Sourland (23 page)

 

Three days of rain and the grounds of the Amherst Academy for Girls were sodden and treacherous underfoot as quicksand. Where there were paths across lawns and not paved walks hay had been strewn for us to tramp on. Soon most of the lovely-smelling hay became sodden too, and oozed mud of a hue and texture like diarrhea and this terrible muck we were scolded for tracking into buildings, classrooms. We were made to kick off our boots just inside the doors and in our stocking feet we skidded about on the polished floors like deranged children, squealing with laughter.

I was Mickey, skidding about. My laughter was shrill and breathless even when a husky girl athlete, a star on the field hockey team, collided with me hard enough to knock me down.

“Mickey, hey! Didn't see you there.”

I had friends at the Amherst Academy, I could count on the fingers of both hands. Sometimes, in that hazy penumbra between sleep and wakefulness, in my bed in the residence hall, I named these friends as if defying Momma.
See! I can live away from you. I can live different from you.
Some of the girls at the Academy did not board in the residence hall but lived in the vicinity, in large, beautiful homes to which I was sometimes invited for dinner and to sleep over. And at Thanksgiving, even for a few days at Christmas. After my first year at the Academy, my grades were high enough for me to receive a tuition scholarship so now my aunt Agnes paid just my room, board, expenses. It was strange to me, that my aunt seemed to care for me. That my aunt came from Cleveland to Amherst to visit with me. That my aunt was eager to meet my roommates, my friends. That my aunt did not ask about Momma, or Lyle. My aunt did not ask about Georgia, or Sonny. Not a word about Sonny!
You are the one I take pride in, Aimée. The only one.

Aunt Agnes was a slender quivery woman in her early forties. She did not much resemble her younger sisters in her appearance or in her manner of speaking. Her face was thin, heated, vivacious. Her teeth were small, like a child's teeth, and looked crowded in her mouth that was always smiling, or about to smile. Where Momma would have been awkward and defensive meeting my teachers, having to say quickly that she “never was very good” at school, my aunt smiled and shook hands and was perfectly at ease.

At the Academy, it may have been assumed by girls who didn't know me that Agnes was my mother.

Even those girls to whom I'd introduced my aunt seemed to hear me wrong and would speak afterward of “your mother”: “Your mother looks just like you, Mickey”—“Your mother is really nice.”

My mother is a beautiful woman, nothing like me. My mother is a slut.

My first few months at the Academy, I'd been homesick and angry and took the stairs to the dining hall two or three at a time slapping my hand against the wall for balance not giving a damn if I slipped, fell and broke my neck. I'd glowered, glared. I was so shy I'd have liked to shrivel into a ball like an inchworm in the hot sun yet there I was waving my fist of a hand, eager to be called upon.

I was Mickey not Aimée. Fuck Aimée!

I tried out for the track team but ran too fast, couldn't hold back and so became winded, panting through my mouth. Staggering with sharp pains in my side. I helped other girls with their papers though such help was forbidden by the honor code we'd solemnly vowed to uphold. I said outrageous things, scandalizing my roommate Anne-Marie Krimble confiding in her that I didn't have a father like everyone else: “I was conceived in a test tube.”

Anne-Marie's mouth dropped softly. She stared at me in disbelief. “Mickey, you were not.”

“
In vitro
it's called. My mother's ‘egg' was siphoned from her and mixed with sperm from a ‘donor male,' shaken in a test tube the way you shake a cocktail.”

“Mickey, that did not happen! That is gross.”

Anne-Marie had taken a step back from me, uncertainly. I was laughing in the way my cousin Sonny Brandt used to laugh, once he'd gotten us to believe something far-fetched. “
In vivo
, that's you: born in an actual body. But not me.”

Tales quickly spread of Mickey Stecke who said the most outrageous things. But mostly funny, to make her friends laugh.

 

“These are very serious charges, Aimée.”

Aimée
. In the Dean's flat, nasal voice, the pretentious name sounded like accusation.

Dean Chawdrey was peering at me over the tops of her rimless bifocal glasses. In her hand she held the neatly typed letter I'd sent to her the previous day. I was sitting in a chair facing her across the span of
her desk, in my damp rumpled raincoat. I heard myself murmur almost inaudibly, “Yes ma'am.”

“You saw, you say, ‘someone cheating' last week at midterms. Who is this ‘someone,' Aimée? You will have to tell me.”

M. V. Chawdrey was a frowning woman in her early fifties, as solidly fleshy as my aunt Georgia but her skin wasn't warmly rosy like my aunt's skin but had a look of something drained, that would be cold to the touch. Her mouth was small, bite-sized. Her eyes were distrustful. It was rare that an adult allowed dislike to show so transparently in her face.

“Aimée? Their names.”

I sat miserable and mute. I could see the faces of the girls, some of whom were my friends, or would have believed themselves my friends as I would have liked to think of them as my friends. I could see even the expressions on their faces, but I could not name them.

Of course, I'd known beforehand that I could not. Yet I'd had to report them. It was the phenomenon of cheating I'd had to report, that was so upsetting.

At the Amherst Academy much was made of the tradition of the honor code. Every student signed a pledge to uphold this “sacred trust”—“priceless legacy.” The honor code was a distinction, we were repeatedly told, that set the Amherst Academy apart from most private schools and all public schools. On the final page of each exam and paper you were required to say
I hereby confirm that this work submitted under my name is wholly and uniquely my own
. You signed and dated this. But the honor code was more than only just not cheating, you were pledged also to report others' cheating, and that was the dilemma.

Punishments for cheating ranged from probation, suspension from school, outright expulsion. Punishments for failing to report cheating were identical.

Who would know, who could prove. You have only to say nothing.

I knew this, of course. But I was angry and disgusted, too. If I did not want to cheat, I would be at a disadvantage when so many oth
ers were cheating. My heart beat in childish indignation
It isn't fair!
It wasn't just incidental cheating, a girl glancing over at another girl's exam paper, two girls whispering together at the back of a room. Not just the usual help girls gave one another, proofreading papers, pointing out obvious mistakes. This was systematic cheating, blatant cheating. Especially in science classes taught by an affable distracted man named Werth where notes and even pages ripped from textbooks were smuggled into the exam room, and grades were uniformly A's and B's. In English and history it had become commonplace for students to plagiarize by photocopying material from the periodicals library at the University of Buffalo that was within walking distance of the Amherst Academy. Our teachers seemed not to know, unless they'd given up caring. It was easier to give high grades. It was easier to avoid confrontations. “Well, Mickey: I know I can trust you,” Mrs. Peale had said once, mysteriously. The emphasis on
you
had felt like a nudge in the ribs, painful though meant to be affectionate.

My first few months at the Academy, eager to be liked, I'd helped girls with homework and papers but I'd never actually written any part of any paper. I'd wanted to think of what I did as a kind of teaching.
This isn't cheating. This is helping.
Uneasily I remembered how at freshman orientation questions had been put to the Dean of Students about the honor code, those questions Dean Chawdrey had answered year following year with her so-serious expression
Yes it is as much a violation of the honor code to fail to report cheating as to cheat. Yes!
A ripple of dismay had passed through the gathering of first-year students and their parents, crowded into pine pews in the school chapel. Aunt Agnes had accompanied me and now she murmured in my ear
Remember what that woman is saying, Aimée. She is absolutely right.

I felt a stab of guilt, thinking of my aunt. Agnes had such hopes for me, her “favorite” niece! She wanted to be proud of me. She wanted to think that her effort on my behalf was not in vain. I seemed to know that what I was doing would hurt Agnes, as it would hurt me.

For nights I'd lain awake in a misery of indecision wondering what
to do. In Ransomville, nothing like this could ever have happened. In Ransomville public schools there was no “honor code” and in fact there hadn't been much cheating, that I had known of. Few students continued on to college, high grades were not an issue. Here, I'd come to think, in my anxiety, that our teachers had to know of the widespread cheating and were amused that girls like me, who never cheated, were too cowardly to come forward.

The irony was, I wasn't so moral—so “good”—that I couldn't cheat like the others. And more cleverly than the others. But something in me resisted the impulse to follow the others who were crass and careless in their cheating.
I am not one of you. I am superior to you.
Finally, I'd written to the dean of students a brief letter of only a few sentences and I'd mailed the letter in a stamped envelope. Even as I wrote the letter I understood that I was making a mistake and yet I'd had no choice.

I thought of my cousin Sonny whom I loved. Whom I had not now seen in years. My boy cousin who'd been beaten in the youth facility yet refused to report the beatings out of what code of honor or fear of reprisal, I didn't know. I thought of Sonny who'd killed a man out of another sort of honor, to protect my mother. Sonny had not needed to think, he'd only acted. He had traded his life for Momma's, by that action. But he'd had no choice.

Dean Chawdrey persisted, “
Who
was cheating, Aimée? You've done the right thing to report it but now you must tell me who the girl is.”

The girl!
I wanted to laugh in the dean's face, that she should imagine only one cheater at midterms.

I mumbled, “…can't.”

“What do you mean, ‘can't'? Or ‘won't'?”

I sat silent, clasping my hands in my lap. Mickey Stecke had bitten fingernails, cuticles ridged with blood. One of my roommates had tried to manicure my nails, painted them passionflower purple, as a kind of joke, I'd supposed. Remnants of the nail polish could still be detected if you looked closely enough.

“What was your motive, then, Aimée, for writing to me? To report that ‘someone was cheating' at midterms but to be purposefully vague about who? I've looked into your schedule. Perhaps I can assume that the alleged ‘cheating' occurred during Mr. Werth's biology midterm, last Friday morning? Is this so?”

Yes. It was so. By my sick, guilty look, Dean Chawdrey understood my meaning.

“I hope, Aimée, that there is merit to this? I hope that you are not making a false report, Aimée, to revenge yourself upon a friend?”

I was shocked. I shook my head. “No…”

“Or is there more than one girl? More than one of your ‘friends' involved?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. The buzzing in my head had become frantic. I wondered if a blood vessel in my brain might burst. I was frightened recalling how my aunt Georgia had described finding an elderly relative seated in a chair in his home, in front of his TV, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood “leaking” out of one ear.

“Aimée, will you look at me, please! It is very rude, your way of behaving. By this time, you must certainly know better.”

Through the buzzing in my head I heard the Dean chide me for my “mysterious subterfuge.” Wondering at my “motive” in writing to her. If I refused to be more forthcoming, how was the Academy's honor code upheld? “I wonder if, in your mutinous way, you are not making a mockery of our tradition. This, perhaps, was your intention all along.”

At this, I tried to protest. My voice was shocked, hushed. In classes, as Mickey Stecke, I was a girl whose shyness erupted into bursts of speech and animation. I was smart, and I was funny. My teachers liked me, I think. I was brash and witty and willing to be laughed at, but not rebellious or hostile; no one would have called me “mutinous” I did not challenge the authority of my teachers for I required them desperately, I adored my teachers who were all I had to “grade” me, to define me to myself and my aunt Agnes. Dean Chawdrey should have been one of these adult figures, yet somehow she was not, she saw through my flimsy pose
as my cousin Sonny had once laughed at me in a Hallowe'en costume flung together out of Aunt Georgia's cast-off fabrics
What in hell're you s'posed to be, kid?

Dean Chawdrey had dropped my letter onto her desk, with a look of distaste. It lay between us now, as evidence.

“I've looked into your record, ‘Aimée Stecke.' You are a trustee scholar, your full tuition is paid by the Academy. Your grades are quite good. Your teachers' reports are, on the whole, favorable. If there is one recurring assessment, it is ‘immature for her age.' Are you aware of this, Aimée?”

I shook my head, no. But I knew that it was so.

“Tell me, Aimée. Since coming to our school, have you encountered any previous instances of ‘cheating'?”

I shook my head, yes. “But I…”

“‘But'?”

“…didn't think it was so important. I mean, so many girls were cheating, not such serious cheating as lately, so I'd thought…”