All Souls

by Christine Schutt

  "Medusa."

  "You know, don't you, what the girls do when they ask to go to the bathroom or when they just arbitrarily exit class? You know? I know. I've asked," Miss Hodd said. "There's a new hand dryer in the third-floor bathroom and they're in there playing with it. It's got jet power to make your skin jiggle."

  "Please."

  "I'm serious. Sometimes they go back to the lounge and complain about class, or they run errands, print out things for you, Mrs. Quirk."

  "They've got college decisions to make."

  Dr. D said he had found Alex Decrow in the computer room when she was supposed to be in class. "She said she was trying to get a date for the prom."

  "Poor girls," Miss Hodd said. "Some of them have never had a date."

  "Ellen," Phil Meeks said. Ellen, her name, Ellen Hodd. "Let's get out of the'D's," and he advanced the projector to shine the next report card onto the screen: Forestal.

  "What's happening in French, Simone?"

  "I told you," Madame Sagnier said. "They're the children of the corn."

  Hives

  Unattached

  Only her small, bare feet, preternaturally pale in black rubber thongs, toes polished, gave away the recently sick part of Astra Dell. The rest of her—in a bush jacket, black jeans, and kerchief—looked armed, alert, and steady. Her red hair was boy-short and spiked, seeming darker, but was it the same color? Astra Dell come back as from up country was how it seemed to Anna Mazur, looking at the girl, happy to see her come to school, and just for the book fair. That was what Astra Dell said. She was on her way to the hospital but stopped at school to find a book to read. This part of getting well took up a lot of hours of every week. How could Astra smile at that, but she did and held up Anna Karenina, saying, "I'm thinking it's time for the Russians," and smiled. She read, "'All happy families are alike,'" and didn't bother to finish the sentence; she knew it was famous. "Yes." She said yes to most of Anna's questions: better, every day better, school, some of school manageable, and summer school and then. "I don't know," Astra Dell said. "I'm not sure. And you've had a good year, Miss Mazur?"

  Yes, she had had a good year, but some of the best moments were due to Astra Dell's being sick, and she blushed when she talked to the girl, as if Astra Dell already knew how she had brought them together, Tim Weeks and Anna Mazur, but now Astra Dell was an outpatient and—however uneasily—on the mend at home. "And I won't visit her at home," Tim had said. He had said, "I'm actually a very shy person despite appearances. I'm fine around kids, but adults baffle me. I have nothing to say to the girl's father except how fucking sorry I am." In fact, Tim Weeks had been uncomfortable in the hospital, too; he had used the word obscene to describe what was happening: "I don't like to look at her"—his words—"and I don't feel comfortable not looking at her. It's obscene what's happening on that floor." His vehemence had frightened her, and he had apologized for it. He had said, "Look, I don't want to put myself in a situation where I have to experience death or loss."

  "Yes," Anna Mazur said to Astra Dell, "I've had a pretty good year. I like my eighth-grade class." This she said loud enough for her nearby eighth-grade book browsers to hear. "They're very bookish," Anna said, and at that moment in the timely fashion she had about her, Gillian Warring came forward with a question.

  "Do you think I'd like this?" she asked her teacher.

  "Lolita is not what you think it's going to be," Anna Mazur began.

  Siddons

  "Nothing is," Lisa Van de Ven answered, "nothing is interesting to me or feels useful at all." She was taking three APs and she didn't know why she bothered: Their real purpose was over; she was in college. "When will I ever need to know how to use the antiderivative of a polynomial function to find the area between the curve, the x-axis, and the given bounds?"

  Miss Wilkes asked Lisa if she had seen this: And she showed Lisa a painting of a sliver of a face in profile, the slight neck surmounted by the weight of an enormous turban, a bright red towel so carefully painted the fluffy part was visible. Astra Dell's self-portrait. "You could reach out and touch that towel, couldn't you?" Miss Wilkes said. Miss Wilkes looked at the painting with the same wonder she had felt when that poor sick girl—she still looked sick or fatal, didn't she?—when Astra Dell had brought it in. Done at home. Hardly a face, and what little of it there was, was very pale—eyelashes and eyebrows as if done in pencil. The uncertainty expressed in pencil; pencil, so evidently perishable. The towel was in acrylics.

  "I could never in a million years paint like that. Do you remember my own self-portrait last year?"

  Miss Wilkes remembered.

  "I couldn't get my nose right." The nose, the mouth—even the eyes were off—weren't they? Didn't Miss Wilkes think so?

  Miss Wilkes thought Lisa Van de Ven was tiresome. "The proportions were off a little, I remember." Miss Wilkes said, "Next time." Next time look at the person you address—meet her eye. Good god, how could this girl have hurt her, but she had—Lisa Van de Ven had made Miss Wilkes's school year unbearably hard for months; she, too, had rubbed her back against the towering wall of why bother, and even now she wished the month of May—her favorite month!—were over. She was uncomfortable in Lisa Van de Ven's company, confused, sad, embarrassed. Miss Wilkes had compromised herself to be in this girl's company, and now when she wanted it least, Lisa Van de Ven sought her out! Left notes in her mailbox asking to meet.

  CHF

  "Places you don't think about on the body hurt," Astra Dell said. "More than hurt, ached. My nostrils dried up and the insides cracked and it hurt to breathe; the tips of my fingers felt swollen; my feet burned. You talk about fever. There was no relief, and I have a low tolerance for pain. I wanted to die. I played the awful game, the one where the people I love are sacrificed so I can live." Astra Dell said, "When I had that allergic reaction and my fever spiked to 107, I was delirious. Then I wasn't asking for anything—my body was clacking on its own—no help from me. I was along for the ride. My father told me. He was there the whole time. He said I was laughing, which is how hard it hurt."

  Astra played with the hair-thin pretty silver bracelet Car had given her. "I love this bracelet you gave me," she said. "You know how I love jewelry, but this is the only thing I can wear now. All my other jewels, my rings and bracelets, are too heavy, and they get hot and press against my skin, but this bracelet. I could be wearing a feather. It tickles."

  Car said, "How are you feeling now?"

  "Tired, relieved. No more dosing after yesterday." Astra said, "I have the weekend to rest and then I am coming back to school." Astra said, "I miss it."

  Car asked if Astra wanted some healthful snack, but she did not. Astra said, "The receptor cells in my mouth have been confused by the treatment. Most of what I eat tastes like metal. This is a side effect that passes quickly, I'm told. I want to enjoy food again. Does that surprise you?"

  What surprised Car, and she felt it on the walk home, was her own appetite. The expensive coffee shop with its seacoast cottage interior was just down the block, and they made the most astonishing chocolate chip cookies. The glass case of cupcakes and scones, muffins, cranberry-blueberry-walnut muffins, studded nutty crusts, and burst berries. The famous mini-cupcakes, yellow cake with a twisted cap of buttercream frosting, a circus of sprinkles on top. Oh, she was hungry. She was hungry and she could eat, and Astra wanted to eat and Car wouldn't let herself eat, though she could eat whatever food pleased her and it would not taste like a penny, a penny or a key or a mouthful of nails. By the time she reached the expensive coffee shop, she had come up with a long list of metal objects. She was sucking on a doorknob when her turn came to order, and the word that came out was coffee. "With skim milk, please." Belt buckle, cuff links, clippers, and cutlery. The easiest way to get the figure you want is to be sick.

  Alex and Suki

  "Psychosexual," Suki said. "Psychosexual. I just like to say the word."

  "It sounds sexy," Alex said. "Say Psychosexual five ti
mes fast," and she tried to do it herself but sissed out.

  Suki said, "I am not doing very well in my classes. I am not going to finish in style, as Miss Brigham says." Suki said, "I want to goof off more than ever."

  Marlene

  Marlene would like to explain to Astra Dell why she had taken some of Astra's letters from Car. How she had wanted to know what it felt like to be Car Forestal. Once home, each letter shriveled like a trick every time—just a hankie from a hat, who cared? Nothing was changed; Marlene was still herself. She read one of the filched letters again. It was not loving. People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent. Not so true. Her father had left her mother. Marlene was at school when he packed the yellow cardboard suitcase her mother remembered him carrying. Marlene's father had left her mother a hundred years ago. His name was Bob. As far as she was concerned, her father was just a stupid name that didn't send money. Marlene's grandmother, Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ted, her cousins Wendy and Steven, all relatives on her mother's side, were coming to Marlene's graduation. In the drawing for pews, Marlene had drawn seats from the middle of the church. Astra Dell was also in the middle of the church. Car Forestal was in the front.

  Beyond Astra Dell, Marlene and Car Forestal had this in common: Their families were small; their fathers were absent.

  Unattached

  "I didn't want him to take an interest in my leaving New York. Of course, I didn't, Mother."

  Tim Weeks had said the River School would be lucky to have her. He said he would be sorry to see Anna go but that he understood.

  But what exactly was it that he understood? Did he know how disappointed she was not to have persuaded him to regard her beyond the status of a colleague? Did he understand that part of the winter's experience? A seven-month winter, October to May.

  CHF

  The easiest way to get the figure you want is to be sick. That was a sick thought, but she had thought it more than once. She drank a cup of bitter coffee and decided not to call him. Too much French pastry, Carlotta: her father, in front of the slender Dutch hostess, who knew so many languages. French, chief among them—

  APs. The tests, the tests were coming up, and was she ready?

  Unattached

  The middle-school girls were shushing about boys in whispers. When I liked him and he liked me; he she he she. Other words came through—knew and asked and kissed—in the conversation Anna Mazur overheard as study-hall proctor. The only other stand-out words, before she told them to be quiet, were french fries and breath. The school conspired against her: Last-period study hall every other Friday in spring was a cruel assignment, especially today. Today she was meeting Tim Weeks for a walk in the park—her request.

  She wanted to give him something to remember her by, but she had to proceed furtively, out of school, or else—and this made no sense she knew but she thought it—her mother would find out and tell her it was another stupid move. Women don't give men presents.

  Maybe not, but Anna Mazur had a present for Tim Weeks in her bag, and it made her happy to see him walking toward her down the hall when she had a surprise for him. But they were not yet out of school. Lower-school dismissal was begun, and they craned over the stairwell from just above to watch the little girls jangle down the stairs, little walking packages, projects strapped to their backs. Some looked stunned, some sealed, still others tickled to death. "What was school like for you?" She had asked him this question before, and he had answered in the same way then as now. School was messy and unfinished, full of guilt. He was shy—largely mute—but physically way ahead of everybody his age. "I was faster. The gap diminished as we got older, but in elementary school I could run circles around my classmates, and I was treated specially. I was picked first for teams. I didn't have to talk to make my way among kids." Most of school was a sunny tedium, but there were flashes when Tim Weeks felt himself reverse the flow of the game, intercept, drive the ball. "You can be the most closed person, yet if you are an athlete and in that world, junior high school, you are part of the social scene. I eventually worked for the school playgrounds, coaching baseball. I've been teaching kids since I was seventeen. Never had to live in the adult world."

  He said, "But I have a tremendous sympathy for those who don't have the same ease with life."

  Anna Mazur was one of these and uncomfortable in life, which might explain the pleasure she felt in Tim Weeks's company. How, walking with him now on the bridle path around the reservoir, she felt favorably observed by strangers, approved, envied, light on her feet. Anything she had to say seemed of interest to him; he listened; he laughed. Was she really funny? She hoped so!

  "Here," she said, and she took out of her bag a silver-plated personalized bar to hold open books and, tasseled as it was, to serve as a bookmark. She had had his initials and the school year engraved on one side. (For a time she debated something else, his initials and her own initials, her first name?)

  "Annie," he said. "How nice of you! But this wasn't necessary." He hugged her. He said, "I am going to miss you next year."

  Really? she silently asked, and the voice she heard was Gillian Warring's saying, Do you miss us? Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?

  It was so easy to flatter a teacher. I hope I have you next year.

  Anna Mazur and Tim Weeks stood downwind of a poignant scent—was it verbena? "I'm going to miss you," she said. "This year has been very eventful, what with Astra Dell and all, and you've made it a heck of a lot easier. You listened to me about my brother and my mother and the English department, Hodd and O'Brien—all of that." So Anna Mazur was professing love to a man who had yet to kiss her with any romantic intention. "I'm really grateful," she said. Her tongue stuck in her mouth.

  "Oh"—his response—"I was glad to listen." He said he had learned a lot about Jane Eyre that he never knew. Mr. Rochester in disguise was far more dangerous than ever Tim Weeks suspected. Tim said, "We've had fun," and he turned his body in a way that was welcoming but in a forward direction, not toward her, but continuing along the path. "Walk with me," he said, when what she heard was This is why I can't. The story he went on to tell had to do with his home, and a hometown girl, and their being rumored into romance—one of the reasons he decided to strike out on his own in New York. "I don't want to be in a position of making anyone unhappy," he said.

  Prizes

  Unattached

  "That's all he said, Mother."

  Once Tim Weeks had thought to join the ministry, but he had majored in history instead. He was a sixth-grade history teacher at the Miss Siddons School. Some years he had taught eighth-grade history. Astra Dell had been his student. She reminded her mother of just who Astra Dell was, but her mother cut in.

  "I know," her mother said. "The sick girl."

  Anna Mazur hugged a cushion. "I'm depressed, Mother, is what it is." Beyond the cloudy window, the river insinuated itself, seeming scaly as a snake and the same dirty brown. This, whatever this was, whatever she had known with Tim Weeks while Astra Dell was sick, was a flirtation. Tim Weeks was as serious about Anna as he was about Gillian Warring. Tim Weeks was the school's bachelor. There were actually three of them that she knew of, but Tim Weeks was nearer her age and so very cute. She was a type, too, common as a robin, a Miss forever in a Miss Siddons School. In Miss Brigham's office was a portrait photograph of Margaret Witt Siddons, founder, 1921: a barefaced woman from an old-fashioned time. Everything, the picture seemed to say, is gone, everything but the desk and the modern version of Miss Siddons, a head of school who was not above wearing a pantsuit in cold weather.

  Marlene

  Marlene Kovack was working backstage in costumes for social service hours when she overheard someone—too loud—a middle schooler, say, "You know when people are gay, don't you?" Mr. Weeks was nearby, with props, and she wondered, as she wondered about many of the unattached faculty in school, but why were the middle schoolers always so out of control? Marlene helped only the lower schoolers
in the play. The lower schoolers were delicate and shy; they made peeping sounds as Marlene dressed them, the King of Siam's littlest children.

  Francesca Fratini swung into the room and cooed over the King of Siam's two littlest children. "Oh, don't you look pretty. I love your headdresses." Then to Marlene, "Remember when we were this size?"

  The little girls had hands as small as starfish. "How old are you again?" Marlene asked, and the little girls answered: first grade. Marlene said, "I was never this small in first grade."

  Francesca said to Marlene, "You should come to the interschool Macbeth. I'm one of the witches. Our director is crazy. I have to lick Macbeth's face like a dog."

  The King of Siam's littlest children turned in their seats to look at Francesca Fratini. "Am I scaring you?" she said. "That's the kind of thing you get to do in high school. I'm a senior." Francesca said, "What do you think of that?"

  Little shrugs from the little rouged girls, who stepped away lightly as if their feet were bound.

  "You scared them," Marlene said.

  "Look, Marlene," and Francesca turned around, and there was a bumper sticker on her butt: Property of the King of Siam. "Prank night," she said. "When we all bow and our hoop skirts flip up, this is what the King and Anna will see!"

  Marlene stayed for the cast party and ate cake and went downtown with Francesca Fratini and Gillian Warring, who were doing their imitations of Dr. Bell. They called him the stress doctor and said he came to Siddons twice a week to get the kinks out. Their story was Dr. Bell had an office in the basement at school and that only the nurse had a key. "She takes us downstairs and lets us in," Francesca said.