At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “Poppy is nothing if not subtle,” Melissa said, her voice low so as not to wake Lenore, but Lenore stirred anyway, lifting her head and wiping her mouth and looking around like she didn’t know where she was.

  The parking lot was mostly empty at this hour, wet leaves plastered to the pavement, the pavement dingy with road salt. Bishop left Coach Fink on the bus to keep an eye on the girls and headed inside the visitors’ center. At the reception desk, he found a petition against Disney’s America, and he signed it while he waited to meet the park ranger, a spry-looking elderly woman in a round-brimmed hat.

  Their group numbered sixty, counting Bishop and Coach Fink, too many for such a tour, so many that the ranger had to shout to be heard at the back of the crowd, but this was a problem every year, and there was nothing to be done. Even shouting, some of what she said was lost to the wind. Bishop reassured himself that his students were well prepped. Two separate battles had been fought over this ground, both Confederate victories, the first announcing to the world that the American Civil War would be long and bloody and nothing at all like the glamorous military romp the politicians had imagined, the second paving the way for Robert E. Lee’s push toward Antietam. His students would survive if the wind carried away a few lines of the ranger’s script. Besides, the purpose of a field trip was not to gather information but to stand in the shadow of history, sift history through your fingers. Today, they would be focusing on the First Battle of Manassas. Bishop had been teaching at Briarwood for twelve years now. He’d been out there so many times he practically knew the script by heart. Next would come the bit about naïve government officials loading wagons with picnic supplies and hauling their families down from Washington to bear witness to a real battle.

  “Obviously they were shocked by what transpired!” the ranger boomed.

  Above a certain volume, the appropriate solemnity was impossible, and Bishop worried that his students would find the park ranger absurd. She led them past Henry House, where Judith Henry, the only civilian casualty of the battle, was killed in her bed by shrapnel from Union cannon fire, and along Matthews Hill, where the Confederate flank gave way. Coach Fink darted among the students like a sheepdog, nipping them silent with her glare. They lingered on the patch of hallowed ground where Stonewall Jackson rallied the nearly whipped Confederates, earning his nickname and his reputation and a monument in his honor—Jackson in the saddle, fist propped on his hip, both man and horse as overmuscled as comic-book superheroes. “I’ll never cease to be amazed,” the ranger bellowed, “at the depth of human courage.” Poppy Tuttle and Lenore Littlefield and Melissa Chen were milling along at the back of the crowd, Bishop close enough to hear that they were talking but too far behind to make out what they said.

  “Not interested?”

  Poppy flipped her ponytail out from under the collar of her coat.

  “Quite the contrary, Mr. Bishop. We were just debating what to bring on a picnic to a battle. I said beer and burgers like at a tailgate party.”

  “But if you brought burgers you’d have to cook them,” Melissa said, “and how would you keep the beer cold? That all sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”

  Lenore said, “Did they even have beer in the Civil War?”

  “Definitely they had beer,” Poppy said. “The Sumerians invented beer.”

  “You would know that,” Melissa said.

  Bishop understood that they had been talking about no such thing when he interrupted, and he was amazed, as he often was, by the quickness of their minds. Ask a Briarwood girl to walk you through the Bill of Rights and who knows what kind of answer you might get, but catch her chatting on a field trip and here’s a plausible comedic riff on battlefield picnics and the history of beer. Bishop was forty-two years old, the son of a parole officer and a librarian. He would have been terrified of girls like these when he was their age.

  “It must seem crazy to you,” he said, “but think about Desert Storm. I know I was sitting on my couch with a bag of chips watching night-vision images of bombs obliterating Baghdad. I’ll bet you were, too. At least your parents were. History’s a stickler for repeating itself.”

  “That’s not exactly the same thing,” Melissa said.

  “It’s the same impulse. The war probably didn’t seem real to those people. That footage from Iraq sure didn’t.”

  “The question,” Poppy said, “is, did they have chips in the Civil War?”

  Bishop did his good-sport smile.

  “They had chips,” he said, “and they had beer.”

  The tour was moving again, the ranger waving everyone along, the sky looming low over the trees. Bishop gazed off toward the road, the visitors’ center. He loved that story about the picnicking Washington dignitaries, their wagons gumming up the Union retreat. He had always been intrigued by the oddball details of history, by the extras as much as the stars. Along the front, facing the parking lot, the visitors’ center was outfitted with a colonnade, giving it a veneer of the antique, but from this side, it looked as redbrick institutional as a rest stop off the interstate.

  “Where’d you get that button?” Bishop said.

  Poppy dipped her chin to look, like she’d forgotten it was there. She unclipped the pin, slipped it through Bishop’s lapel, fixed the clasp. She patted his chest with the flat of her hand.

  “Fuck the mouse,” she said.

  Lenore rolled her eyes and stifled a yawn.

  “Have you been to Disney World, Mr. Bishop?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. I was already in college when it opened.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said.

  Coach Fink was standing like a fence post beside the trail. Arms crossed in her sweatsuit. Waiting. The girls dropped into single file as they passed. Today was Monday. By Wednesday, Bishop’s classes would be finished with the Civil War and through the Reconstruction. Thursday, review. Test on Friday. Then on to a new century and World War I.

  As Bishop drew abreast, Coach Fink said, “I could hear you jawing from thirty yards.”

  Bishop touched the button on his lapel. “History lesson,” he said, and at just that moment, the bottom fell out of the sky. The tour dissolved in a mad dash for the visitors’ center. The students took off at a sprint, and Coach Fink took off in hot pursuit, but Bishop lingered there, rain running in his ears and down his neck and beating on the battlefield all around him.

  III

  In the senior section of the 1976 edition of The Green and White hides a photograph of young Patricia Fink, Coach Fink nowadays to her players and her peers, though her classmates had called her Tricia. In this photograph, young Coach Fink is smiling beneath Farrah Fawcett bangs, her round face freckled and open and unlined, her nose upturned, her blue eyes optimistic and unperturbed, her teeth sheathed in a delicate tangle of braces. Deeper into the yearbook, all the way back in Activities and Athletics, are several more images of young Coach Fink—driving hard to the basketball hoop against archrival Saint Mary’s of the Green, swatting a field hockey ball during a sideline hit. The image, however, that would have startled her players and her peers, had they stumbled across it, features young Coach Fink in a white nightgown and a dark wig, barely recognizable, freckles blanked with stage makeup, hand in hand with a young man from Woodmont School, the two of them singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story, in which she’d played Maria, a stretch to be sure, considering her appearance, but her voice had been too beautiful to give the role to someone else.

  Even today, on this Tuesday evening, making her way from basketball practice to Beatrix Garvey Memorial Auditorium, she could remember most of the lyrics to most of the songs, and she could remember the young man’s name—Wilson Barber, as Tony—and how his palms went clammy when he held her hands and the way he squinted because the director refused to let him wear his glasses. This day would be her first as faculty adviser to the Drama Club. Her predecessor, Margaret Rowan, had taken leave to care for her ailing mother back in Baltimore. M
s. Rowan also taught American Lit. Her classes had been handed over to Lucille Pinn, the riding instructor, who, it turned out, had majored in English at Bryn Mawr. Headmistress Mackey had been ensconced at Briarwood for more than thirty years, and she had not forgotten Coach Fink’s performance in West Side Story. It was determined that this arrangement would suffice until end of term, when either Ms. Rowan’s mother would have passed or a permanent replacement could be found.

  Now, Coach Fink shouldered through the double doors and crossed the lobby on the balls of her feet and then through another set of doors into the auditorium proper. There, standing on the lip of the stage, waving a sheaf of papers like she was in charge, was a student Coach Fink recognized but could not name. Degrassi? Debussey? Plump, pale. Definitely not an athlete. Half a dozen other students slouched in the first few rows. Coach Fink took the proscenium steps two at a time.

  “Who are you supposed to be?” she said to the girl who was definitely not an athlete.

  “Juliet. Juliet Demarinis.”

  “Park it, Demarinis,” Coach Fink said.

  She waited for the girl to be seated, then linked her hands behind her back and began to pace, words coming to her in rhythm with her steps.

  “We’re all sorry about Ms. Rowan’s mother, but I know, if she was here, she would tell us to knuckle down and make her proud. There are things in life we can’t control, and that’s too bad, but one thing we can control is how we rise to this occasion.” Her sneakers squeaked when she pivoted on the stage. “The first thing we have to do is decide on a production.” A hand shot up among the students, but Coach Fink ignored it. “I was thinking West Side Story. It’s a classic, and I’m—” The hand in the air was frantic now, the waving accompanied by a peeping sound. Coach Fink glared to let the waver know that such intrusions would not be tolerated, but the girl did not desist.

  “What is it, Debussey?”

  “Demarinis,” the waver said. “It’s just that—”

  “Let me ask you a question, Demarinis. Do you interrupt Ms. Sharp or Mr. Bishop in the middle of their lectures?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you interrupt your mother when she’s trying to tell you something? Do you interrupt your pastor during a sermon?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then what makes you think it’s acceptable to wave your hand at me and make animal noises when I’m giving a pep talk?”

  “I’m sorry, Coach Fink. It’s just, we’ve already decided on a production. Ms. Rowan chose The Phantom of Thornton Hall.” She held up the sheaf of papers again, a script. “This year is the twentieth anniversary of the first Broadway performance, but it’s never been done on campus.”

  This information stopped Coach Fink. The Phantom of Thornton Hall had been written by one of Briarwood’s most famous graduates: Eugenia Marsh, class of ’62, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The play remained required reading in American Lit, but because it was set on the campus of a boarding school very much like Briarwood, and because it dealt with sensitive subject matter—teen pregnancy, suicide—the administration had traditionally frowned on its performance. That was not the kind of thing parents and potential donors wanted to see. Coach Fink squeezed her hands into fists, released them, balled her fingers tight again.

  “Not a musical?” she said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Has Headmistress Mackey signed off on this?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then why didn’t she say anything to me?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  Coach Fink pointed at a redhead sipping from a can of Sprite.

  “You—what’s your name?”

  The girl mumbled a reply.

  “Speak up,” Coach Fink said. “You sound like you’ve got a mouthful of mashed potatoes.”

  “Thessaly Roebuck.”

  “Let me ask you something, Roebuck. Is Demarinis here a good egg?”

  “What—egg? I don’t understand.”

  “I want to know if what Demarinis says is true, or if she’s the kind of sorry human being to pull a fast one on a newly appointed faculty adviser to the Drama Club.”

  “You can ask Headmistress Mackey yourself,” Demarinis said.

  Her best option, Coach Fink thought, was probably just to turn the whole business over to Demarinis and let the Drama Club get on with whatever they had planned, but ceding authority wasn’t Coach Fink’s MO, and she felt the strongest urge to make Demarinis drop and give her twenty. Beyond the basic subject matter, the particulars of The Phantom of Thornton Hall, like the particulars of “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” of “After Apple-Picking” and “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” had washed over Coach Fink without making much impression, just enough to earn her reliable C, and then on out to the field hockey pitch or into the echoey gym, where she could lose herself, become herself, where she understood the nature of the world, where it didn’t matter that she remained undiscovered by the boys at Woodmont or Prince William Military Academy or that certain girls made certain jokes at her expense, misguided, unimaginative jokes reserved for the kind of young women who preferred field hockey and basketball to dressage and winter formals.

  The doors from the lobby clattered, and everyone turned to look. Lenore Littlefield appeared at the top of the aisle.

  “Littlefield?” Coach Fink said. “You need something?”

  “I’m here for the Drama Club meeting.”

  Littlefield was Coach Fink’s swingman, not her best player by a long shot, but she showed flashes of toughness and speed, and Coach Fink had never been more pleased to see her.

  “I didn’t know you were in the Drama Club.”

  Demarinis blurted, “That’s because she’s not.”

  “I missed curfew last weekend,” Littlefield said. “Headmistress Mackey told me I could earn off the demerits with an extracurricular. She said the Drama Club needed bodies for the spring show.”

  Coach Fink’s first impulse was to berate the girl for missing curfew—bonehead infractions like that could get her suspended from the team—but she was buoyed by the possibility of an ally, and she sensed a familiar fluctuation in the air, a shift in momentum. She knew from experience that there were moments and decisions in every contest that seemed insignificant as they occurred but that ultimately shaped the outcome. Sometimes, if you were paying attention, those moments could be detected before the crucial decision had been made. At times like that, life slowed down and Coach Fink’s vision went sharp, the edges of everything perfectly defined.

  Demarinis slapped her script against her knees. “We don’t need anybody. There are only five speaking parts, and Ms. Rowan already—”

  “Button it, Debussey,” Coach Fink said.

  Question 2

  In 1979, after the critical and commercial failure of her second play, Dream Entropy, Eugenia Marsh gave up writing, abandoned the limelight of Broadway, and refused all media inquiries. To which of the following locations did she retreat?

  A) A cottage in the Five Islands area on the southern coast of Maine.

  B) A farmhouse in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

  C) A log cabin in Idaho’s Salmon River valley.

  D) An artists’ commune in the desert outside Santa Fe.

  IV

  Trailing archrival Saint Mary’s of the Green 36–34, with nineteen seconds on the clock, Bunny English deflected a pass midair, rerouting the flight of the ball directly into the hands of Rachel Milner. Rachel zipped the ball to point guard Veronica Tuck, who was already moving into fast-break position, and Veronica bounce-passed to Lenore Littlefield, who was sprinting ahead on the wing. In the time it took to dribble once, twice, several alternatives presented themselves to Lenore, all of which she processed, thanks to hours of drills and repetition, without having to think about them much at all: she could pass the ball back to Veronica, thus bringing the fast break to a halt and allowing the d
efense into position; she could pull up for a fifteen-foot jumper, a low-percentage shot; or she could attempt a risky pass across the defense to power forward Brunhilde Shimmel, who was streaking into the paint from the opposite side of the court. In that next moment, as the ball was rising for the third time toward her palm, before a decision had been made, when all her options remained equally viable, Lenore’s vision fuzzed, and her head felt suddenly a long way from her feet, and the thrum of the crowd receded like someone was twisting a knob—the gym, the school, the whole world of possibilities dissolving into nothing.

  She came to on her back with a ring of faces hovering over her, each face a ring of its own, and in each face two more rings of worried eyes. Gradually, the nearest of those faces resolved into Coach Fink, the heat in her cheeks highlighting her freckles. “Give her some air,” she was shouting. “Everybody back off, back off,” but none of the other faces withdrew.

  “Can you hear me?” she said in a smaller voice. “Littlefield, you with us?”

  Lenore felt herself nodding, though she was not aware of instructing her head to move.

  Coach Fink swung a glare around the ring. “Back off now. I said give her room, ladies. Let her breathe,” and this time the faces disappeared from view, leaving only Coach Fink, her hand tucked under Lenore’s head, the hot white lights in the ceiling burning like distant stars.

  “Did we win?” Lenore said.

  A spasm passed across Coach Fink’s eyes and mouth like someone had given her a pinch. She looked away and told someone to elevate Lenore’s legs, and Lenore felt her feet rising from the floor.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” Coach Fink said.

  “Three.”

  “How many now?”

  “Still three.”

  “You’re OK. I don’t think you hit your head.”

  “Did we win?” Lenore asked again.

  “The ball went out of bounds. Saint Mary’s possession.”