Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “Well, that’s all very nice, but I said name three cars, not every car.”

  “Can I do a motorcycle?”

  “No, and you’re taking too long, so I’m deciding for you. You’re getting a Dodge, a Mustang, or a Ford Probe.” She scribbled on her paper. “Now, three girls.”

  “Wait,” Nick said. “Come on. Put in the Porsche.”

  “For those only just arriving, please seat yourselves quietly, if you can possibly manage that,” M. David called toward the back of the room. A peal of distracted laughter rang out from up in the balcony.

  “How many kids do you think you might have?” Anna asked Nick. “Three? Four?”

  “Zero? Babies are foul.”

  “Let’s say five to eight.” She scribbled again.

  Theo gave Nick a thoughtful look, chin on his fist. “I could see you with babies. Eight fat babies.”

  “If you have not already discussed your semester plan with your advisor, I would advise you to set up a meeting to do so at your earliest convenience,” M. David said, louder now. “This is your second year. That means the work will become harder, not easier. We aren’t going to hold your hand anymore. Your studies are your responsibility. And— Where are you going?”

  A girl was hopping by the door. “I have to pee,” she said.

  “Please be seated.”

  She sat down right where she was, cross-legged, on the rug.

  “You’re going to marry Claudia Schiffer,” Anna said, “and drive a Mustang, and have seven babies, and live in a shack. Congratulations.”

  “Please also keep in mind,” M. David was saying, “this summer, in just a few short months, you will find yourselves on this very stage, at forums, presenting your work to your peers and to this community of scholars.”

  Somehow, the auditorium had quieted.

  “Your studies of the past year, and those of the coming semesters, all converge into this one presentation, and that will lead into your tutorial. While you do not need to have already finalized your topic, each of you should be planning with your advisors. Make sure you’re taking the requisite classes. Get yourselves on track. I know that right now it seems like you have all the time in the world, but these semesters go quickly. Before you know it, the year will be gone, and you will be here.”

  M. David gestured toward the stage.

  “Now is the time,” he said, “when you must decide what you are doing here at Catherine. And you must be sure.”

  He cleared his throat. He seemed uncertain what to do with our attention now that he had it.

  “That is all for now,” he finally said. “Please pass the sign-up sheets to me.”

  “My advisor has no idea what she’s doing,” Nick said as we slunk through the hallways. “I think she’s been trying to seduce me. It’s wonderful.”

  “Mine’s terrible, too,” Anna said. “And she’s still disappointed because I decided against new materials. Speaking of …” She tugged Theo’s sleeve. “Congratulations on getting into the concentration. Aren’t you excited?”

  “I’m kinda nervous, to be honest,” Theo said, though he didn’t look it. He was focused on peeling an orange. “Lab starts next week.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” she said. “They don’t accept anyone who couldn’t do it. But this is probably going to be the last time we ever see you. That course load is no joke.”

  “Goodbye, kid,” Nick said. “Claudia and I are going to miss you.”

  Theo threw an orange slice at him.

  *

  So Catherine swung into the new year. The dining rooms served dishes I remembered from my first few months here: squash soup, zucchini salad, cold rainbow trout arranged on glittering beds of ice. Our shorts and sandals were taken away and our closets restocked with the familiar jeans, sneakers, and sweaters, sized to fit our new bodies. Somehow, despite all the rich food, we were all skinnier.

  One night I was reading one of my old Betty and Veronica comics in bed when I suddenly shivered. A cool, mossy breeze had slipped through my open window.

  I got up, stood in front of the cracked window, and closed my eyes. The breeze smelled like fall and decay and the woods—like my first days at Catherine.

  M. David’s words rang in my head: You must decide what you are doing here.

  Did anyone really know what they were doing here? Was anyone sure?

  Baby had known. Baby had been sure. She’d hurt, yes, but she knew what she was doing.

  I closed the window.

  Much was the same as that first fall at Catherine, but not everything. The third-years were gone. Baby was gone. And I was older.

  A new class of students arrived. I spent their move-in day hiding in the Molina library, but even there I could hear the noise of their invasion. Suitcases clunked on stairs and sneakers squeaked down the halls as they ran back and forth to the commissary. They yelled to their ushers, pleading for more soap, refilled prescriptions, and phone credits. They were idiots. I napped with a pillow over my head.

  By the next day, the halls were filled with their unfamiliar faces, smells, and hair they seemed to shed like dogs. They hovered together outside bathrooms and below stairways, trying not to seem as lost as they were. They referred to their professors as Mister and Miz and spent hours arguing with the pharmacists about their prescriptions. And they never knew where to sit in the great hall. They just lingered around the dessert service.

  But they were nice enough, and they were new. They were suntanned. Their hair was shiny and cut into deliberate styles. When we asked, they gave us hints as to what was happening outside. America’s president had been reelected and a new Nintendo system released. They spoke in unfamiliar voices with unfamiliar accents. They had unfamiliar bodies. They came to our parties, and we watched them, and they felt us watching them.

  “They think they’re such hot shit,” Anna said, eyeing the girls on the other side of the morning room.

  “They are hot shit,” Theo said through a mouthful of banana.

  “Just because they’re, like, the new kids on the block,” Anna said. The girls were sharing a plate of pear slices, giggling as their eyes darted around the room. “Like their shit doesn’t stink.”

  “I just feel bad for them. They don’t know how stupid they are.” Yaya stirred at her yogurt. “Anyway. Growing up is fabulous. I plan on getting better with age.”

  “I can see that,” Theo said. “You’re going to be a very sexy grandma.”

  Yaya licked yogurt from the corner of her mouth. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Some days, when I was avoiding everyone and everything, I holed up in the reference room, a dim, humid alcove wedged in the back of the Harrington library that housed Catherine’s collection of dictionaries and encyclopedias. In addition to rows and rows of dusty leather-bound volumes, the shelves held old Catherine ephemera. It was easy to forget that this place had existed before we arrived, and that there were hundreds of men and women out in the world who had lived at Catherine before us. But here was the evidence in graduate circulars and annual reports, old Blue Books and director’s office scrapbooks, taped-together newsletters and boxes of microfilmed press clippings. According to the microfilm canisters, the clippings dated all the way back to Catherine’s founding in 1851, when the house was first officially chartered as a school. But I couldn’t get the reader to work to see for myself.

  Instead, I flipped through the scrapbooks. The linen pages were filled with memos, mission statements, and celebratory dinner menus. There wasn’t much information about plasm, except for one memo dated thirty years ago announcing the new concentration: A concentration in the revolutionary, transdisciplinary science of new materials. M. Shiner, as the concentration’s first head, was described as a well-respected chemist with a background in cancer research. The accompanying photo depicted a goggling, white-haired man, hunched and shy.

  I didn’t recognize the names of any of the previous Catherine directors until Viktória’s arrival
about twenty years ago. Her hiring was announced with an article and press portrait. She stood at the top of a glass stairway in a serious black dress, arms folded and legs crossed. “Art World Phenom Viktória Varga Tapped for Catherine Director.”

  I ran my finger over her unlined face. She looked young, maybe in her twenties. Not that many years older than I was now.

  M. Neptune was named head of the new materials concentration about ten years ago. There were no clippings about M. Shiner’s departure. M. Neptune must have been some kind of boy wonder; he’d gone directly from graduation to head of the department.

  The scrapbooks also held letters from the directors to the Catherine community at large. I didn’t know when the house had stopped doing those. The letters from the old directors were perfunctory and dull, but Viktória’s first few were sweet, with long, eager descriptions of new programs, schedule arrangements, and fund-raising efforts for exciting renovations, classrooms, and labs. They didn’t sound much like her. The letters became more reserved over the years. One from six years ago sounded like her voice as I knew it. It referred to the recent death of a student. We hurt, Viktória wrote, because we miss him.

  That was what she had said about Baby.

  The letter included a small school portrait of the boy who had died. The photo was hard to make out, reprinted in blurry black-and-white, but he looked friendly. I ran my finger over his face. I wished the image was clearer. The only details I could see were his dark curls, his crooked smile, and a mole by his lip. It was hard to believe he’d once been a real boy.

  Baby’s little hairs had been swept from the bathroom sink. Her bed didn’t smell like her lotion anymore, her drawers were emptied, her shoes taken away. But the new students, the first-years, didn’t even know she was missing. They had never met her. For them, she was never anyone at all.

  *

  M. Rogers, the professor of my Russian and Italian Futurisms class, was a giant woman who loomed over even the tallest boys. She wore her iron-gray hair combed up into a robust beehive and had the biggest hands I’d ever seen, and her voice was coarse and loud. The class was mostly reading. As we hunched over the texts, M. Rogers would pace the room, her voice resounding with a godlike boom as she read manifestos about the death of old, gray art and the birth of speed, technology, youth, and violence; drunken, rambling stories of burning down museums and building brass future machines; experiments in breaking down language into its component parts and building it up again to re-create the chaotic whoops and blares of a city street. M. Rogers spoke faster and faster as the class went along, punctuating her words by slapping the chalkboard until the dust rose.

  We spent the first few weeks with only the grayscale reproductions in our text packets for reference. (“These fuckers won’t even give me slides,” M. Rogers would thunder, “while the labs put in orders for whatever shit they want. I swear to God, you want to see fascism? The politics of the place, I swear!”) It wasn’t until midterms that she finally received the slides she’d ordered and found a projector to rent. The day before our test, we sat in gray shadow as she clicked through painting after painting, a fusillade of commentary following each flashing image. “Here we go, zang tumb tumb, the city rises!”—a carnival of color, figures storming to work—“and Balla, lovely, lovely, a master of movement”—there, an image of a dachshund on a leash, its legs a scurrying blur.

  The boy beside me snorted.

  M. Rogers swiveled in her seat. “And just what is so funny, hot stuff?”

  The boy hesitated, as if deciding how much of a debate he wanted to get into right now. Finally he said, “It’s just … how can they think these paintings are revolutionary? We’ve spent weeks reading these treatises about blood and violence, revolutions in technology and culture, and this is what it comes down to? A painting of a puppy with blurry legs to show that it’s running?” He lifted his chin. “It’s not even a new idea to depict motion like this. Muybridge published Animal Locomotion in, what, 1886, ’87? So, twenty-five years before this. The futurists write like they’re conquering the world, and then they make these paintings that are just … silly.”

  “Hah!” M. Rogers said, slapping the table. “Yes. They are very silly paintings.”

  The boy looked at me, as if for defense.

  “But don’t you see where this is going?” M. Rogers said. “Remember Boccioni?”

  She bounded up as she clicked forward to a slide of a Boccioni sculpture. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

  We had seen the sculpture in black-and-white, but it was different now to see it in color, in bronze. Here was a man running, his body warped by its own velocity, his arms and legs mangled into motion. He wasn’t just human; he was a speed machine. He was action itself.

  “You’re right,” M. Rogers said. “These paintings are pretty shitty. That’s obvious.” She ran a hand along the screen. “But look at this. This is all right. Remember Boccioni’s manifesto of Futurist sculpture? What did he say?” She slapped the screen for emphasis. “Futurist sculpture creates ideal new forms by using motion to break down the barrier between an object and its surroundings. To join the object’s exterior plastic infinity to its interior plastic infinity.”

  She let her hand drop. She shook her head.

  “Interior plastic infinity,” she said. “It’s like they almost knew what they were talking about.”

  She clicked forward to an image of another sculpture. This one wasn’t a person or an animal or any recognizable object. It was a bronze ovoid, abstract and nowhere, polished to a mirror shine.

  “Brancusi,” she said, “The Beginning of the World. Not that Brancusi was a futurist. Brancusi wasn’t anything. But look at this. Look at this—this plastic infinity.”

  She touched the screen again.

  “What is it?” she said. “An egg, maybe. A baby’s head. A womb. The instant when one cell splits into two. It is the moment of life, the generation of a world, all in one object, one surface, reflecting this. An exterior and interior plastic infinity. Here. Can’t you see it?”

  She turned back to the boy, still pointing to the screen.

  “Here,” she said, “is your futurism.”

  *

  Plastic infinity. Was that what Baby had been looking for?

  At session, I sat by the windows and folded my hands. These sharp fall days, the sun set earlier and earlier, turning the light in the great hall a deep gold. Viktória was standing far from me, by the windows, her body shadowed against the sunset. I couldn’t see her face.

  I closed my eyes.

  I am in the house, we chanted. The house is in the woods. My hands are on the table. The table is in the woods.

  I opened my eyes.

  M. Neptune’s students were sitting toward the back of the hall. I’d noticed that even among the new materials concentrators, his students stuck together. I watched as the seven of them chanted, The door is in the hall, the hall is in the house, eyes fluttering in beatitude. Their voices disappeared into the collective sound.

  I closed my eyes again. I squeezed my hands tighter.

  When session was over, everyone else drifted out of the hall, but M. Neptune’s students still sat smiling in dazed bliss. They didn’t move.

  One of the students, a girl with long princess-blond hair and mean blue eyes, was cradling something in her lap. I craned to get a better look.

  It was a rabbit. A real rabbit, white, with silky ears and sleepy eyes.

  No one else seemed to notice the girl’s pet, and none of the professors reacted to it, either. The other concentrators lounged near their table, waiting for everyone else to file from the room. The girl stroked the rabbit’s little head.

  Finally, the concentrators all stood and left together, the girl still holding the rabbit.

  I followed them.

  I walked slowly at first, quietly, a few paces behind. I don’t know why I bothered to be so careful; they were too engrossed in their conversation to notice me. They wand
ered down the hall, past a basement passage, up a stairway, and around a corner. They took turns holding the rabbit as they argued about an episode of The Twilight Zone.

  I crept behind them. Up more stairs, this staircase illuminated by a bright skylight, and down a long yellow hall. I thought maybe they were going to the umbrella room. Instead, they walked toward the main plasm lab in Harrington.

  They went into the lab and closed the door behind them.

  I stared at the door for a while before turning back. I was a long way from Molina.

  *

  Someone knocked on my door with a high-spirited rap, then opened it without waiting for an answer. It was Yaya in her new favorite fur-collared wool coat and electric-pink lipstick.

  “So, I’ve discovered the trick,” she said, with no preamble. “From a very enterprising first-year whom I completely detest, and I’ll tell you why on the way there.”

  “On the way where?”

  “To—” She looked me over. “Are you coming dressed like that?”

  It was late afternoon, and I was lying on my bed in my pajamas, eating toast with tangy lime marmalade. I hadn’t realized I’d be following her on any adventures today.

  I climbed out of bed. I held the toast in my mouth as I pulled on a jacket.

  “It’s muddy out.” Yaya plucked the toast from my mouth and took a bite.

  I slipped my feet into boots. The pajama pants bunched at the ankles.

  She slipped her arm through mine. “Excellent, dear friend. Open.”

  I opened my mouth. She put the toast back in.

  As Yaya led me down the stairs and out into the cool October twilight, she outlined her plan. “Okay, so you know how the commissary gets new items on Wednesday? Well, everything comes in through the loading dock on Monday, and it’s processed out there. And the manager used to be a total hard-ass, but now he’s about to retire and kind of stopped giving a shit. He’s become much more lax about letting kids in during processing. So, this first-year—oh, and I hate her because she’s used half, fucking half, of that nice honey-lavender lotion I’d been saving in the bathroom, which we apparently now share, but after a little discussion she knows to keep her hands off my shit. Anyway, she imparted this delightful little intel to me in the spirit of restitution. I hope some good stuff’s come in. I’ve been dying for something new to play with.”