by Rachel Klein
“Girls,” she called out to us in her irritating voice, “don’t sit like that. It’s not proper behavior for young ladies.”
I jumped up. Miss Olivo’s voice had an edge to it that made me feel I must be doing something wrong, not sitting harmlessly on my friend’s lap. When I got up, Miss Olivo turned away quickly. I stared at her. She sat at the desk, with her hands folded neatly on the blue blotter in front of her. Her head wobbled from side to side, the way it does all day long, and she began to hum to herself tonelessly.
Is that proper behavior?
The bells rang, and Sofia pulled me by the arm into the dining room. As soon as we were out of sight, we burst into uncontrollable laughter.
October 5
I wish we could talk about books or politics or anything other than sex and food and drugs. That gets so old. Everybody always says the same thing over and over again. Tonight I got my wish, sort of. We were sitting in the Playroom after dinner. Everyone was quiet. No one had anything to say. Lucy and Ernessa were off together, talking by themselves. I don’t know what they talk about, but I doubt it’s German poetry. I doubt Lucy even knows who Rilke is. Out of the blue, Sofia said, “I’ve had a few talks with Miss Rood, and I’ve decided that life isn’t meaningless after all. There’s so much beauty all around us. It’s up to us to discover it and to give purpose to our lives.”
“Give purpose to our lives? What kind of line is she feeding you?” asked Dora.
“Walter Pater,” I said. I knew that Sofia had already forgotten what I read to her, so I quoted, “‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’”
“That’s it,” said Sofia.
“That stuff was dead and buried in the 1890s,” said Dora, “along with Miss Rood. Don’t be fooled. She’s not a real person. She’s a fossil.”
“Maybe art really can save us,” I said. “It shows us that there’s something besides our own messy lives.”
“What did art ever do for you?” asked Dora.
She’s jealous of me for having “artistic” parents. I should have gotten up and left then, but it would have been lost on her. She was too busy lecturing Sofia, who was listening openmouthed.
“Life is absurd,” said Dora. “You have to learn how to be fearless and to triumph over that absurdity, not to pretend that it isn’t true. You have to do what Nietzsche says and seize the thyrsus, be tragic.” Sofia looked overwhelmed by the mention of Nietzsche. (She could never figure out how to pronounce his name, much less read his books. But it sounds Germanic and profound.)
“What the fuck is thyrsus?” shouted Kiki from behind us.
“It’s the ritual staff of the Greeks,” said Dora, “entwined with the grapevine. Bacchus carries it. You know all about that.”
“I do?” asked Kiki.
“He represents drunkenness and sex,” said Dora. “The thyrsus is a giant dick.”
Everyone started to laugh. “Fuck you,” said Kiki, matter-of-factly. We all know that Kiki lost her virginity at fifteen, or maybe fourteen, and has already had lots of boyfriends.
While we were laughing at Kiki and I was thinking how much I disliked Dora, Ernessa came over. She stood right behind Sofia and said to Dora, “I think Nietzsche’s ideas, if you want to call them that, are rather reductionist, not to say simpleminded.”
“Meaning what exactly?” asked Dora. She’s not used to being challenged.
“He divides the world in two. The Dionysian and the Apollonian. The rational and the irrational. On-off. Night-day. There is nothing in between.”
“Nothing else except boring, hypocritical, everyday life. That’s good enough for most people, but it’s not really being alive. More like living cocktail party death.”
“What does it mean to be really alive?” asked Ernessa.
“Not to have any fear,” said Dora.
“Is that all? Then you might start by giving up your precious Nietzsche. Really being alive feels entirely different. It feels like ecstasy without losing your self.” Ernessa turned to Kiki and added, “Like having an orgasm with your eyes wide open.”
Dora turned away from Ernessa and addressed the rest of us: “She’s a false prophet. ‘Believe with me in Dionysian life and in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for ye are to be redeemed!’”
“The Birth of Tragedy,” said Ernessa.
We were all speechless.
They were both in on a secret from which I was excluded. I had to go down to the library later on to find the quote. I couldn’t begin to remember it.
No one even laughed.
“Oh, no, not the thyrsus again,” said Kiki. “I’d rather have the real thing.” And she got up to leave.
I imagined Dora in her room, poring over her Nietzsche, memorizing quotes just so that she could make us plebeians feel stupid. Ernessa gave her the perfect opportunity to show off.
The bells rang for study hour, and everyone put out their cigarettes and hurried upstairs. I was the last person to leave the Playroom. I kept staring at the empty blue plastic sofa, which sticks to the backs of our sweaty legs, hoping that it would reveal something that had eluded me in that conversation. It didn’t. I wish I were like Ernessa and could keep up with Dora. But even if I knew what I was talking about, Dora still wouldn’t take me seriously. She refuses to. When Ernessa talks, no one can ignore her. I’m going to ask Miss Norris about this the next time I see her. I’m sure she’ll be able to explain it to me.
October 6
I feel incredibly dense. That’s the only word for it. Nothing can penetrate my brain.
I brought my journal to my Greek lesson and read to Miss Norris what I had written about the discussion last night (with some editing). When I finished, she said, “You have to understand, dearie, the Greece of the great tragedies was an extraordinary place. The most contradictory things were joined together. There were cults and magic and early science. There was rationality and irrationality. There was beauty and violence. Opposites were twins. Even Plato is filled with the strangest ideas. It sounds to me as if your friend Ernessa thinks of herself as a Dionysian, a soul in permanent revolution, but one who also manages to see clearly and to stay in control.”
She paused and smiled at me. “Ancient Greece is so foreign to our way of thinking, my dear. We tend to make of it whatever we please. The way we do our dreams.”
I wanted to tell her that Ernessa was definitely not my friend, but instead I said that I didn’t really understand what she was saying. What is all this Dionysian and Apollonian stuff?
“Write down what I said in your journal. We can come back to it later.”
I’m just not as smart as Dora and Ernessa, and I don’t care about reading philosophy.
October 7
Ernessa’s stopped asking me to sign her in at breakfast. She must have found someone else to do it. I said to her, “You should get up for breakfast. You’re missing the best meal of the day. Mrs. Wing gets there at four to make sticky buns and crumb cake and doughnuts. I can smell the fresh rolls all the way up in my room. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
“That kind of food doesn’t interest me,” she said. “It’s too sweet. All that sugar. White death.”
What kind of food does interest her? She’s never at lunch. She goes straight to her room after class. When she was at the dinner table right behind mine, she was the server, and she spent so much time serving that it was almost time to clear before she sat down at her place. She was always the one to volunteer to get seconds from the kitchen when it was something good. In between she just moved the food around on her plate. I watched until her black eyes met mine across the tables. I had to look away. Of course she turned down desert, even when it was a caramel cornflake ring with coffee ice cream. No one can resist that.
> “Ah, Ernessa, dieting?” I overheard Mrs. Davenport say coyly.
She doesn’t need to diet. She has a beautiful body, firm and muscled and strong and not too skinny. She smokes like a chimney. She’s the first one down in the Playroom after dinner, and she’s there a lot on the weekends. She always has a cigarette in her mouth. She inhales so deeply that you think she’s going to suck the lighted cigarette down her throat. It’s the way a man smokes. I always get smoke in my eyes and have trouble holding the cigarette between my fingers. I don’t even like smoking that much. I do it to hang around the Playroom. Maybe I bum one cigarette a day.
October 10
I never thought Lucy would get on my nerves.
She decided to stay at school this weekend, and I just assumed we would do something together. When I went into her room after breakfast, she wasn’t there. The bed was made, and all the doors were closed. No one else knew where she was. I ran down and looked at the sign-out sheet. Both Lucy and Ernessa had signed out at the same time: 7:30 A.M. She didn’t come back until right before dinner, and I didn’t have a chance to talk to her until we were getting ready for bed. She’s avoiding me.
At first she wouldn’t tell me where she had been. “Just out. I went by myself.” Finally I got it out of her by saying I knew she and Ernessa had signed out together. I probably shouldn’t have said that. She says they went riding all day out in the country. By the time I got her to tell me where she’d been, she was really angry at me. I was miserable because she made me feel I’d dragged something out of her that she didn’t want to tell me. I asked her why she made such a big deal about it. “I thought you’d be annoyed with me for not asking you to come,” she said. “But I know you don’t like to ride. And the weather was so beautiful I couldn’t resist. It was almost like summer.”
I went into my room and closed both doors behind me. I didn’t slam them. I closed them quietly. To show her that I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I don’t care how she spends her time. I’m not her keeper.
“You don’t like to ride.” I’ve never ridden a horse in my life, and Lucy knows that. I’m afraid of animals.
October 11
I was walking in the Botanic Garden with my father. It was a bright day but windy and cold despite the sun, and I slipped my arm through my father’s and drew close to him. It was the beginning of spring. The tiny, perfectly formed leaves were unfolding, and the flower buds on the trees were still green. I thought to myself, How can I wait another week until the flowers open up and show their colors? I knew exactly where I was standing in the Garden and which trees I was looking at: the magnolias on the terrace with their dark, twisted branches and fat, fuzzy buds like a baby’s fist about to unclasp itself and reveal … nothing.
But if I was standing next to my father, resting my head on his shoulder, why was I also standing off to the side, watching from a distance the two people in front of the sea of creamy magnolia blossoms, which had suddenly materialized in the few seconds I had turned my head away? My father’s outstretched hand pointed to something in the distance. He was talking as he pointed, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because he was so far away. My father was wearing his overcoat and the brown wool cap he always wore, but I wasn’t wearing any of my own clothes. I had on a black coat and a black beret. It slowly dawned on me that this was my father, but it wasn’t me. I could tell by the offhand way she walked that she was a girl and not a woman. Another girl was walking with him in the Garden.
They walked away. Neither one turned to look at me. I couldn’t follow behind them. I couldn’t move from where I stood.
I hate dreams like that. I wake up in the morning still angry and frustrated that I couldn’t do in my dream what I needed to do.
October 12
This morning at breakfast, Claire made a snotty comment about how much time I spend with Mr. Davies: “It’s obvious you’re in love with him.” She’s absurd. She’s the one who pesters him all the time and wants to visit him at home on the weekend so that she can meet his wife. Who cares about his wife? It’s gotten so bad that I even feel embarrassed for her. I like to talk to Mr. Davies about books. I get excited when I read something that I really like, and there’s no one else to talk to. I have nothing to do with Ernessa, and Dora always lectures me. What I read can’t possibly be of significance. She is still lecturing Sofia about philosophy. Being in love with Mr. Davies would be like being in love with my father. I’m much more in love with someone like Lucy – not sexually but emotionally.
October 13
Charley is out of control. She’s trying to get thrown out of school, and I think she’s going to succeed. Last night, she and Carol threw an easy chair out the window of Carol’s room into the courtyard. It made an incredible noise, as if it were being sucked down to the ground and then exploded when it hit. Mrs. Halton’s rooms face the courtyard, and she heard it. She came running down the corridor, calling out, “Girls, girls, what happened?”
Everyone was standing by the doorway to Carol’s room. Mrs. Halton went in, and Charley shrieked, “We didn’t get a chance to stop her. Kiki just went over to the window, opened it, and jumped. She was screaming something about –”
Mrs. Halton fainted before she reached the window. She crumpled to the floor. I’ve always wanted to see someone do that. I thought it only happened in books. They both got two weeks’ detention. Charley was pissed off. You get a comment for shouting out a window; what does she expect for throwing a chair out a window? Now everyone will be watching everything Charley does. She’ll get thrown out if she looks cross-eyed. And she’s always going into Ernessa’s room for a joint. She gets stoned practically every day. I don’t know how she can function.
She’s also not eating much, probably copying Ernessa. Why is everyone so fascinated with Ernessa? Lucy trails after her like a puppy. Everyone tries not to eat like Ernessa. Charley goes up to her room and has a diet Coke for lunch. This will last for two days at most. I don’t understand it because she’s not interested in boys and she doesn’t really care how she looks. On the other hand, Lucy and I were just talking about how creepy it is to watch Charley’s body change. She was always so thin, and now she’s filling out, getting big. I can’t get used to seeing her like this. Every time I look at her, something seems wrong. She doesn’t have breasts or hips; she’s just becoming wider. I remember the first time I saw her. She had just come back to school after vacation, and she was leading her mother down the corridor. Her mother is large, with broad red cheeks and tightly curled gray hair. I couldn’t believe that she was the mother of the wiry girl at her side. But maybe Charley’s going to look like her mother in the end. All of a sudden one day, she’ll be large too. Her parents have planted a bomb inside her, and there’s no way to stop it from going off.
I never want to look older than I do today. I don’t plan to let it happen. When I’m waiting for dinner in the lobby downstairs after setting up, I leaf through The Brangwyn Echoes. There are pages and pages of photos of class reunions, of women with children and grandchildren. Fat matrons with black pumps (small, conservative heels) and matching handbags. Were they once like us? Their legs are thick, their hair is short and permed, they have no waists, and their dresses are like sacks. They all have the obligatory string of pearls around their necks. They are another species. And it happens so soon, after a few years. My mother doesn’t look like an old woman. She’s still as beautiful and thin as she was when she got married.
One day last fall I noticed that my body was no longer flat. I panicked. I went on a diet for a few weeks, and all I could think about was food. As soon as I thought about not eating, I had to eat. At the end of two weeks, I said to Lucy, “I can’t stand this anymore. I hate being on a diet.”
“Thank God,” she said. “That was all you could talk about. I got so sick of listening to you. Now we can have honey buns again on the weekend. I had to eat them in secret while you were on your diet.”
Lucy and I lik
e to buy frozen honey buns at the supermarket and heat them up in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon and eat them with tea. It’s something I look forward to all week, just sitting together in the kitchen and concentrating on our honey buns. We hardly say a word. She really doesn’t have to worry about being fat. She has no fat on her, except for a strange little pot belly.
Her belly reminds me of the paintings my mother likes. For a while, the only books she had in her studio were about Flemish painters – Memling, David, Petrus Christus, Van Eyck. All their virgins have rounded bellies, like Lucy, just noticeable beneath their blue dresses. They have wan faces and lank blond hair and bulging foreheads. Their skin is untouched by the sun. They’ve only seen beyond their rooms through a window. The world is far away but crowded with tiny trees and bushes and rocky mountains and castles and wide fields with animals and peasants and stalks of wheat and beyond that water and sky and clouds. You can’t see anything like that from the Residence, only bushes and trees and iron fences. Then it just stops. The faces of the virgins aren’t even pretty. The only word I can think of is pure. You can’t imagine them speaking a word or eating food.
I was so surprised when Lucy said that about my going on about dieting. I couldn’t remember even saying one word. Actually, I was annoyed at her for a few days. I felt so stupid. It’s stupid to be obsessed about what you put in your mouth.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter”: “‘My father,’ said Beatrice, feebly – and still as she spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart – ‘wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?’”
The father slowly poisoned his daughter, until even her breath was deadly and a bouquet of fresh flowers withered in her grasp. But was her soul tainted?