Emile’s: raw oysters and salads and crudités; in the summer, chilled peach soup and macédoine of fruits. Twice a week she
smoked a whole Alaska salmon or cured it with herbs for gravlax. For two days she’d soaked this one in a special marinade; now, finally, it was the proper color. She drained off the marinade and arranged the salmon in the smoker, then filled the bottom pan with a mixture of wood chips and lit the burner. At the other table the pastry chef filled profiteroles with cream.

She’d worked at the restaurant for four years, ever since she’d dropped out of college and her father had stopped paying her rent. The usual jobs open to young girls—waitress, supermarket cashier—were, for her, impossible: she was paralyzed by the thought of making small talk with customers, carrying trays of food across a roomful of strangers. Finally she’d answered an ad for kitchen help. Emile had hired her on the spot.

She’d been surprised to find the kitchen full of men. Emile staffed the dining room with stunning hostesses and waitresses, but felt the kitchen was no place for women. “Nobody can see you,” she’d once heard him tell a pretty job applicant. “It is a waste of beauty.”

She started as a prep cook—at Emile’s, everybody did. Her first day Emile had diced a red pepper and placed a single, perfect cube on the table in front of her. “Like this,” he said. “Each piece exactly like this.” Soon she could pare an apple in ten seconds; the peel came off in a single perfect strip. Emile encouraged her to apply to culinary school, let her arrange her shifts around her class schedule. After she graduated he hired her full-time.

Now the cold kitchen was her domain; she preferred its relative calm to the chaos of the main one, crowded with line cooks, hot from the grill and Emile’s fiery temper. She shared the space with the pastry chef, an impassive Swiss who rarely spoke. The cold kitchen smelled of cucumber and melted chocolate; she couldn’t imagine a better smell.

T
HE LUNCH RUSH
ended; at four o’clock the staff broke for dinner. The main kitchen smelled deliciously of Emile’s cassoulet, a hearty stew of white beans, sausages, duck legs, and pork.

“Another leg, please,” said Dinah as the line cook filled her plate.

“Encore?”
he said, incredulous.

Dinah reddened. “Yes, please.” She rarely had to ask, but he was new to Emile’s. The other line cooks knew her appetite.

She sat at the long table, her plate mounded with cassoulet. She’d always been a hearty eater: eggs and flapjacks for breakfast; seconds of everything, plus dessert. As a little girl she’d asked for two sandwiches at lunch, yet remained painfully thin; her mother finally took her to a doctor, fearing she had a tapeworm. “She’s a growing girl,” the doctor said. “It’ll catch up with her.” So far it hadn’t; at twenty-three she was slim-hipped as a boy.

She dug into the cassoulet. The pork was tender, the house-made sausages seasoned with garlic and fennel. The line cooks piled in across from her, then the prep cooks and the executive chef. There were twelve men all together, not counting Emile and the pastry chef, who ate standing up. Deep voices filled the small kitchen, a ragged blend of English and French.

“My God,” said one of the line cooks. The hostess had come into the kitchen in a short skirt.
“Les jambes qu’elle a!”

Deep laughter, a whistle, grunts of approval. Dinah smiled, embarrassed.

“There you are,” said the hostess, coming toward Dinah. “I saw your friend yesterday. He came in for lunch.”

“Ça alors,”
said a line cook. “Little Dinah has a friend.”

Dinah blushed. “Ignore these cavemen,” she told the hostess. She lowered her voice. “Are you sure it was him?”

“Positive.” The hostess sat down, so close Dinah could taste her perfume. “He asked me out.”

No, Dinah thought. But the hostess had a stunning figure, the coveted hairstyle of a famous TV actress. Of course Reverend Kimble would find her attractive.

“Dinner, dancing, the works,” said the hostess. Then she noticed Dinah’s expression. “Oh, don’t worry! I told him no. But he’s pretty smooth. I see why you like him.”

“He’s a wonderful man.” Dinah glanced around the kitchen. The others had finished their cassoulet; a few stragglers remained, swabbing their plates with crusty bread.

“Where do you know him from, anyway?” the hostess asked.

“He used to work with my dad. At Pennington College, in Richmond. He was the college chaplain.”

“Chaplain?” The hostess frowned. “Not this one. He’s in real estate. He’s got a big agency downtown.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” The hostess stood to go. “I guess you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“Oh well,” Dinah said lightly. “Looks like you turned down a date for nothing.”

“That’s okay,” said the hostess. “He’s not my type.”

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, climbing the hill to Glover Park, Dinah saw a police car parked in front of her house.

She sprinted up the front steps. The first-floor lights were on. The front window was broken, the porch covered with jagged glass.

“Hello?” she called out, her heart racing.

In the hallway the Patels’ door was ajar. Ann Patel sat on the worn sofa, a colorful shawl around her shoulders. Her husband sat next to her, still in operating scrubs. They were talking to a policeman.

“Are you the owner?” the officer asked. His eyes lit briefly on Dinah’s birthmark.

“Yes. I’m Dinah Whitacre.” She looked around. Broken glass littered the floor; at the front window the curtains hung askew. In one corner was a mass of extension cords; the appliances they’d been attached to were gone. “What happened?”

Ann Patel’s eyes met hers. “I am sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and I hear a noise. I come into the living room and I see two men in face mask.” She pantomimed pulling on a ski mask.

“Oh God,” said Dinah.

“One of them go in the bedroom and I hear him tearing everything apart,” said Ann Patel. “The other one tell me to sit down; he unplug the TV and the record player. Then he want to go upstairs; I tell him I have no key. That’s when he show me the knife.”

“We’ve had a number of these smash-and-grab robberies in the neighborhood,” said the officer. “It’s mainly juveniles, drug addicts, that type of thing.”

“I see.” Dinah turned to Ann Patel. “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

“No, thank God,” said Dillip, rubbing his wife’s shoulder through the shawl.

“You got some good locks on that upstairs door,” said the officer. “They tried to force it. Lucky for you that dead bolt held.”

“That’s good, I guess.” Dinah avoided the Patels’ eyes, ashamed that her own apartment hadn’t been touched.

“What happens next?” she asked. “Can you catch them?”

“I’ll file a report,” said the officer, “but without a positive ID it’s pretty unlikely.”

Dinah nodded stupidly. They’ll be back, she thought. It’s just a matter of time.

“We’ve had two break-ins in the last year,” she said. “Isn’t there something else you can do?”

The officer shrugged. “Put some bars on that window. No way would I live in this place without bars.”

“I cannot live behind bars,” said Ann Patel.

Her husband adjusted the shawl around her shoulders. “You’ve been very kind to us,” he said to Dinah. “But we can’t continue to live in this neighborhood. It’s simply too dangerous. My wife is expecting a baby.”

Dinah thought of the noises late at night, the rhythmic thud of the headboard against the wall. “A baby,” she said softly. “That’s wonderful.”

Dillip got to his feet. “We’re going to stay with some friends until we can find another apartment. I know this is not your fault, but you understand our position.”

“Yes,” said Dinah. “Of course I understand.”

T
HE MOON
was full that night; Dinah lay in bed listening for noises. The locksmith had come and gone; he’d charged her a hundred dollars to install an iron grate over the front window. “A hundred dollars?” she’d repeated; but she’d written the check. After he left she covered the window with plastic to keep out the draft; she’d call someone in the morning to replace the glass.

The old windows whistled, leaking frigid air. The rooms beneath her were perfectly silent. She thought of Ann Patel, pregnant, making love to her husband the night before. The idea shocked her. She’d never imagined that a pregnant woman could have sex. It was, she suspected, just the beginning of what she didn’t know.

She thought of the man who wasn’t Reverend Kimble, his blue eyes fixing hers with an expression she couldn’t decipher. She closed her eyes and listened. Outside the street was loud with traffic. Hundred of cars, thousands, any one of which might contain the two men who’d robbed the Patels. There were two dozen houses on her street, two dozen on the next. For reasons she couldn’t imagine, they had chosen hers.

She lay awake for hours, alone in Glover Park.