All Souls (10 page)

 

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 Mockingbird
again?” from the same blinking back of the room, Gillian's constellation.

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.”

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 Edie, “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!!!!

Alex had her camcorder on yearbook's lit editors and “guest editors” gassing in the lounge.
Wallowing in their wit
was how Suki put it. Why was Suki there? She stuck her face up close to the camera and said, “I am contributing.”

One of the two Elizabeths, Elizabeth G., was telling her own significant teacher story. Fifth grade and for some reason she couldn't do her history homework. “So Miss Bell stapled my hair.” That was good. Everyone agreed they should use that on the “Indelible Memories” page. Definitely. Worst academic experience? “Too many,” Alex said, “they blur.” Edie said, “The most grief I ever got out of an assignment in high school was definitely tenth grade's research paper. Having the most obscure topic imaginable, mathematical achievements in non-Western cultures during the Renaissance, made it worse.”

“I didn't really like my topic either,” Alex said, “but I got stuck with it. Calvin's Geneva. I couldn't figure out what my thesis should be.”

“That's a problem,” Kitty said.

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Katherine Johnson

cc: Ufia Abiola, Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow, Krystle Cruz, Suki Morton

Astra Dell isn't up to choreographing a dance.
Not really. We should be prepared to finish it
for her.

Any thoughts? Be realistic.

Lisa

 

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Katherine Johnson

I'm really, really sad that we didn't get around to
making a dance with Astra. She's too sick to ask
now. I feel awful, then I wonder what must Astra
feel?

Edie

P.S. Lisa dropped the ball.

 

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Lisa Van de Ven

cc: Ufia Abiola, Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow,
Katherine Johnson, Suki Morton

Astra Dell is probably writing an amazing book
about life in the hospital bed with an IV and
pale clothes with tiny flowers on them.

xoxoxoxoxo

Krystle

 

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Lisa Van de Ven

cc: Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow, Krystle Cruz,
Katherine Johnson, Suki Morton

Ladies,

I wish you would all stop being so ghoulish. Astra
is in a treatment that razes the disease, so of
course she looks like hell, but she is strong. She
has a strong heart and a will to live, and we should
celebrate that drive with a dance in her honor, one
of the dances in the program, the most joyous and
energetic dance. My dance might be appropriate.
Ufia

 

Lisa turned away from the computer and looked up at Miss Wilkes. They were in school, so it was
Miss Wilkes.

“Ufia is so conceited, isn't she?” Lisa asked.

“Are you surprised I found you?”

“No.” Lisa turned back to the computer screen.

“Why didn't you show up yesterday?”

“I told you.” Lisa logged out and went on talking to the dark screen. “I forgot.” She turned to Miss Wilkes. “Don't act like my mother.”

“What I don't understand is, how could you forget when you made the date yourself?”

“How? I'm applying to college, that's how. I've got February deadlines. What's the big deal, anyway? I forget all the time. I know who you want me to be, but I'm a little screwed up.”

“You're more than a little because it's not just yesterday, and you are the one who insists we meet. Wasn't that you last night in tears?”

And when the girl didn't respond, Miss Wilkes spoke again, in a gentler voice. “I know it's hard to be kind,” she said, “but it wasn't hard to begin with.” Miss Wilkes was speaking as Janet, as a woman in love, un-titled, unembellished, a woman with wide hips in peg-legged pants and some kind of scuffed-up loafers. This woman said, “I don't know. You tell me. We don't have to meet.”

“No,” Lisa said, “I know. I'm sorry.”

Miss Wilkes felt as if she were passing through curtains of feeling. “I'm in a bit of a swoon here, but if you don't want to see me anymore, and you're not in any of my classes next semester—” Miss Wilkes began, but Lisa interrupted.

“I don't.”

Miss Wilkes stepped back just as Alex and Suki tussled through the door into the computer room. The girls stopped shouldering each other when they saw Miss Wilkes and Lisa alone at the other end of the room.

“Look,” Lisa spoke impatiently, “could we not do this here?”

“Here's as good a place as any.” Miss Wilkes stood between Lisa and the two girls, but her voice was growing louder. “We can talk here.”

Lisa appraised her. Lisa stood up and hitched her book bag over her shoulder and said, “You just said we didn't . . . ,” but even before Lisa had finished, Miss Wilkes had begun to move away. Suki and Alex watched
Miss Wilkes and Lisa, and when Miss Wilkes, in the doorway, dared to look back at them, Suki and Alex were still watching. They were smiling.

“Where's my camcorder when I need it?” Alex said. “Let's go after.”

“I told you ages ago,” Suki said. “I told you I saw them on York. They had to be coming from the hospital.”

“When did you? Why did you? Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god”—Alex, in the middle of the empty hallway, hopped as if she had water in her ear. She was making goofy expressions and Suki was laughing. “I mean it. I don't know what I'm doing half of the time. What am I doing? Where's my camcorder?”

Dr. Meltzer, looking down the hall at Suki and Alex, said, “Why haven't the two of you been shot yet?”

They stood on the landing to the fifth floor and discussed what distinguished them, Alex and Suki, from people like Lisa, from most of their classmates really. They were, both of them, naturally thin. Thin to begin with. “Absolutely no cellulite, Alex.” They were distinguished by their slender bodies and their disregard for their bodies, their purebred bone structure, their incongruously elegant good looks, also their money, their snobbery, their wayward society swagger. They pushed
their names together saying, “SukiandAlex, Alexand-Suki, we're perfect. That's why Meltzer can't stand us.”