Belzhar (3 page)

“Like anyone, I do make mistakes,” says Mrs. Quenell. “I am certainly not perfect. But I have reviewed your files carefully, and I have no doubt that you are in the right class. Even you, Griffin.” She glances around at us once again. “Between now and late December, when class ends, I’ll be extremely interested in hearing what you have to say about yourselves.” Then she says, “I don’t expect you to understand anything that I’m trying to tell you.”

We all just look at her. No, we don’t understand it at all. 

“But it’s all right,” says Mrs. Quenell. “You will. Of that I am certain.” She peers at her watch again and says, “I see that time is flying by, the way time tends to do. I’d like to introduce the first writer we’ll be reading this semester. She also happens to be the last writer, because she’s the
only
writer we will read. Whenever I’ve taught this class, I’ve focused on a single writer, and it always changes. I like to keep the conversation fresh.” In a quieter voice Mrs. Quenell adds, “I guess I can also tell you now that you are my last students.”

We’re confused. Sierra raises her hand and asks, “What do you mean?”

“Raised hands aren’t necessary in here, Sierra. Only raised minds. What I mean is that I’m going to retire after this class ends,” says Mrs. Quenell. “I’ve been here a very long time, and it’s been magnificent. But I believe it’s time for me to take my leave. So I’ve sold my house, and I plan to take a world cruise—one of those enormous ships stuffed with old people like me waiting in line for dessert—before I decide where to settle down. By the time the semester is over, I’ll be packed up and saying good-bye to The Wooden Barn.” Emotion pokes through as she speaks, though she clearly doesn’t want it to. “The school is giving me a retirement party at the end of the semester,” she adds. “Of course you’ll all be invited.”

The end of the semester seems so far away; I can’t even imagine how I’ll get from here to there. It will be agonizingly long. She may think that time flies, but I think it stands still.

“But enough about me,” Mrs. Quenell continues. “I’m not important to this discussion. You are. So let’s get on with the last Special Topics ever.”

She reaches below the table and pulls out a stack of five identical books, which she passes around. It’s
The Bell Jar
, by Sylvia Plath. I remember Hannah Petroski telling me it was incredible, “but so depressing.”

Marc Sonnenfeld raises his hand, then remembers what Mrs. Quenell said, and quickly lowers it. “I know that book,” he says. “It’s supposed to be really dark. I think I remember something about the author.” He pauses, not sure if he should go on.

“Go ahead, Marc,” says Mrs. Quenell.

“Well,” he says uneasily, “I guess she . . . you know . . . killed herself, is that right? She turned on the gas and put her head in the oven?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“No offense,” says Marc. “I’m sure you’re a good English teacher and all, but is that . . . appropriate for us? I mean, aren’t we all sort of—” He breaks off in the middle of the sentence, embarrassed.

“Go on.”

“
Fragile
,” he says, with a little bit of irony in his voice. “Like it says in the brochure. We’re all supposed to be so, so fragile. Like porcelain.”

“Yes, I believe it does say something like that in the brochure,” says Mrs. Quenell. “Marc, do you feel as if reading a book about a young woman’s emotional problems—by a writer who finally succumbed to her own emotional problems—would be too much for you?”

Marc considers it. “I don’t
think
so,” he says. “I know it’s supposed to be a classic.”

Mrs. Quenell looks around the table. “Is there anyone here who feels uncomfortable about reading
The Bell Jar
?”

We all shake our heads no. But I wonder what my parents would say. Maybe they’d worry about me reading such a depressing book. I imagine going to the pay phone when class gets out and calling them to say that I’m reading
The Bell Jar
, and that it’s making me feel upset. “We’re pulling you out of that school,” my dad would say, outraged. And then I’d get to leave here tomorrow, and return to my own home and my own bed, and not have to deal with this odd, new environment and all these people with problems.

“All right, thank you,” says Mrs. Quenell, as if she’d barely noticed before now that her choice of book and writer, at a school like this, is kind of unusual. Marc is right; suicide has to be a touchy issue here. A lot of students at The Wooden Barn are probably depressed. But it’s almost as if Mrs. Quenell were going right for the gut by picking Sylvia Plath. It’s like she’s doing whatever she wants, because she doesn’t care what people think of her. And for the quickest second, I’m almost impressed.

“If anyone’s feelings change,” she goes on, “please come talk to me. I chose the curriculum with care. Just the way I chose all of you.”

Maybe she did choose us with care. But who knows how the choices were made. None of us in the class seem to have much in common.

“For those of you who aren’t familiar with
The Bell Jar
,” she says, “it was written over fifty years ago by the brilliant American writer Sylvia Plath. The book is autobiographical, and it tells the story of a young woman’s depression and, I suppose, her descent into madness. Does anyone know what a bell jar is?” We shake our heads. “It’s a bell-shaped glass jar used for scientific samples. Or to create a little vacuum. Anything that’s put under a bell jar is isolated from the rest of the world,” she says. “It’s a metaphoric title, of course. Sylvia Plath, whose depression made her feel as if she herself were in a kind of bell jar, cut off from the world, took her own life at age thirty.”

No one says anything; we just listen. “This is the one novel she wrote in her lifetime. She was a very fine and accomplished poet, and she wrote some of her most powerful work—the poems in her collection
Ariel
—at the end of her life. We’ll be reading them, too, of course. Oh, and she also happened to be a prolific keeper of journals over the years. Which is why,” she says, “I’m also giving you
these.
”

Mrs. Quenell reaches below the table again and pulls out a stack of five identical red leather journals, passing them around. When I get mine I open it and the book makes a slight creaking sound, its spine tight. It’s a well-made object, I can tell at once, and it’s also clearly very old, the pages slightly yellowed, as if it’s been sitting in a box in a closet for decades. The pale blue lines on the paper are closer together than I’m used to, and I know that I’d have to write a lot to fill up even one page.

“Whoa, this is an antique,” says Griffin.

“Yes. Just like your teacher,” says Mrs. Quenell with a smile. She folds her hands and looks at us. “For tonight,” she continues, “in addition to reading the first chapter of
The Bell Jar
, you will also begin thinking about keeping your own journal. Try to imagine what you might write. Begin writing, if you can. But at the very least, think about it. It’s your journal, it belongs to you, and it will be a representation of you and your inner life. You can write anything you like.”

But all I can think is, sarcastically,
ooh, how exciting
. Because there’s nothing I want to write. I’m hardly going to put down on paper the things I think about all the time, night and day. The person I think about. That’s only for me.

“Once the spirit moves you,” says Mrs. Quenell, “you will write in the journal twice a week. And you will all hand your journals back to me at the end of the semester. I won’t read them, I never do, but I
will
collect them, and keep them. Like the writing itself, this is a requirement. I’m a firm believer in my students moving forward and not dwelling on what might be less than productive.” She takes a moment, then says, “You will be doing close reading all semester, and also what I call close writing. And you will all be asked to participate in class discussions. Some days this will be harder than others, no doubt.”

She looks around the room again, very seriously, and says, “And there’s something else that I require for this course. Though I don’t like to put it like that. It’s something that I would like to
ask
you to do, human being to human being. Which is that you all look out for one another.”

I’m not sure any of us really knows what she means, but we all agree that we’ll do what she’s asked of us.

“Thank you,” says Mrs. Quenell. “Are there any questions?”

“Are you sure it’s okay to write in this?” Marc asks. “It looks like it should be in a museum.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” she assures him.

“But what should we write?” he presses.

“Marc,” says Mrs. Quenell. “You’re not a young child anymore, are you?”

“No,” he says.

“I didn’t think so. If I told you
what
to write, then I would be treating you as if you were. I believe your birthday was in the summer, yes? And you turned sixteen?” He nods. “That’s a fine age to be. An age at which you can make certain decisions on your own, and one of them is what to write in your journal. You don’t need some old woman giving you prompts. I know that there’s a lot going on in your brain.”

But Marc still looks stressed. “Mrs. Quenell, I don’t mean to be annoying,” he says. “But I do best in school when teachers give me instructions. I’m sorry,” he adds.

“No need to be sorry. Just a moment, let me think.” She takes a few seconds, and then she tells him, “I would say that you should write whatever best tells the story of you. I hope that helps.”

I look at Marc. No, it doesn’t seem to have helped at all, but Mrs. Quenell doesn’t appear to notice. She stands up then, and I see how tall she is. She towers over us with her white head and elegant silk blouse.

“Everyone,” she continues, looking around at all of us, “has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.”

“S
O
WHAT
WAS
IT
LIKE
?” DJ
ASKS
ME
THAT
EVENING
during study hours. This is a two-hour period when we have to sit in our rooms or in the common room downstairs in our dorms and do homework. I’ve actually decided to use my ugly orange study buddy for the occasion, and to my surprise it’s sort of comfortable to lean against the corduroy surface and rest my human arms on its thick, inanimate-object arms.

“What was what like?”

“Special Topics in English,
obviously.
”

“It was fine, I guess,” I say. The truth is that Special Topics in English was a little strange. It alternated between being uncomfortable and oddly interesting.

“You didn’t learn an obscure language?” DJ asks. “Or go through an initiation rite involving essential oils?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe those kids in the class the year before last were yanking everybody’s chain,” says DJ. “At the end of the semester, they acted like it was the biggest deal in the world.”

“It was hardly much of anything. She handed out copies of
The Bell Jar.
”

“Sylvia Plath? That’s who you’re reading all semester?” DJ says with light superiority.

“Yep.”

“Nice choice for this place.”

“Exactly,” I say. “I guess she thinks we can learn from it or something.”

“I read
The Bell Jar
ages ago,” says DJ. “Well,” she adds in a pleased voice, “it’s probably for the best that I’m not in the class, since it would’ve been tedious to have to read it again.”

“Oh, and we have to keep a journal,” I add. “We can write whatever we want. But we have to hand it in at the end, and then she keeps it. She swears she isn’t going to read it.”

“Journals.”
DJ snorts. “What a cliché.”

DJ settles back onto her bed comfortably, clearly happy that Special Topics in English doesn’t seem so great. My first day at The Wooden Barn hasn’t been horrible, but it’s been no better than any of the days I’ve been living for almost a year. The hours have gone by pointlessly; only the difference is that my parents are no longer hovering in my doorway, worrying about me, wondering when I will “snap out of it.”

I lean against my study buddy and quickly read the first chapter of
The Bell Jar,
and then the second chapter, even though I’m not supposed to go that far. The book is all about a smart, hyperambitious college student named Esther Greenwood, who wins a magazine contest and gets invited to spend the summer in New York City to work at a fashion magazine with a group of other prizewinning girls. And while she’s living at an old hotel where men aren’t allowed above the first floor, Esther starts to feel really unhappy and peculiar.

The book takes place back in the 1950s, when the world was different. People wore hats, and went on dates. According to a stapled handout Mrs. Quenell gave us, Sylvia Plath herself had won a contest and worked for a magazine one summer during college. And while she was there she started to feel detached and isolated. Just like Esther, when she got home after that summer she swallowed a lot of sleeping pills and hid in the crawl space under her family’s porch, waiting to die.

But she didn’t die. Instead, Sylvia Plath went into a coma, and then came to consciousness days later; her family heard her moaning and called an ambulance and saved her life. Then, after being put in a psychiatric hospital and given a lot of regular therapy and also shock therapy—where they attached electrodes to her and turned on the voltage—Sylvia Plath recovered. And so did her character Esther. In real life, the author went on to become a writer, and she had a troubled marriage to another writer, an English poet named Ted Hughes. They had two children, a boy and a girl.

But when she was thirty years old and living in London, she made another suicide attempt, turning on the gas and putting her head in the oven, just like Marc said in class. This time she succeeded.

DJ snaps her history book shut and stands up. “I am so done,” she says. “I’m going to go downstairs to see if I can bum a Mint Milano off Hayley Bregman. Want to come?” This is the first vaguely social invitation I’ve received at The Wooden Barn, but I can’t work up any interest. Besides, DJ and I are spending plenty of time together already.

“Nah,” I tell her. “I should probably write in my journal. Not that I have anything to say.”

“Just go the bullshit route,” DJ says. “That’s what I always do when someone asks me to write something about myself.”

When she’s gone, I pick up the journal from where it lies on my desk. So far tonight I’ve spent absolutely no time sitting at that desk. Instead, I’ve done all my homework in bed, and my efforts have been really feeble. My grades are not going to be good, but I just can’t bring myself to “try,” like my parents begged me to do before they sent me here.

“Just try, Jam,” my dad said. “Give it one semester, okay? See how it goes.”

Far from home now, sitting in this bed with the wind shaking the old windowpanes of my dorm room, and the distant
thump
of dubstep from the girls across the hall, I lean back against the study buddy and open the journal.

I’m only going to write a few lines, nothing more.
Just go the bullshit route
, DJ had said. I’ll write something bland and boring so at least at the end of the semester, when Mrs. Quenell says, “Everybody hand in your journals,” she’ll see that I seemed to have made an effort—even though she’s not going to read what I wrote. I realize that for some reason I don’t want to irritate or disappoint her.

But I’ve really got nothing to say. The only thing I ever think about is Reeve.

It’s funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time. Reeve and I had met in the first place because we had gym class together. A few years earlier, my school created an alternative to regular gym called “co-ed gym,” which involved a lot of yoga and badminton. So on the first day, in the middle of badminton, this dark-eyed boy showed up, wearing long, wrinkled shorts and a red T-shirt that said Manchester United. Someone whispered that he was one of the new exchange students.

This English boy didn’t even try during the game, but just let the birdies whip past him. I gave up trying to play too, preferring to observe this person who muttered “Bloody hell” as little plastic things came within inches of his face.

Then gym class was over, and as the girls and boys headed off into their separate locker rooms, I did something totally out of character. You have to remember that I was one of the quiet, shy, nice girls. I wasn’t someone who went out of her way to make a big impression on anyone.

But for some reason I said to this boy, “Good strategy.” It took all my nerve even to say something to him as dull as that.

He looked at me with a squint. “And what strategy was that?”

“Avoidance.”

He nodded. “Yeah, it’s basically how I’ve gotten through life so far.”

We half smiled at each other, and that was the end of it. I saw him around school throughout the week, and I made excuses to talk to him and he made excuses to talk to me.

“My host family, the Kesmans,” he said one day in the cafeteria, “enjoy singing rounds. Do you know what rounds are?”

“‘Rounds’?” I said. “Oh, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’”

“It’s excruciating. After dinner, we all have to stay at the table, and we sing rounds for
hours.
Or maybe it only seems like hours. This is the most wholesome family I’ve ever met. Are all American families like this?”

“No,” I said. “Mine isn’t.”

“Lucky girl,” said Reeve.

I was so excited by him, but I told myself to stop it, to not be excited, he’s just a friend. Still, I hoped he would become more than that. But really, why would he be interested in
me,
when there were so many more obvious choices? But I could swear he was interested. I told none of my friends, but just quietly felt what I felt.

One afternoon our art class was sent off to do landscape drawing, and I was sitting with my pad and charcoal on the hill overlooking the parking lot with the trees in the distance, when Reeve appeared beside me.

We sat in stillness, shoulder to shoulder, not touching. Our shoulders were so near each other’s, encased in sweaters, but they hadn’t even accidentally banged. I’d only known this boy a couple of weeks then, and I barely knew anything about him. Our entire relationship consisted of smiling, smirking, and saying funny things to each other.

But I
wanted
our shoulders to touch. It was as if I thought our shoulders could almost communicate. My shoulder, under the sky-blue wool of a sweater that my grandma Rose had knitted before she died, could have a little conversation with
his
shoulder, which was under the chocolate-brown wool of a sweater that had probably been purchased in a shop somewhere in London. And if our shoulders managed to touch, I knew I’d feel a thrill beyond anything I’d ever known. Which made me realize that I’d never felt
thrilled
before.

In ninth grade, I’d kissed Seth Mandelbaum exactly four times. It was okay, but
thrilling
is the wrong word. The second time it happened, we’d stood behind the drapes at Jenna Hogarth’s fourteenth birthday party (“It’s Jenna’s Sweet Fourteen!” her mother kept going around saying, annoyingly), and Seth put his hand up my shirt and on my bra and whispered in a serious voice, “You are very womanly.” Which made me crack up. Seth, hurt, had to say, “What’s so funny?” And I had to say, “Nothing.”

That relationship didn’t really end, but just sort of faded away. Soon it was as if it had never happened at all.

But Reeve and I were different. I felt so much when I was with him that I had to play it down
.
There was no touching at all at first; there was barely even much eye contact. Every morning I’d quickly scan the hall, and my laser-beam focus would pick him out from among the dozens of people in the big morning-breath crush at the lockers.

And the day after art class, where I ended up drawing an impressive likeness of Reeve, and everyone saw that he and I had a real connection, Dana Sapol invited me to her party. I couldn’t believe it, and I was so excited, though I forced myself to act ultra-low-key. Reeve and I would be seeing each other outside of school for the first time, and who knew what would happen.

The idea of just sitting beside this boy who was visiting for a few months from London, or even being in the same room with him at a party, made me feel like I might pass out and fall down with a loud
clunk.

On Saturday night my parents dropped me off at the Sapols’. Leo was in the car, because he and my mom and dad were going to the mall for pizza and a movie. As we drove through town, I looked out the window at the stores in the shopping center, and I saw the little purple horsey ride that my dad used to take me on when I was little. He’d keep putting quarters into the slot, and I’d ride and ride like it was the most exciting thing in the world.

But really, I’d never done anything exciting. I’d barely been far away from Crampton, except once to go to Disney World, and every summer to visit my grandparents in Ohio. Reeve was from a whole other place, where they spoke differently, and had different words for things. He’d had experiences I couldn’t even imagine, but wanted to. The world was huge, I thought as I was driven to the party that night. Just unimaginably huge, and sometimes thrilling, and Reeve was part of it.

“Have a great time, babe,” my mom said as I got out in front of Dana’s McMansion in the rich neighborhood in our town, where the houses are spread far apart. There were white columns out front, and an enormous picture window, but the drapes were closed.

My parents had no idea about the significance of this evening. They didn’t know this was a different kind of party from the ones I’d gone to before. They imagined that all the kids at Dana Sapol’s house were sitting on the rug playing Bananagrams. And, of course, they didn’t know anything about Reeve, because I’d never mentioned him to them.

The Sapols’ living room was dark when I walked in, and smelled of cigarettes and pizza and beer and weed. The music was loud and thumpy. I didn’t see Reeve, and I said hi to a few people but didn’t stop to talk. He was the only one I wanted to talk to, so I made my way through the crowd until a British accent drifted out, and I was like a dog who snaps to attention at its master’s voice. Then I followed that voice, and there was Reeve Maxfield in a wrinkled button-down shirt.

Sometimes it seemed as though he still hadn’t unpacked since he’d arrived in the US. His sleeves were rolled up and he held a grocery bag in one hand, and a beer bottle in the other. He saw me, and abruptly stopped talking to a group of guys right in the middle of a sentence.

“Finish what you were saying, bro,” said Alex Mowphry, who was holding his beer bottle by its neck and trying to look older than he really was. In sixth grade Alex had projectile-vomited on the bus during our grade’s overnight to Colonial Williamsburg.

“Nah,” said Reeve, and he put down the beer and headed right toward me. “You’re going to have to imagine what I was about to say.”

“Douchebag,” muttered Alex.

“Douchebag?” said Reeve, holding a hand to his ear. “Sorry, I’m not familiar with that as a name to call someone. I only know that it’s a device for female hygiene. And I do like hygiene. So I’m assuming it means . . . something
nice.
We don’t usually call people ‘douchebag’ in the UK.”

Alex flipped him the finger, but Reeve just laughed. Then he came over to me and said hi. My face went hot; I could feel it even in the warm room. The other guys began to joke with us about how I’d drawn Reeve’s portrait in art class. He and I joked right back. Then he said to me, “Want to go somewhere and talk?”

“Sure,” I said, and we walked down the hall toward the bedrooms. The first door we opened revealed two people in a tangle on top of a pile of coats. They looked up at us without much interest. I recognized the girl as Lia Feder, who’d been in last year’s Dumb Math with me. She nodded and said, “Hey,” then went back to kissing a boy I’d never seen before, and who maybe Lia hadn’t either.