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All Souls

Page 10

by Christine Schutt


  Ufia said, "Some of us want intellectual engagement."

  "Wait until you get to Harvard, Ufia. You'll see a lot of engagement then."

  "What a dirty mind you have, Alex," Krystle said.

  "Rub my back." Suki sat herself between Alex and Krystle, and bumped against Alex, saying, "Would you please rub my back? I'm so sore." And Alex stopped looking at Krystle and pounded Suki's back until the girl said, "Not so hard."

  Jade, the dance coach, said, "It's too late now to think of cutting." Instead Jade's finale included each girl giving herself a window.

  "What does that mean?"

  "If you'd come to rehearsals," Krystle said.

  "Bite me."

  "Nothing should happen on the extension," Jade was saying to Lisa. "And if you have trouble with the lean and lunging, well ... Terry will clean up on Monday." Jade looked at the seniors. "If you feel uncomfortable, see me, but I'm not spending hours on any one dance. Those days are gone." Then she circled the room in address. "Every choreographer," Jade said, "you're now a dancer. Hand your dance to your people. Amen. I love you guys."

  Kitty said, "Will everyone remember etiquette backstage? Nothing back there belongs to us. Not one bobby pin. It's the drama department's. You've got to organize yourself. Put your gear in a little corner, so you know where your stuff is, all of it."

  " The show is less than an hour and a half," Jade was saying to Lisa.

  Ufia said, "Seventy-eight minutes."

  Krystle walked around the gym with a garbage bag picking up the afternoon rehearsal's refuse, the empty water bottles and candy boxes left mostly by the middle schoolers, she guessed. The coffee refuse was theirs, surely, the juniors and seniors. Upper school's indulgence: expensive coffees from the seafaring shop on the corner, the one with perfect cupcakes and, outdoors, pretty foliage in all the seasons.

  "I'm sick of you guys," Jade said to some girls lingering in the folds of the curtain. "Go home," Jade said, but she was not so emphatic, seeming drugged by the hallucinatory nonsense of their nonstop talk now that rehearsal was over.

  "Did you know a sneeze travels a hundred miles an hour?"

  "A lot of moose or a moose so no fishes."

  "But what's the plural of rhinoceros?"

  "Oh, Kitty, why so sad?"

  Kitty spoke quietly and out of Jade's hearing. "Seniors, don't forget your money for the flowers."

  "I'm serious. Chapters nine through eleven in To the Lighthouse."

  "Oh great! More chapters where nothing happens."

  "Don't fret!" Suki jostled against Alex. "We'll stalk Will Bliss," she said, and the two, bumped up against each other, shouldering past the younger girls, lugging stuffed feed bags on their backs.

  "I need a suitcase," Alex said. "This is ridiculous. I'm carrying my life."

  Fathers

  All of the dances had meaning, however difficult it was at times to discern given the distraction of the music, but Ufia choreographed a dance set to a smoky voice in a song about skin color. Ufia and three black dancers—Mr. Dell knew only the seniors—in yellow dresses onstage. The dance involved something made up to look like a brownstone stoop. The girls changed places on the stoop, but their attitudes were by turns sultry, submissive, dismissive, and independent. The song played these same changes. The next dance involved girls in pajamas—Mr. Dell recognized no one, but his daughter, seated next to him, explained that Gillian Warring, the leggy girl in the blue babydolls, was only in eighth grade, which he took to mean the girl was good, but none of the girls had his daughter's grace. He sat through Alex Decrow's shrill, head-banging solo—"Is she mad?" he asked—and endured "Unbelievable" by EMF and was attentive to even the clumsiest dances, but nothing put him into a gaze, and he was taken aback by Lisa Van de Ven's aggressive movement and wondered at how thin Suki Morton was and why hadn't the dance teacher taken out a few of the weaker dances? His daughter, seated next to him, fully enjoyed herself. After spring break she hoped to come back to school every day—a half a day. "Now and again" was a phrase Grace Dell would have used, but what would she have said to Astra's friend? Car, seated next to her, was too thin by half. The other girl, Marlene Kovack, he knew from the hospital. And in the rest of the auditorium, Mr. Dell saw others from the class. Let-tie Van de Ven, of course, was there in the third or fourth row with flowers. She waved at him during intermission but seemed disappointed to see Astra. (Later he wondered if it wasn't the damn wig the woman had been hoping to see.) Teachers came up to Astra during intermission. Mr. Dell recognized Dr. D and Dr. Meltzer and Miss Hodd and Mr. Weeks. The woman from the English Speaking Union contest, that woman, wasn't there; Mr. Dell could not remember her name, but he had seen her at the hospital. Miss Brigham came forward and talked to him: The froth of school goodwill, but Mr. Dell was grateful to the school. His daughter had always been happy in it, and the school returned his daughter's affection. The teachers who visited—and so many had come to the hospital, he couldn't get over it, by which he meant ... he meant he couldn't get over everything that had happened. He had the sensation that he was standing in the middle of a desolate summer road and that the heat waves, the watery kind a person sees from a distance, were really waves of love, and that he was standing in this water, braced by waves of love from his community—at work, the hospital, Siddons, his wife's church; from all sides came this heat. He hoped never to forget how he had learned to love God, which was what his wife had wanted for him all along. His daughter's near extinction had left him no choice but to have faith.

  Mothers

  "Oh, for Christ's sake," Mr. Van de Ven said to his wife when she thrust the flowers for their daughter into his arms at the end of the program so as to catch up with Mrs. Quirk, the college counselor. The woman was already moving down the aisle, and Mrs. Van de Ven only wanted to say hello, to say wasn't the Dance Concert splendid and how hard the girls worked. Lisa was president of dance; of course, Mrs. Quirk must know that.

  "You didn't?"

  Mrs. Quirk smiled. "Of course, I know."

  Mrs. Van de Ven told Mrs. Quirk how glad she was that the last applications had been mailed off; the temperature in the house was cooler.

  "I should hope so," said Mrs. Quirk, who was quick—she often put these words together—quick Quirk was quick at turning away.

  Poor woman was all Mrs. Van de Ven could think, but who poor?

  A Daughter

  The first person Lisa Van de Ven wanted to see after the concert was Josh, who said he would come, but the first person she actually saw was Astra, who waved at her and Jade. All the seniors in Dance Club received the ritual rose that marked the end of their dancing careers at Siddons, and most of them were crying. Lisa, as Dance Club president, received a bouquet as well, and for this Astra and Car were shouting, "Way to go, Vandy!" Which was so generous of them considering, considering Astra had been Dance Club president until she took sick. But somebody had to replace her, so Lisa had put herself forward. No one else wanted the job. "Josh!" Lisa shouted out to him, and he bobbed or nodded or whatever boys did. "They're so queer," she said to no one in particular. Damn. Her mother was in the dressing room. "Mom!"

  "I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful." Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it...

  "Mother, please, we're all getting changed here."

  "All right, all right, all right, all right," and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers.

  Lisa said, "Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it."

  Marlene

  After the Dance Concert, Marlene walked with Car and Astra and Mr. Dell to the corner. Astra was saying she was tired but happy to be out-of-doors in an unaccountably springlike spell—a spring snap—and she feeling springy, though she leaned against her father. Marlene could not look at him; once before she had bee
n a stranger and now? At the corner the old cut opened: She was not going their way but east, as far east as the river, though she couldn't see it from where she lived. Marlene would have liked to have explained why she stole Astra's mail, but she was afraid. Part of the reason she stole the letters was to ward off being afraid, also curiosity, jealousy. What did Car do for Astra? And the hair clip? The hair clip was to be brought nearer to Astra. It was a comfort for Marlene to hold the barrette in her pocket, the way she might a bit of bone, to caress it and so find strength enough to talk.

  A Daughter

  "If it's not great sex, and it's not true love, then it's definitely worth my time because how else are you rife with passion and singing with hate all at once?"

  Josh said, "Has anyone ever told you, you are a really scary girl?"

  "All the time," Lisa said. "So are you interested?"

  Siddons

  Valentine's Day and Kitty's romantic life amounted to zilch, nada. "All I am doing is counting the days until AP physics is over, and Families in Distress—ha. Oedipus and his brood: our dysfunctional family of the week. I thought second-semester senior year was supposed to be fun." Sometimes Kitty wondered about the Ramsays. Miss Hodd had read the novel with them in junior year; it was one of the books in her elective on heroines. The Ramsays: Were they a family in distress or just a family?

  Red sweaters, red tights, bows, bracelets, stick-on hearts, the red streaks of the middle school down the sixth-floor hall were as hectic as the drugstore's cheap displays. The sixth-grade girls had been on countdown since the first of the month, and now here it was Valentine's Day, and Anna Mazur, in pink, was putting an animal valentine on Tim Weeks's desk, this one a picture of a panting terrier with the message: Be my valentine, doggone it! His desk was already loaded with big cards from students, homemade some of them, stickers, doilies, pasted-on red hearts: I'm stuck on you! A rose, already blackened despite the plastic cap of water on its stem. Some Red Hots, some chocolate hearts, a bag of Twizzlers. Tim Weeks, ever the favorite. She had seen less and less of him since Astra Dell had come home from the hospital, but why did that surprise her when beyond visiting the sick girl, they had never had a date? A few weeks before, she had helped chaperone a sixth-grade outing through the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan. She had kept her coat on, though it was damp from the walk in the light snow that fell through the elm awning along Fifth. "Bear squares" the girls called the paving stones and skipped, and Anna Mazur had walked behind with Tim Weeks—Mrs. Nicholson was at the head—and Anna admitted, "I've lived here three years now and have not once gone to the Whitney. Isn't that terrible?" He said it was and they had laughed when she admitted the same was true of the Egyptian wing. "I've never been. Don't tell the girls." She stood with him in front of the Fragmentary Head of a Queen in yellow jasper. "How sensuous she is." The wonder of it was the way the face was there in full even as they looked at just the mouth.

  Her own mouth was a string of pins. He'd never kiss it.

  However did Edie Cohen manage to stick a valentine into every classmate's mailbox when she had been sick most of the week? That was the wonder in the senior lounge, as Edie's classmates discovered their "perfect" individualized, homemade, secretly delivered card with her fat script and XXXXXXXX's.

  " This might be my last valentine from Edie ever," Krystle said, and she made a tearful face.

  Lisa Van de Ven bought herself a pair of silk embroidered boxers with rhinestones, but she told her classmates the gift was from Josh. In truth, though they had talked and e-mailed, she had not seen him since that night after the Dance Concert when, still in her leotard and gauze skirt, she slid past him into his apartment—"I can't go home. You saw it. My mother's a drunk." She invited him to take a shower with her, but he was smoking up in his bedroom—she could smell it—and didn't answer, so she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hand outstretched for a toke, and she said, "I've never had sex with a man, but that doesn't make me a virgin." She said, "Do you have something I could borrow?"

  He gestured to the closet behind him. "Help yourself."

  She sat with him on the floor; she wore nothing underneath his jeans and soft dress shirt. They smoked. They smoked, and Josh got up to put on something she thought he called narcotics, wobbly music that made her sway, but her boobs were bags of sand and her face was doing something ugly. "Oh my god," she cried, and she cried and laughed and cried. "It's all over, I can't believe it, that's the last time I will ever dance on that stage, the last time with any of those stupid people, stupid, stupid Alex Decrow—could you see how we had to cover for her?—oh my god, my boobs weigh a ton," Lisa said, and she went into the bathroom and flung herself into a defeated halter with gymnastic support, and who cared if it was stinky and damp—that stupid stoner Josh was asleep, so where was his hairbrush, didn't he have a hairbrush, where was his hairbrush? "Ach! I look so ugly!"—and she took up a scrub brush he used on his back and banged it against her head. Everyone has an outstanding feature; yours is your hair. Her mother said all she needed was a good colorist; all she needed was Elie at Ishi. She brushed her hair and wondered at her face; she knew who she looked like, and it was not her mother. She's got my hair, at least. Not her mother's color, never her mother's fake, man-made, fake. "I hate my mother!" How much does Suki Morton weigh, do you think? ... How tall is that Ufia Abiola? ... What does her father research? ... All those minorities, you know ... Is she Jewish, is she rich, is she smart, is she Jewish, she must be Jewish, she must be Jewish or Asian. My manicurist's daughter is an anesthesiologist. What are you?

  "'How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?...the hives, which were people....' That's such a beautiful passage," Car said when she had finished reading it in the yearbook proof of Astra's ad to Car. The picture of them, girls, arm in arm, in bathing suits. Astra and Car had both wanted sisters, had wanted to be sisters, had pretended to be sisters. In the photograph both girls are missing front teeth, but their smiles make out that the world is hilarious, especially to those with secrets.

  What were they keeping from Mr. Dell, who took the picture, and from Mrs. Dell, who stood behind the porch screen at the lake house? How prescient that picture now seemed with Mrs. Dell scratched behind the screen. The picture was years and years ago, if Car were being dramatic, and lately she had been very dramatic. "I called my father to tell him I wasn't coming."

  "And?"

  "I don't want to talk about it, Astra."

  The fantasy of a father, an impeccable appraiser, a cocktail-cool and lethal man with a shapely hand at the small of her back, guiding her through a clamor that seems to lean toward them, toward this man, this pretty father, whose concern is for her—and she? Car is not so demurely dressed as to be expected; the back of her dress is low, and her back, her shoulders, the stem of her neck, the upswept hair, and ears, visible and smally inviting, invite touch, touch, touch, touch, touch. Car, on her knees, put her head in Astra's lap and let the sick girl pet her weeping friend; Astra finger-combed Car's hair out of her face and around the small ear, and thus they sat in Astra's room in a month reduced to dusks. March, nearing spring now and spring vacation, and the enormous old window in Astra's room waggled in the high wind, and the easterly dark was not so complete as to obscure the bombast of the air-conditioning system on the rooftop play yard of the neighboring boys' school. "God," Car said, lifting her head to see how the school's addition had obscured Astra's distant view of the river. "When did they do that?"

  "That," Astra said, "was finished just before school started last fall."

  "When do the little boys come out to play?"

  Mothers

  The fat envelope that arrived just before spring break was from Siddons and not, as Theta Kovack had hoped, from the University of Wisconsin. The fat envelope was an invitation to the School Spring Auction and included a list of live and silent auction items and raffle tickets. Top of the live auction list was thi
s: "A fabulous stay for five nights in a beautiful four-bedroom/five-bath private retreat on the island of Kauai, Princeville, Hawaii. The property includes a swimming pool, a staff of seven, and a cook." Next came a walk-on role in a Woody Allen movie, a sleepover for twelve at the American Museum of Natural History, a VIP table at the Hampton Classic Horse Show, a weekend getaway by private jet to Palm Beach and the Breakers, and a day of sailing on a forty-foot Dufour sailing yacht with captain. How tempting to sail away, and there were families that could do just that and did just that, and, to be fair, these same cheerful rich or many of the same also spent their Saturdays at the Family Service Morning, where students and parents could jostle in a good-cause direction: roll pocket change; bead a bracelet for a sick child; decorate and fill a toiletry kit for Women in Need. Time was Theta thought of herself as a woman in need, but Dr. Bickman had hired college consultants for her. (Theta, how many years have we been together? I know Kal. His kids are going to need braces soon) And Kal had come to the apartment and explained the forms: All Theta had to do was ... and Kal would ink in the final forms, and college was affordable wherever Marlene went. Once or twice, Theta had considered calling Bob ... but why? Why bother was always where she settled late at night when she could almost see the green that was the wider world of college. To think Marlene was about to embark on what she, Theta, had not quite finished. Dentist's receptionist was a good job but not what she dreamed of for Marlene, for Marlene ... oh something. What we hope for our students is that each will find her passion. But friends, one can be passionate about friends; some have a passionate need of them. Not so long ago, whenever it was Astra Dell left the hospital, Marlene had said, "I can't visit Astra at her home. I never went there when she was well; why would I go there now?"

 

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