Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  But I couldn’t say those things. It would be bizarre. She would think there was something wrong with me, something more wrong than what she already thought.

  “I like the reading,” I said. “I think it’s interesting.”

  “What book has been your favorite?” I could hardly finish speaking before she was barking another question.

  “I like, um, Song of Myself. ”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “I don’t‑” I made a kind of involuntary gulping sound. I was not about to cry, but it sounded like I was, and immediately, Ms. Moray’s expression softened. “I don’t know,” I said. “The words.”

  “I like Whitman, too,” she said. “That’s why I assigned him.”

  She was staring at me‑with less hostility than before but still staring‑and I looked away, at the chalkboard, at the window, down at the table. When I looked back at her, her stare had not wavered.

  “You can go through life disengaged,” she said. “You can be a person who always says no, who’s not interested, not enthusiastic, who’s too cool to be part of things. Or, at some point, you can say yes. You can develop interests, take a stand, reach out to people. I see the way you don’t talk to your classmates before or after class. People want to be friends with you. Dede and Aspeth want to be friends with you, and at some point, I hope you’ll give them the chance.”

  I felt the corners of my lips twitch. To smile at this moment would be the worst thing I could do; it would enrage her. But she was so wrong. She was wrong about everything, and her wrongness was, if absurd, also flattering. I was not disengaged, I was not disinterested, Aspeth certainly did not want to be my friend, and I was one of the least cool people I knew‑all I ever did was watch other students and feel curious about them and feel dazzled by their breeziness and wracked by the impossible gaping space between us, my horrible lack of ease, my inability to be casual. And not feel strongly about things? I felt strongly about everything‑not just my interactions with people, their posture or their inflections, but also the physical world, the smell of the wind, the overhead lights in the math wing, the precise volume of the radio in the bathroom if it was playing while I brushed my teeth. Everything in the world I liked or disliked, wanted more or less of, wanted to end or to continue. The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the U.S. and China did not mean I didn’t feel things. As for whether I was a cipher, that was more difficult to say because I didn’t know what the word meant. But I would definitely look it up in the dictionary when I got back to the dorm.

  “Are you hearing me?” Ms. Moray asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, do you get what I’m saying?”

  “I know. I‑I get it.” She wanted more from me. She wanted me to talk as much as she was, to confide. But I had nothing to say. I was not what she believed me to be except at this moment, with her, because she’d invented me. “Do you want me to rewrite the paper?” I asked.

  “This isn’t about the paper. Yes, the paper pissed me off a whole lot, but this is, and I know this sounds dramatic but the stakes are high here, this is about your life. About you making something of your life. I want you to remember this conversation.”

  Why had she picked me? I wondered. What in my demeanor provoked her?

  “I want today to be the day you decided to say yes.” She slapped her palm against the table. It was a slap of excitement‑her fury was gone‑and it made me think of Aspeth; if Aspeth had witnessed this scene, this would be a gesture she’d imitate later, the fervor of it. Even if I didn’t know the reason, I was glad that Ms. Moray had chosen me to freak out on because I would only tell Martha about it, I wouldn’t spread it all around the school. “Will today be the day?” she asked.

  I swallowed. “Okay.”

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  I was supposed to say Yes! –to really shout it‑but I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to humor her, more that I was unwilling to lie. Did she actually think, if I cried out enthusiastically, that it would mean anything? Wasn’t she a little old to believe that a person could transform her outlook in the span of ten minutes? Before, her comments had seemed like a misunderstanding of me, but they’d had a relationship, even in their inaccuracy, to my life. This part of her presentation had nothing to do with me at all; she was acting like a football coach, or a motivational speaker. I’d had this thought before but never explicitly and never with sadness rather than disdain. As I looked at her agitated, hopeful face, I thought, You’re not that smart.

  She came to my dorm that night, knocking on the door around nine o’clock. Martha was at the library, and I was eating graham crackers and reading Glamour. She didn’t wait for me to open the door but turned the knob herself and stepped inside. Seeing her in the threshold was both surprising and perfectly natural‑since I’d left her classroom, my head had been pretty much continuously buzzing with pieces of our conversation, and her presence felt merely like the physical manifestation of what I’d already been imagining.

  “I’m not interrupting, am I?” she said.

  I stopped chewing. “No.”

  “Here’s what I want.” I could feel the energy coming off her body‑she’d had an idea, she’d decided something, she’d walked briskly through the cold air across campus‑and how it contrasted with my own inertia, my bad posture, the crumbs dusting the front of my shirt. I sat up straighter.

  “I want you to cut my hair,” she said. “I’ll give you a grade for it. And that’s how you can make up the paper. Whatever grade I give you for the haircut replaces the F.”

  I looked at her and felt, suddenly, extremely tired.

  “How’s that for a deal?” she said.

  “Um, okay.” Of course I was going back on my vow to stop cutting hair. She was my teacher, and I had no choice, but even if it had been someone else, another student, I still wouldn’t have said no, and I didn’t over the next few months. For a while, I kept saying yes and then I’d say, What about in a few days? and I wouldn’t follow up, and sometimes I’d say, You know, your hair looks kind of complicated and I wouldn’t want to mess it up. Still, the last haircut I gave wasn’t until well into my junior year.

  Ms. Moray grinned. “You’ll see that this is no favor on my part. My hair desperately needs to be cut.”

  I hesitated. “You want me to do it now?”

  “That’d be great. I brought the tools.” She reached into her bag, took out a brush and a pair of scissors‑of all the people whose hair I cut, she was the only one who ever provided her own‑and held them up. “I imagine these’ll do the trick. Should we adjourn to the bathroom?”

  It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I was relieved by the suggestion; having her in my room made me uneasy.

  I carried a chair into the bathroom and set it on the tile floor between the stalls and the row of sinks. Ms. Moray sat. I stood behind her, holding one of Martha’s towels. It would be weird to put it on her, to pat her shoulders or touch her throat. I walked in front of her and handed her the towel. “Here,” I said. “So the hair doesn’t get all over you.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Very thoughtful. Excellent customer service, Ms. Fiora. Should I be getting my hair wet?”

  “You don’t need to.” Standing behind her, I told myself that hair was just hair. I could pretend she was someone else.

  She bent her neck forward. I saw that she had a mole, a tiny tan bubble just below her hairline, and I felt a wave of repulsion. I could smell her hair, a distinct human smell, not the perfume of Aspeth’s shampoo. At the crown of Ms. Moray’s head, the hair was clumped together in darker, moist‑looking bunches. Either she hadn’t washed it lately, or it got greasy fast‑probably, to be fair, it got greasy fast, because her face was greasy, too. I began to brush. Ms. Moray’s hair was thick, thicker than it looked, which meant it would take longer to cut. But I would be careful, I wouldn’t rush it. The situation called for thoroughness‑the fact that I was capab
le of doing this well made doing it well an obligation.

  We didn’t speak. I think she’d have liked to, but I gave her no encouragement, and as the minutes passed, I could feel her becoming calmer, settling into the lull of her own stillness. I did the back, the right side, the left, then came to the front and made sure it looked even. I brushed it all once more, to see if there were any stray long pieces. It was 9:45, then 9:50, and I could hear people returning to the dorm for curfew at ten. What was Ms. Moray thinking as I cut her hair? She was twenty‑two years old then‑I found this out later in the year because in March, she brought us cupcakes for her twenty‑third birthday‑and her mind was a city I couldn’t yet imagine.

  But later I could imagine it; I could see her as having been in a clearly recognizable stage of her life. She was a young woman who had moved alone to a different part of the country, and she must have been acutely conscious of all these factors‑that she was young, that she was a woman, that she was alone; her happiness, if she was happy (I have no idea if Ms. Moray was happy), must have felt so tenuous. This is why, looking back, I am almost sure that she bought the silver book pin for herself. To have done so would have been the act of someone trying very hard. On the afternoons when I used to gaze at it, fastened to her button‑down shirts or turtleneck sweaters, while she sat at the head of the table or stood at the chalkboard, when I thought of all the ways she might have obtained the pin, that’s the one possibility that didn’t occur to me. To think it would have seemed unbearably depressing, it would have seemed pathetic (it is, of course, a mark of my own youth at the time that to try too hard struck me as so sad, as if the world were not full of many greater sorrows), and it might have elicited from me true and continuous sympathy instead of mere intermittent pangs.

  When the haircut was finished, Ms. Moray turned from side to side in front of the mirror. She said, “This is great, Lee. I see what all the fuss is about.” Before she left, we stood facing each other in the hall outside the bathroom, and she said, “Really, I can’t thank you enough.” I could tell that she was considering hugging me, and I willed her not to.

  I would not want to see her now, I would not want to apologize to or thank her, I do not believe she influenced my life in any lasting way, as the best teachers are supposed to do. But something about her is haunting to me: perhaps her blend of bravado and sincerity, perhaps the mystery of what happened to her next (as far as I know, no one from Ault was ever in touch with her after she left), perhaps only her mistakes because she made so many.

  For the haircut, as I had known she would, she gave me an A.

  5. Parents’ Weekend

  JUNIOR FALL

  W hen I entered the dining hall, I saw that it was as quiet and empty as on a Sunday morning, though actually it was just after six on Friday night. In the section where juniors sat, only one table was occupied, and even that was only half full. I set down my tray between Sin‑Jun and Nick Chafee, the blond, not especially handsome guy whose grandparents had started the Chafee Museums in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Across the table sat Rufina Sanchez and Maria Oldega, who were the only Latina girls in our class besides Conchita and were roommates and best friends. Rufina had long wild black hair and swollen lips and dark, thin, arched eyebrows over big eyes, and she wore tight jeans and tight shirts. Maria wasn’t nearly as pretty, and she was heavier, though she, too, wore tight clothes. Also, she wasn’t deferential toward Rufina, she didn’t talk less in groups, and that was something about her that had always impressed me.

  When I’d sat, I turned to Sin‑Jun. “Your parents aren’t here this year?”

  She shook her head. “Too far.”

  “I guess especially if they’ve been before,” I said. When they’d come from Seoul our freshman year, Sin‑Jun’s parents had taken me out for dinner at the Red Barn Inn, which was, apparently, the only restaurant between the Ault campus and Boston that most parents could abide. The dining room had been filled with Ault families, and many of the parents seemed to know one another independently of their children; they lingered by each other’s tables, called out to one another in joking tones. When Mr. or Mrs. Kim spoke to me, I had a hard time concentrating on what they were saying over the background din, and when I responded to their questions about where I was from and whether I liked Ault, I didn’t know if my answers made sense. Mrs. Kim had a dead front tooth and bright, shiny red lipstick, and she ate approximately a tenth of the food on her plate and didn’t ask for a doggie bag; Mr. Kim was balding and smelled of cologne and cigarettes. They both spoke fluent, heavily accented English and were both short. Like most Ault parents, they were rich‑Sin‑Jun’s dad owned a bunch of running‑shoe factories‑but they were Korean rich, foreign rich, and that was not at all the same as New England, or New York, rich. Most of the other parents resembled one another: The fathers were tall and thin and had gray hair and rueful smiles, and they wore suits. The mothers’ hair was ash‑blond and they wore headbands and pearl earrings and gold bracelets and black cardigan sweaters with gold buttons over long plaid skirts, or else‑the skinny ones wore this‑pantsuits in beige or charcoal, with silk scarves around their necks. (Also, the mothers had names that made it hard to imagine they’d ever held real jobs: Fifi and Tinkle and Yum.) In addition to dining at the same restaurant, they all stayed at the same hotel, a swanky Sheraton on I‑90; they rented separate rooms for their children, and according to rumor, all the kids staying there, which was most of the kids in the school, got trashed and ended up skinny‑dipping in the indoor pool, or making out in the hall by the ice machine. The Kims had not invited me back to the Sheraton, but, honestly, I wouldn’t have wanted to go‑Sin‑Jun and I probably would have gotten in our beds and just lain there in the dark, listening through the walls to the thumping and shouting of other people’s good time. Sophomore year, Martha invited me to go to the Red Barn Inn for dinner with her parents, and I went, but when she’d invited me this year, I’d declined and only in the moment of declining had I realized how much I’d hated it all along.

  “My father think of coming, but my mother say plane ride make her so tired,” Sin‑Jun said.

  “When you’re flying from Asia, it’s worse coming west to east,” Nick said. “When I got back from Hong Kong, I slept for like a week.”

  I didn’t respond to Nick’s remark, and neither did anyone else. I finished cutting my spaghetti, set down my knife, and wound noodles around my fork.

  “Lee,” Maria said, and I looked up from my plate. “Your parents aren’t here, either?”

  “They’re coming tomorrow.” Immediately, I felt a welling anxiety that someone would ask why they were arriving late‑after all, the headmaster’s welcoming tea had occurred that afternoon‑and I would not want to admit that they were driving, not flying, from South Bend. (“All the way?” someone might ask. “What is that, twelve hours?” and I would have to reveal that in fact it was eighteen.)

  “Just make sure they come after our game is finished,” Rufina said. “That’s something no parent should see.” Though we were juniors, Rufina, Maria, and I all still played on JV soccer.

  “It is the first time for your parents to visit, yes?” Sin‑Jun said.

  “Besides when I started here,” I said, though only my father had dropped me off.

  “Dude,” Nick said. “I’m so happy my parents aren’t coming. My brother goes to Overfield, and it’s parents’ weekend there, too.”

  “What, they like your brother better?” Rufina asked.

  “The official reason is that he’s a freshman so it’s his first parents’ weekend. Not that I’m complaining.” Nick grinned. “Really.”

  Everyone laughed, including me‑over time at Ault, I’d realized that it was an act of aggression not to react to a situation as everyone else was reacting, a request for attention‑but I felt surprised. Didn’t Nick feel guilty, wasn’t it a betrayal to insult people you were close to in front of people to whom you weren’t close? On sitcoms and in movies, a casu
al antipathy for your parents was the norm‑men dreaded going home for Christmas, women wrangled with their mothers over wedding plans‑but such scenarios bore no relation to my own experience. I knew my parents so well, they were so real to me: the sound of their car pulling into the driveway, the smell of my mother’s mouthwash, my mother’s red bathrobe and the brand of her cottage cheese, and the way my father could burp the alphabet and carry both my brothers, one under each arm, up the stairs at the same time. How could I speak of my parents casually, ever, at all, unless I was not really thinking of them but thinking only of the words my mom and my dad ?

  “You know why I like parents’ weekend?” Maria said. “Because the food is so much better. Not this”‑she gestured toward the few limp noodles resting in watery marinara sauce on her plate‑“but like tomorrow, the lunch is going to be so good.”

  Rufina snorted. “And then all the parents can say, Ault takes such great care of its students. I am so glad we decided to send little Teddy here. ” Rufina was speaking in a snooty accent on top of her normal accent; the overall effect made her seem cheerfully goofy, not bitter as I suspected I would have if I mocked Ault. She turned to Maria and said in her normal voice, “You think they’ll have those brownies again? Those were good. ”

  “We went to the tea at Mr. Byden’s,” Maria explained.

  “Until we got kicked out for wearing jeans,” Rufina added, and they looked at each other and laughed.

  I, of course, had not attended the tea; it was meant to welcome parents and I hadn’t yet had any parents on the premises. I was not real friends with either Rufina or Maria, but I’d always felt a mystified admiration for the way they seemed not to care what people thought of them. They didn’t seem to feel either beholden to Ault for its gifts‑they were both on scholarships, and wasn’t a scholarship, in essence, a gift?‑or worshipful of its conventions. But there were two of them and only one of me and you could not act irreverent alone, not really. Plus, while I could pass, their ethnicity made their status as outsiders definitive.