"I'm sorry," Marlene said. She was hurrying now, forcing folders into her book bag. Astra's otherworld voice scared her. She put on her coat and was almost at the door when Astra opened her eyes.
"It's too exhausting," Astra said, and she seemed to see dimly. "I can't be personal all the time."
Siddons
Dr. Meltzer repeated the question just asked him, "Can I give you the format to the exam? Do you really think knowing the format helps?"
How many times did Miss Mazur have to say it, "Yes, you should know the part of speech. Okay, okay. If you can use the word correctly in a sentence, I'll give you half credit."
"Extra credit? I never give extra credit."
"Will there be multiple choice?" The girls asked, "Maybe?"
"Can we not have an essay question?"
"I hate essays."
"I can't write essays."
"I never do well on exams."
"Even if I study for hours, I fail."
"I always fail."
"What if you can't read my handwriting?"
"Canweplease,pleasewriteinpencil?"
Alex and Suki
They were looking for Will Bliss again. They put on their lightweight coats despite the weather. They gave up on matching gloves but found good hats. They were taking long steps up Park Avenue, midnight by the clock, Alex and Suki, walking into the wind with their tiny coats wide open. Tube skirts, boots, candy striped, goofy hats with pom-poms. The snow, another snow, another storm predicted, had begun to fall. The big flakes seemed to be swinging in their descent, seemed to splash they were so large, and the ticklish pelt of them made the girls laugh, and it was hard to see for all the snow caught and melting on their eyelashes, watery drops on their cheeks, tears. They had given up on chemistry and Dr. Meltzer. Blue books, pencils, boxes of Kleenex.
CHF
A—
I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll
understand it now. Please do. Not everything can be
funny.
I'm not even bothering to study.
kisses,
C
Mothers
Mrs. Forestal told the school nurse that she was doing everything she could to get Carlotta help. Carlotta had a nutritionist and a psychiatrist. "We have a cook. I sit at the table with her as often as I can, but I can't watch her every meal."
"Yes," the nurse said. "That's the hard part."
"Yes," Mrs. Forestal said. Why should she understand what the nurse was saying when she couldn't make sense of her daughter? The most recent poem she had been given to read didn't make any sense to her. So her daughter didn't like her body? Fine. Who did?
She reread her daughter's poem: "...and covering my eyes with tea bags, listened to the menagerie of bears, pigs, puff-white lambs, and crumpled tissues swarming the sheets." What was this all about? And why would anyone in her right mind admit to a "zoo-ish fragrance"? It made her think of apes. Was Carlotta trashing her father's place again? Now at least it looks as if somebody lives here: Carlotta's defense. Mrs. Forestal felt helpless and a little bored with Carlotta's bullish enthusiasms and clumsy lows. Maybe after exams.
Siddons
The snow that had fallen on Sunday was added to again on Wednesday, but by then Marlene Kovack had taken the math exam.
Miss F defended Marlene's grade, saying, "Marlene must have studied. She sees Astra Dell, and Astra could have helped her with discrete math."
Poor Astra Dell was the general feeling. The girl would have been in AP calculus if she weren't sick. "I mean, she's in it," said Dr. D. "She just won't take the exam, I guess."
Exams were over in a sentence and returned just as fast.
Romance
Marlene
Marlene looked into Astra's letter basket and saw Car Forestal's hand, and she read the note because Astra was out of the room on some test. Marlene read:
A—
I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll
understand it now. Please do. Not everything can
be funny.
I'm not even bothering to study.
kisses,
C
Marlene was still in Astra's room, so she took up Car's latest letter, and she put it in her pocket. A note on a note card: It wouldn't be missed. Would it, would it, would it?
Sometimes when Astra turned the white radiance of her attention onto Marlene, when Marlene saw Astra considering her openly and clearly and fairly, then Marlene knew what it was about Astra Dell that made her feel possessive of the sick girl. Marlene wanted Astra to herself and resented even the intrusion of Astra's father, although she was polite enough when she saw him.
"Hello, Mr. Dell. Astra's a little sleepy today."
A Daughter
Lisa told Josh (he had asked was she gay or not) that she was only experimenting with Janet Wilkes and Queens and all of it. "It turned me on for a while, but my mother ruined it. What happened was I'd be with Janet somewhere and I'd think I'd see my mother."
Siddons
"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"
"A present for your girlfriend?"
"Try a bag of tests." Whenever he spoke, Mr. Weeks smiled or seemed to smile or was just about to smile, and the little girls and big girls, girls of all sizes, loud and silly, guileless and gentle, smiled back. The youngest faces were clean as how they came; the older were subject to hormones. Oh, hormones! That klieg light word they knew; hormones meant adolescence and suffering. "My hormones, Mr. Weeks!" Girls were bleeding all over the place, or that was how it sometimes seemed to him.
"Why are you crying?" one girl to another. "What did I say?"
"Why are you crying?" another to another.
"Why?"
"We didn't know you were coming."
"I tried to save you a place."
"She couldn't invite you; she could only have six friends."
"My parents are going to kill me."
"My grandmother is really sick."
The hallway's backdrop of posters: roundly muscled, oily heroines on the GAA board, drawings of the family—ma mère, mon père—from French V class. In-school polls and graphs for math. Popular after-school activities: Look at the pie and see what the middle schoolers do after school.
"Mr. Weeks? Do we really have to have a test on the explorers?"
"We do the explorers every year, Mr. Weeks."
"Why can't we just have a discussion?"
"You're so unfair!" said smiling.
"Why aren't you married, Mr. Weeks?"
"Do you have someone in mind?" he asked.
Unattached
Tim Weeks said his best and favorite year in school had been sixth grade, and he still felt like a sixth grader, which went some way in explaining his delight in the company of sixth-grade girls of all sizes: middle school, a mishmashed time, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, class by class, grossly uneven rows of dangerous bodies, bodies in motion, sharply angled, full of feelings, bawdy, brazen children asking anything. "Was that your girlfriend?"—pointing to someone pretty when they had surrounded Tim Weeks on the street outside of school. In some ways, he was always in school. "We knew it was you on the street, Mr. Weeks."
"It was your walk."
"Sexy," from someone in the back, in a small voice but heard.
"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"
"Is it something for us?"
"Yes." Yes, yes, yes, yes, from many sides, and each girl laughing and jouncing closer. Mr. Weeks, ringed by girls, girls jamming sidewalk traffic. Everyone in the middle school knew that Gillian Warring, the Sarah Bernhardt of the eighth grade, was going to marry Mr. Weeks. Even Tim Weeks knew of Gillian's plans. He had seen Gillian in the lunchroom looking at him as she spoke, insisting on herself. I am. Watch me.
He is so cute! from the entire eighth-grade class.
Mrs. Archibald, head of the middle school, told Mr. Weeks that Gillian was too smart for her own good. Mrs. Archibald liked best the
girls who still wore undershirts and read mysteries. If not mysteries, then something funny. Funny. As far as Mrs. Archibald could see, funny did not much enter into the English department's curriculum. Had Miss Mazur ever considered reading Wodehouse? Why did Miss Mazur insist on that depressing Lord of the Flies? Mr. Weeks, on the other hand, loved P. G. Wodehouse. He liked mysteries and crosswords, Scrabble and show tunes. He knew a lot about Jane Eyre because the eighth-grade girls read it every year, and they told Tim Weeks about it. They told him they did not think, as Miss Mazur thought, that every object was phallic. That was a sexy word to know, wasn't it? Some of the eighth-grade girls believed Miss Mazur was oversexed, and some of them believed she was really sex starved!
Tim Weeks told the girls he didn't want to hear them disparage their teachers.
"Disparage? What does that mean?"
"We weren't bad-mouthing her."
"It's true though, Mr. Weeks. All we talk about are the sex parts."
"Sex, sex, sex. Why do you girls think you can talk to me like this?" Tim Weeks asked these eighth-grade girls, and they said, "Because," and laughed. They had trailed him in school and out of school, girls past and present. Mr. Weeks! The best!
"Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?"
"You never liked us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"
"You don't like us anymore."
"That's right," Mr. Weeks said. "I like the others better."
Ha-ha-ha, from all the eighth-grade girls, who said, "You love us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"
"Mr. Weeks, be careful you don't disappoint anyone by marrying."
Anna Mazur saw him surrounded by sixth-grade girls and eighth-grade girls, all of whom seemed to be teasing him at once for his new tie, the blue tie with hot-air balloons that he said was a gift from his mother. When he smiled, the under-folds of his eyes turned down sweetly. Anna Mazur watched as students pressed him, circled about, said, "We'll get you some elf shoes, Mr. Weeks."
The middle-school girls laughed and laughed, but ask what seniors had thought of middle school, and they gagged and howled and said it was the worst time of their lives. Older girls would say they didn't laugh much in middle school, but here was middle school in front of Anna Mazur. Middle-school girls laughing; middle-school girls, an acquired taste, an age of elbows and knees, at once knockabout and full of shyness, streakers on the sleepover, always out of fashion, over- or under-dressed—here they were laughing. Middle-school girls: Anna Mazur did not really love them, but Tim Weeks did and his love was returned.
If you asked a Siddons girl what a Siddons girl was, she invariably replied, "We're nice."
"Different ones of us taught different chapters."
"That's an idea."
"He assigned us."
The eighth-grade girls were giving Miss Mazur suggestions.
"Why can't we read a book like To Kill a Mocking-bird again?" from the same blinking back of the room, Gillian's constellation.
Marlene
Marlene sat at the foot of Astra's bed and talked about school. Marlene reported on what she was listening to in the senior lounge. The Billie Holiday that Ufia put on with a flourish, the Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins. Music was school, the best of it for Marlene, although she had graveled her voice with smoke. What else had Marlene been listening to? What stories? Edie Cohen was wild for Brad Pitt and had his face all over the walls in the senior lounge. Ufia said, "Why do you have to have these idiot movie stars all over the lounge?"
"Ufia is such an intellectual," Astra said.
What else was there to say? Suki and Alex looked for Will Bliss every weekend. "But you knew that already. They think he's still not back at boarding school. For a while they thought he might have been kicked out, but they couldn't find anyone reliable enough to confirm it. Mondays we get the Bliss Report. It's boring." What else? "Dr. Meltzer is expecting a baby."
"He has a dozen kids already."
"Sarah Saperstein says it's humanizing. Whatever that means."
"She would know."
"She's his pet." And? "You probably already know this," Marlene said. "Lisa Van de Ven and Miss Wilkes."
Astra made motion of a yes. Lisa Van de Ven and Astra Dell were in Dance Club together, and in that way were friends, but Marlene had to tell Astra. After all those years, years of hurts, middle school especially, eighth grade. Why would Kovack think to ever come up to us? Lisa to her gang. Astra had not been in anyone's gang; she had been, was still in a way, exclusive with Car Forestal.
"Do you talk to her?"
"Lisa?" Astra said.
"Car."
"Yes."
"She's never in the lounge."
"Car studies a lot at her dad's. It's quiet there. It's like being on the moon. Everything floats and looks romantic. There is no dust there whatsoever."
"No dust," Marlene said. "I'm shedding all the time," and she only had to look down to find a long strand of hair somewhere on her person.
Astra said, "Me, too." She said, "Not now, of course," and she laughed. The truth of it wasn't horrible or it was; only Astra was determined to get better. "I have faith," she said. "I have a community behind me. A lot of people visit—you among them—and it makes a difference." The doctors were applying things, and their cruelly mechanical equipment still hurt, silvery and sharp and cold; the machinery made her shake and run, want to run away, tear the IV from her arm, run open armed to sleep. "I'm waiting for the day when I wake up and feel nothing but a pleasant consciousness. I used to wake up that way. In Car's father's apartment, I didn't feel my body at all. That's what a perfect place it is. Maintained but unlived in for months at a time."
Siddons
Astra Dell and Car Forestal, for all of their temperamental differences, had been best friends since nursery school. Suki and Alex were baby birthday party friends. (Suki said anyone she met after sixth grade did not count as a friend.) Kitty Johnson and Edie Cohen turned exclusive in their tenth-grade year on Swiss Semester. Sarah Saperstein and Ny Song were nerds in love. They admitted it! They had the same favorite classes, the same favorite teachers. They thought Dr. Meltzer was funny and trailed after Dr. D asking about Catullus.
A lot of students loved—they used that word often, generously, fervently—they absolutely loved Miss F. Miss F was kind and accessible. She made math almost interesting even for the weaker students. She held math contests that carried prizes of bags of jelly beans and chocolate Kisses. Other teachers were kind. Mrs. Nicholson was especially forgiving of late papers and absences, and Mr. Philips was known to offer makeup tests in history. Miss Hodd—who taught the creative writing elective, as well as tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade English—had a dinner last June and let her seniors drink sangria.
Kitty Johnson was on a student panel for prospective Siddons parents, and along with Sarah Saperstein and Ufia Abiola, she spoke about the best of the Siddons experience, which included remarks on "the support and affection students feel from their teachers." Kitty read from a talk she had used before. "I never considered myself a 'mathy' person simply because I hated fractions with an unhealthy passion. So it took me by surprise when my physics teacher suggested that I pursue the Advanced Placement course in senior year."
Miss Brigham sometimes remarked on how many of the teachers gave over weekends to class trips and social service projects and fund-raising fairs and baseball and basketball and badminton contests. She did not mention the chaperones needed for the chorus trips. Miss Brigham also did not remark on Miss Mazur's visits with Tim Weeks to Astra Dell. She did not know about them any more than she knew about Mr. Rhine-lander's generous habit of slipping Greta Varislyvski, his genius chess player, a twenty for a cab after tournaments. Keep the change was his message.
Miss Brigham didn't know that Mr. O'Brien was in love with Kitty Johnson and that he told her of his love every time they met in advisory. He got mad at Kitty, too; they had fights. Kitty didn't always show up for their meetings. "Imagine," Kitty had told Edi
e, "imagine the intensest sex without sex, and that is my relationship with Mr. O'Brien." Wednesday advisory they sat together at a lunch table pressed against the wall and talked. Sometimes they talked for hours after school. Mr. O'Brien sometimes cried. He had a young wife and a baby in New Jersey.
"He is exhausting," Kitty said. "After all my applications are in, I'm going to put my life in order."
Miss Brigham did not know about Kitty Johnson and Mr. O'Brien. She was not a woman for romance; she liked emotional business kept at home. What would she have said to Mr. Rhinelander's Keep the change, Greta?
"Keep the copy of The Scarlet Letter" Miss Hodd said as much to any girl who seemed halfway interested in any book in her homeroom bookcase. "The school has more than enough copies, and you should read it." School was ongoing Christmas: something always to take home. Lost-and-found freebies could be had at the end of every term, and early birds to the table of clothes could sometimes find expensive labels. One year Marlene Kovack went home with a black Nicole Miller blouse—surely someone's mother's. There were fleeces and scarves and gloves and sweats, umbrellas and flip-flops and pencil cases, all unclaimed and free to student and teacher shoppers on the last day of school before the holidays. The rule was that if a student later recognized an item as being hers, she would have to think of it as still lost or else negotiate for its return.
Part of the experience of school was the daily reward: rewards of flattery and affection, signals of success, prizes, gold stars and smiley faces, exuberant marginalia on essays and tests—very smart, insightful, terrific, exactly, yes, yippee!!!!
All Souls Page 7
