At Briarwood School for Girls
Page 7
Bishop cupped his hands over his knees and looked at the floor between his feet. “What will happen to Poppy?”
“It is my intention to see that Miss Tuttle is suspended following the requisite meeting of the Disciplinary Committee.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little harsh?”
“This is not her first offense, Mr. Bishop, and even if that were not the case, insulting a guest of this school at a public assembly, the representative of a donor no less, by referring to him as a feminine hygiene product would be unacceptable behavior to say the least, deserving of stern and immediate punishment.” Even as she spoke, her eyes still boring down on Bishop, she was aware of Linwood, tan and beaming on her periphery like one of those movie stars the past few generations seemed incapable of producing, a leading man whose magnetism was only enhanced by time.
“Look,” Bishop said, “I raised the subject of Disney’s America in class. Maybe I shouldn’t have—I don’t know—but there’s no way Poppy would have done what she did at the assembly if I hadn’t.”
“There’s plenty of blame to go around.” Headmistress Mackey stood, leaning forward slightly in order to loom with greater presence. “I believe you have a class to teach. You’re on to World War II if I’m not mistaken. If you insist on incorporating real-world lessons into your discussion, I’m sure the subject of teamwork would prove invaluable to the girls, perhaps something about Churchill and Roosevelt.”
As if on cue, the bell began to chime, tolling Bishop out the door.
Headmistress Mackey passed the hour between Bishop’s departure and Miss Tuttle’s arrival composing a letter to potential donors, those alumnae most likely to see a new computer lab for what it was—not as an indulgence but as a necessity—her shadow gradually solidifying on the wall, the impression of her hair like some wild jungle plant opening in the sun. She’d written hundreds of similar letters in her career, and so, as she composed, she was able to simultaneously disappear into the back room of her thoughts where she considered the rogues’ gallery of students she had been forced to suspend or expel over the years, the majority for cheating, though there had been a handful of students she’d sent home for drinking or smoking pot or, more often, as in Miss Tuttle’s case, some conglomeration of disciplinary concerns, perhaps two dozen girls in all, half again that number if you included her time as assistant headmistress, a short list, really, given the length of her tenure, each case difficult and disappointing, none more so than Eugenia Marsh, suspended for smuggling a Woodmont boy into her room after an on-campus production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.
Even among the older faculty, time had blotted out that detail of Eugenia Marsh’s record, a collective lapse of memory further blurred by the glitter of her Pulitzer Prize, but Headmistress Mackey had not forgotten. Eugenia Marsh had been such a bright young woman and so talented but also erratic and impulsive, incapable of distinguishing authentic self-expression from pure mulishness. How could Headmistress Mackey forget—how could any of them?—the day Eugenia Marsh had worn her bra outside her blouse to class, arguing later that she was still within the confines of the dress code. What had she accomplished? Not one thing, except to compel an absurdly specific revision of the dress code. And there was the incident with the bell tower and that business in the trophy room. Headmistress Mackey shuddered to recall. It was not infrequently the case that suspended students decided not to return, seeking instead a fresh start at a school better suited to their personalities, but Eugenia Marsh had returned for her senior year. To Headmistress Mackey’s surprise, she came back changed, humbled, proof that punishment might lead to rehabilitation. She caused not a lick of trouble for the school until that mixed blessing of a play.
Headmistress Mackey scrawled a closing on her letter and dropped the letter in her outbox for Valerie to collect and type this afternoon. She checked her shadow on the wall—denser, more distinct, a near-perfect silhouette. She was about to buzz Valerie on the intercom when she heard a voice rising from below. She couldn’t decipher the words, but the sound was cadenced and robust, repeating like a chant. She pushed to her feet and faced the windows, the light so bright she had to shade her eyes to make out Poppy Tuttle, sign propped on her shoulder, marching on the quad.
X
Down with Disney, the sign had read, a slogan so obvious it failed to impress Lenore. The Disciplinary Committee was scheduled to meet on Friday, an expedited hearing, and when Lenore let herself imagine how the hearing might play out, a lump of fearful anger bellied up in her throat.
Tonight she was following Poppy and Melissa on their rounds of the library. They were still working off their service hours. Melissa pushed a book-laden cart with a bum wheel from row to row, the wheel stuttering a rubbery sticking noise every few rotations, like the cart had something to say but couldn’t spit it out. Poppy, on the other hand, had no such hesitation.
“There are only two kinds of women in those movies—insipid beauties and crazy witches. That’s it. Either you’re sweet and submissive and enjoy cleaning house and singing to birds and rodents and dwarfs, in which case you require a man to come to your rescue when the shit hits the fan, or you’re pathological with vanity and jealousy and bent on the destruction of your prettier counterparts.” Every now and then, while she spoke, Poppy would select a book from the cart and, without checking the title or author or call number, press it into a gap on one of the shelves. “Aurora and Maleficent, Snow White and the evil queen, Cinderella and her step-bitches, Ariel and the big fat squid woman.”
“Ursula,” Lenore said.
“Right, Ursula. The point is we’re being brainwashed young. Helpless or horrible, those are our choices according to Disney. Two of those princesses are so pathetic they snooze through their own movies waiting for a handsome prince to kiss them back to life.”
From somewhere behind the stacks a peal of laughter fluttered up and away beneath the vaulted ceiling. Ransom Library resembled nothing so much as a cathedral—weathered stone, arched windows, Gothic details; the only thing missing was a steeple—but Lenore had once heard Mr. Higgins remark that its closest architectural model was a prison, on the inside at any rate: three stories, each floor a gangway lined with shelves and overlooking the study area and the circulation desk on the ground level. Overhead, a pair of enormous chandeliers scattered shards of light. That laughter bubbled up again, the sound so bright and insubstantial it might have been coming from the chandeliers, but no one seemed to notice except Lenore.
“Ariel’s not so bad,” Melissa said.
“Give me a break. Ariel literally gives up her voice for the love of a man she’s laid eyes on for like fifteen seconds total. Her voice—hello?”
Lenore had been amazed, even proud, when Poppy stood up in front of the whole auditorium to challenge Vernon Plank. She couldn’t recall every detail of their exchange, but she remembered the way his hand had gone to his heart like Poppy had hurt his feelings. “I can assure you that we aren’t ignoring anything, young lady. In fact—and I’m giving you a genuine sneak preview here—by employing the very latest in virtual-reality technology, Disney Imagineers have created an Underground Railroad experience so revolutionary that it will really make you feel what it was like to be a slave.” That’s when Poppy called him a douche. And you couldn’t blame her. Setting aside the lameness of the term Imagineers, what kind of person believed that you could re-create the experience of slavery in a theme park ride? What Lenore couldn’t get her head around was why Poppy cared. Or why she was pretending to care. This whole line of discussion felt a little rehearsed to Lenore, a little overstated.
“You forgot Belle,” she said. “She’s not a princess. She’s smart. She saves her dad.”
“Belle—shit. She might be the worst of all. Disney wants us to believe that Belle’s all independent and strong, but she willingly becomes the prisoner of a monster. And then she falls in love with him. Really? Sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me, but the movie still ends with a wedding.”
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Lenore left her friends in World Literature and hurried down to the basement where the stacks were metal instead of wood, the lighting all wan fluorescence. On a row of shelves facing the back wall of the building, she located past editions of The Green and White. It had occurred to Lenore that she might hunt up a photograph of Elizabeth Archer in the yearbook, an idea that made her heart race, as if a yearbook photograph, proof of Elizabeth Archer’s presence on campus, proof of her passage though real life, might lend credence to the stories about her ghost. She crabbed along the aisle, fighting a sneeze against the dust. But the volumes only dated back to 1925. According to legend, Elizabeth Archer had been a student during WWI. Did they even have yearbooks in those days? Or maybe the earliest editions were too delicate to be handled? And if that was the case, where were they stored? Surely a school as tradition-proud as Briarwood saved old yearbooks for posterity.
Perhaps because they had moved on to WWII in Mr. Bishop’s class, Lenore plucked the 1944 edition from the shelf. The dedication read, “To the Heroes of Prince William Military Academy,” nineteen of whom, according to the copy, had lost their lives in combat that year alone. Prince William Military Academy had closed its doors long before Lenore’s time, but she’d heard her grandmother and her mother reminiscing about formals way back when, handsome boys decked out in military dress. She thumbed deeper into the yearbook. Each girl in the senior class, only twenty-six of them, had a whole page to herself. Poised and smiling, they looked, like all young women in antique photographs, more grown-up than their true ages. Mary Ellen King. Judith Lawrence. Rosemary Magnuson. Augusta Price. Recognition startled Lenore like the photograph had blinked. Headmistress Mackey. Her maiden name. She hadn’t been exactly pretty, but she was sure of herself, you could tell, her eyes staring into the camera, her smile suggesting somehow that she knew things you didn’t.
Lenore slipped the 1944 edition back into its slot and ran her finger down the row of spines to 1962, Eugenia Marsh’s final year at Briarwood. The hairstyles and the poses had changed—instead of head shots and a solid backdrop, the girls were seated on a wrought-iron bench in front of a phony nature scene—but the uniforms were the same. Even then Eugenia Marsh sported what would become her trademark bob. Her hands were folded in her lap, her knees cocked demurely to one side. Nothing about that image hinted at what history had in store. Lenore flipped to Activities and found her again, this time with the Drama Club, hidden in the back row, her face barely visible between two taller girls.
After Eugenia Marsh, Lenore went searching for Coach Fink, skimming years of bad haircuts until she tracked her down in 1976. By then, enrollment was high enough that there wasn’t enough room to give every senior her own page, and she found her coach lined up with three other students, second row from the top, last face from the left, her smile so big Lenore almost didn’t recognize her, wouldn’t have recognized her if not for the freckles. Those braces! Those bangs! That face looked more familiar in the action shots back in Athletics—eyes fierce, lips pressed into a hard, determined line. Before returning the yearbook to the shelf, just out of curiosity, Lenore flipped to the Drama Club, and there was Coach Fink in a white nightgown, holding some boy’s hand, her mouth a perfect oval, like an angel’s mouth on a Christmas tree ornament. Coach Fink as Maria in West Side Story. That helped explain why her basketball coach had been put in charge of The Phantom of Thornton Hall, a much-debated mystery among this year’s cast, but it was so weird to imagine. Coach Fink onstage, emoting. Lenore clapped the yearbook shut like she had bungled onto something lewd.
She looked up her grandmother—1947—and her mother—1968. Lenore had her grandmother’s upturned nose, her mother’s brow and chin. All three of them had the same no-nonsense eyes. Seeing her eyes in those old photographs gave Lenore such a case of the creeps that when someone spoke behind her, she gasped and clapped a hand over her stomach and spilled her mother’s yearbook from her lap.
“Are you mad at me?” Poppy said.
She was leaning against the wall at the end of the aisle, bathed in the pallid light of the fluorescent bulbs, and at that moment, just as Lenore was settling back into herself, recognizing her friend in the basement instead of some lurking phantom, the lights buzzed and flickered, and one of the long bulbs in the rack over Poppy’s head expired.
“Maybe a little.”
Poppy shouldered away from the wall, retrieved the fallen yearbook, and handed it to Lenore.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” Lenore said. “You’re gonna get kicked out of school.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing either,” Poppy said.
“There’s too much happening right now,” Lenore said. “We’ve got the Port Royal game tomorrow night. And the play—I’ve never been in a play before. And now this, you.” She bit her bottom lip, forcing herself to hush before her secret came tumbling out again.
“Do you think people can be happy?” Poppy said. “In a general sense, I mean. Like do you think happiness is even possible?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know.” Poppy sat on the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I think we spend so much time pretending that we’ve forgotten what real happiness feels like anymore.”
Lenore heard footsteps. Melissa appeared at the end of the aisle.
“What are we doing down here?”
“Smoking,” Poppy said.
She fished around in her peacoat and came out with a pack of Marlboro Lights. Lenore watched her stab a cigarette between her lips and, in no hurry, light up and breathe the smoke into her lungs.
“Fuck it,” Poppy said, followed by a long exhale.
Lenore looked at Melissa. Melissa shrugged. There was no point scolding her. Obviously, you couldn’t smoke in the library, but nothing Poppy did was likely to make her situation worse. It had not escaped Lenore that she could move in with Melissa when Poppy was gone, be done with Juliet Demarinis, problem solved. So she said nothing, and they sat among the yearbooks and let Poppy puff away, whorls of smoke hanging low over their heads.
XI
The bus trip back from Port Royal was long and quiet, and it was after midnight by the time Coach Fink got the girls off to their dorms. She sat on a bench in the empty locker room trying to absorb the fact of a losing season. Not her first but rare enough and always hard to swallow. 54–21. The score that close only because Port Royal took pity on them down the stretch. She had reached that particular state of exhaustion in which her body was spent but her mind kept racing, as if it had already sprinted past consciousness and entered the revved-up state of a waking dream, a sensation that recalled the actual dream most likely awaiting her in sleep. The only thing she could think to do was jog herself down into another, deeper state of weariness in which her brain shut itself off completely.
A full moon blurred out the stars. Her footsteps on the pavement made a muted thumping sound that seemed independent of her running, as if she were pursued by the ghost of her younger self, w
oods on her right all the way around to insulate the school from the rest of the world, campus on her left, old buildings slabs of shadow in the moonlight. Coach Fink hated losing. There was no getting around the fact that it happened once in a while, but she believed that if you pushed yourself hard enough, if you did the little things right every day, every hour, every minute, if your focus was clear, if you dedicated yourself to winning, then that’s exactly what you would do more often than not. Losing was a habit. Losing was a state of mind. And she had somehow failed to notice it taking hold of her team. Port Royal hadn’t just beaten them tonight. They’d broken them, obliterated them. No matter how Coach Fink tweaked the lineup or the game plan—zone defense or man-to-man, half-court offense or full-court press—her players had never believed that they could win, and that lack of belief was Coach Fink’s fault.
She’d let herself get distracted by The Phantom of Thornton Hall, the envelope on her doorstep. She could see that now, and there was nothing she could do to make it right. The play was better with Littlefield as Jenny, or it could have been, but morale was shot, and Demarinis yawped her lines, and the rest of the cast were even more wooden and lethargic than before. Coach Fink was in over her head. She was aware that this was exactly the sort of defeatist attitude she’d recognized in her players, but she didn’t know how to shut it off. She reminded herself that they still had a month of rehearsals. She’d just have to ride them harder. She spurred herself past the student parking lot and the physical plant, steam pluming into the night, but she felt drained empty, as if her will had sprung a leak. She couldn’t be sure if this was her fifth or sixth lap around Shady Dell Loop. Even before she knew she was going to stop, she began to slow, hands on her hips, taking in as much air as the night would give. She paced a hundred steps, then turned and paced a hundred more, warming down her legs, and when she counted the last few steps—ninety-eight, ninety-nine—she found herself face-to-face with Lucas Bishop, who was out there with his dog.