The Finishing School

by Joanna Goodman

  After he left the house, Kersti paced around rehashing their argument and then impulsively decided to book a flight to Boston. As the plane lifts off now, veering sharp right over Lake Ontario and leaving the island airport behind, Kersti closes her eyes. When did this happen to them? How did it happen? She thought they would always be partners, always on the same page about life’s most important decisions. She sees now how childish that was, how idealistic.

  She remembers the night they told her parents in a burst of optimistic solidarity that they were going to try IVF. It was the night of the festival of St. John’s and her whole family was gathered around the bonfire in her parents’ backyard. The sun had set and the sky was dark and smooth and speckled with stars. Jay and Kersti were sitting side by side in the red and white plastic lawn chairs her parents have been hanging on to since the seventies. They touched their bottles together. She was feeling hopeful again for the first time in a long time.

  The festival of St. John, which falls on the eve of the summer solstice in June, is one of the more important Estonian holidays—not just for its religious significance but also for its rituals and traditions, which include jumping over the bonfire, drinking, dancing, singing, and, for the Kuusks, more drinking. Like all good Estonians, Kersti’s father, Paavo, believes that lighting the bonfire is a way of guaranteeing prosperity and avoiding bad luck. He’s a huge, hulking man. Tall, uncomfortably overweight, silver-haired and bearded, his cheeks are always dangerously flushed, his nose red and pocky. He is not a man of moderation.

  That night, he rose unsteadily to his feet—much vodka had been consumed—and kindled the fire. “Who is jumping first?” he thundered in his thick accent.

  Kersti’s sister, Jutta, shouted her husband’s name, “Rasmus!” and everyone began to clap and chant. Ras-mus! Ras-mus! Ras-mus!

  Her six nieces were running around the fire, all with white-blond hair, round faces, and the trademark Kuusk blue eyes. Kersti was the only one in that circle without kids.

  Jay was the only one with dark hair. Together, they were a pair of misfits in a clan of procreating blonds.

  Ras-mus! Ras-mus! Ras-mus!

  Rasmus leapt over the fire, rolling on the grass after he landed, looking like a break-dancing giraffe. “I never get tired of this,” Jay whispered to Kersti.

  After the rest of them jumped, Paavo boomed, “Jay’s turn!”

  Everyone started chanting as they passed around a bottle of vodka. Jay! Jay! Jay!

  “I’m going to skip it this year,” Jay said. “I charred my Varvatos pants last summer—”

  “You have to jump,” Kersti said. “Or we’ll have bad luck all year.” She gave him a meaningful look.

  Jay downed his beer and reluctantly stood up. He removed his Sperry Topsiders and carefully set them aside. He took a breath, made the sign of a cross in front of his chest, and jumped over the fire. The Kuusks exploded in applause and Kersti ran over and lay down beside him in the grass. She was happy. It felt like a perfect night to share their news. So when the little girls were dozing in their mothers’ arms and the adults were drunk and sleepy and the air smelled of high summer, Kersti said, “Jay and I are going to do IVF.”

  No one cheered or clapped the way they had when people were jumping over the bonfire. Anni shook her head disapprovingly. There was a long, terrible silence that made the crackling fire and buzzing crickets seem deafening.

  “This goes against nature,” Kersti’s father thundered. Even in his late seventies, he was no less intimidating.

  “Why can’t you keep trying the old-fashioned way?” her mother said. “You know some women just take longer. It’s in our family. You’re just like me. You probably just need your tubes cleaned—”

  “My tubes are closed,” Kersti said. Her brothers-in-law were squirming in their plastic lawn chairs. Her sisters were quiet and typically unsupportive.

  “Then it’s not meant to be,” Anni said pragmatically. “You have to give up now, Kersti. You don’t always have to be so jäärapäine.”

  Jäär meant ram, so the literal translation was “ram-headed.” Growing up, her parents always used to call her that.

  “You should have married an Estonian,” her father said. “We’re not being racist, Kersti. Understand, it’s not because you’re Jewish, Jay. It’s because you’re not Estonian.”

  “Is there a difference?” Jay said, baffled.

  “Of course there is a difference!” Paavo roared, his face dark red in the firelight. “This is all we have! Our community. Each other.”

  “Well,” Jay said. “Happy Jaanipäev, everyone.”

  Kersti broke away from him and ran inside her parents’ house. Jay followed her.

  Her parents’ kitchen was shabby, messy, outdated. The last time Anni did anything to it was in the eighties when she made the girls get on their knees and replace the original rotting linoleum with a stick-on version. She adhered to her husband’s philosophy of not spending a nickel on anything that made their home feel permanent.

  Kersti poured herself a chipped mug of vodka and slumped down in a chair.

  “You’re father’s an ignorant bigot,” Jay said, pouring himself a glass.

  “No matter what I do,” Kersti complained, “I can’t fit in with them. I look like them, I talk like them, but I just don’t belong.”

  “Look, we’re going to have a kid. And even if he or she has brown hair like me—God forbid—we’ll still find a way to love it.”

  Kersti giggled.

  “And Adolf out there, with his pure, undiluted blood, can go fuck himself.”

  Jay took a deep gulp of the warm vodka, gagged, choked, and slammed the mug on the table. She’d never loved him more than in that moment.

  The plane touches down, bounces on the tarmac, and comes to a deafening stop in the fog. Boston. A city she could have loved, if circumstances had been different.

  A thick cloud of dread descends on her. She has Lille’s letter in her purse and a fresh purpose for the visit. Maybe it won’t be so bad this time.

  Chapter 8

  LAUSANNE—October 1995

  Monday morning in English lit, Mrs. Fithern is going on about the love triangle in Sons and Lovers. She has a cold and keeps coughing and blowing her nose. She draws a diagram on the blackboard.

  PAUL & WILLIAM—MRS. MOREL & WALTER—MIRIAM/GYP

  She circles Mrs. Morel and beside all the names, writes: flame of life. Turning back to face the class, she says, “Tell me about the flame of life.”

  Without raising her hand, Cressida responds. “The flame of life is Lawrence’s metaphor for that part of a person’s soul that no one else can control or possess,” she says confidently. “Mrs. Morel tries to control all the men in her life, destroying them all in the process.”

  “Specifically, Cress, what are some concrete examples of that flame of life?”

  “The coal mine for Walter,” she says. “For William, I think it’s probably Gyp and her superficiality. Maybe even the city, too.”

  “Yes, London! Absolutely,” Mrs. Fithern agrees, whipping her tissue out of her shirtsleeve and blowing her nose again. “What about for Paul?”

  “Nature,” Cressida answers. “Mrs. Morel suppresses his life-force by making him work in the factory and separating him from nature.”

  “And how would you characterize their relationship? Someone other than Cress?”

  “Smothering,” Kersti calls out.

  “Suffocating.”

  “Incestuous,” Cressida adds.

  “Incestuous,” Mrs. Fithern considers aloud, followed by three short sneezes. “I would say lacks boundaries, though I wonder if their relationship doesn’t fall just shy of incestuous?”

  Cressida reads out loud. “He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life . . . And nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was . . . It was as if the pivot and pole of his
life, from which he could not escape, was his mother.”

  Cressida closes her book and looks up. “Sounds incestuous to me.”

  “Sounds like what a mother is supposed to be,” Kersti chimes in, surprising herself.

  “You have a pretty twisted view of motherhood,” Cressida says.

  Mrs. Fithern smiles, the way a mother might smile at her daughter if she was proud or impressed by her, or felt she was an extension of herself, as most mothers do. Kersti feels excluded.

  The door opens then and Mr. Fithern appears in the classroom.

  “Hello, luv,” she exclaims, looking genuinely delighted to see him.

  Charles Fithern is a bit of a legend at the Lycée. He’s in his late twenties, tall and lanky, with buzzed black hair and a thick brow. He speaks with the same heavy northern accent as his wife and usually wears scuffed Doc Martens, jeans, and a button-down shirt with tie. He has a faded red, black, and yellow tattoo of the Worcester City Football Club on his forearm, and possibly, Kersti imagines, a history involving the punk subculture in England. He reminds Kersti of Sid Vicious, if Sid had been a schoolteacher. She occasionally pictures him wearing a black Sex Pistols T-shirt under his starched button-downs.

  Kersti has always viewed the world from a writer’s perspective, like it’s an unfolding story and the people in it are characters. When she doesn’t know their stories, she makes them up. When she does know them, she embellishes. At the back of her mind, she’s always writing a book about everyone. The Lycée is full of characters—Mr. and Mrs. Fithern being two of the most interesting. Kersti frequently imagines their private life when they’re away from the Lycée—watching Coronation Street together; having afternoon tea in their small English garden, which he planted for her to remind her of home; watching football at the local pub. She pictures their relationship as being quite chaste. Mrs. Fithern doesn’t strike her as a sexual type. She’s girlish and matronly at the same time, slightly frumpy with bouncy curls and a chipper disposition. She’s clever and wry, but not sexy the way Mr. Fithern is sexy.

  Everyone at the Lycée knows their story—they met at a teachers’ college in Worcester, England. Her maiden name was Brains—Annie Brains—and true to her name, he thought she was the smartest, wittiest girl he’d ever met. He proposed after they’d been dating just six weeks. A year after their wedding, they left England to teach together at the Lycée.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Mr. Fithern says, approaching his wife with a small white paper bag. “Sounds like you’re havin’ an interesting discussion about Paul Morel and his mum.” He looks out into the tittering class and winks. Some of the girls giggle out loud. It’s like he’s Eddie Vedder or something. “Ye forgot your medicine, milady,” he says, handing her the bag.

  “Oh, thank you, luv. You could’ve given it to me at lunch.”

  “And miss my chance to see all these lovely ladies?”

  More giggles. Mrs. Fithern looks inside the bag. “Penicillin,” she says, frowning.

  He blows her a kiss and the entire class goes, “Awwwwwww!” and he leaves.

  “All right,” Mrs. Fithern says, her cheeks still flushed. “Let’s talk about Miriam. Someone other than Cressida tell me how she fits into our love triangle.”

  Next class is French 2 with M. Feuilly. Cressida has Model United Nations with Mr. Fithern and rushes off, not wanting to be late.

  “Hey, Kuusk,” Magnus Foley says, as Kersti takes her seat beside him.

  “Hey, Foley.”

  She isn’t very good at grammar and she speaks French with an unmelodious Estonian accent, which is why she’s still in French 2. Magnus is also terrible at grammar, although he can speak it fluently. The moment she sits down, he shoves a note her way. It’s a caricature of M. Feuilly wearing a mosquito headnet and a red button that says stop sida, which is the French acronym for AIDS. M. Feuilly is worried he caught the disease from mosquitoes on a recent safari in Africa and he discusses his concerns at great length with the class on a regular basis.

  Magnus is an excellent cartoonist and Kersti bursts out laughing as soon as she opens the note and sees M. Feuilly’s large hawk nose, thin mustache, and wiry bifocals.

  “Mademoiselle Kuusk?”

  Kersti looks up and M. Feuilly is watching her. “Please recite the verb ‘to laugh’ in pluperfect,” he says.

  She can hear Magnus snickering.

  “Je riais, tu riais—”

  “That’s the imperfect,” he says, annoyed. “Perhaps less actual laughing, Mademoiselle Kuusk, and more practicing your verb conjugations. It’s: J’avais ri, tu avais ri, elle avait ri . . .”

  After he’s done humiliating her, M. Feuilly tells them to open Camus’ L’Étranger. They start reading out loud from the beginning.

  Magnus stretches out his legs so that they’re touching Kersti’s. He’s always moving around like that, unable to sit still. He stretches his legs, shifts in his seat, leans this way and that, bounces his knee, chews his pen, draws pictures. Whenever he moves, he somehow winds up brushing up against her. Her crush on him has grown exponentially since last year and she thinks he might like her, too. Although there’s no concrete evidence of this other than their classroom banter, his restless legs, and their Saturday night flirtations, Kersti feels there’s something burgeoning between them.

  Feuilly reads the opening sentence from the book out loud and then looks up. “Is Meursault amoral?” he asks the class.

  “He lives by his own truth,” Magnus responds. “That’s not amoral.”

  Abby Ho-Tai jumps up from her desk and runs out of the classroom. She takes laxatives to lose weight so she’s always rushing to the bathroom. Magnus slides over another cartoon drawing, this one of Abby sitting on the toilet with a mountain of Dulcolax boxes beside her.

  After class, Magnus walks out with Kersti and they stop for a cigarette in the garden, where most of the student body gathers to smoke between classes. “Let’s go to the tennis courts,” he suggests, lighting her Marlboro.

  She looks around for Cressida, but can’t find her. She’s probably still at Model United Nations practice. Kersti accompanies Magnus to the tennis courts, her heart pounding. They sit down side by side on the grass, legs outstretched, faces upturned to the fall sun. The air smells faintly of Alpine jasmine. Magnus plucks a forget-me-not and hands it to Kersti.

  “You going on the Gstaad trip over the holiday?” he asks her, blowing perfect smoke rings with an exaggerated motion of his jaw.

  “Um, no,” Kersti says, laughing. “I’ll be going home to work at my dad’s travel agency, so I can afford to buy my family presents.”

  “That’s cool,” he says.

  “Is it though? Because I think skiing in Gstaad is a lot cooler.”

  “Not really. You’re not like any of the spoiled weirdos who grew up here,” he tells her. “I like that about you, Kuusk. You’re real.”

  “Are you a spoiled weirdo?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “But you. You’re refreshing, Kuusk. You’re almost normal.”

  It’s exactly what Cressida told her in her first year. Kersti had never thought about such things before coming to the Lycée. Normal, not normal. Are the Kuusks really normal? Kersti doesn’t think so, but everything is relative.

  “I just got my driver’s license,” Magnus says. “Why don’t we go for a drive this Saturday? My uncle said I could use his car. I’ll take you for beer fondue.”

  Kersti is caught off guard by the invitation. She wants to run onto the court, jump over the net, and squeal. She can’t even look at him when she answers. “Sure, Foley,” she says, in the most aloof, offhanded way she can manage. “Beer fondue sounds great.”

  Later on in her room, still giddy about the afternoon, Kersti carefully tucks the forget-me-not he gave her inside her copy of L’Étranger.

  Chapter 9

  BOSTON—October 2015

  Deirdre Strauss’s place is on Beacon Street in the flat section of Beacon Hill known as the Fl
at of the Hill. She lives in a restored townhouse with a granite façade and copper roof, surrounded by birch and dogwood trees, hydrangeas and wisteria, and ivy swirling around the front door.

  Kersti rings the bell. A Filipino woman wearing jeans and a stained T-shirt answers.

  “Hello,” Kersti says. “Is Deirdre home?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She said it was okay if I came. I’m Kersti Kuusk.”

  The woman hesitates, but eventually steps aside.

  “And you are?”

  “Laylay,” the woman says, closing the door.

  The house is exactly as Kersti remembers it. High ceilings, dark parquet floors, wall-to-wall bookcases filled with old books that look more like props. Dark, gleaming antiques, fancy brocade sofas with matching armchairs, expensive knickknacks cluttering the surface of every piece of furniture in the room. The parlor has a breathtaking view of the Boston Public Garden.

  “How is she?” Kersti asks.

  “See for yourself,” Laylay says. “She’s waiting.”

  Kersti moves numbly down the hall, past the bedrooms. She glances inside one of them, startled. It’s a room for a princess, with light pink walls and white eyelet curtains. There’s a pile of stuffed animals in the center of the bed, an embroidered bolster pillow, a Barbie sitting cross-legged on a hand-painted bookcase. It’s as though Deirdre reconstructed Cressida’s childhood room, preserving it exactly the way it must have been. As though she’s still expecting Cressida to return home from boarding school.

  The den is at the end of the hall and has been converted into a hospital room. The smell hits Kersti before she even enters. Ointment layered with vanilla diffuser and perfume, an attempt to mask the scent of illness and hopelessness.

  Kersti gasps when she sees Cressida for the first time in almost fifteen years. She’s propped up on her orthopedic bed, staring at a flat-screen TV on the wall in front of her, looking as beautiful as she was at eighteen. Deirdre obviously goes to great lengths to maintain her daughter’s appearance. Cressida’s hair is clean and shiny, still curly and perfectly untamed. Her lips are glossy, her aqua eyes clear and her cheeks pink, whether naturally or from a touch of shimmery rouge, Kersti can’t tell. She’s wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and a soft gray cardigan, her slender body not even hinting at paralysis or disfigurement.