“You look neato,” Mr. Hank said as I got in the car. One of his ornately carved canes sat between us on the front seat.
A fashion compliment from Mr. Hank was not a hopeful sign. He may’ve had a hundred canes, but he had just one suit, rumpled, and three ties, red, red, and red striped.
Covenant’s cross was not a hopeful sign either. It couldn’t be seen from the road, but once we turned into the school’s driveway, there it was—big and brass, rising straight up from a steeple. Covenant was new, and it was the best private school in Atlanta, according to Fontaine. Cross or no cross, Mother, who valued education over almost anything, agreed to send us, particularly with Mr. Hank writing the checks. So Fontaine pulled a string to get us in. “She pulled not just a string, but a whole ball of twine,” Mr. Hank had said, but he said it with one of his wry smiles.
That morning, in the circle drive in front of the upper-school building, Mr. Hank tapped my knee, short and sharp. “It’s the first day for everyone,” he said. “Show ’em who you are.”
Whoever that was.
“See you later, Nattie-gator.” I reached over the seat and tickled her before getting out and hugging my blue linen binder to my chest, hoping to seem confident and not like the girl who’d recently heave-hoed in a bush. I swung the car door closed with my hip.
This was what I heard as I approached the girls by the picnic tables:
“Have you seen her hair? It’s black.”
“Like a communist.”
“I hear her father dropped dead right on the streets of New York.”
“Her mother was a Magnolia.”
“She somehow already went to Columbia—the university.”
“She’s a Landry.”
“She’s a champion equestrian.”
True, false, true, true, false, true, false.
“Oooh, you went really red.” Gracie stood in the center of a group of girls in a dress the color of a Creamsicle. She was the eye of the flower, the pistil amid her pastel-petaled friends, and I wondered if she’d white-lied about the school-spirit business. But then I saw a red ribbon in her hair. The others wore only tiny red accents.
Claudia grinned what I assumed was a phony smile. “Feeling better?” Her only red seemed to be lipstick.
“Swell,” I said. Imagine it and you can be it—I’d read that in Mademoiselle.
Gracie stepped out of her circle and took my hand to bring me to a good-looking boy at a neighboring picnic table. “This is my Buck. Buck, Ruth.”
“Hey now,” Buck said. He had sunburned cheeks and an easy smile. An even-easier smile belonged to the boy sitting next to him, a boy with a single dimple and a white oxford shirt with rolled-up sleeves.
“We’re off to physics, Bucky and me, but find us at lunch.” Gracie twirled and pointed at the half-moon of picnic tables. “Our posse sits under the big tree.”
“It gets pretty crowded there.” Claudia came over to hang on the arm of the friend of Buck who’d met my eye for a half second.
Thurston-Ann, in a red patent-leather belt, sidled up to me. “She’s a walnut, Claudia is,” she whispered. “Tough to crack.”
I laughed, but it came out like a snort. “Can you point me toward”—I glanced at my schedule—“Lenox Hall?” All the brick buildings looked exactly alike.
“Claudia just told me that her first class is in Lenox. Claud!” Thurston-Ann yelled, her ringlets dancing around her shoulders.
I was struck then by a certain sameness in hair color. Everyone in sight was on the blond spectrum, from nearly white to deep honeycomb. I might have been wearing the right spirit color—too much of it—but my hair was definitely the wrong shade, unless or until I made a weekend date with Miss Clairol.
The back of Claudia’s head flounced to the right, along with the boy, but once inside the building I lost track of them in the sea of blond. The doors were marked with names (Archer, Beauregard) instead of numbers.
The bell rang before I found Greer, my homeroom/history class. I slid through the door and to the first available desk as “And to the Republic for which it stands” boomed over the intercom.
I flung my hand over my heart, promised “liberty and justice for all,” and sat down.
But the voice over the speaker continued. “Our Father who art in heaven—”
I jumped up. Of course I’d heard the Lord’s Prayer before; Fontaine and Mr. Hank had always said it on Christmas Eve when we’d visit. But the words had never left my mouth, not in the right order. I said the “kingdom come” part loud. The rest I mouthed along, religion by ventriloquism, until we were delivered from evil, power, and glory.
“Amen,” the class said.
Ah-mein, I said to myself. Certainly, Fontaine couldn’t object to my sounding Yiddish-y if I did so only in my own head.
“We continue, now, in sighhh-lent prayer,” the teacher said, his voice slow and low. “Y’all may take a seat.”
I kept my head down but let my eyes drift up. A row over, the white-shirted boy with the dimple didn’t even pretend to bow his head. He folded a piece of paper into an elaborate airplane, a marvel of notebook engineering.
After a moment so long it must’ve been three, the teacher, a balding man with round glasses and a bow tie, tapped his pencil on my desk. “In my room, girls sit to the left.”
“Oops,” Claudia said from across the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush. “Sir,” I added belatedly. I grabbed my binder and moved to what I now clearly saw was the girls’ side.
Mr. Sawyer quickly glanced at an attendance sheet. “Of course, I had nearly every last one of you as second-years. No need for a drawn-out prelude. We will begin our work where we left off—at the cusp of the War of Northern Aggression.”
I aligned my binder with the top of the desk and willed my face to look less hot and bothered.
Mr. Sawyer inched his glasses down his nose and looked around. “What happened in this country one hundred years ago? Miss Starling?”
“I have no earthly idea,” Claudia said.
He nodded to me. “Maine—Maine is your clue. You are from the North, are you not, Miss Robb?”
I had no earthly idea how he knew I was a northerner. “I know Maine became a state in 1820—” I remembered the sign we passed on the way to sleepaway camp.
“Off the point.” Mr. Sawyer’s tone soured. “Mr. Jefferson, perhaps you can enlighten us.”
“Sir?” the cute paper-plane boy, Mr. Jefferson, said. The cute boy who—of course—must be Claudia’s Davis Jefferson. “A hundred years ago were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, before Mr. Lincoln became president. They were a preview of Mr. Lincoln’s views on slavery, sir. And the state of Maine, sir, was somewhat divided on the issue of slavery—little-known footnote of Yankee history there.” He turned my way with his wide-open smile and his single dimple.
The dimple did me in, even though his New England facts seemed suspect.
“Indeed,” Mr. Sawyer said.
I raised my hand. I was a hand raiser. Being in the South didn’t make it less so.
“Yes?” Mr. Sawyer bounced a piece of chalk in his palm.
“Before the Civil War,” I started. The paper-plane boy turned to me, his tongue punched into his cheek.
“Miss Robb,” Mr. Sawyer said. “When you spend a little more time with us, with people who lost their homes, who buried their silver and their loved ones and their livelihoods, you will see there was no civil war. The war was most uncivil. We refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression, or if we are feeling more generous, the War Between the States. Is that clear?”
No. “Yes, sir,” I said. “It’s just I remembered Lincoln’s first vice president was from Maine.”
Mr. Sawyer didn’t say anything. He turned to the board and wrote—The Three S’s: Slavery; Sece
ssion; Fort Sumter—then launched into a lecture about the first shots of the Confederacy, looking over the tops of our heads at some invisible spot out the window.
“Hannibal Hamlin,” I added, feeling a current of northern aggression course through me. “The vice president.”
While Mr. Sawyer stayed at the board and listed delegates from the first states to secede, Davis Jefferson stood up. He pinched the fold of the plane and let go.
It sailed onto my desk. I stuffed it in my lap and unfolded the missive. Inside, Davis Jefferson had written: “Welcome to the nineteenth century.”
When the bell rang for the next period, the pilot swooped in to retrieve his aircraft. “Hey, I’m Davis.”
“I figured that out,” I said.
“Oh, she’s Rude,” Claudia cooed over his shoulder. “I mean Ruth.”
I checked my schedule. “I’ve got English in Lawton. Why’s everything here a name?”
“For the Civil War generals,” Davis said.
“The War of Northern Aggression generals?” I volleyed back.
“It’s for the big donors, actually—as Davis knows,” Claudia said. “There’s a Starling Hall in the lower school.”
Davis looked at me, his confident hair swooping my way, a kind of hello. “I like a smart-ass, Ruth.”
At lunchtime, Gracie was sitting, legs in an S, under the tree, as promised, along with Claudia, Thurston-Ann, Buck, and two boys from English.
“I heard you ended up on the boys’ side in first period,” Thurston-Ann said.
“I tried to tell you,” Claudia said, which was a fatso lie. She took a sip from a bottle of Coca-Cola, holding it so casually it could slip right through her fingers.
Davis leapfrogged a bench to join the posse. “Ruth can sit on my side. Why not? Hey, Ruth,” he said with his single dimple and sunbeam smile.
“Hey.” I was only three letters away from “Say hey.”
“Hey yourself!” Claudia stood up and looped her arm through Davis’s.
“Girls, girls, girls,” Buck said, leaning back and clasping his hands behind his neck. His elbows framed triangles of blue sky. “Will one of y’all go on into the cafeteria and find me a pineapple Jell-O?”
“Did someone take away your ability to walk?” Gracie asked, but then she got up and headed through the double doors of the cafeteria.
Thurston-Ann swung her skirt over so there was room for me at the end of the bench.
The talk was regular lunch talk about homework and Elvis and weather, and whether The Blob was scary or stupid (both, I said). If I were in New York, inside my old caf, we’d be having some version of this same conversation.
“What’d the doctor say about your shoulder, Davis?” Claudia bit down on her straw.
“Out for the season.” Davis windmilled his arm around. “Buck’ll have quarterback all to himself.”
“Well,” Claudia said, drawing out the l’s. “Now you can watch the games with the rest of us.”
Davis took an acorn or such from the ground and chucked it from hand to hand.
Gracie returned with a scoop of jiggling Jell-O in a metal sundae dish. I decided against eating my lunch, knowing Mother had likely packed a note in there, as she had since I was in second grade—an aphorism or a few lines of poetry from Zora Neale Hurston, her favorite—and knowing my sandwich, a slab of cream cheese on rye bread, looked different, like something, not like the Twinkie Thurston-Ann was torpedoing into her mouth.
Buck sucked down the Jell-O. “Too bad you can’t help us slay Ansley Academy on Friday.” He had very white teeth, Buck did.
“Do you have plans this weekend?” Davis asked somebody, maybe me.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Claudia said. “Davis E. Jefferson, will you accompany me to the year’s first mixer?”
He smirked. “Year’s only mixer.”
Claudia stomped her loafer. “You and your wit.”
“Course I will, Claudia,” he said.
“Do you need a date to go to the game?” The question popped out of my mouth before I thought twice. Apparently, I was now the type of girl who was smart-ass-y in history and flirty enough to hint around to boys with dimples—a single boy with a single dimple who’d already said yes to another girl—about going to a game.
Davis’s smile was wide as a Buick. “Anyone can go with anyone to a game.”
“You’re some ball of wax, Ruth,” Claudia snipped. Before she could say more, we were interrupted by the authoritative clap-clap-CLAP of Mrs. Drummond, the Home Heck teacher who’d taught us how to tell lamb shank from lamb shoulder in third period. “Ladies! Ladies only! Time for the Awesome Blossom!”
She moved on to the next picnic bench. “Ladies! Ladies only! Awesome Blossom!”
I looked to Thurston-Ann.
“It’s a first-day-of-school thing,” she said by way of explanation, taking out a compact and reapplying her lipstick. “We line up and look pretty for pictures.”
Mrs. Drummond stood at the edge of the quad and yelled stage directions. “Tall ladies first. Claudia?”
Claudia situated herself on the top step in front of the chapel, her swan neck stretching skyward. From this angle, it looked like the steeple rose straight out of Claudia’s scalp.
Thurston-Ann and the majorettes were next.
The boys—Buck, Davis, and a few others—stayed at the picnic tables, our audience.
Gracie and I were in the front with the shorter girls. At least I wasn’t the shortest. Next to me was a girl with a non-red sweater, who sat in the backy-back row of history.
“I’m Geraldine,” she said.
“Ruth.”
“I heard.” It occurred to me Gracie and her friends had the snazziest outfits, the loudest laughs, and the tightest circle, one that didn’t, perhaps, ripple out Geraldine’s way.
Mrs. Drummond assessed us. “Angle to the side for the most slimming silhouette.” She walked over and repositioned Geraldine’s hips. “Better!” she announced. “Now, the blossoms.”
“Awesome!” Buck yelled.
“Blossom!” Davis added.
“Gentlemen!” Mrs. Drummond said, but not in a voice that would give anyone pause. She started on Gracie’s side, offering up carnations from a picnic basket. When she got to me, I looked in the basket and paused.
“They’re exactly the same,” Mrs. Drummond said. “Don’t be fussy.”
They weren’t the same. Some looked like they’d been imprisoned in wicker for weeks. I took a blossom that wasn’t too brown around the edges, along with a straight pin.
All down the row, the silhouette of flowers poked out from girls’ chests. I pinned the bloom over my left breast, which reminded me of putting my hand over my heart, which reminded me of the pledge, which reminded me of the Lord’s Prayer, which reminded me I wasn’t in New York.
I sneezed.
Mrs. Drummond patted my unadorned breast. “Pin to the right.”
“What?”
“Wrong bosom,” she said. “Right is right—that’s a way to remember it.”
I must not have read that page of the pink book. A flush rushed up my neck, and I repinned the flower. I shot a look at Davis, but he was goofing with Buck.
While the photographer clicked away, what drifted into my mind without my permission was this: I wanted to kiss him. There was something so nice, so warm about the sunny smile that lived on his face.
Afterward, Mrs. Drummond collected our flora. “I’m sorry to call attention to you, Miss Ruth.”
“It’s fine, ma’am,” I said, the honorific coming almost naturally.
Mother was always telling me to stand out from everyone else—to skip the girdle, to open my own car door, to be an individual. Like being part of the crowd was the worst thing imaginable. I think she missed the point. It felt good t
o be part of a whole, even something flowery, even something brown around the edges.
“So, Ruth.” Davis bounded up the stairs like a golden retriever. “I’ll see you at the game then.”
“Ruth’d be bored out of her gourd at our game—she’s lived near Columbia University,” Claudia la-di-dahed. “Has she worked that into conversation yet?”
Davis grinned. “Not yet.”
What was wrong with dreaming about a boy’s lips, even a boy named, of all things, Davis Jefferson? A small sting of something—guilt, I’d guess—fluttered behind my right eye. But it was shockingly easy to blink away the idea that Claudia thought Davis was divine, mainly because she herself was so undivine.
“See you there,” I said.
“Careful you don’t get her bombed.” Claudia threaded her arm through Davis’s. “Evidently, New Yorkers can’t hold their liquor.”
“Oh, good,” he said, giving his hair the quick flick of someone who knew he was a charmer.
Consider me charmed.
5
Shut the Oven Door
Mother rolled up twenty minutes late to pick Nattie and me up after school, her window down, a cigarette dangling from her hand like a sixth finger. Evidently, it had been a while since she’d read the pink booklet and its advice about puffing in public.
I called dibs on the front, per usual, and slid Mother’s typewriter, a portable, to the floor, running my fingers over the keys, wondering what she’d typed today. “Couldn’t you be on time for our first day?” I said instead of hello.
“Got stuck covering the world’s most tedious school board meeting, a half step up from reporting on rose blight,” Mother said. “And you girls? How was day one?” She swiveled from one of us to the other.
“It was bad,” Nattie said. “Boring and bad.”
I cranked down the passenger window and angled the side mirror so I could keep an eye on Nattie in the back seat.
“It’s okay, Nattie,” Mother said. “No day is harder than the first. You, Ruthie?”
“We’re all going to the game on Friday.”
In the Neighborhood of True Page 4