All Souls

by Christine Schutt

  "He helps you with all the ways you're backward," Gillian said. "I can't believe you don't know this. I know this, and I am in eighth grade!"

  Marlene said, "It's an extra, probably, like tutoring."

  "No," Francesca said, "you just have to reverse your letters to be in the club."

  Dr. Bell had a mustache, and when he spoke, spit caught on the bristles of his mustache and it was gross. It was a mustard color, too—dirty mustard. "It makes me sick," Gillian said. "He has terrible breath, and he sits too close and watches you read for speed, and he keeps his pencil near when you write, and he corrects you as you go along, and you get all confused and of course you seem dumb to him. You're dumb to yourself. The man makes you dumb." Gillian took up Francesca's hands and danced with her the way the King did with Anna. "God! I hate him! Dr. Bell..." After a few turns, Gillian stopped short and confided to Marlene, "Can you tell I've been drinking?" One of the beauties of school was in its bringing like minds together briefly and intensely in these moments outside of school. Now in the Village outside a bar that blinked at fake IDs, Marlene held Gillian's hair while she puked into the street. Francesca went back in the bar to buy the drunk girl a Coke.

  A Daughter

  "I've just been here too long," Lisa Van de Ven said to Miss Wilkes. "I can't get interested in a single subject. I don't like anyone in my class. Nothing. The other day three of the nine seniors in AP French showed up." Lisa Van de Ven said, "I can't wait to get out of here." Then she said college as if she were making a wish, and she shut her eyes. "That's what I'm passionate about, if you want to know. Leaving. I can't wait."

  Youth in its sullen husk, dry, shrunk, ugly as a cornstalk, prematurely autumnal, an awful, rasping wastefulness, Lisa Van de Ven tamped her bloody thumb with a napkin and talked about how alienated she felt from all of her classmates. "Ever since the Dance Concert," Lisa said to her, and said again, "I can't wait to get out of here." She did not look up at Miss Wilkes until the end of recess, and for a moment it seemed to the woman that the girl's face signaled something other than complaint. Was Lisa embarrassed, for Miss Wilkes was certainly embarrassed. However could she have cared so much about this tough girl, but she had; she hoped Lisa Van de Ven would stop chewing her thumb long enough to look up again and see the expression on her teacher's face, an expression that felt easy and dispassionate in its perfect insincerity. "Soon enough you'll be gone," Miss Wilkes said, "but you'll be missed. You must promise to come back and visit us."

  Unattached

  "Happy in this, she is not yet so old / But she may learn; happier than this, / She is not bred so dull but she can learn." Portia to Bassanio at the English Speaking Union Shakespeare contest, 1995. Anna Mazur had coached her in Miss Hodd's stead. (Poor Miss Hodd had been sick then.) Anna Mazur had coached Astra Dell, and Astra Dell had remembered the speech as well as the sonnet. One of their chief topics of conversation in the hospital had been Shakespeare and what plays Astra Dell knew and liked best. Her favorite was A Midsummer Night's Dream, which wasn't original, Astra knew, but Anna Mazur said, of course, it was a favorite of hers, too.

  Favorites. Anna Mazur wanted to be a favorite.

  "See what a memory she has!" Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks.

  "I heard," Tim Weeks said, and he saw how small Astra was, shrunk a little, her long sleeves loose over her hands, only fingertips visible. He stood with Miss Mazur and watched as Astra walked down the hall to her next class.

  Anna Mazur said, "Her hair, at least it's growing. I almost said 'glowing.'"

  Suki and Alex

  The prom was in the future, along with a lot of other ceremonies from which someone would walk home with a corsage or a scroll or a secret-society pin. "I'd hoped to be invited," Suki said. Carlotta Forestal, Elizabeth Freer, and Katherine Johnson were the new inductees from the senior class to Cum Laude, the high school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa; seniors made members in their junior year were Ufia Abiola, Sarah Saperstein, and Ny Song. A cardiologist, Siddons, class of '72, addressed the assembly. The cardiologist, at the beginning of her talk, asked if Siddons seniors still had the tea party with the headmistress in the Conservatory Garden.

  Nos from the audience.

  Suki said to Alex, "So this person I hardly know asks me if I'm on Wellbutrin. I want to know what about me screams I really require heavy-duty anti-depressants." Something the cardiologist said—death? "All year it's been doctors. Astra's still not out of the woods, you know." Suki said, "Get me on Astra's video after this is over. I have something to say."

  Siddons

  Tea parties with the headmistress. Headmistress, that was a word from years ago.

  "Too bad," Miss Hodd said, "it's prettier than head of school."

  "You can't have it both ways," Mr. O'Brien said.

  "I'm contradictory. I like the white dresses for graduation, too," Miss Hodd said.

  "The girls should be in academic robes," Mr. O'Brien said.

  "Oh," Miss F joined in, "white dresses."

  "Comme une jeune fille," Madame Sagnier said.

  Alex and Suki

  Suki smoldered at the camcorder, and Alex turned it off. "I thought you had something to say."

  "I thought I did, too, but Astra's being back has taken the punch out of this video." She considered. "I'm glad, of course. Did I sound like my mother just then?" Suki's mother said that most of what was true about human nature was ugly, and Suki cited, as an instance, the fact that Marlene Kovack had visited Astra Dell more than any of Astra's real friends. Marlene, who was not in most of Astra's classes, took it on herself to bring Astra's homework to the hospital.

  Marlene

  At graduation rehearsal the upper-school chorus bludgeoned "For the Beauty of the Earth" with its high notes never reached: "Lord of all, to thee we raise..." But the singing improved with "Jerusalem," and its familiar opening, "And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?" Lilies and smokestacks were the hymn's earliest associations for Astra Dell, next came images of Oxford and summer abroad and students in spinnakered capes blown down the High Street. Marlene sat next to Astra Dell in the church and considered Astra's view of the hymn and what Astra was saying about scones and clotted cream and being hungry—"You can't imagine how good it feels," Astra said. To be hungry and here in the church where they would graduate in two days. Astra was graduating. "There won't be a diploma until after I take exams, but then." Astra smiled. A small part of her had learned to keep what hopes she had to herself.

  "I understand what you're saying," Marlene said, but she, herself, had changed. That night, with Francesca Fratini and Gillian Warring, when Gillian drank too much and was sick on the curb and Marlene tended to her, that night marked the start of something for Marlene. She began to wear her own accomplishment: a red sweatshirt with a perky badger across her chest. Marlene was going to Mad-town and she felt ready for the multitudes, but, first, she was looking forward to a summer of other nights, just like the one with Francesca and Gillian, nights with friends, confessions, and dramas. Not everyone was working every day. She wasn't! And she didn't start for another week, and the day after tomorrow she would be released, free! One of forty seniors from the class of 1997, Marlene would walk down the aisle of the church wearing a white A-line satin dress—not exactly summery, but a white dress that might serve a couple of occasions was hard to find—and a seed pearl necklace. And her hair? She pinned her hopes on the hairstylist; otherwise, she was wearing a helmet. Astra, Astra Dell was sitting next to her with her feathery scalp against the back of the pew, looking up, and the blue life-stuff at her temples seemed especially complicated and close to the surface.

  Be real.

  Marlene took out the journal and wrote. Be real. Don't ever become fake like the people that say hello in the elevator. The journal she had started for Astra, a log of lounge events, had long ago turned into something private, though she often wrote in public. She made promises to her self. I hope that years from now you
won't look at this journal and skim it like a dream and laugh and read lines out loud to others. Remember it wasn't about the grades ... live that way always, it's so much more worth it. Remember the days in the lounge, the music, the classes. Now her heart was caught up in Astra. I hope the girl I love now is not one of those fake people. I hope her magic lasts because of her humanity. I hope I wasn't in love with an idea.

  Siddons

  Mr. Dell had been at Prize Day every year for the past six years when prizes were first given out to students. Siddons pins and sports letters, all-around everything prizes—It's in the handbook, Grace had said. Year after year, perfect attendance, no school day missed until Grace died. Astra wasn't winning a prize this year, but Mr. Dell had come to the occasion to take Astra and Car out to lunch afterward, and when he saw Mrs. Forestal on the other side of the balcony, he knew Car was winning a prize, and that perhaps Mrs. Forestal might join them for lunch. Nice-enough woman, albeit seemingly bewildered and certainly expensive, she was very attractive in a slightly brittle way. He knew men who went in for that precision. Around him now were parents, some from his daughter's class and the Mortons' party. Dr. and Mrs. Saperstein, Mrs. Abiola. The Decrows! Some girls dared to look up at the balcony while others looked straight ahead at the long table with its pile of books in white paper, red ribbons.

  Middle- and upper-school faculty sat in the choir stalls; however, Miss Mazur was late and so was Mr. Weeks. They stood in the back and watched for an hour and forty-five minutes as girls in perfect uniform—white shirt, pleated skirt, knee-highs, dark shoes—walked toward the ministerial center of the church to accept prize after prize, named and unnamed. Car Forestal, the Selfridge Prize, for four years of excellence in English. This came as no surprise, except that Astra Dell would surely have been in the running had she been well and in school all year.

  She was well now, wasn't she? Anna Mazur was uncertain. Her brother had died, remember. Yes.

  Yes, Car, Car Forestal. Most of the named prizes went to seniors. Sarah Saperstein won the Milton Weiner Science Prize. Her friend Ny, the Dr. Jerome Kronenberg Mathematics Prize. Ufia Abiola won the Sophia Mutti Modern Languages Prize; Kitty Johnson, the William Wadsley Essay Prize, for an essay on King Lear she wrote in the spring.

  Somehow Alex Decrow had managed to work a rainbow chiffon scarf about her hair, and it fluttered in her rushed walk to accept a prize for improvement in physical education. Was the prize a joke? Alex could hardly breathe for smoking! Seniors in the front row laughed. The scarf and the prize and how she put it past them.

  "Mostly, it was attitude," Alex explained after Prize Day was over.

  Lisa Van de Ven said to no one in particular in the exiting throng, "I want to do something with my life."

  "Speak for yourself," Suki said—to Lisa?

  Unattached

  Tim Weeks said, "Alex Decrow's prize in PE, who would have guessed?"

  Anna Mazur took a packet of Kleenex from her purse and pulled out one, two, three Kleenexes and blew into the bunch of them.

  "Anna," he said, "I think I have disappointed you, and I am sorry."

  "Oh," she said, "it's just the end of the school year is all."

  Gillian Warring, sprung from out of nowhere with silly intentions, took Tim Weeks by surprise. "If it weren't for you," the girl said. Her headband was sliding backward and off, and filaments of colorless hair stood up around her face. The girl was rosy and pretty, a plinging string of a girl with life and more life. She was smiling at Tim Weeks, who held up his arms as if ambushed but smiled and told the girl how he knew, he wasn't surprised, and the girl might have talked longer but for friends—and her parents!

  "I never thought Gillian had any parents," Anna Mazur said, then, "Oh, that was bitchy of me," and she cried.

  Tim Weeks pulled her out of the crowd and in a corner of the vestibule told her he was stoned. He was too stoned for any of this.

  So the pixilated face was a card trick. "You're not naturally cheerful and loquacious?"

  He might have elaborated, but he had elaborated. More than once Tim Weeks had admitted he liked teaching middle school, and he liked teaching at Siddons. Beyond the school's doors was for him vacancy, silence, sickness. Beyond the doors the women he knew in school changed; conversations were full of holes; nothing felt finished but about to begin and about to begin, and then of course it didn't; he stalled. This did not mean Tim Weeks could not feel love; he could—he did. He felt affection for many people. "Do you want to know why I think I'm successful at this work? It's because I'm their age; I think the way a twelve-year-old might think. Look inside any school and you'll find characters like me, Anna. Like most teachers, I'm more comfortable around kids than grown-ups. I like them better. I have more to say to them. And middle school. Kids are at their funniest then. Middle school is the best part of school." The way the girls slung themselves against objects and other people; the way they bruised and healed so quickly.

  "Middle school," Tim Weeks said in a voice that sounded like a lover's. Rough expressions he had heard could be beautiful. What do you look like on the inside without any clothes?

  Siddons

  "Are you still in a snit about the white dresses?" Miss Hodd wanted to know.

  "Edith Wharton would not approve," Mr. O'Brien said. "Poor Edith! She was left to learn at home with a governess, you'll recall, and the really good books were forbidden her in her father's library..."

  Mr. Gates, Mrs. Archibald, Mr. Quinn and Mr. Santiago and Mr. Johnston, Mrs. Riley, Dr. Meltzer, Jade, who taught dance, Mr. Principia, Rose, Denny, and Jorge, from the cooking staff, Mariana Papadakios, who costumed plays, and Miss Barns, who directed them, the math team, Phil and Judy, the librarians, Lucy Caldwater and Helena Miser and Mrs. Cohen, the entire physical education department, swimming downstream, en masse, Bilba, from the music department, and Peter Hoy, who ran technology, were some of the guests on their way to the fancy faculty luncheon. Mr. Carson, Señora Valdez, and Anna Mazur were one group walking up Madison Avenue. Tim Weeks had told Anna Mazur he would be there just as soon as he was finished signing yearbooks.

  Mrs. Van de Ven explained she had come early for a back-row seat where she would not be seen by the girls marching in, and there she had discreetly sat through Prize Day. She had come not because Lisa was winning a prize—Lisa was not, Mrs. Van de Ven knew it or she would have been called—but Mrs. Van de Ven had come to applaud the entire senior class and their teachers for their efforts and accomplishments. "And your daughter," Mrs. Van de Ven said to Mr. Dell, "your daughter is here. That's wonderful."

  Her wonderful sounded hollow to him, though Mr. Dell could appreciate the sound of disappointment: how to explain Lisa's empty arms on June 11, 1997? Lisa was graduating, was going to ... where was she going to? Astra hadn't said and Mrs. Van de Ven did not say, which seemed to Mr. Dell unlike Lettie Van de Ven, but he thanked her for her solicitous inquiries about his daughter. Astra was well; they were in holding mode, but she was well. She would be walking with her class.

  "Yes, of course," Mrs. Van de Ven said, "I know." Mrs. Van de Ven was a class rep, so she knew; she knew a lot that was happening at school. Certainly, she knew about Astra. "Does she ever wear that wig you bought her?"

  "She may have," he said. "I don't know."

  Mrs. Van de Ven said, "There's so much we don't know about our children, isn't there?" These were the last days, weren't they? Never again high school, this school. Yes to the campaigns and annual funds, yes to the ten-year reunions, but never again this daily abrasion: the wonder it was possible to feel so much. Didn't Mr. Dell think that was so? Her own daughter had ruined her thumbnails with nervous sucking. "Some nights I thought to myself, she's just a baby." Then there was the club scene after spring vacation, the slacking off—the terrible slacking off—the smell of cigarettes in the clothes tossed about the room. Messy stacks of homework for weeks unmoved, untouched, and new books, novels from the spring electives—Families in Distress (poor ch
oice)—their spines unbroken. "It's been hard," Mrs. Van de Ven said. "Honestly, I haven't known what to do, and Bill hasn't been any help. He flees to the office and stays late. We haven't had a dinner together, the three of us, in months it feels like. Not since the new year." Mrs. Van de Ven stood with Mr. Dell, who could have left her—she didn't have him in a corner—but he stayed to console her because she had started to cry.

  "Tears of joy!" she insisted. "I'm going to miss my little girl."

  CHF

  That day was the last day I lived in my body. I retreated above the neck, and I've lived inside the "fire" in my head ever since. This was not the first time Car recognized herself in a play, although it was the first time she heard her own feelings expressed in the same images she had used all winter to describe the fever that was hardly purgatorial but a low-grade, constant wearing away. Nobody wakes up in the morning trying to burn.

  Car walked Astra to her building, where they talked on the corner out from under the stage light of the iron-and-glass marquee. The play had been Astra's idea, but Car had known what it was about: a girl and her uncle in a car. What is it about uncles and fathers, Car wanted to know. "Have you ever loved somebody so intensely that you wanted to be inside them—literally, you wanted to slide down their throat? Something out of sci-fi, I know, but I'm serious, I've felt this way about my father. I've felt it for him and he's felt it for me, I'm sure, but then last spring. And now I haven't seen him in over a year. He comes to New York when I'm away with Mother. I went to his apartment the other day. I still have the key. I'd left the place a mess. I thought, let it look lived-in, let him see I've been here, but the other day—and I know he's got help—the place had been cleaned up, and there were no signs of me, but there were signs of him. I know. I know him. I know he was in New York." Car let herself be embraced, although it was easier to cry outside of someone's arms, and she did want to cry a little more. "It feels good to cry," she said. "There was a time last year when I thought I'd run out of the power to cry."