“About what they think might happen over there in, Laos or Cambodia or one of those countries over in—where is it?”
“Southeast Asia?” Elizabeth Brownell helped her. “I read the same thing, Mother. A prediction of what we might do if those little countries fell into communist hands. The crux seems to be Vietnam, according to what this article said.”
“Is that so?” Mr. Brownell looked at his wife and then his mother. “Don’t we already have what they call advisors there? Didn’t Ike send them in?”
“What does this mean, advisors?” Dieter asked between bites.
Even the way he chewed made me angry. I decided not to engage in this conversation.
“It’s hard to know for sure but from what I’ve read it means military people who are there to train and help facilitate the existing indigenous military but not engage in active fighting. It’s all sad. Very sad. And I’m afraid our country will not be able to stay out of whatever happens there.”
Mr. Brownell’s happy expression had shifted to a furrowed brow and downcast eyes.
“Ya, this country seems always looking for a fight.”
Okay so now Dieter was getting on my nerves.
“We didn’t go looking for either of the world wars. They sorta came looking for us. Begging for us in fact,” I said.
“Now, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What do you young people think of the presidential campaigns?”
“I hope Kennedy wins,” Arlene hadn’t said much the whole weekend so it was a surprise when she had any opinion at all, much less a political one.
“And what do you like about Mr. Kennedy?” Mr. Brownell asked her.
“Nixon is creepy,” she said softly. “He always looks like he’s hiding something. Sort of shifty.”
“So you would vote for someone against someone else?”
“No. I like Kennedy.”
It seemed like she wasn’t going to give any specifics.
“He’s quite charming,” Mrs. Brownell smiled at her son. “I’m sure the ladies will vote for him.”
“Who, Mother?”
“Well not that Nixon character. The other one. The young, handsome one.”
I can’t say, at the time, I was particularly interested in politics or elections or talk of military advisors. The one brief thought about Wes had kindled a longing to see him and I was ready to be on our way. But the meal dragged on and then we helped clean up, climbed the wooden stairs to the rooms we’d slept in, stripped our beds and, in the middle of our chores, in walked Virgy, wearing the same print dress she’d worn the first day we’d arrived. She was carrying a large white wicker basket, the paint chipped in places and the handle held together with some tape, partly covered by a pale blue ribbon.
“Miz Browen-elle axed me to give you chillrens these baygs.”
She set the basket on a chair and handed Faith and me a paper bag each. There were four more in the basket. I could tell from the scent that rose in front of us that they were muffins, warm from the oven.
“Thank you, Virgy,” I said.
Faith gave her a tender hug. “You didn’t have to climb all the way up here. You could have given them to us at the door,” she said.
“I gots to come up here anyways, once you all is gone. No differn to me. You had a fun time, feedin’ them peoples?”
Faith looked at me and then at Virgy. Neither of us knew how to answer that question but it turned out we didn’t have to.
“Peoples gots a hard time nowadays. Thass right. I know that mission. I goes there ever Friday evening and doles out supper to ’bout a hundred or more souls. Old peoples, young peoples, Negroes and white, some bring chillren in there and them’s the ones tear at my heart the most. Innocent little chillren never done nothing to nobody and they hain’t got nuff to eat. Well, you enjoy them muffins. I baked up fresh this mornin’. Give you somethin’ sustains you back at the school. And then, when you gets ready, you can go on and change this ole world for a better place.”
TWENTY-THREE
The Kindness of Bearer
EVERY ONCE INAWHILE AT RANDOM TIMES DURING THE week, the deans called for unscheduled dances that lasted only forty-five minutes. The Monday after everyone returned from Thanksgiving break, a dance was called with a sign on the deans’ bulletin board in the main hall of Fox Building. It was posted there because everyone had to pass by it on their way to the dining hall. Usually these dances were not well attended. No one really paid much attention to choice of music so that was one reason. And the time was so short that the weekday dances felt rushed. A lot of kids just went off to the library or stayed in their rooms to study. I was still tied to study halls every night but the dance happened before study hall began so I could go and Wes wanted to so I agreed.
As I walked past the dean’s office, Donald Wingart was standing in front of the sign for the dance, just staring at it as if it was written in Sanskrit. As I walked by, I slowed down just as he turned and saw me.
“Is this what you meant?” he pointed to the sign.
“Sure,” I said, and smiled at him. I was trying to be reassuring but the look on his face had a tinge of terror.
“You mean just show up?”
“Sure. Like anyone else.”
“Alone?”
“Do you want to go with someone?”
He shrugged and backed up so he was flat against the wall. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to ask someone to meet you there?” This opening was more than I had hoped for.
“Who?” Now he looked really petrified.
“Well, not someone like Daria.”
He suddenly relaxed and slumped forward.
“How about Moll Grimes?”
“Why would she want to go with me?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“What if she says no?”
“She won’t say no, Donald. Trust me. Just be at the door and she’ll show up. I promise.”
He walked off, kind of weaving back and forth as he moved toward the front door.
I’d expected an emotional reunion with Wes Sunday when I got back from the soup kitchen mission, but his plane was delayed and he returned so late that all we had time for was a few stolen moments outside the back door of Fox Building before the doors were shut and locked. We didn’t say much, standing to the side of the steps in as hidden a corner as we could find out there. Hardly an ideal spot for rekindling our passion but that didn’t hold him back and I remember being swept up in the moment. There were the usual exchanges.
“I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too.”
“I dreamt about you every night, about what we would do when we saw each other again.”
“Me too.” Although in reality I was so tired after every day at the mission that I’d fallen into bed like a boulder and sunk into an unfathomably deep sleep.
“I couldn’t wait to hold you again. Your hair smells like sunshine. I missed that.”
As these exchanges were going on, it seemed to me that something a little desperate had crept into his tone. Or maybe it was the way he clung to me. Or that his breathing seemed different. There was a slight gasp at times, as if he’d been running hard and his lungs were empty.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He didn’t answer but leaned down and found my lips. At that moment we heard the push bar at the back door and we broke apart hurriedly. He backed away and gave me a little wave and disappeared around the building so it would seem to whoever was at the door that I was just getting some fresh air.
“Anyone out here?”
It was Miss Alderton, the dean everyone liked. Some faculty members—Bleaker for one—would have questioned me being out there in the dark, would have wanted to add to my demerit if at all possible.
“Only me.” I came up the steps slowly. “I just wanted some fresh air.”
She held the door open and, for a few seconds, I thought she might call me on this lie, but she
turned aside and let the door clamp shut behind me. Maybe it was her own youth— after all she wasn’t much older than the students—that allowed her to ignore certain infractions. Whatever it was, my luck held out and I wandered down the hall and up the back stairs to my room, where I would sit down to study my Latin text and ponder that feeling about Wes.
Once there, I read, “By diplomacy and arms, Caesar had at last brought all Gaul under the power of Rome and there was now peace in the land. But it was not the peace of contented and free men; it was a peace imposed by force and maintained by fear.”
And then there was text in Latin, which I started to translate beginning with: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. All Gaul is divided into three parts.
I had signed up for Latin because I was also taking French, which I hoped to use one day, and I thought Latin would help with that. The irony of studying the workings of the mind of a military general and dictator along with Caesar’s own record of his military conquest of Western Europe at a Quaker school did not escape me. I also knew that to get to third year Latin and more poetic readings like The Iliad or The Odyssey, I’d have to slog through Caesar’s military campaigns, something a fifteen-year-old girl had little interest in pursuing. Not that either of the more advanced texts weren’t replete with battles and gore. And then there was the violence and warfare in much of Shakespeare, yet my Latin and English teachers never seemed to address the dichotomy of immersing our minds in the bloody history of man while at the same time exhorting us to non-violence and peaceful problem resolution based on silent consensus. From where I sat, that didn’t seem to be an option that had taken much root upon the land.
At Foxhall there was a sweet tradition of sending notes, folded in a complex origami-type pattern into a small, thick square that made it impossible for anyone to read unless carefully unfolded by the recipient. These folded paper squares began as a normal sheet of three ring binder paper, creased lengthwise twice, then folded over and over from one end on a diagonal until you had one end that could be tucked into the first crease, creating a fat little square with a hole in the middle. The KOB, as they were called, short for Kindness Of Bearer, ended up being about two inches on all four sides. On the outside the sender wrote the name of the recipient and any coded message he or she wanted to add. After study hall was over, in the forty-five minutes we had to wrap up our personal needs and get to bed, a designated person from each hall in each dorm hurried down to Mrs. W.’s to leave a batch of KOBs at the ledge outside her telephone operator cubicle. The messengers then waited for all the dorms to report and the KOBs were sorted and then delivered to their respective halls and dorms. Most KOBs were between boys and girls although every once in a while a girl would send one to another girl, usually if she was upset or having some kind of trouble, usually with a boy, as a sort of cheer up things will get better message.
That Sunday night, after the four-day hiatus, Mrs. W.’s little ledge could barely contain the overflow of torturously folded love papers. My hall designated me as collector for the week so down I ran, not expecting anything since Wes had never sent me a KOB. I had thought of sending him one a few times but didn’t want to seem desperate, even though it was a struggle to hold myself back.
Yet, when I collected the ones for my hall, my name and hall number was scrawled on one of the outside triangles so I pocketed it and was about to run back up the stairs to deliver the mail when Daria appeared from nowhere.
“You get one?” she hissed near my ear.
“Um, yeah. How did you know?”
“Tim told me Wes was mooning around in their dorm.”
“When did he tell you?”
“A few minutes ago when he brought over the KOBs.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yes,” again she hissed in my ear. “Listen tonight we’re meeting in the mattress room after lights out. He’s getting the key from someone. I have to jam something in the back fire door lock so he can get in the building then we’re meeting in the basement by the laundry.”
She meant the back door where Miss Alderton had found me earlier that evening.
“Have you ever done it?” she asked.
“Gone to the mattress room?”
“No, stupid, propped the door open enough so the lock doesn’t catch?”
“No, I never had to. What are you going to use?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe a knife from the dining room but that’s too big.”
“How about a wad of chewed gum?”
“Oh, God, that’s perfect. That’s why I’m friends with you. You can figure all the odds for getting around the crap here.”
“What about Wes, though?”
“What about him?”
“You said Tim said—”
She cut me off. “Oh, that. Never mind. Just some guy stuff I expect. Anyway Tim and I haven’t seen each other for five whole days, so I gotta run.”
“Be careful.”
“Right.”
She said it with irony, like it was dumb of me even to suggest caution, but I had a bad feeling about something. At the time, I thought it might have been about her risking the mattress room right after returning from the break. But she was gone before I could say anything else. Gone with all the KOBs for her hall, and when I turned to go, I almost bumped smack into Moll lurking behind me like a shadow. She looked furtive, like she had some secret and was struggling with her-self about spilling it. Then I thought maybe she’d heard Daria.
“Hi,” I said and backed up a little.
“Did you get one tonight?” she asked.
“One what?”
“A KOB.”
“Oh. Yeah I did.” It was in my jeans pocket and I wanted to get upstairs to my room to read it. Also, I had others to hand out and I knew the girls were waiting for them.
“You’re lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
“That a boy likes you enough to send you one. I’ll never get one.”
“You know, Moll, I just spent the break at a soup kitchen in downtown Philly and Donald was there too. He’s really sweet. Why don’t you at least talk to him?”
“Oh I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You could ask him about music. He plays that tuba so he must like music. Isn’t there any music you like?”
“I do like opera.”
“Well there. Ask him if he ever listens to any opera. And if he says yes ask him which ones.”
“But when could I ask him anything?”
“Well you could come to the dance tomorrow and if he’s there, you could talk to him. The music at those weekday dances is always kind of haphazard so that might be a good time to talk about music.”
Before she could object I patted her on the shoulder.
“I have to get these back to the hall. See ya’ later.”
TWENTY-FOUR
A Small Packet of Kindness
THE PROBLEM WITH GETTING A KOB WAS YOU COULDN’T answer it right away. So if a boy made a declaration, wrote something intimate, poured out his heart, or just told you he’d been watching you, you had to sit on it until breakfast the next morning when you’d be certain of seeing him. If he broke up with you by KOB at night, you had to confront him in the morning when presumably all his friends knew you were not a couple anymore. It would be all over the school in a matter of minutes and you could be humiliated right there over the half-boiled eggs the kitchen cooks churned out by the vat. I dropped off the KOBs for my hall and shut my door. I sat down on my bed, for some reason reluctant to unfold my KOB.
I didn’t know it then, but opening that KOB initiated a tumble of events like a rockslide that would crash down not only on me but on the entire school in ways no one without a clairvoyant streak could have predicted. It was a week that stayed with me and that always defined for me how the choices we have made have consequences that can last over a lifetime.
On the outside, along one of the folds, Wes had written my name in hi
s small, left-handed scrawl. On another fold, on the same side of the little square packet, he had drawn two tiny hearts, one overlapping the other. I thought this was so sweet that it was a shame to open the note and find anything else. But I did. Unfolding it carefully, butterfly-like it transformed into a creased piece of notebook paper folded twice lengthwise. I further unfolded this and there, in his precise slanted handwriting, was the following note:
“I don’t know how to begin this. I’ve been thinking about it since that day at the trestle. Which by the way was the best day of this whole year so far. And I don’t mean just the school year. I mean the WHOLE year. Which will be over soon and when it is, I will face a decision...”
So far so good, I thought. It didn’t sound like he was breaking up with me. I exhaled hard and slid my butt back until my back hit the propped up pillows. I pulled my knees up and spread the crumply notebook paper on my thighs. With my eyes closed, I pictured Wes the way he looked running the track behind Bedford Hall. Long cheetah strides like he was after some prey, each foot barely grazing the ground before it lifted and the other touched down, a clockwork of precision and constant forward motion. It was like watching a ballet of one, thigh muscles flexing, calves pounding, his head pitched slightly forward, neck taut, his face blankly determined. I opened my eyes and looked down at the paper lying against my thighs.
“…I’ve known this decision was looming. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it but it never seemed the right time. Also I think I feel a bit ashamed to talk about it. When I was home for Thanksgiving my mom tried to discuss it but I put her off because I know what she thinks and my dad didn’t even try to talk to me practically the whole time I was home. Just how did you sleep and want some more stuffing and how’s your running time; are you staying in shape for spring track and stuff like that. So I guess what I’m saying is I don’t know how to say what I want to say…”
Oh, God, he was going to break up with me. I felt this something-stuck-in-my-throat constriction like a cat choking on a hairball, and my chest felt like a foot had stomped on it. I took a deep breath and tried to shake the panic-room feeling.
The Other New Girl Page 15