At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  Eugenia Marsh said, “Of course it is.” She was already steering Lenore toward her Mercedes, one hand on the small of her back. “Tell me—what brand of soda do you prefer? I wasn’t sure, so I bought Coke, 7-Up, and Mountain Dew.”

  “Coke is fine,” Lenore said.

  “And Doritos—how do you feel about Doritos?”

  “I like Doritos,” Lenore said.

  “You wait one damn minute,” Coach Fink said. “You’re not leaving here with that girl.”

  In no hurry, Eugenia Marsh lifted the shopping bag down from the roof of her car, opened the trunk, and set the bag inside. “As I recall,” she said, “it was a dream that brought you to me in the first place. Isn’t that right? Doesn’t it follow that a dream should herald your return?”

  To Lenore’s surprise, Coach Fink failed to respond, and Mr. Bishop just stood there, holding Pickett’s leash. Lenore hardly registered lowering herself into the passenger seat. Even before starting the car, Eugenia Marsh began to describe her dream. “So I was a girl,” she said, “and I was back at Briarwood,” and off they went, Mr. Bishop and Coach Fink and Pickett receding in the rear windshield until they were small enough that Lenore could have held them in the palm of her hand.

  XXII

  She was a girl again, and she was back at Briarwood, and night had fallen over campus, and she was walking all alone across the quad and could hear a baby crying somewhere in the dark. Such an obvious symbol. Even dreaming, part of her was aware of the heavy-handedness of her subconscious, but in no way did this awareness render the sound any less desperate, any less heart-wrenching. She searched for the baby in Everett Hall and Blackford Hall without success. She searched the library and chapel, each building thick with shadows, her footsteps echoing, not another soul to be found. Sometimes the crying grew louder as she searched, and she was sure that she would come upon the baby in the next room, around the next corner, but the sound would fade and she understood that she had been searching the wrong building altogether. And then she was running up the hill toward Thornton Hall—it seemed impossibly far away—and even though her conscious mind informed her sleeping mind that all of this was just a dream, that there was no baby, that she was right here in her bed, her heart was pounding in her physical body and the body in her dream, and she couldn’t catch her breath, and she knew that if she failed to find the baby soon, something terrible would happen, something final.

  “It’s so embarrassing,” she said, reaching up to touch her cheek. “At my age. I’d like to believe that after all this time, I was capable of a more original dream.”

  “I’m not following,” the girl said. “How did you know we were coming?”

  “Let me finish,” she said, and she described how she burst into Thornton Hall, and right away she could hear the baby’s cries bleating down from the second floor. She took the stairs two at a time, the crying suddenly all around her, the way the sound of the ocean fills your ears when you’re underwater, holding your breath, your heart thump-thump-thumping inside your head. Now she realized where the sound had been leading her all along. “My old room,” she told the girl. “Room 208. Elizabeth’s room.” She raced down the hall and pushed open the door, and instantly the crying stopped. “And there I was,” she said, with a flourish in her voice, and even as she steered her old Mercedes past the mailbox and down the drive, she felt that rush of recognition all over again, her waking self and her dream self washed with comprehension and relief, a feeling like landing on the right line of dialogue in one of her plays, a certainty beyond reason but no less palpable and true.

  “And there you were?” the girl said as Eugenia parked the car beside the house.

  “There I was,” Eugenia said.

  She dropped her hands into her lap and regarded this girl in her car—this Lenore Littlefield, this Jenny March.

  “I used to live in 208,” the girl said.

  “I assumed as much,” Eugenia said, delighted. “So now you see?”

  “See what?”

  Eugenia pressed her lips together, tried again. “I met myself. In my old room. I met Jenny March. I met you.”

  She performed another flourish with her voice to emphasize the last word, but the light refused to flicker on behind the girl’s eyes.

  “Where was the baby?” the girl said.

  “There was no baby, not a literal one.”

  The girl said, “I’m confused.”

  Eugenia looked away. The sun streamed down. It was beginning to feel a little close inside the car. Very well then. If she had to spell it out for this girl, then that’s what she would do.

  “You were pregnant, were you not?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Your teacher told me.”

  “Mr. Bishop—why? He shouldn’t have told you that. That’s private. He had no business telling you.”

  “Well, he did. He believed it was important for me to know, and he was right. But surely now you understand.”

  The girl blinked half a dozen times in quick succession. None of this was transpiring the way Eugenia had imagined.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said. “This is—I don’t know—it’s a lot. Not just you. Everything. The last few months. I’m sorry.”

  Eugenia sighed. Three decades had slipped away since her time at Briarwood. She touched the girl’s elbow with her fingertips.

  “Let’s see about those snacks,” she said.

  Eugenia had spent the morning cleaning house. Amazing the mess a solitary person can make. You would think the opposite would be true—the more people, the greater the mess. It’s the peripheral details of tidiness that escape one’s attention living alone. Eugenia made her bed each day and hung her towel on its rack after a bath. She did not let dishes pile up in the sink or dirty clothes accumulate in the laundry hamper. She managed quite capably the daily clutter of her life. All the while, however, over all these sequestered years, cobwebs had spun into being in every corner of the ceiling, and dust had been silting down on the mantel and the windowsills, on baseboards and the tops of picture frames. Unnoticed, mildew propagated in the seams of bathroom tile. She’d swung out of bed that morning, invigorated by her dream, and immediately she began to clean. She told herself that even if the dream proved to be a dud, at least the house would be in order and she wouldn’t have to broom cobwebs from the ceiling or scrub baseboards for years and years. Three hours later her enthusiasm had diminished slightly, worn down by the scope of the task, but the house was gleaming, and she opened the refrigerator to pour herself a celebratory glass of milk. The milk was right where she’d left it, but mostly what she’d noticed was all the empty space. There was butter in the little compartment, lettuce and carrots in the crisper, soy sauce and Dijon mustard and a half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc on the door. And that, more or less, was all. She could hardly entertain a teenage girl with these supplies, so off she rushed to Mother’s Best. She would rather have driven to the supermarket in Lexington, but the day was already getting on and she worried she might miss the girl if she was gone too long, but even in this instance the forces of the universe were at work, delivering the girl directly to her, or her to the girl, depending on your point of view, delivering each to the other, as forecast by her dream.

  “It is a proven scientific fact,” she explained to Lenore, “that energy is neither created nor destroyed. You know this. I have no idea who is teaching in the sciences at Briarwood anymore—surely Mr. Reese is long dead—but I’m certain that whoever they are they have not failed to mention the first law of thermodynamics.” Lenore nodded and sipped her Coke. For her part, Eugenia had been intrigued by the radiator-fluid tint of the Mountain Dew. They were seated on opposite sides of the breakfast table, a mid-century piece with aluminum legs that had survived her New York days, a bowl of Doritos between them. “If this is true of tangible things—the wood which becomes the fire which becomes the smoke—it must also be true of the intangible as well.”

  �
��Are you talking about ghosts?” Lenore said.

  “That’s just one example,” Eugenia said. “Our thoughts, our dreams, the very force that beats our hearts. What else is existence except another form of energy? If we follow this line of thinking, it might be argued that all existence has been recurring in one form or another since the beginning of time.”

  “History repeats itself?” Lenore said, and now the light really did blink on behind her eyes as visibly as if someone had thrown a switch.

  “Indeed,” Eugenia said, “but these energies are much more inscrutable than such a literal phrase implies. Empires inevitably fall, frequently for similar reasons, but they never fall in precisely the same way. There is always an element of the particular in their demise.”

  Lenore drew in a long breath, the sort of breath that often precedes a question of considerable gravity, but she released it without speaking. She reached for the bowl but withdrew her hand without taking a Dorito. She glanced at Eugenia, then dropped her eyes. Finally, she folded her hands one atop the other on the table.

  So Eugenia answered the question she knew Lenore had been suppressing all this time. “In the winter of my junior year at Briarwood,” she said, “I met a boy during a production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. He was playing Trigorin. I’d been cast as Nina.”

  “What was his name?” Lenore said.

  “His name is unimportant.”

  Lenore raised her eyes.

  “His name was Cortland Teasdale,” Eugenia said, “but everyone called him Cort. He went to Woodmont. He was a senior. He had brown hair and brown eyes, and he smelled like rain and cigarette smoke.” She paused a moment to assess the effect of these details. “Satisfied?”

  Lenore nodded and took a chip.

  “Thank heavens, because that’s about all I can remember.”

  This wasn’t true—she could recall almost everything about him, from the cowlick at the back of his head to the fact that he kept dimes in his loafers instead of pennies—but she did believe that the minutiae were beside the point. She suspected that she would have kissed most any Woodmont boy backstage, provided that he was moderately handsome and displayed at least a modicum of talent. She would have taken him by the hand, whoever he might have been, and slipped away from the cast party and sneaked him up the back stairs to her room, not only because the play itself had cast a spell but because that was just about the worst thing a Briarwood girl could do, and to her younger self the worst thing always seemed so much more vital, so much more interesting than the best. Sneaking a boy into your room wasn’t even all that dangerous and rare. She knew dozens of older girls who claimed to have gotten away with it. What were the odds that her RA would walk in on them while Eugenia was buttoning her blouse, Cortland Teasdale lingering in her bed, still astounded at his good fortune? What were the chances that this single assignation would leave her pregnant, a fact she wouldn’t discover until after she had been suspended from Briarwood and she woke one morning in her parents’ house sick to her stomach for no good reason? Or that her father would be so averse to one scandal that he was willing to risk another? Or that her mother would know exactly which unscrupulous doctor to call? Or that her rebellious younger self would turn out to be so weak-willed, so staggered and heartsick, that she would go along with every single thing that happened without protest or complaint? The odds, it turned out, were very good, though her younger self couldn’t have known that larger energies were at play, energies that would one day deliver Lenore Littlefield to her kitchen table.

  “So Elizabeth didn’t come to you until—after?” Lenore said, letting that word, after, stand in for all that it implied.

  “That’s right. After. I changed the details in the play. The conflict is more immediate if the decision hasn’t already been made.”

  “By why did she come to you?”

  “You already know,” Eugenia said.

  “She was pregnant,” Lenore said. “She was pregnant when she died.”

  “She never said as much. She didn’t like to talk about her suicide. But I don’t think we’re off the mark.”

  “Why didn’t you put that in the play?”

  Before Eugenia could reply, there came a slapping sound from the next room, and Lenore startled in her chair.

  “That’ll be a bird,” Eugenia said. “The poor things fly into the windows. The windows reflect the sky over the fields this time of day.”

  Very slowly, like a pantomime, Lenore brought her hands up from the table and covered her eyes. Crying. Her shoulders trembled but she hardly made a sound. Eugenia sipped her Mountain Dew while she waited. Finally, Lenore lowered her hands, and as she did, someone knocked on the door, three sharp raps, her coach and her teacher returning to claim their charge. Eugenia stood and rested a palm on Lenore’s shoulder.

  “Just because it’s not directly addressed,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not in the play.”

  Question 6

  On September 28, 1994, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced the termination of the Disney’s America project, later claiming in various interviews that its failure was the “greatest disappointment” of his executive tenure. Which of the following is/are believed to be responsible for dooming the historical theme park to cancellation?

  A) Financial concerns related to the project, including a 40 percent increase in the estimated cost of construction.

  B) Legislative efforts funded by local landowners and spearheaded by organizations such as the Piedmont Environmental Council and National Trust for Historic Preservation.

  C) A shift in public perception steered in large part by a group of notable historians and celebrities and writers, among them Eugenia Marsh, who purchased a full-page ad in the Washington Post referring to Michael Eisner as “the man who would destroy American history.”

  D) All of the above.

  XXIII

  Lenore lay in bed in the dark waiting for the phone to ring. Sunday night. Then Monday, Tuesday. Her ears became fine-tuned to every tick and shuffle and mutter in Thornton Hall. Why would Elizabeth abandon her just now? She must have dozed, she told herself, but it didn’t feel that way. Strangely, those long nights did not leave her ragged with exhaustion. She felt a little dreamy in class but also perceptive and alive, alert to something just beyond her reach.

  On Wednesday, Coach Fink kept the cast late to rehearse the scene in which Eleanor’s ghost compares memory to dreaming, Jenny’s loneliness and confusion getting the better of her fear. Afterward, Juliet caught up to Lenore on her way down to the dining hall.

  “I’m already so nervous I could puke,” she said.

  A curious alteration had occurred in Juliet. She had, it seemed, absorbed Eugenia Marsh’s advice on some fundamental level, her Eleanor Bowman so restrained these last two weeks as to be downright otherworldly.

  “It’ll be great,” Lenore said. “You’ll be great.”

  Her parents planned to attend. All of them. She hadn’t wanted them to find out, but Willow had spotted a notice in the school newsletter and called Lenore’s mom, who called Lenore acting all indignant that Lenore hadn’t told her, when really she was pissed that Willow had found out first. Now flights had been booked, hotel rooms reserved.

  “Do you think she’ll come?” Juliet said.

  The question was briefly disorienting for Lenore—was she referring to her mom or Willow, and why did she care?—but then she realized that Juliet was asking about Eugenia Marsh. Debate about her presence or lack thereof had dominated discussion before and after rehearsal ever since Coach Fink made her announcement. As for Lenore, she had her doubts. And though she could imagine a perverse pleasure in dashing Juliet’s hopes, she didn’t see the point. How hard would it be to keep one more secret?

  “Shit,” she said, smacking her forehead. “I left my backpack.”

  This was, in fact, the case. Lenore was suddenly aware of the absence of the backpack’s weight on her shoulders. She wasn’t sure if her forgetfulness w
as a result of lack of sleep or post-rehearsal abstraction, but she trotted back up the hill toward the auditorium, picturing her backpack right where she’d left it, on a chair in the second row, three seats from the aisle. She rarely went anywhere on campus without her backpack. Lenore banged into the lobby and stopped, her attention arrested by an unexpected sound—singing. A lone voice, sturdy and clear. “Tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night.” Lenore crept across the carpet and peeked into the auditorium. Coach Fink was standing between the beds onstage, bathed in a solitary spotlight. “Tonight, there’ll be no morning star.” Her eyes were closed, her chin tipped toward the back row, her shadow puddled at her feet. Lenore was reminded of those images of Coach Fink in the yearbook. She could see her backpack exactly where she’d thought it would be, but she made no move to retrieve it. The dust rising in the spotlight and Coach Fink’s voice rising with it filled Lenore with anticipation—any moment now and something important might occur. Something might be understood.

  But nothing happened. No signal descended from the universe, no message was received. Half a minute ticked by, and then the last words of the song were fading on the air, and Coach Fink slipped backstage to shut off the lights. Lenore took advantage of her absence to scurry down the aisle and nab her backpack and beat it out of the auditorium undetected.

  Her mother was the first to arrive, consolation for being the last to know. She flew into Dulles on Thursday morning, rented a car, and drove directly to campus to sign Lenore out for lunch. They ate in Manassas because none of the restaurants in Haymarket was good enough, but even in Manassas the pickings were pretty slim. Her mother recalled a sandwich shop, a favorite of Briarwood parents for its tablecloths and chicken salad.