Black Ice (22 page)

Alma and I explored North Upper and settled into our new room. Like the rest of the Upper, the room was trimmed in old wood. It had two large windows that looked southwest onto long-needle pine trees. Instead of a closet, an armoire was provided for each of us, as well as the standard bed, desk, and bureau. Instead of linoleum floors like Simpson and concrete-block walls like Middle, we had pine floors and plaster walls.

In addition, our hallway was a dead end, separated from the rest of the house by a fire door. Although the door was customarily propped open, in contravention of city fire codes, we did have the option of closing it if the noise wafted up to the second floor from the stairwell (and, as Sixth Formers, we had the clout to keep it closed). We were not troubled by passersby, and we were just across the hall from the toilets and showers. Also, positioned as we were over the kitchen, we were on the main steam line. Our radiators, we learned on the first cold night, clanged and banged as if Marley’s ghost were trapped inside, but they worked. They sizzled and hissed and spat drops of boiling water on our beds, and gave more heat than I’d ever dared hoped for in Simpson. So, too, did the radiators in our bathroom.

Alma liked to keep the room much warmer than I did. It was a running joke between us, but I looked forward to coming into our toasty room, where the color of the several mix-and-match woods glowed in the afternoon sun. Not only did Alma like the room warm, she liked to sit half dressed at night as we braided our hair together and talked about the day. My side of the room bristled with order. Hers was less insistently tidy.

“How come you got to start making the bed the minute your
feet hit the floor? You need to lighten up, girl. Live a little!” Then she’d laugh, delighted with herself and at my inability to be angry with her.

I found her lightheartedness incredible. I kept waiting, without knowing it, for some event to shake her. She accepted rather than fought against her limitations, and she enjoyed her strengths. When we choreographed dances together for dance class, we learned to respect each other’s bodies, and we marveled, with the sharp, quick joy of adolescent insight, that our dispositions were reflected in our movements. She was short, fast, and playfully athletic; I was bigger, tense, controlled. We jumped and cavorted on the dusty green carpet in our hallway, and the old wooden floorboards underneath groaned with our efforts.

Underneath this new, surprising friendship ran the less-than-lovely fact, as Alma told me years later, that I had “made a project” of her. Just as I had corrected her pitch in choir rehearsals the year before (we’d sat next to each other in the soprano section), I now fixed her collars, coached her on a proper point in dance, instructed her on how not to stack our albums without first putting them back into the sleeves and album covers.

“I
can’t
study anymore. Don’t you understand? My brain is tired, and yours is, too, ’cept for you’re too crazy to know it,” she’d say at night while I prepared to begin a midnight study session.

“Hey, did I ask you whether you were going to study?” I asked disingenuously. “No. All I asked was if it was OK for me to keep the lights on or if I should go somewhere else.”

“Where else are you going to go?”

“I could get late sign-out to the Schoolhouse.”

“Aw, come on. It’s raining too hard, and you know it. I just guess I’ll read some more of this old French. Now’re you happy?
I’ll be looking as baggy-eyed as you tomorrow. But I guess that’s the price of rooming with the vice-president of the school. You gotta uphold the standards.”

Most of my friends joked about my position on Student Council, but accepted it, as Alma did. A few, I found, were not comfortable with it, or with me as I took on the mantle.

One fall evening—when the leaves had turned red and gold, and frosts came at night to knock out the mosquitoes but retreated in the daylight—I happened upon Janie and some of her friends, a circle of them sitting cross-legged on the ground. They invited me to join them and showed me a bottle of rosé that someone had secured. I was looking down on their white legs shining in the twilight. We seniors felt relaxed for the first part of the term, knowing we’d soon be grinding like maniacs, filling out college applications, writing essays, taking the standardized tests for the last time. I wanted to bask with them in the early days of Sixth-Form year. (We were already referring to ourselves with premature nostalgia.)

But I was scheduled to sit on a Disciplinary Committee meeting soon. I’d received notification in my mailbox. More and more frequently that fall, I received official notes in my box. They listed several names across the top, faculty members first, then two or three students. My name would be circled. I knew that the Rector’s secretary typed these notes and photocopied them, and that each person named would receive one. I was notified of meetings, dinners for visitors, planning sessions for school functions. I attended meetings in the Schoolhouse, in Vice-Rectors’ offices, and in the welcoming living room of the Student-Council adviser, a gracious French teacher named Mr. Archer. I ate lunches and dinners at Scudder, where I met again with the diminutive housekeeper who had made breakfast for my parents and me when I’d come for my interview nearly two years before. I carried plates out to her. I talked to her in order
to escape for a while the repetitive discussions about school life.

Mostly, however, I took part. I learned with what care the faculty scheduled our lives, and to what degree they considered the good of the students. The Lower School was being phased out; what could we do to keep the younger boys from feeling left out of activities geared toward older teenagers? The trustees were coming. How could we arrange for more students to interact with them—not just the straight-arrows hand-picked by the administrators? Older students were allowed to take long weekends away from school, but only the wealthy or those who lived nearby could make use of the privilege. How could we give scholarship kids and students from far away a chance for a break, too? (Answer: a Student Council initiative called Long Weekend on Campus, which excused a student from Saturday classes.)

The Disciplinary Committee had not yet met that year, but we were due to convene soon. Peter Starr and I, and a group of faculty members, would hear the case of a student who had been caught breaking an “expectation” (they weren’t called rules) of the school. We would deliberate and suggest a response to the Rector.

I looked around at the cross-legged kids on the grass. What I had been doing was different from what they had been doing that fall. It had not seemed so different at first, but my thinking had changed. I tried to tell Janie that I couldn’t drink this year. “It just wouldn’t be right,” I said. “I’d like to, but I shouldn’t.”

“I can’t believe that you’ve let this vice-president crap go to your head.”

The others were quiet. They were watching. This was between Janie and me. It was the sort of dispute that rarely took place in company. They watched with avid interest.

“It’s not going to my head,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t sit
in judgment on somebody tomorrow night knowing that I’ve done exactly the same thing the night before. I can’t do that.”

“Next thing you’ll be turning us in.”

According to the Honor Code, that’s what I was supposed to do. I did not think it would help my case to point out that at the present moment, I was being lenient.

“I really didn’t think you’d take it this way,” said Janie.

“Neither did I.” I had not expected that anything would change. I could lose my outrageous friend. I did not want to lose her irreverence and swagger and fun, her loyalty or brassy sexuality. I felt important with Janie, as if we knew more than others, saw more, felt more, perceived some quality through a sixth sense of headiness that others did not possess. I didn’t want her to think I’d joined the establishment, but the truth was that, in a way, I had.

I went back to my hot little den to lick my wounds and convince myself, in the glow of Alma’s company, that I’d found something better. And I did indeed begin to receive other, subtle rewards of my new (relatively) law-abiding status. Although I did not realize it at the time, my relations with my teachers were changing. I had little to hide from them, a state which I understood only in terms of their treatment of me: they’d stopped watching me so hard. My St. Paul’s career suddenly seemed shorter. Like a fifty-year-old manager, I saw that I’d gone as far as I could go in the company, and I felt released, just a little, from the tyranny of competition.

Anthony Wade, who had teased me relentlessly the year before, noticed the change in me, and felt it incumbent upon him to tell me about it. He made me laugh. I was astonished by this new friendship, which was clearly headed toward romance. I wondered if I could date Anthony and still remain myself. He did not seem to demand that I affect a girlie witlessness. He accepted me, committee meetings and all, and he
showed compassion toward my difficulty in math and my more successful struggles in science.

“Anybody who could get an HH out of Buxton’s class can memorize the Periodic Table,” he’d say as we walked together from the science building. “The only problem with chemistry is you can’t wing it. You can’t go in, read the first and last line and come out with, ‘Mr. Hawley, this chemical reaction really acts as a metaphor for human relations with God as expressed in the Trinity.… ”

I’d make some retort, but I took his point. There was a difference in the disciplines. I’d learned that in last year’s desperate battle with calculus and the more successful campaign I’d mounted in Spanish under Sr. Fuster’s loving tutelage. In the fall term I was taking dance, Modern Novels, Spanish, Biology II, and chemistry. I knew that I could not afford to skitter over the basics in science. I did not know them. I would not be able to pick them up later.

These simple facts were easier to accept as I spent more time with Anthony. We studied together, met between classes, sat together at lunch. I could see up close that he, too, did the groundwork for his sciences. I could see the repetition and exercise, and I learned to believe in it.

Parents’ Day turned out to be an unsettling time. My parents and my grandparents Jackson were scheduled to come to school, but at the last minute, my mother, on the recommendation of her doctor, decided to stay home. She was ill.

I was deeply disturbed by her absence. I was one of four students chosen to speak at the Parents’ Day Symposium. She was not there to hear me. She had been in every audience for every skit I had performed since second grade. I was only half of the performance. She was the other.

Mr. Oates introduced me as “the first girl to be elected an officer of the School.” The audience registered a suitably quiet Episcopalian appreciation. Mom would have drunk it in, but she missed it. Then Mr. Oates said that I was on the editorial board of the
Horae
, the school literary magazine. I gulped. That was wrong! I had submitted several celebration-of-blackness poems, but the
Horae
honchos had rejected them all. He said more, and I held my breath through the applause.

I stepped to the lectern and adjusted the microphone. My grandfather turned around to the people behind him. No doubt he was identifying me as his granddaughter. It made me smile, and I used the smile to slide into my speech. The moment I heard my own voice bounce back at me through the speakers, I saw someone else. It was Ethel Kennedy. I knew that her son was at St. Paul’s, but a smart-mouthed Fourth Former was not the same as a famous mother. Not three sentences into the speech about diversity in the morning chapel services, my bladder leaked.

I could feel the warm betrayal like a five-year-old awakening from a dream. Pop-Pop was smiling broadly, my grandmother more discreetly; my father looked proud. I could not stand in front of these white people and wet myself! I crossed my legs behind the lectern and pulled all of myself up into my voice. I heard it deepen in the speakers. It was calm and poised. My voice finished its speech, and the rest of me sat down.

I had also prepared a special dance for my mother at the evening recital. I saw the white faces again, blurred now and small above the footlights. I smelled the heat of the footlights. The music I had chosen was repetitive and romantic. It was Dvo
ák’s Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor, the kind of thing my mother loved. The melody rose up around itself, and I whirled as I had for Alma in practice after practice on the green-carpeted hall outside our room, on the thick, shiny surface of the gymnasium floor, and finally, on the Mem Hall
stage. It was Mama’s story: the yearning, twirling and twirling out of control, the love dance danced alone. The movements and the music were big, melodramatic, romantic. I felt foolish doing them without her there, clearing her throat in the audience.

I lost my place. There was a twirl and a drop to the floor, a roll during the quiet section, and another roll, one leg whipping around in a circle and pulling the other leg and my body with it to a sudden stop, then a pull up from face down to hands and knees, and then up to knees. Suddenly the music was ahead of me, and I knew that I should have been on my feet by then. I was on my hands and knees like a dog when I should have been leaping in the air—one, two, three leaps in the air in a tight circle, the energy closing in a tense, bent arabesque. I threw my arms up and whipped them around to pull myself upright and went right into the arabesque, but I was off by then. I had a minute more to go, and my mind was flashing mechanically through the movements. That was wrong, too, terribly wrong. I shouldn’t have been thinking steps then, as if this were the second week of rehearsal. I should have known them, as I had known them two days before, when Mama said that she thought she’d be able to make it, if she drove with a pillow propped behind her bad back, and if they made several stops along the way so she would not tighten up. I knew I had to stop concentrating on the movements. I had to fix my face, and maybe the face, the right face, would discipline my mind and body.