All Souls (2 page)

The sofa Car sat on was smooth as a mushroom and so plumply overstuffed that no indented evidence of her remained when she stood up; in fact, there was no evidence of anyone's passing through her father's apartment, and she could only imagine the swaying enormity of the cleaning lady, who was so thorough in her work that the slats of light through the blinds seemed dust-less. Here all was sealed, unscented, unused, unmarked, yet the clock was wound and keeping time. Her father's drawers were empty; his closet, locked. Car had a key to her father's apartment, and this, she supposed, was enough, was a lot really, and meant she could wander and phone as she would, as she had and did last week, this week, any week, and because her father's number was unlisted and her mother didn't know it, Car was inaccessible.
That man!
was all her mother said. That man,
Car's father, impeccably pressed and pleated, was surely in handsome company.
Dearest girl.
He wrote the occasional postcard that took weeks to get across the ocean.
Dearest wren. Today in the Galleria Borghese, William stood in front of the Bernini and wept. You know the statue. Daphne breaking into branches.
Her father was a character in a Henry James novel. Car lit up another cigarette and ashed it on the table.

Marlene picked her nose and sent what she found in it flying across her room. She was a dirty girl, she knew that much, and whatever the girls in school suspected her of—stealing, farting, lying—was true. The slut part was not true, although she wished it were, but all the dirty parts—yes, she was that girl. Look at her messy room, the unresolve of such disorder. She had no ambition but to dizzy herself into absence. Smoking cigarettes helped. The nights when her mother came home and went straight to bed saying her feet were swollen, those nights Marlene often shamed herself into high feeling. She flashed her ass in the bright windows of the living room; she pulled her cheeks apart; she said,
Kiss my a-hole;
she said,
Eat me.
Ugly expressions she used as she would spit, and she picked at herself and made worse scabs. But who could see this now
in the soft light of her bedroom? She wrote to Astra Dell and chewed her nails to a bloody quick she blotted on the draft of her letter . . .
Dear Astra.
She meant what she wrote, the
dear
part. Of all the girls in her class, only Astra Dell had ever been genuinely kind to her and was, yes, was dear to her, and now Marlene was in a position to help Astra. To help Astra Dell! To be her friend as no other.
I have never shared more than a hello nod or a smile with you, but the one time I saw you cry, I wanted to share those tears with you. I am thinking of you,
which was purely the truth. Marlene was thinking of Astra and rumors of scorching treatments being used to cure her. Marlene wrote three pages, single-spaced, telling Astra about stupid things, school, Miss F.
She either just sits there and waits for you to have some trigonometric moment or tells you that she cannot believe that you don't know it.
Marlene's letters were filled with whatever she had overheard in the senior lounge, for she had found a place there for herself in the lounge. Alex began laughing hysterically over nothing in chemistry, and Dr. Meltzer kicked her out of the class. Marlene often sat in the corner of the lounge leaned up against the lockers, and from there she listened in, took notes, copied stories, scribbled, drew flowers. Alex was making a video of the senior experience, but Marlene was writing it all down for the sick girl.

Marlene wrote to Astra about her yearbook page. Marlene Kovack,
Last Heard Saying: Nothing.
Who wrote
that? Marlene had some ideas—Suki Morton and Alex Decrow. Some joke.

But there's always got to be one person to hate in every class, right? Marlene wrote to Astra:
Expect to see Alex's movie. She's shoving her camera into everyone's face.
Even Marlene's, of course. Marlene had been asked to look into the camera and say something to Astra. Marlene, watching from her corner, had said, “Catch me in action,” and then held as still as she could, hardly seeming to breathe. Alex filmed some girls from below because, as Alex said, the angle was so fucking freaky, possibly original; the way a little kid sees the world is mostly oily, prickly legs. Marlene believed Alex wanted everyone to look ugly. That was school for Marlene, an ugly ongoing movie, but now suffering had another meaning, real suffering led to real death.
Dear Astra, I hope to see you even before you get this letter,
and she did hope to see Astra; this was the truth.

Dembroski was checking off attendance in senior class meeting.

Alex Decrow?

Edie Cohen—sick.

Marlene Kovack—

Suki Morton?

Later Mrs. Dembroski wondered at the suspended notation for Marlene Kovack; she couldn't account for her own indecision on the matter. Where was Marlene on Wednesday?

Anna Mazur sat near the end of the bed and watched Astra's breathing because everything else she looked at was hospital-like, too white and too clean, bandaged, tubed, needled, starched, so that the rise and fall of Astra's breathing in the bed was what she watched, the way she might watch a clock, as if the visit could be hurried by such attention, but her time at the hospital was like all time at the hospital and slow! A nurse came in and pinged the IV sac, and later the nurse came back and said, “Still sleeping is she?” and Anna wondered at the sameness of hospital talk, remembering her brother Mitchell in a cold room where he slept and slept away what little time was left. The unfairness of things. Anna Mazur knew Astra from the English Speaking Union's Shakespeare contest. “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand.” Anna had never been Astra's teacher; she had only stepped in to coach when, last year, Miss Hodd was out and Astra had needed help to prepare for the contest. Anna liked the girl very much and wished she had taught her, wished she had been a favorite, but Anna
had never been anyone's favorite. (She was no Tim Weeks.) Maybe in a different school or another profession, she might be valued more. Oh, she had been liked as a teacher, yes, even well liked on occasion, but nobody's best, nobody's favorite. She had been three years at Siddons and had never seen Tim Weeks's apartment. Anna stared at the blanketed rise of the sick girl's feet. She thought Astra's toes would break off if she touched them, and so she backed out of the room in good-bye, glad to be gone and down so many floors and into the unseasonably flushed and humid yellow air. She shivered to be alive, but the unfairness of things—criminals turning on the spit of their crimes, the crooked and maimed and unspeakably wicked thrumming with health while the innocent died—saddened Anna, and she called Tim Weeks once outside.

He said, “Why don't you come over?” And when she didn't answer, he said, “Take a taxi. I'm not really as far as you think.”

She didn't know where to sit once she was in his apartment. The couch was serving as a table; stacks of magazines and newspapers and books took up its length, and the chair under a reading lamp was clearly Tim's, so that the only other possible chair was the beanbag in the corner. “From somebody's youth,” he said, “probably mine.”

She moved around the room. She looked at the
books on his shelves: biographies—Ernest Hemingway, Adlai Stevenson, Frank Lloyd Wright—and in a cleared space a picture of a dour little girl and another picture of her, younger by years, smiling on a lawn in a skirted bathing suit. “My niece. My sister's children. They live with the folks in Ohio. The little boy's name is Ted. He's six, I think, or he may be seven.” The little boy was cuter than his sister, freckled, a little like Tim. “He looks like you,” she said.

“I'm flattered,” he said. “I'm glad. I've got beer and beer. What would you like?”

“Nothing.”

“Really?”

But she joined him in a beer, clinking bottles as he moved his chair closer to the couch, remarking that they had more than Siddons in common; they were both from the Midwest. Yes, he said. He knew that, and Tim was glad she had called, had come; he had been wondering about her visit to Astra Dell.

“Yes,” she said.

“So?”

“The girl slept the whole time. She opened her eyes when I first got there, and she may have seen me. I don't know. The nurse said she would tell Astra I'd been there.” Anna drank and shrugged her shoulders, said she was tired. She said, “So,” said, “Nothing much to say except I'm depressed.”

He took the beer from her hand and kept her hand in his and looked at her in that Tim Weeks way he had, and he was adorable again.

She said, “Well, I'm not suffering, am I? I came here, didn't I? I'm sitting with you and drinking beer and playing the sad sack when what do I have to be sad about?”

“Don't be so hard on yourself. You have reason to be sad. There's something wrong about a child gravely ill. There's the memory of your brother.”

“You think they could fix it by now. You think they'd know more.”

“Next time maybe I should go with you,” and he let go of her hand.

“I'm not being hard on myself. I was glad for an excuse to call you.”

He smiled. He talked about quiet experiences and how it helped to see a lot of foliage from the windows of his apartment. “Look,” he said, and she did, and she saw the leaves on the cherry trees were small and ovate and a yellow-red that looked edible.

“I like where you live.”

By the time Car got to the hospital, visiting hours were almost over, but Astra was awake, and when the girls saw each other, they cried. Astra was hooked to machinery and fenced off behind a castered table, so that Car stood aloof and cried. The words for what they were feeling were ordinary, familiar words, and Car was sorry to say them. Even the language behind her silence was worn and uninspired and whapped the way balloons did without surprise or weight. And what had she brought to show Astra? Old photos, the colors too bright; the beach, a hurtful white against the blue of everything else. Astra in a tented costume and Car in a bathing suit, and both of them laughing at Car's father, who had taken pictures then. The girls eating lobster. Car asleep in the hammock. The girls older and eating lobster. Sweet peas whimsically tangled on tepeed trellises, and hydrangeas, so heavy headed from a rain, they flopped on the lawn as if playing dead. Pictures of the front of the house swept and raked. Thor, more of Thor, this time with his bone. Kayaks far out in the bay. “That's us,” Car said. “Remember? That was the same day we saw Will Bliss and met his friend from Taft. Remember?” Astra remembered. There had been a party on the beach, a bonfire. Astra said, “Will Bliss, just the name. You have to love him. Besides, what's wrong with looking cute all the time and being the favorite friend of little children?”

Car smiled. “What was that song those boys were singing?”

What was it? But Car didn't remember what it was or what she was going to say next, and she opened the
present she had brought for Astra while Astra watched: a bracelet, light as the cotton it was swaddled in, from Cartier, thin as a string, a silver bracelet beaded with silver beads. Astra's mouth opened in a kind of smile, her tears looked milky, and Car was ashamed to look at Astra and turned her attention to the upright row of cards.

“All your cards!” Car said. “This one,” and she opened and read and put it behind another card. “Lisa Van de Ven has the neatest, fattest handwriting.
‘Dear Astra . . . at least you're escaping Mr. O'Brien's first-period Monday class . . . ugh. I'm sure you're happy about that. And you'll be able to catch up on the sleep . . .'
Lisa is such a bore.” Car took up another and read aloud:
“‘Remember the chorus trip when we stayed up all night and talked about EVERYTHING!!!?'
Who is this from? Edie, I should have known. And Alex of AlexandSuki, what did they have to say? I
miss you a lot, and I know so many people have said that to you, but I know that you know that coming from me . . .'
Alex is so crazy. You know she's making a video about the senior experience? She thinks it'll look good on her applications.” The rest of the cards Car read to herself, and when she turned back to Astra, her best friend's eyes were shut. They were shut and her face settled in a way more final than before, and Car knew she was asleep. Someone rapped at the door; visiting hours were over; it was time. True enough, the room had darkened. The corridor, too, was asleep, and the
nurses' station empty, and the doors along the hall were half shut on screened-off beds, and nowhere was there music or TV, only the nurse on spongy soles, moving just ahead, checking on the darkness from room to room, saying to Car as they walked down the corridor, “She's looking pretty good, your friend.”

“Was that good?” and when the nurse didn't answer right away, Car said that maybe she could come tomorrow. Maybe, yes, she should come. Tomorrow. Tomorrow was school again.
Folio
meeting. She had AP calculus to do. No frees tomorrow except lunch. No lunch tomorrow. Tomorrow no food, nothing, only water.

Edie Cohen explained right speech involved abstinence from “lying, telling tales, harsh language, and frivolous talk.” In the first skit at morning meeting, three girls were talking, and as a fourth approached, one girl said to the others, “Don't let her join our group.” In the second skit, four girls were talking and after one of them had left, the others spoke behind her back: “She is a drag. I wish she wouldn't follow us.”

In the third skit, four girls were talking and then one of them walked to a pile of book bags and took something that was clearly not hers. When later she had
the opportunity to confess, she lied: “I didn't take anything.”

Marlene played the student who said, “Don't let her join our group,” a line she had heard: Lisa Van de Ven, eighth grade, middle school. The jittery disconnect and suddenness of middle school: breasts and stinks. Rumors, boys, dances. The boys froze some fatty's bra and waved it like a flag in Frost Valley.