Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

  “Hold still!” I yelped. “You’re making this impossible.”

  “Sorry, Plummy,” Ginny said. “Thanks.”

  I continued braiding in silence.

  “Oh, wait!” Ginny jumped forward, which screwed up my braid, and grabbed a little velvet box from the dresser. “Here.”

  “My hands are full,” I reminded her.

  “Right.” She popped it open. Inside was a stack of silver rings.

  “I found them when I was digging through the guest room dresser,” she said. “You should wear them.”

  I finished what was probably my fifth-best braid and took a ring from the box, surveying. It slipped all the way to the bottom of my finger.

  “See?” Ginny said. “I knew they were meant for you.”

  I shimmered my fingers in the air. It did look nice. I slid on the rest. “Thank you.”

  Ginny grabbed me around the waist, and I shoved her off, and then we both went downstairs to where Mom was waiting with Almost-Doctor Andrews, who was probably over to deliver his rent check and a loaf of zucchini bread. Almost-Doctor Andrews was a slim and attractive man of about twenty-eight with brown hair and a mustache. If he were not gay, and if our mother had any interest in remarriage, I would put him forth as a possible stepfather.

  “Oh, there you—” Mom stopped. And laughed. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  I looked down at my body, which was clad in a fairly regular pair of jeans, socks that did not match, and a purple T-shirt with a cat that read COFFEE RIGHT MEOW. Plus, now, rings.

  “From the tone of your voice I’m guessing that’s unacceptable,” I said drily. I say many things drily. It is my trademark.

  “Ginny,” Mom said. “That’s a bridesmaid dress I wore in Kathy’s wedding in 1992.”

  “I don’t have anything else,” Ginny said, folding her puffed-sleeve arms fiercely. “You wouldn’t let me buy anything.”

  Mom and Almost-Doctor Andrews exchanged a glance.

  “It’s vintage?” he offered.

  “Told you so,” I said.

  “And you’re just going to let Plum go like that?” Ginny demanded. “Siblings are requested to please dress their best. It says so on the invitation.”

  “This is my best,” I said. “And they split an infinitive.”

  Mom sighed. “Don’t you have a skirt or something, Plum?”

  “Senior Tea is only a big deal for seniors,” I pointed out. “And I don’t have a skirt.” Skirts made me look like a tube of spreadable meat.

  “Okay,” Mom said. “So wear those pants.”

  I groaned. Ginny cackled.

  “What’s wrong with those pants?” Mom said. “The gray dress ones with the little cuffs at the end? Aren’t those the kind of nice things respectable people wear?”

  “Mom,” Ginny said. “You are always telling Plum to wear Those Pants.”

  “What?” Mom said. “Am not.”

  “You are, too,” I said, and ticked off on my fingers. “Church. Your students’ gallery shows. Almost-Doctor Andrews’s recital that one time.”

  Mom flushed. “So? They’re nice pants.”

  “We’re already late,” I said. “I don’t have time to get changed.”

  “Only because someone took a long time getting dressed,” Mom said.

  “Only because someone else wouldn’t let me buy a real dress!” Ginny cried. “What’s wrong with one dress? Are you trying to deprive us? Is this why you’ve been acting so shady lately?”

  Mom flushed deeper. “Ginny. I have not been—”

  Kit Marlowe cut her off with a hacking cough. An orange-and-whitish blob splatted against the carpet.

  It was a cigarette butt.

  “It’s time to go,” Mom said briskly. She flung her scarf around her neck. “Put on a skirt, Plum.”

  A tense moment of silence followed.

  “Forgive me if this is something I should know,” Almost-Doctor Andrews ventured. “But is there supposed to be liverwurst on the mail table?”

  The Gregory School is among the Philadelphia area’s most elite private schools. This means that it is both expensive and full of rich people who spend their summers sailing around various islands in New England and eating lobster. The Blatchley sisters, who spend their summers watching British television from the 1980s and eating microwave popcorn, have never been a smooth cultural fit. Were it not for our being the daughters of Buck Blatchley, I doubt we’d have even been admitted. (Well, Ginny, maybe, but only because she is actually a genius. I might have been able to skate in on my large vocabulary, but I’m almost certain it was just that they didn’t want to split up a pair of siblings.) And were it not for the life-insurance policy of Buck Blatchley, we would not have been able to stay enrolled.

  Ostensibly, the Senior Tea is a chance to get to know the twelfth-grade faculty, socialize with the other seniors, and kick off the year that would serve as crowning glory of your TGS career. In reality, as Ginny was making abundantly clear on the drive over, it was a viciously competitive session of passive-aggressive one-upmanship, but with cucumber sandwiches. Project utter calm and confidence that you’d be cruising into an early slot at Princeton, and your classmates were likely to crack from the pressure, leaving one fewer competitor in the arena. Screw things up, and—

  “I am going to fail, die, and end up at Anthracite Swineherd Academy and Secretarial School,” Ginny moaned to the car window. “In that order.”

  “Don’t be classist, Ginny,” Mom said. “I worked as a secretary when your father was in grad school.”

  “Also, anthracite is coal,” I said, having studied this in ninth-grade earth sciences last year. “Why do you need pigs and coal?”

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said miserably. “For barbecues or something. It doesn’t matter.” She pressed a hand to her temple like she was getting faint, which, although the air-conditioning was broken, was patently ridiculous.

  “You’d better improve that delicate constitution if you’re going to become a coal miner,” Mom said.

  “Or a pig farmer,” I said.

  Ginny tried to stay pained-looking, but her lips started to twitch between a smile and a fake frown. “This is all a joke to you, isn’t it?”

  “You started it,” I pointed out. “Unless you’re serious about animal husbandry. You already have practice from the chickens.”

  “You would know, Laurie,” Ginny said, glaring at my skirt. “Excited for the box social?”

  As it turned out, I did own a skirt: red with little yellow flowers and with a ruffle around the bottom hem. You see, every year, TGS forces the ninth grade to participate in a production of musical theater. Oklahoma! is a musical about farming and cowboys and other things that no ninth grader has cared about since Manifest Destiny. (It is also—ridiculously—spelled with the exclamation point at the end; I looked it up.) I tried to get out of it by offering to paint the scenery, but then I got stuck with double duty: stagecrafting and singing the soprano harmony to the title number.

  “Everyone is going to know it’s from Oklahoma!” I said.

  “The only thing anyone remembers about Oklahoma!,” Ginny said, “is that Tommy Wills-Wyatt came onstage with a boner on opening night.”

  This is true, both that it happened and that that’s all anyone remembered. You just don’t forget the image of a fourteen-year-old kid with chaps, spurs, and a raging erection.

  “I think the skirt looks darling,” Ginny said, and reached around to pat my hair from the front seat. “And your hair looks fantastic.”

  “Just as long as I’m not embarrassing you,” I said. “Or screwing up your chances at college.”

  “Please, Plummy. I’ve already done plenty of that myself.”

  “You get straight As!” I said.

  Ginny acted like she didn’t hear me.

  After five minutes of big houses and bigger lawns, the Blatchleys pulled up to the headmaster’s house. Mom made a beeline for the group of parents underneat
h a plastic tent, where they seemed to have bottles of wine. Ginny made a beeline for her friends. I, having nowhere else to go or hide, trailed behind her to where her fellow High-Strung Smart Girls were circled.

  TGS is not a particularly cliquey school. It’s hard to develop sufficiently defined subcultures when a graduating class is only eighty people; there is too much bleed-over. Regardless, subfactions occur. Ginny had long been a member of the High-Strung Smart Girls group, which included Charlotte Forsythe, Lily Sweet, Lily Gordon, Ava Kestenbaum, and Julia St. John. All of them had straight-A averages and wore cardigans and ate yogurt together in the alcove under the stairs in the math building.

  Behind the HSSGs there was a little garden wall, and, after making sure the coast was clear, I sat down and took out Jane Eyre. It was a bargain copy with tightly cramped text, and the pages were thick with Ginny’s underlines and highlights and sloppy margin notes, which left little room for me to say anything of my own. So instead of noting, I simply read, and imagined I was on a moor. The headmaster’s backyard was very beautiful, though un-moor-like, and extremely suitable for reading. From my place on the small patio, I could see a huge, sloping green lawn with white wrought-iron chairs sprinkled here and there and even a gazebo past a swell of grass. Gizmo and Doug would’ve gone crazy for it. And with any luck, I would blend right in and no one would notice me.

  But apparently I didn’t have any luck, because I had barely been reading for fifteen minutes when someone found me.

  “Excuse me? Are you lost?”

  A mom had discovered me, and, since I could not come up with a valid reason not to be wearing my name tag, led me to a little table stacked with sticky white squares and watched while I filled one out. Then the mom asked me why didn’t I join the party and serve some snacks with the other younger sibs. (That is what she called us—sibs—which sounds like the acronym for a disease.)

  I gave her a look that said, Because I am very shy and wearing a skirt from Oklahoma! It did not work. The mom outfitted me with a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches and instructed me to go forth.

  My heart sank. I could literally feel it sitting in my stomach. I decided the quickest way to unload as many sandwiches as possible would be the adults, since Ginny and her white-dressed friends were probably not eating much, and so I headed to the parent tent, where the conversation was exactly the sort of things you would imagine hearing from parents of seniors at an expensive private school: beautiful time of year, summer never long enough, Long Beach Island, the Hamptons, the Poconos, the Shore, get together, so fun, visiting a few, not sure, can’t believe, grew up so fast, early decision, early action, tutors, counselors, subject tests, not worried, excited, don’t know yet, hoping, grades, points, sports teams, applications, working hard, push through, scholarships, football, cross-country, New Haven, Cambridge, Ithaca, didn’t your father, know him from work, we’ll see we’ll see we’ll see, laugh laugh laugh.

  Awash in grown-up talk, I finally threaded my way to Mom, who was listening to another mom talk about how busy she was.

  “It’s just so much work, volunteering,” the other mom was saying. She gave a quick glance at my plate of sandwiches, which I offered and tried to telepathically command her to eat as many as possible.

  “We’re trying something so much more ambitious at ArtSong this season, but our fund-raising coordinator has been out on ‘indefinite maternity leave,’ even though that child has to be at least five . . .”

  “Mm,” Mom said.

  “. . . but it’s good to work, I think,” the other mom finished. “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Mom said. “At least until we find that room full of money.”

  The other mom must have noticed that I wasn’t smiling, because she smiled very aggressively at me.

  “Everything okay”—she glanced at my name tag—“Plum?”

  “It’s short for Patience,” I explained. “Sort of.”

  “Plum,” Mom said. “You remember Tommy’s mom.”

  “Pamela,” said Pamela. “Pamela Wills.”

  “How do you do?” I said.

  “Your family is so artsy,” Pamela said. “I love it. You did those little mouse books, right? The—oh, gosh, what are they called? I used to read them all the time—”

  “Five Little Field Mice.”

  I knew exactly how the rest of this conversation was going to go. I’d heard it dozens, if not hundreds, of times before: No, Mom did not write them. No, she hasn’t met the author. Yes, her kids loved them, too. (We did.) Yes, it was fun. No, she hasn’t done any other books. They’re selling fine, thank you very much. (That was none of anyone’s business, but yes, the Field Mice were a perennial favorite of families and continued to make a respectable royalty year after year.)

  “You know, I used to paint, myself,” Pamela said, chomping so hard her earrings swung. “Watercolors, mostly. So freeing. So delightful.” She hummed a little to herself and chomped some more. “Are you working on another book?”

  “I teach,” Mom said. “At Ferrars College of Art.”

  Mom did not enjoy teaching. All her beginning art students paid $40,000 a year to paint the exact same things and experiment with hallucinogens. Yet another reason Ginny and I were duty-bound to find practical careers.

  Pamela Wills, not listening at all, took another sandwich. “Your mother was just saying that your sister’s hoping to major in some kind of science,” Pamela said, earrings wobbling. “Are you interested in that, too, Plum?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t think analytically.”

  Pamela gave me a knowing smile. “I find that hard to believe.”

  But she didn’t know me, and so the knowing smile threw me off. I must have looked stymied, because Pamela elaborated.

  “You don’t have to be modest,” she went on. “I’ve read what your father wrote. Everyone has. It was just lovely.”

  I suppose context is necessary. Richard “Buck” Blatchley wrote short stories, a form of creative writing that pays more than poetry but less than novels, and earns you the respect of fellow creative writers and very few others. He published them in good places: the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and once—and I still find this incredibly embarrassing, even though he is dead and nobody reads magazines anymore—Playboy.

  But he wrote personal essays, too, and his most famous, “A Treatise on the Astrolabe,” was a meditation on the relationship between artists and their children (the title being borrowed from a poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer, Father of the English language, and also a son in need of an astronomical education). In it, he marvels at his two-year-old daughter, “a tiny genius, toddling forward, somehow sprung not from a crack in some immortal’s skull but from the loins of a schmuck like me.”

  That two-year-old daughter was Virginia Eleanor Blatchley.

  “That’s not me,” I said shortly. “My sister.”

  Pamela smiled at me like I was Gizmo dancing on his hind legs for a glob of spreadable meat. “Huh,” she said. “I guess it’s been a while since I read it.”

  This woman probably never read. Or she only ever read at her Nantucket house. She probably kept a basket of paperbacks with titles like The Candlemaker’s Wife by the sunscreen.

  “I would think so,” I said. Mom looked daggers at me.

  Pamela was unfazed. “Well, I’m sure you’d rather be a writer anyway. You have the genes.”

  That was the thing, though. Everyone expected me to be a writer, and the more they expected it, the less I wanted to do it. It’s not that I had any other skills—actually, I had almost no skills whatsoever, beyond French-braiding and Kit Marlowe–whispering. But when your father is someone talented but dead, your own skill is beside the point anyway. And Ginny was the one with the documented genius.

  As if she were reading my mind, Pamela Wills beamed brighter. “I mean, just think about it. You’ll have your career cut out for you. I’d think publishers would be falling all over themselves to publish something by
Buck Blatchley’s daughter.”

  I would like to say that what happened next was an accident. But—in the interest of total transparency—that is not exactly the truth.

  “Ah!”

  Pamela Wills winced and rubbed her toe, her earrings swinging frantically.

  “Oh,” I said, face absolutely calm. “Was that your foot? I’m so—”

  “Plum,” Mom interrupted. “Why don’t you get more food?”

  There were still five sandwiches on my plate.

  “Or give them to your sister,” Mom said quickly. “You know how much Ginny loves salmon.”

  At first I didn’t move (we Blatchleys have just never been big fish eaters, or particularly good liars), but then Mom gave me a little shove between the shoulder blades in the general direction of Ginny.

  “I’ll have another one,” Pamela Wills said, but it was too late. I was hustling my way out of there, tray in hand.

  Ginny was sitting at a little table with a bunch of High-Strung Smart Girls. I thrust the tray at her.

  “Here,” I said. “Can you just eat all these?”

  “Ew, what? Are those salmon?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just take them. It’s a sandwich-related emergency.”

  Skeptically, Ginny unloaded the remaining five scraps of bread onto a napkin, and I thanked her and walked away very fast, past the High-Strung Smart Girls at their table, past the stretch of lawn where the Sporty Senior Boys were playing a game of pickup football, and around the corner of the headmaster’s house, to where the rest of the snacks were lying in wait.

  And I sat down.

  And I clenched my fists a little.

  And as if things could not get worse than almost severing the toes of a very important mom at your sister’s Senior Tea, I was then interrupted in my almost-meltdown by a triumvirate of my least favorite TGS subfaction: the Loud Sophomore Boys.