The Demon Queller

[This is certainly a weird one. If you like, you can print the Google document instead of reading the blog post below.]

In later years when the conversation turned to college adventures, Bea and Alicia would laugh about their narrow escape on the Stanford campus. “It was all my fault,” Bea insisted. “If I hadn’t jumped in front of the Chinese student’s bicycle and had my tooth knocked out, Alicia might be a Stanford graduate or at least a famous model by now.”

Nobody they told the story to could quite visualize Bea and Alicia cavorting on the Stanford campus. For one thing, they hadn’t lived in California for years and when their father was transferred to Philadelphia, they ended up going to Bryn Mawr College, and the thought of Stanford or any other California school seemed ludicrous. Yet they swore it happened and Bea would show the very tooth which was knocked out at the root and miraculously reattached at the Stanford Hospital. (Apparently there was some fear that her family would sue over the accident and the hospital gave her superb treatment and sent no bill.) There was a lawsuit pending over a “hit and run” bicycle accident and the university wanted above all to forestall another legal action charging negligence.

Alicia, on the other hand, experienced something quite different. She was looking for a bathroom and wandered onto a TV documentary being made about a professor/author from Stanford and was asked to take the part of a student. Although she told the director that she wasn’t a student but was only thinking of applying, he said, “You look more like a Stanford student than a Stanford student and they’re all gone somewhere for spring break so just walk by if you don’t mind but don’t let on I asked you to because you don’t have a card and we can’t pay you.” The family actually saw the segment on TV so they knew that Alicia wasn’t having one of her fantasies.

She told the story this way: After we parked the car in one of those forty-minute zones (Did you ever wonder how forty minutes was established as the period of time in which to visit anything?) we walked towards a large open space with an enormous mosaic of Jesus in dead center and the multitude standing all about as if they were waiting to be blessed. It was on the front of a church, protestant from the look of it. We’d been in the car for a long time and I was feeling like running and getting the kinks out of my muscles, so I started ahead and came to this lovely big circle. I was twirling and twirling and singing to myself and making up a poem about space on earth instead of space out beyond the earth and feeling very frisky and thinking that if this was what college looked like, I did want to go after all. It even smelled wonderful. There was some plant that had the scent of ripe peaches. I was positively transported. High school was a nightmare—sweat socks and chalk dust and math problems that gave you headaches and teachers who wanted you to take advanced placement in everything. I wouldn’t do it. They said I would have a better chance of selecting the college I wanted if I did well on advanced placement. I said no way. In fact I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to college at all. I wanted to be my own person. My parents were pretty tolerant, more concerned that I express myself and be happy, but Bea was determined that I should go to a “good” university although she was planning to study dental hygiene at a junior college. Anyway they were looking all over for a bathroom because Bea had drunk a Sprite and was about to die needing to pee.

I knew they would be along in a minute but I wanted to have an adventure all by myself, so I crept up onto this raised circle of plantings and hid behind a bush. A group of people were gathered in front of an enormous man with very dark hair and a very pointed beard. The point looked like it had been waxed and his hair was plastered in place. It was a warm day, but he was wearing a suit with a topcoat thrown over his shoulders and he was reading from a piece of paper in his hand. “Shyness is not a disease, but a condition we can modify with appropriate treatment. The person who suffers from shyness truly suffers. It is a very real handicap in today’s world.”

“That’s Bea all over,” I thought to myself. How remarkable that he would understand. I wanted to jump out and tell him what a smart person he was but I also wanted to watch what else would happen.

Everything about that day on the Stanford campus seemed unlikely to have happened to anybody they would know, but particularly to them. They called it Their Day on the Farm and sometimes “Mrs. Stanford Lives On.” That’s when they would start telling about the bathrooms or rather the lack of bathrooms.

“Apparently,” one of them would say, “Mrs. Stanford abhorred the idea of inside bathrooms so there are practically no bathrooms in the Quadrangle. The idea was that nature’s need be attended to in a separate building.”

“The problem was that she also decreed that the proportion of men to women should be three to one and therefore there were three men’s bathrooms at various places around the Quadrangle but only one bathroom for women and that one was hidden away behind the Church with the entrance almost obscured by bushes. It was all underground and most peculiar. We’re talking 1980, you understand, not 1890. And of course, in our case we were three women and one man looking for bathrooms.”

“Sounds as if there were some kind of denial going on.”

“Well, that was the Victorian way, wasn’t it,” Bea said.

Alicia looked at Bea and smiled. Something solidified for them the day they spent on the Stanford campus. Until that day they were sisters in body but not in spirit. Their mother dressed them in twin clothes even though they weren’t twins and insisted they were equal in every way. But they had never felt like equals and certainly not like twins.

Alicia was a smashing beauty, but Bea was in that old fashioned sense plain, even homely. Stylish clothes were transformed the minute she put them on into ordinary, lumpish garments. A haircut that looked perfect for Alicia turned into a dreadful mistake for Bea. When her mother wasn’t looking she hacked at her hair so that it was never long enough to take a permanent.

A “B” student—her homework was always carefully done, on time and correct. Her answers in class were correct and to the point but not very interesting to the teacher or other students. She set the norm for behavior, never getting out of her seat and wandering about, always on time, remembering to sharpen her pencils before the class began, never losing her textbooks and returning them without cartoons in the margins. “Deadly dull,” one teacher said to another, “But imagine how it must feel to have that Alicia for a younger sister.”

Still they didn’t up her grade to a B+ because she seemed the perfect B student. She never wavered. Her mother wondered if they should not have named her Bea but Anita or Annette or Annie, but felt she shouldn’t speak to the teachers.

Alicia delighted her teachers. She looked like a Princess and she laughed at everything. Her worse efforts received at least A–. “Your spelling and grammar need improvement,” one teacher wrote, “but your ideas are excellent.” Bea had suggested her paper topic and explained to Alicia that teachers have to have an idea explained to them in detail, that they would not give points for unproven assumptions. “Imagine they don’t know anything at all and are rather obtuse.”

Alicia went into peals of laughter and followed Bea’s directions.

When Alicia made the Honor Society and Bea did not, Bea was not jealous. She had assigned herself the role of B student, and she liked the protective coloration. She found the high school teachers as uninteresting as they found her. She loved Alicia’s success. It was a triumph for her belief and for her efforts.

Arriving on the Stanford campus was, she supposed, something like getting to Hollywood.

Bea had decided that she would go to Junior College and study Dental Hygiene and that Alicia would go to Stanford. It was her idea that the parents couldn’t afford for both of them to go to Stanford and she wanted Alicia to go. The day on the Stanford campus, which the whole family had thought of as a kind of shopping expedition, turned out to be a disaster, but for the girls it was the beginning of their understanding of what they had been doing to one another. They never tried to explain it to their parents.

Bea saw that she was sacrificing herself, though no one had asked her to, and she decided she was being stupid. It was as good as a year with the psychiatrist to hear the Chinese student say quite firmly, “She saw me coming and she stepped into my path.” Of course, he didn’t say that to give her insight into the kind of personality trait she was developing. He was scared to death that he would be charged with hit and run even though he remained right with the family until the policeman told him not to worry that he was free to go (unfortunately he couldn’t ride his bicycle since the wheel had been bent) but he dragged it along to the Campus Bike Shop. The father insisted that he take $25.

Some demon made her do it and now she had caused him to drop his shopping bag and break all his eggs and Alicia disappeared for half an hour and ended up never getting to Admissions. Later they found out that the Admissions office was closed entirely and gone on a retreat to Asilomar, but at the time it was the same as if they could have visited Admissions and the people there could see what an apt applicant Alicia would be. It was the Chinese student rubbing his knee and saying over and over that he was not a hit and run driver that brought Bea to her senses. She had from some deep-seated hostility tried to spoil Alicia’s chance to go to Stanford. She thought that she wanted Alicia to go to Stanford, but deep down she resented the role she had assigned herself. When the tooth came out, it was like a demon coming out.

As soon as their father parked the car in front of the Museum where there were metered spaces, Bea was sure she would need to go to the bathroom any minute. He said when he pulled into the space that now she could go, but The Museum had a big CLOSED sign on its glass doors. Bea pulled a long face. She almost said, “I knew I shouldn’t drink that Sprite,” but her father was too far away to hear her and he was the one who had urged her to have it.

Alicia danced ahead. Her walk was light and graceful, remarkably unaffected, slightly athletic, stopping short of the unfeminine. She was wearing a light flowery dress with Monet colors.

Bea plodded, placing one foot down flatly as if to connect dutifully with Terra Firma before lifting the other, never in doubt of her path. Her swerving into the path of the oncoming bicyclist was totally uncharacteristic.

“Slow down, Alicia, wait up,” her parents called as they approached the Archway that marked the entrance to the Stanford campus. “I hope they have rest rooms,” Bea said to her mother. “I shouldn’t have drunk that Sprite.”

“Of course they have rest rooms,” the father said irritably. He pressed the Sprite on Bea when they stopped in Watsonville. She needs to learn how young people act, what they eat and drink, he thought. She needs encouragement to act young.

“Don’t be an old woman, “Bea,” he said when she argued against anything to drink. But he assumed his best jovial manner. “I’ll stop anytime you want to,” and faithfully, he asked twice in the last hour if she wanted to stop.

“No thanks, not yet. I’ll wait until we get there.”

“Anyone else?”

“Let’s keep going so we have time to see the campus,” the Mother said. She wished her husband would not take the girls and their peculiarities so hard.

Alicia nodded that she was OK and got out the packet she received from the Admissions Office. “I wonder if I’ll get accepted. I’m not sure I should apply.”

Bea snorted. “They’re better not try to keep you out.” She was prepared to challenge single-handed any obstacle set in her path. Hadn’t she supervised Alicia’s homework and helped her think up paper topics from they started school. Alicia’s straight “A” record was more than compensation for her own straight “B” record. She always wanted to go to Junior College herself, but Alicia must go to Stanford. Even Alicia had caught the fever. Stanford or bust!

They walked towards the large open space looking at the enormous mosaic of Jesus and the multitude on the façade of the church. Alicia ran ahead into the center and twirled around. There were flowers in bloom in the large circles.

From her perch on the raised planting circle Alicia watched the cameraman move to a different angle and the people holding giant reflectors moved as well. “Let’s hear it one more time for pace and then try talking without your notes.”

The dark man repeated his sentence on shyness again and the person in the background said, “That’s it.”

Just as the signal to start over again was given a swarm of Japanese entered the open area and whipped out their cameras. They were like birds suddenly landing in a flock and all pecking and scratching at once only they were all holding their cameras and posing for another—stiff and formal—before the church. She giggled to herself. They were all wearing dark suits and they all walked with small steps as if they were not used to wide open spaces. She wanted to leap out at them and see if they would scatter and run the way birds would. Instead she stood up slowly from behind the bush where she was crouched and waited, peering through the bougainvillea stock still while the Japanese cameras took pictures of the palm trees and each other. She could hardly keep a straight face thinking about all that film being developed in Japan and her picture going to all those Japanese homes. Perhaps she wouldn’t even be noticed there was so little of her showing, but she would be there in dozens of Japanese homes whether they knew it or not. She could hardly wait to tell Bea.

Where was Bea? She’d thought they would be along in a minute and now it was getting hot and she was thirsty. She hadn’t thought before she wanted to go to college, but now it looked like fun. Only where were the students? Just then the camera man spotted her and told her he needed someone who looked like a student.

It made her think of the time they had gone to Hollywood. When they got there they didn’t see any stars. And now she felt the same way. She jumped down from the bushes when she saw her parents and Bea coming across the circle in the middle of the Quad. They had found the information booth but it was closed and they didn’t have the foggiest idea where admissions would be. They could not go inside and see the church. “I can’t wait much longer,” Bea says.

“Look, there’s a sign saying men, so there must be a door for women. Let’s try that.”

They walk towards the square building, made of the same material as the Quadrangle buildings. The father walked completely around the building and saw that there was only one entrance and that it said Men. “I’ll look inside,” he said and when he came back he said someone he met told him that there’s a women’s room towards the back of the church.

They skirt the church and find a bunker-like arrangement with cement steps going down and indeed the sign says women. Bea shakes her head. She starts back towards the church when the bicyclist appears coming towards her. She can’t make up her mind which way to turn and without meaning to she watches his wheel to see if he will turn into her path and then she waits stock still for him to decide which way he’ll turn and when he does she moves straight into his wheel. Just at that moment a squirrel runs between them and the bicycle swerves to avoid either or both of them. Bea dives towards the squirrel and hits the handlebars. When she picks herself up, blood is streaming down her chin; and when she holds her hand against her mouth, a large tooth comes loose in her hand. She looks a bloody mess.

The Chinese student is frozen in fear. His bicycle is bent, disabled, lying on its side. He hates the sight of blood and he had done everything a reasonable person could to avoid hitting this maniac young white woman. He knows that his eggs are broken even though they have not yet soaked through the paper sack. He wonders if the police will arrest him. He does not have his passport with him. He has not registered his bicycle with the city though it has a registration sticker from the previous owner.

The man who is practicing the speech about shyness has followed them. Apparently the sun has shifted and the camera crew has brought all its reflection equipment around the corner away from the circle where Alicia first saw them. The Chinese student thinks that they are intending to film the accident for the TV News. He tries to pull his cap down over his face.

Bea puts her hand to her bleeding mouth and the tooth dangling by a mere fragment of skin comes off into her palm. She holds the bloody mess in her palm and identifies it as the canine tooth. With her tongue she notifies her brain that it is the lower right, stage right, that is. It suddenly strikes her that the mouth is a stage and the teeth are actors prancing about and saying their lines. She turns to the grass and spits out the bloody drool. She feels faint but mostly she feels hot and done in. She no longer feels that she needs to go to the bathroom. In fact, she feels that she wouldn’t be able to go if she had a chance.

The Chinese student is holding his student I.D. card for her father to see and is explaining how the accident happened. Bea listens closely because she is not sure herself what happened. He is saying that he was not speeding, that she moved suddenly without warning into his path and caused him to collide with her. He doesn’t mention the squirrel that ran between them. Bea decides that the squirrel isn’t important.

The Chinese student wants to call the campus police so they can take down what he says and put it in their records. That is extremely important he says over and over, to call the police and have the facts recorded. He is not a hit-and-run driver he says over and over. He was giving them a wide berth and making sure not to hit the elderly couple when the young lady suddenly sprang into his path when he could no longer stop. Why had she done that?

Bea thought to herself that she had not purposely got hit by a bicycle. The Chinese student was angry about something else. Of course, his bicycle was a mess and broken eggs were soaking his jacket. She felt like wailing and she did.

[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]