At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “She was nice, I guess. We didn’t stay long.”

  “Did she seem happy?”

  “Lenore,” Bishop said.

  “Somebody asked me not too long ago if I thought happiness was even possible or if we spend so much time pretending that we’ve forgotten what real happiness feels like.”

  Eavesdropping was not Coach Fink’s style. She was much more likely to barge into a situation whatever it might be. She couldn’t have explained the impulse that had caused her to dart behind the car, but now she wasn’t sure how to extract herself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to extract herself. She was bothered by the idea of Bishop fraternizing after hours with a student, and if something was going on with her lead actress, something that might affect the play, Coach Fink wanted to know about it, but mostly she couldn’t help wondering if Bishop might say her name. She was part of this story, too. She had met Eugenia Marsh. Rummaged her cabinets for a mixing bowl. She had waited with Bishop in her truck, the night crazy with stars.

  “It must be strange. For you. Playing Jenny.” He was speaking so slowly that Coach Fink had the sense he was choosing his words with care. “It must be. Hard.”

  “I like it,” Littlefield said. “It’s a relief.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Coach Fink shifted on her haunches.

  “You remember the last scene?” Littlefield went on. “When Jenny walks over to the window and she stands there staring out at the dark, and the play just ends with her still standing there. You can hardly believe it’s over. You have no idea what happens next.”

  “I remember,” Bishop said.

  “I used to think it was a cop-out, but I don’t think so anymore.”

  “Lenore,” he said again.

  “It was just an abortion,” Littlefield said, and Coach Fink gripped the bumper of the station wagon like she intended to yank it off with her bare hands. She didn’t understand everything she was hearing, but the intimacy between them felt illicit, and worst-case scenarios scurried through her mind, and she knew that, whatever she was hearing, it was terrible somehow. She understood that she would never forget this night, not a single detail, not Connie Booth or the stupid bumper sticker or the ache in Bishop’s voice when he spoke Littlefield’s name, and this understanding sickened her. They were still talking, but she couldn’t make out their words over the pulse whomping in her head. She had no idea how much time had passed before she realized that nobody was saying anything anymore. She peeked around the bumper, but they were gone.

  Then she could feel herself moving closer to Bishop’s door, almost floating, the door drifting nearer until she was so close she could see brushstrokes in the paint. Part of her already regretted what she did not know she was about to do. She knocked, and Bishop opened the door, and at the sight of him, before he’d said a word, before she’d had time to register the pleasantly surprised look on his face, she grabbed his shoulders for leverage and brought her knee up into his balls, dropping him like he’d been shot. He clutched himself with both hands, half in the house, half on the stoop. The sound he made put her in mind of a cold engine failing to start. Pickett trotted over to sniff Bishop’s ear, then the back of Coach Fink’s hand. The video was right there on top of his TV. She stepped over Bishop and crossed the room. “I’m taking this,” she said. Bishop was struggling to his feet, leaning heavily on the jamb, and she kicked him from behind on her way out, her foot wedging itself neatly into his groin, the breath whooshing out of him, his body curling like a question mark on the floor.

  What she should have done was go directly to Briarwood Manor, inform Headmistress Mackey of her suspicions, let somebody more qualified take it from there, but momentum carried her down the hill toward Thornton Hall, the videotape clutched like a discus in her right hand.

  She barged through the double doors and past the students watching TV in the common room, their heads swiveling as she passed, and then up the stairs and down the hall to the room she’d visited once before. There was Demarinis, belly-down in bed, textbook open, but Littlefield’s mattress had been stripped, the walls bare on her side of the room, and Coach Fink had the sense that time was roaring past while she stood still. She heard a buzz from somewhere, the sound growing louder until it became a rattle, like a beetle on its back. A clock on the dresser, the minute flipping into place. She pointed at the empty bed.

  “Where’s Littlefield?”

  “She moved,” Demarinis said. “After Poppy left, she moved in with Melissa Chen. First floor.”

  Back down the stairs then and through the common room and along the first-floor hall, shouldering doors open as she went, but all she met were the blankly astonished faces of girls who were not Littlefield.

  Behind the seventh door she startled a pretty Asian girl folding laundry.

  “Excuse you,” the girl said, bringing a towel up to her chest like she was naked, though Coach Fink could plainly see that she was dressed.

  “Does Littlefield live here?”

  “She’s on the phone,” the girl said, and Coach Fink slammed the door on her way out.

  Past the bathroom, girls with toothpaste at the corners of their mouths poking their heads out to track her progress, and past the bulletin board, flyers promoting The Phantom of Thornton Hall rustling in her wake, all of this imprinting in her memory, overlaying existing memories of a thousand meaningless passages down this hall. In the bright light of the common room it began to dawn on Coach Fink that she was causing a commotion. She forced herself to slow down. Breathe. She rapped three times on the door of the phone closet.

  Through the little window she could see surprise pass like a shadow over Littlefield’s face but no guilt or fear or sorrow, no reflection of what she had overheard, nothing like the wash of emotion still surging in Coach Fink. Littlefield held up a finger for her to wait, then mouthed a few words into the phone, listened for a second, hung up. She stepped into the common room, looking confused.

  “That was my mom,” she said. “She’s coming to the play.”

  Coach Fink could sense the girls on the couches pricking their ears, feel their eyes on her back, could hear dribbles of TV laughter. Littlefield swiped her hair behind her ear. Just then, Coach Fink remembered what she was holding in her hand.

  “You want to watch a video?” she said.

  Coach Fink’s office was tucked away in a back corner of the locker room, the locker room tucked away in a back corner of the gym. The majority of the space, not much to begin with, was taken up by a chain-link cage, in which could be found a decades-long accretion of athletic equipment: mesh bags bulging with basketballs, chipped and battered field hockey sticks, orange plastic cones, old jerseys and shorts, cardboard boxes of athletic wrap and tape, stopwatches, whistles, dozens of pairs of cleats and high-tops her girls had left behind, frayed towels in laundry bags, liniments in crusty tubes, milk crates containing trophies that Coach Fink had neither the space nor the inclination to display, their proud miniature heads and triumphant miniature arms poking into sight above the rims. The accumulated contents of the equipment cage wafted faintly of menthol and wet rags. Coach Fink never bothered to take inventory—if she needed something, it was always in there—but she was confident that a significant portion of the cage’s contents had been around since Delores Udall’s day.

  An ancient metal desk and swivel chair, also formerly Delores Udall’s, were shoved against the wall, and there was a metal folding chair for guests. Coach Fink had spent countless afternoons in that chair as a student, picking Coach Udall’s brain about technique, but she didn’t think Littlefield had ever set foot in the office until tonight, except perhaps to notify Coach Fink that she’d be late to practice for one reason or another, and it was strange to see her in that chair, her eyes focused on the TV, on a trolley in the corner, The Phantom of Thornton Hall flickering on the screen.

  There was something strange as well about watching these familiar actresses, Sissy Spacek and the one whose name escaped Coach Fin
k, their familiar voices speaking those familiar lines on the heels of what Coach Fink had seen and heard this night but still failed to understand, the set on-screen nearly identical to the set onstage in Garvey Auditorium.

  It was this strangeness, all these layers of strangeness, that made it possible, finally, for Coach Fink to speak.

  “I heard you talking to Mr. Bishop.”

  Littlefield tensed—Coach Fink could see it in her shoulders, her neck—but did not look away from the TV.

  “Did Mr. Bishop,” Coach Fink said, and then she stopped. “Did he—did he do something? Something he shouldn’t have? With you?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Are you sure? Because if he did—”

  “You’ve definitely got the wrong idea.”

  “I’m afraid I’m gonna need an explanation,” Coach Fink said.

  The office was dark but for the TV and quiet but for its sound, and Littlefield did not say anything for what seemed to Coach Fink like a very long time, just the dialogue from the play in the air between them, Coach Fink looking at Littlefield, Littlefield intent on The Phantom of Thornton Hall. When she did begin to speak, the details weren’t as awful as Coach Fink had feared, though her disgust with Bishop was undiminished. A part of her wished she hadn’t reacted so violently before she was in possession of the facts, but that part of her was easily convinced to pipe down by the part of her that had had sex with Bishop in a motel room in Rockbridge County while he knew—he knew—that Littlefield was pregnant. That part of her wanted to kick him in the balls again. On-screen, Jenny stood and walked over to the window, and Coach Fink thumbed pause on the remote, freezing Sissy Spacek in her white nightgown.

  “I hate every bit of this,” she said.

  That dense strangeness washed over her again, here in her office with a recently pregnant teenage boarding-school student watching Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of a fictionally pregnant teenage boarding-school student in a play written by a woman who had been a student at the very school where Coach Fink herself had been a student not so long ago.

  There remained a number of details to hash out, decisions to be made, but all that could wait a few more minutes. For now, Coach Fink pressed rewind on the remote, and they watched Sissy Spacek walking backward away from the window and sitting backward on her bed, where she talked backward to Eleanor Bowman’s ghost, her mouth swallowing up the words she’d already said, before Coach Fink pressed play, and the images rolled forward again on-screen. Bishop had been right about one thing. Sissy Spacek was amazing. No matter what her Jenny was talking about, no matter how trivial the subject, isolation and despair were always just beneath the surface. She exuded them somehow. In her tone, her body language. Those feelings crept over you like a chill.

  XX

  The study of history had taught Bishop to expect the worst, so he was not surprised when Valerie summoned him to Headmistress Mackey’s office in the morning. Valerie did not stand when he arrived, nor did she greet him with her customary cheerfulness. She simply buzzed Headmistress Mackey on the intercom and said, “He’s here,” and Bishop was certain that Coach Fink had told them everything.

  He had used the hours after Coach Fink’s ambush to erase himself with booze, feet up on the couch, a bag of frozen peas over his genitals. She must have overheard, misunderstood. Or maybe she’d understood perfectly. He had wanted to chase after her, bang on her door. He had wanted to explain but he couldn’t imagine the words. Eventually he passed out, with a whiskey propped in his lap, the bag of frozen peas keeping it cold. By the time he woke up, the drink had spilled, the peas had melted, and the phone was bleating in the kitchen, Valerie calling bright and early to bid him to his reckoning.

  Headmistress Mackey was waiting in the swivel chair behind her desk, back to Bishop, facing the window. “Sit,” she said, and Bishop did.

  The office was large enough to accommodate a sofa and a coffee table and matching armchairs, built-in bookshelves along one wall, but in Bishop’s experience, Headmistress Mackey only ever conducted business from behind her desk. Two more chairs—uncomfortable, wooden, spindle-backed—were positioned on the desk’s other side, and it was in one of these that he waited, hangover roiling in his hands, his stomach, his eyes, his joints, his scalp. Only her head was visible, her hair almost sculptural from this angle. Finally, Headmistress Mackey swiveled to face him, tossing a section of the Washington Post onto her desk.

  “Have you seen this morning’s editorial page?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “No, ma’am.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Bishop. I weary of speculation regarding traffic problems and insufficient infrastructure and low-wage service-sector jobs. I’m certain that the good people who need those Disney jobs would offer a markedly different take.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I have half a mind to cancel our subscription.”

  She settled back in her chair with an index finger pressed against her lips. He had the idea that she was attempting to read his thoughts, tendrils of her psyche probing his subconscious.

  “It has come to my attention,” she began, but Bishop cut her off before he had a chance to change his mind.

  “I’ll quit,” he said. “I’ll just quit.”

  He’d been considering this possibility ever since he hung up with Valerie Beech. Before that even—he had sensed the notion rising, half formed, from the depths of his inebriation, but it hadn’t quite reached the surface. He’d made a mistake, and he deserved to suffer for it, and no sense delaying the inevitable. But Headmistress Mackey made an exasperated face, fanning his resignation away like a stink.

  “Under other circumstances,” she said, “I might find your eagerness to throw yourself on your sword commendable, but today it strikes me as a waste of resources and entirely unnecessary and more dramatic than I would have expected from you. It’s true that I was—how shall I put it?—justifiably perturbed that you and Coach Fink sought out Eugenia Marsh. I’d hoped our previous conversation would leave a more permanent impression. I’ll admit I was surprised when Valerie told me what she’d heard. I was also a tad impressed. I wouldn’t have believed you had it in you.”

  Bishop opened his mouth. Closed it. His teeth made a clacking sound inside his head, and behind the sound of his teeth, a fog came wisping into his mind. He could almost see it swirling around in there, layering itself between what he heard and his ability to comprehend.

  “Have you talked to Coach Fink?” he said.

  Headmistress Mackey twitched the corners of her mouth into a grin. “I’ve known Patricia Fink for a long time, Mr. Bishop. Her record in the gym and on the field is unimpeachable, but perspicacity is not high among her strengths. Her role in all this is easily chalked up to foolishness. Your role, however, smacks of rebellion.”

  “You brought me here to talk about Eugenia Marsh?” he said.

  “Nothing that happens at this school escapes my attention, Mr. Bishop.”

  He imagined the news traveling across campus like water in a bucket brigade. Coach Fink had told the cast, and one of the cast members had told her roommate, and her roommate had told a teacher, and that teacher told Valerie Beech, who told Headmistress Mackey, who required a word with Bishop to douse the blaze.

  “I brought you here,” she went on, “to inform you that I have decided to second your invitation. Make it official. We’ll celebrate opening night in her honor. We can’t rename the auditorium of course, but I see no reason that we can’t dedicate the stage. The Eugenia Marsh Stage in the Beatrix Garvey Memorial Auditorium.” She tipped her head from side to side, considering. “Inelegant, but it will do. We’ll need permission from the Garvey family and approval from the board, but those things can be arranged. If Ms. Marsh is anything like the unruly girl she was at Briarwood or the batty recluse portrayed by the media, I’m confident that institutional endorsement and public ceremony should be just the combination to ensure she stays away.”<
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  Now she leaned back in her chair, her triumph over him revealed. She let her wrists droop from the armrests. Bishop worried he might be sick. Headmistress Mackey crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt.

  “I refuse to accept your resignation,” she said, “because I’m putting you in charge of the opening-night festivities. I should think that’s punishment enough. I require someone to liaise with the caterer and the florist. The program must be proofed and printed. Valerie has gotten the ball rolling, but she can’t do all the work herself.”

  “I thought—” Bishop said, but the rest of the sentence was lost in the fog.

  Headmistress Mackey finished on his behalf. “You thought Ms. Marsh might stir up enough trouble that I would reconsider our affiliation with Disney. That sound about right, Mr. Bishop? Eugenia Marsh has made her opposition to Disney’s America public. She makes it newsworthy.” This last word she dragged out in a disgusted way.

  Nausea rushed over him like a wave and then receded, leaving Bishop breathless with self-loathing.

  “Let us understand each other, Mr. Bishop. Disney’s check is in the bank. We’ve received a number of additional pledges from prominent alumnae, and I have no intention of disappointing them. I intend to break ground on the computer lab next fall whether Eugenia Marsh attends the play or not. Let her come, let her stir up trouble. She’ll only be making a monkey of herself. Your job is to see to it that Briarwood welcomes her with a celebration befitting the prodigal’s return.”

  She stood and rapped her knuckles on the desk, and Bishop lurched to his feet. He paused at the door, Valerie’s typewriter ticking in the anteroom. In a few more seconds, he would rejoin the steady stream of his life. Teach his classes, walk his dog. The fog churned in his mind like some huge thing was moving through it. Then he opened the door and hurried past Valerie’s desk and down the stairs and ducked into the men’s room on the first floor, where he vomited into the toilet. There was only one. Facilities for men were scarce at an all-girls’ school. When he was finished, he rinsed his mouth and washed his hands and crossed the quad to Everett Hall.