At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

“I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, sitting beside her. “Today was a bad day.”

  “I didn’t come up here because of Poppy. I came because I shouldn’t have told you what I told you. I need you to know that I’ll be fine.”

  “You could talk to Mrs. Silver,” Bishop said.

  Mrs. Silver was the school counselor–slash–college admissions adviser. Lenore laughed out loud, once, like he’d said something absurd.

  “Please. You know what she told Marisol Brooks about her bulimia?”

  “I don’t want to know about Marisol’s bulimia.”

  “She told her it was all about portion control and positive thinking.”

  Bishop scrunched his whole face up, squeezing his eyes shut tight before blinking them open again. “I’m not sure I should keep this secret.”

  “If you tell someone, Mr. Bishop, if you tell my parents or someone from the school, everything will be out of my hands. No way does Headmistress Mackey let a pregnant girl roam the halls, so right away I’m gone from Briarwood, and how does that help me?”

  “But your parents—”

  “They’ll just fight about it. That’s what they do. You don’t know, Mr. Bishop. Even if, by some miracle, they manage to agree, the whole thing will be about them, the decisions they make. This is nobody’s business but mine.”

  “You made it my business,” Bishop said.

  “That was a mistake,” Lenore said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Bishop had been teaching long enough to witness plenty of students pretending that everything was under control, that they didn’t care about the bad breakup or the failing grade, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen a student who had so thoroughly convinced herself that it was true. He was reminded, suddenly, of his own strangeness in this place, isolated by gender and age and by history itself, his narration of the world past tense, when the world Lenore lived in was mostly yet to come.

  Pickett scratched the inside of the door.

  “Can I pet him?” Lenore said.

  Bishop sighed and opened the door, and Pickett came scrabbling out, all tongue and tail, shivering with pent-up excitement, butting his head against Lenore’s knees. She pressed her face into the ruff around his neck and raked her fingers down his back.

  “He smells like old books,” she said.

  Lenore held the dog’s head in her hands and let him lick her face.

  “I’m moving in with Melissa,” she told Bishop.

  “That’s good, I guess. That’s something.”

  Back in the kitchen, when she was gone, Bishop found his soup smoking on the stove, noodles and broth boiled to paste. He gripped the handle with his shirttail and dumped the mess, pot and all, into the trash. His watery drink was waiting on the counter. He drained it, poured another. “Shit,” he said, loud enough that Lionel Higgins might have heard. Pickett watched all this with interest. Then, as if it contained some hidden meaning, Bishop listened to his father’s message one more time.

  Question 4

  Eugenia Marsh’s second and final play, Dream Entropy, opened on January 6, 1979, but ran for only nine performances before being closed, owing to negative reviews and stagnant ticket sales. A particularly scathing assessment was published in the New York Times. Which of the following criticisms was/were included in that review?

  A) Dream Entropy reflects the kind of unabashed navel-gazing and abstraction that gives contemporary theater a bad name.

  B) Fine performances can’t save this mishmash of memory play and failed postmodern experiment.

  C) Ms. Marsh seems to be under the impression that life is little more than an endless loop of ever-repeating history, an idea that might be interesting in theory but which produces very little actual drama when rendered for the stage.

  D) All of the above.

  XIII

  Bishop told people he’d grown up in Richmond, and that was almost true. The home of his childhood could be found in Short Pump, a suburb on the western edge of Richmond proper, so called because of a short-handled pump outside a tavern once located on the carriage route between Richmond and Charlottesville, a place patronized by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Stonewall Jackson, though there was no sign of that history left to grace Short Pump’s present. Whatever it might once have been, the original village was lost to strip malls and shopping centers and planned communities with names like Wythe Station and Graham’s Run and Wellesley Landing, names meant to evoke bygone plantations. The more upscale developments were laid out around golf courses or man-made lakes or both.

  Bishop’s parents did not live in one of these. Their house in Tuckahoe Trace was buried behind so many identical ranchers on so many identical streets that twice in high school, drunk both times, Bishop had pulled into the wrong driveway and been shocked to discover that his key did not open the front door. His memories of the place were so specific, however, so localized—his bedroom, their kitchen, as opposed to all the duplicate bedrooms and kitchens in all those other houses—that the reality of the place never ceased to amaze him when he returned. The houses really were indistinguishable—bay window on the left, garage on the right—and there were so many of them, hundreds of mailboxes lined up beside hundreds of driveways, each house singled out only by the embellishments beyond its walls: a basketball hoop mounted above a garage, a Marine Corps flag hanging by the door. Given its nature—temporary, prefabricated—Tuckahoe Trace should have been immune to history, but on this Saturday afternoon Bishop steered deeper into the grid wisping vapor trails of memory. Here was the stretch of sidewalk where he’d wrecked his bike, and here was the house where the crazy roller-skating woman lived, and there, no, there, was Haley Polson’s window, behind which Bishop had stolen a first kiss in a bedroom identical to his own.

  It was almost four o’clock by the time he pulled up to the curb. He let Pickett out and waited for him to relieve himself on the mailbox post before ringing the bell. His father answered the door wearing a bathrobe over a white undershirt and khaki pants. Mercy and Rhett trotted up, but they did not bark or venture out. They peered at Bishop from between his father’s legs, his father standing in the doorway with one hand on the knob.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure?” he said.

  “You called me. You left a message. I thought, you know, I’d drive down instead of just calling back.”

  “I left you a message? I don’t think so. When was that?”

  There was an edge of defensiveness in his father’s voice.

  “Yesterday,” Bishop said. “What were you doing home?”

  “Mercy’s been having kidney problems. If I don’t let her out on my lunch break she’ll piss up the house.”

  “Why don’t you just leave them in the yard?”

  “They’re old,” his father said.

  He was taller than his son, leaner, ropier, the difference in their heights exaggerated by the fact that he was standing on the doorstep while Bishop stood on the ground, stooping to hold Pickett’s collar to keep him from bolting through the open door.

  “You gonna invite me in?” Bishop said.

  His father looked surprised for a second, not displeased but as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him until that moment. He shrugged, stepped aside. Bishop turned Pickett loose, and he bounded into Mercy and Rhett, like he’d been launched, and all three dogs went reeling together into the house.

  Bishop’s mother was stretched out on the couch in the den with an open book propped on her chest, half-moon reading glasses perched on her nose. On TV, volume low, North Carolina was leading Virginia in the ACC basketball tournament. His father let the dogs out into the backyard—all the yards in Tuckahoe Trace were stitched together with chain link—then disappeared into the kitchen.

  “We thought you were the Mormons,” his mother said. “They keep sending these teenagers to recruit us. You know, your father had people in the Latter-day Saints on his mother’s side.”

&
nbsp; “I didn’t know that,” Bishop said.

  “Well, it’s true. They want to bring us back into the ward. It’s gotten to where I look forward to their visits. These are nice kids—clean-cut, polite. Your father won’t let me answer the door anymore when they come around. He thinks I’m giving them false hope.”

  “So, no plans to convert?”

  “I think not,” she said.

  The den looked exactly as it had when Bishop went off to college, the same floral-patterned couch and throw pillows, the same prints on the walls—beach scenes mostly, cheaply framed. Bishop’s mother loved the beach, and for one week every summer of Bishop’s childhood, the family had ferried out to Chincoteague Island, where they had stayed in the same cramped room at the same bed-and-breakfast, a place where there never seemed to be any other kids around. His father swept the sand with a metal detector—once he found a Rolex watch—while Bishop tumbled in the surf. His mother pored through book after book on a towel spread beyond the reach of the tide. They played cards at night or board games in the parlor at the bed-and-breakfast, while older couples sat and watched, mesmerized by Bishop’s youth. And somehow all of this seemed to have a restorative effect on Bishop’s mother. Now his parents went to Chincoteague without their son, and the prints on the walls were sun-faded, blurry-looking.

  Bishop’s father returned with a can of beer for Bishop and one for himself. He dropped into his recliner, popped the footrest.

  “Well,” he said, “what can we do you for?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Are you in trouble?” his father said.

  “What? No, I’m not in trouble.”

  “It’s all right,” his mother said. “Whatever it is, we’re here to help.”

  “I need to find somebody. I was hoping Dad could make a call.”

  “Are they in trouble,” his father said, “this person you want to find?”

  After all those years with the Department of Corrections, he tended to interact with the world like everybody had committed a crime and it was his job to keep them on the straight and narrow.

  “Not that I know of,” Bishop said.

  “Why are you looking?”

  “That’s enough of the third degree,” his mother said.

  Bishop told them about the play and Eugenia Marsh and her connection to Briarwood and his idea to invite her for opening night. He was standing in front of the sliding glass doors, and he felt like he was making a presentation. He could see his shadow stretching toward them on the rug, his hands moving in a way that embarrassed him for some reason.

  His mother eyed him for a second, and then she shifted her gaze to her husband, and he lowered the footrest of his recliner and shuffled off to the master bedroom, the location of the only working phone in the house.

  When he was gone, his mother said, “I’m glad to see you taking an interest in the arts.”

  The book was spread open across her chest.

  “What are you reading?” Bishop said.

  “Oh, some novel. We’re getting ready for the spring book sale. They give library employees first dibs on the discards.”

  “Any good?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” his mother said. “It’s backwards. Literally. Not only does it begin with the main character’s death and move in reverse through his whole life, but tap water rises from the sink and runs up the faucet. Stuff like that. There’s a historical angle, something about the Holocaust. You might be interested.”

  “Backwards?”

  “It’s thematic,” his mother said, “and it is a little show-offy, but I’ll tell you what—when you first came in and I stopped reading, everything looked like it was moving in the wrong direction for a second.”

  The basketball game cut to a commercial for a used-car lot. Then one for a mattress store. In the light through the sliding doors, his mother’s skin looked almost translucent. She smiled, conscious of his stare. Though he knew better than most that history was essentially one long obituary for mankind, Bishop was not coping well with his parents’ perfectly natural creep toward old age, every instance of forgetfulness a sign of impending dementia, every hint of a limp noted, every stomach bug the beginning of the end. His mother was sixty-six years old, his father three years older, both in excellent health, but Bishop was swamped with melancholy in their presence, as if mourning in advance. He worried that his parents could sense what he was feeling, and he suspected sometimes that they were eager to be rid of him and happier when he was gone.

  “Dad called me yesterday,” he said.

  “He did? What time?”

  “I don’t know. Lunchtime.”

  “He comes home to let the dogs out.”

  “He told me that. He also told me that he didn’t remember calling.”

  “Maybe he didn’t call.”

  “He left a message,” Bishop said. “It’s on my machine.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. At least not to me. But I could hear the dogs barking and his voice telling them to hush.”

  “That sounds like your father.” She balanced the book on the back of the couch and swung her legs around. “I should be starting dinner.” She pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. Bishop listened to the cabinets banging open and closed, the faucet running. He could picture her filling the pot, putting water on to boil, fetching pasta from the shelf. He would have bet money she was making spaghetti casserole.

  He carried his beer into his old room, across the hall from his parents’ room. Everything the same here as well: twin beds, chest of drawers, bookcase filled with paperbacks and model airplanes, Bishop’s Rolling Stones poster on the wall, his Redskins pennant. He could picture a younger version of himself in there, reading comic books in bed, a band of light under the door, dirty clothes piled in the corner, but the image was like something he’d seen in a movie about his life. He sipped his beer and looked out the window, his father’s voice, deep and muted as his conscience, murmuring over from the master bedroom. Pickett nosed along the fence in the backyard, Mercy and Rhett watching him with their heads cocked, like they couldn’t figure what he found so interesting.

  Bishop came back into the den just as his mother was emerging from the kitchen. “I hope you’ll stay for dinner,” she said. Before he could reply, his father returned from the bedroom with Eugenia Marsh’s address written on the back of a grocery-store receipt.

  “That was quick,” Bishop said.

  “Ike Rails was on duty this afternoon. You remember Ike Rails.” He pointed at the receipt in Bishop’s hands. “This Marsh lady has no phone, at least not in her name, not one that Ike could find, but that’s the address in her DMV records. If you can believe it, there’s a couple of Eugenia Marshes in Virginia, but this is the only one about the right age.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I owe you.”

  “It goes without saying that you didn’t get that information from me and I most certainly did not get it from Ike Rails.”

  “He knows that, Frank,” his mother said.

  Bishop stared at the receipt. 1221 Whiskey Barrel Road, Rockbridge, Virginia. He flipped it over, as if perhaps the other side might reveal more information, but it was only the litany of his parents’ groceries—milk, spaghetti, peanut butter, bread, dog food, lettuce, carrots, salad dressing, coffee, beer—a list so plain and unassuming that reading it raised a lump in Bishop’s throat.

  After dinner, with Pickett snoozing on the back seat, Bishop drove back to Briarwood in the dark, the miles unfolding without registering, trees blurring past the windows, moonlit fields. All the way home, he kept patting his breast pocket, checking and double-checking that the receipt was still there. He stopped at the gatehouse, and the security guard hit the switch to raise the traffic arm. He motored slowly past the stables and around the curve and up the hill. He had assumed that he’d have to wait until morning to show Coach Fink what he had in his breast pocket, but lights were still burnin
g in her windows. Saturday night. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He pulled over in front of her duplex, cut the engine. Pickett roused himself in the back seat, panting hard. For a few minutes, they just sat and watched. Finally, Bishop saw a shadow move past the window, and he left Pickett in the car and made his way to the door. He knocked and waited. Nothing. Tried again.

  “Are you there?” he said. “It’s Lucas Bishop.”

  A beat passed before the dead bolt thumped and the door opened, and there was Coach Fink in a Briarwood sweatsuit with her braid loose, hair tumbling down her back and over her shoulders and chest.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “It better not be pubes.”

  “No pubes.” He smiled. “This is much better than pubes.”

  Released from its braid, her hair was crimped and tangled and wild, and Bishop thought she hardly looked like herself.

  “Well, all right then,” she said. “Let’s see what you got.”

  XIV

  Years later, long before Briarwood School for Girls, struggling financially, closed its doors for good rather than open them to boys, at a point in time when Lenore Littlefield was already slightly famous—a pair of indie films, nice notices at Sundance—though not so well known that people recognized her on the street, before her first commercial success, before she met the man who would become her husband, before she abandoned acting altogether for a more private life with this man, still unknown to her, and their children, still unimagined, before her life, in other words, had settled into its true course, and nearly a decade after her days at boarding school, she was wheeling a carry-on through Hartsfield International when she spotted Coach Fink at a nearby gate. The sweatsuit, that braid. Legs crossed like a man’s. Running shoes. Definitely her. Coach Fink hadn’t noticed Lenore, and Lenore did not call out or change her course—airports were disorienting enough without faces from the past leaping up to greet you—but as she drew closer and then wheeled by, the moment when they might have spoken gone, her memory slipped back to The Phantom of Thornton Hall, the last rehearsal before spring break, 1994, that night precisely, for some reason, rather than the performance of the play itself. More specifically she remembered those minutes after rehearsal when Coach Fink gathered the cast in the front row, the point, most nights, when she detailed the many ways they had failed to meet her expectations.