The Truth About Lorin Jones

JANET BELLE SMITH,

short-story writer

Oh yes, I remember Laurie Zimmern from college. Of course, she was only at Smith for one year, my sophomore year. Then she transferred to Bennington, which was really a much better place for her. She was a strange girl, young woman, I suppose you’d say now. Even for Bennington, where it was more fashionable to be strange then; I believe it still is.

I don’t recall how we got to be friends. I think perhaps it was because of a book of Beardsley drawings that I’d bought, and Laurie asked if she could borrow it. I remember thinking at the time that she was like a Beardsley drawing herself, all long smooth curves of black and white. She was very striking then, beautiful really, very slim, with white skin and those great dark eyes, and masses of dark hair. She wore it in a long bob with thick bangs, like some ancient Egyptian princess. It looked odd back then, when most everyone had short bouncy curls.

If your hair didn’t curl naturally, you put it up on rollers or got a permanent wave.

Her clothes were very odd too, by our standards. I remember the first evening of my sophomore year, going down to dinner in the dorm. There were the new freshmen in their candy-striped or madras-check dresses, or flowered skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars, like what all the rest of us were wearing. And there was Laurie, in a long flounced red gypsy skirt and a ratty black scoop-neck cotton jersey. I felt sorry for her, but I thought she’d soon notice that her clothes were all wrong and do something about them. Only she didn’t. Then for a while I thought she must be on scholarship, and couldn’t afford to buy anything new. Well, you know, I was awfully conventional then. It was the way I’d been brought up.

But it turned out that Laurie wasn’t poor: her parents were quite well off. She wore those sorts of clothes because she wanted to. Most of them she found in secondhand shops — of course, this was long before that became fashionable. I used to shudder sometimes at what she’d bring back from the Salvation Army. To tell you the truth, I still feel that way. I’d never buy anything used; one has no idea where it’s been or what odd diseases its owner might have had.

Oh, no, she went to real stores sometimes. We even went shopping together once. I remember it because Laurie did this really strange thing.

It was in New York, over spring vacation, and she took me to Klein’s on Union Square. I’d never been there before, and I was appalled by the crowds, all those people pushing and shoving. And there were these awful warnings against shoplifting posted up everywhere: a crude drawing of a woman with staring eyes looking through bars, and underneath it said in both English and Spanish, in great black capital letters: DISHONESTY MEANS PRISON — DO NOT BRING DISGRACE ON YOUR FAMILY. I felt as if I were surrounded by thieves; I clutched onto my handbag like mad the whole time I was there.

But Laurie loved it. She found this dress on a rack — it was quite nice, black cotton with a square neck trimmed in black cotton lace. And she liked it so much that she said she thought she’d buy two. I assumed she was joking, but she explained that then she’d never have to bother about what to wear, because one of the dresses would always be clean.

Oh yes, she bought them both. And she actually did wear them when we got back to college, every single day that the weather was warm enough, for at least a month.

Yes, that seems rather enterprising, if eccentric, now; but by our rules at the time it was really shocking, almost crazy. You were supposed to put together a different outfit every day, repeating yourself as seldom as possible. When you wore a dress again you’d be careful to have new accessories, a different belt or scarf, you know. Even today ...

No, I think probably I was the only person at Smith who got to know Laurie at all well. You see, she didn’t really fit in, and of course she was very shy, too, and she said such odd things. Some people thought she was a hopeless neurotic; others just felt she was rather standoffish and affected. Most of my friends couldn’t see why I wanted to have anything to do with her. But I found her fascinating, really, especially at first. She was awfully well read for a freshman, for one thing. And I knew she was amazingly gifted.

I always thought it was a shame Laurie went into abstract art, because she could draw so beautifully. I still have some sketches she made of me and a pot of English ivy. But there certainly was something strange about her, and she wasn’t putting it on. I suppose it might have been better if she had been, in a way.

I didn’t mind Laurie’s being strange at first. I didn’t pay any attention to what my other friends said, until one evening toward the end of the year. I was writing a paper on Hawthorne, and Laurie knocked on my door and asked me to come and see what she’d done to her room. Because she was a freshman, she had one of the smallest rooms on the corridor, but she’d gradually decorated it so that somehow it looked much bigger, and not like a college dorm at all. There were a lot of little mirrors, and an Indian print spread on her bed, and heaps of embroidered pillows in bright colors, scarlet and crimson and plum, that you’d think wouldn’t go together, but they did. On the floor she had one of those big fuzzy-edged pale Indian rugs with a design of a tree full of peculiar birds. And she had strange posters, and lots of leafy tropical plants —

No, you have to realize, this was back in the nineteen-forties, those things weren’t clichés yet, they were original — weird maybe, but exciting. Laurie was way ahead of the fashion, you know. Because what most of us had in our rooms then were African violets and chintz armchairs and the Oriental throw rug from one of the spare bedrooms back home; and the girls who weren’t so well off had Bates Piping Rock bedspreads and curtains.

So naturally I was interested, and I followed Laurie down the corridor to see what she’d done now. She opened her door, shoved it back as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because there was something wedged up against it inside. I squeezed in after her, and she put on the light.

Well, it was upsetting. Everything had been turned backward or upside down. Laurie had tacked all her posters to the walls wrong side out, and shoved the furniture around, so that the chest of drawers and the desk couldn’t be opened: they were slap up against the walls, and you could see the raw unpainted wood in back. Her lamp was still on the desk, but it was upside down, balancing on its white pleated shade, with the brass base sticking up. The chairs all faced the walls, too, and the rug was upside down on the floor.

The worst thing was the bed. Heaven knows how she’d managed that, because our college furniture was solid oak, and very heavy. It looked quite dreadful, lying on its back with its square legs in the air, each one ending in a kind of metal claw caster, and the ribs of its slats were exposed, like something that had been killed. And the plants were awful too. All the pots on their sides and some of them upside down, spilling out dirt and leaves. It frightened me, really.

Well, I stood and looked at it. And Laurie looked at me, and gave me this little smile, and said, “Isn’t it nice?” I thought she was kidding, and I wanted to play along, so I said, “Oh, yes. But where will you sleep?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I won’t sleep for a while.”

Yes, she did leave it that way, but only for a few days. Then I think the maids — we had maids then, you know — complained that they couldn’t get in to clean, and our housemother made her put everything back.

I didn’t know what to think. If I’d been more sophisticated I probably would have wondered if she’d been smoking marijuana or something. I guess mostly I was amazed by the whole thing, and frightened, like I said. It was as if Laurie were saying, My life here is upside down, inside out, and backwards. She seemed so serious, and I couldn’t be sure it was a joke.

No, really, I don’t think that it was, quite.

Yes, it made a difference. I had to realize that Laurie wasn’t quite normal. And by the end of the spring term, when exams came, she’d gotten very strange. Of course, a lot of girls did become tense then, and do odd things; another friend of mine used to sit up all night studying in the bathtub — without water, of course — because it was so uncomfortable there she couldn’t go to sleep. But with Laurie it was worse, somehow. She didn’t eat properly, and in the end she sat through one exam, biology I think it was, without writing a single word.

It turned out that all she’d done for three hours was to pull out her eyebrows very slowly, hair by hair. I saw her afterward, and the strange thing was, she didn’t seem at all upset, and she didn’t look too bad either.

A bit like one of those fifteenth-century European portraits, a Memling perhaps. Odd, but rather elegant. You know it was fashionable in those days for ladies to pluck out their eyebrows completely.

I did see her once or twice over the next summer. We met in New York and had lunch and went to some galleries. I was glad to see her again. But we didn’t really keep up with each other after that.

Well, for one thing she’d acquired this rather crazy hatred of Smith College. She said it had a malevolent philistine atmosphere; and she wanted me to leave too, before I was poisoned by it. But of course I couldn’t leave Smith; I didn’t want to, anyhow. And then Laurie transferred to Bennington and made new friends; and that was it, really. We lost track of each other. I’m sorry about it now. I’ve never known anyone else like her.

No. Well, I did try to write about her, several times, but it never worked. Of course, the story would have been partly about my reaction to Laurie, but still. ... She always came out quite unbelievable, or simply weird, which wasn’t the point at all. I think that often happens when one tries to portray exceptional people. And if one excuses it by explaining within the story that the character is a genius, or is going to be famous, well, it’s rather like special pleading, isn’t it? It doesn’t convince. I think that in fiction, at least my own particular kind of fiction ...