Schooling

by Heather McGowan

  YOU KNOW WHO

  Yes, bored.

  GIRL

  I was going to say that we were different then.

  WHO ELSE

  We?

  GIRL

  I mean me, for I never had a friend named Isabelle.

  SICK OF HIM YET

  You chose to leave her, this Isabelle, for you make your own decisions.

  GIRL

  (sadly)

  I have done it to myself.

  YES YES

  I arrived from somewhere else, time passes, they forget you have a different voice. Once I saw you in the corridor on my way to swim, you looked like you were hardly here, I pressed the back of my hand to your face to keep you with us. Say, I am I am I am.

  GIRL

  Take me for a buffoon?

  PARTING LINE MAKE IT A GOOD ONE

  Girl, I won’t take you at all.

  Now it is the next day. Here is our heroine after an uneasy night of sleep, after all she has been confronted with the idea of her own complicity, but let’s not get so trapped in false notions of time, look at this morning, look at this day. April already, crocuses spotted by those who love nature. The girl is leaving breakfast.

  Out steps a TALL BOY.

  GIRL

  They told me you had left for the city. I took you for dead.

  GREDVILLE

  I’m not so easy to kill, I am not a man on a motorcycle, yes that one back in Maine. Admit that you dreamed I would die the night I held you to a tree. Do you think you have that sort of magic, to wish a man gone and là it is so?

  WHARTON’S BACK

  (consults script)

  You’ve been phased out, Gredville. Get thee hence.

  GREDVILLE

  But I’m not really ready to leave yet.

  WHARTON

  You’ve served your purpose, now vamoose.

  Annoyed, the boy crosses to exit.

  WHARTON AGAIN

  Did you see the ghost back there?

  Gredville shakes his head.

  WHARTON

  These absences are intolerable.

  As Gredville goes, a DIFFERENT BOY, one with bastard eyes steps out from a doorway.

  BRICK

  I believe you accentuate your differences in order to draw clear distinction between yourself and us. You are more American here than you ever were in Maine.

  GIRL

  Your round vowels and looped cadence betray Americans well have I known.

  BRICK

  (in a snide aside)

  She has yet to understand we are all one.

  A CROW flies on.

  PUCK

  Words can make wings. Words raise a man out of himself.

  WHARTON

  Wrong play, lad.

  Exit crow.

  BRICK

  When you stood on that hill and the highway, yes I said highway not motorway, rushed beneath you, you knew then, though you would not admit it, that this would be your last chance. Your American hair matted from lying in the leaves with Isabelle. You wanted to keep her. You had to have something, you no longer shared horses. Here was your last chance, you had to make use of it. What would it be? Something grand, something unforgettable.

  GIRL

  It wasn’t like that.

  BRICK

  You want to believe that Isabelle remembers, that she too remains bound by the tire tale. But Isabelle never gave it a second thought. The man, the motorcycle, the hill, the terror, it all disappeared with your flight here.

  WHARTON

  What an American day it is, a year ago, April, mother gone, what have you to lose, why not push heavy objects down down into the innocent. Oh blame the moon for wayward thought, or too much sugar from the cigarettes. Isabelle Isabelle. Moving on to skirts, to real horses, fielding comments regarding her legs, she no longer has use for bridled trees. You need some other way of holding on. Find the tire stashed under leaves, it waits for you. Go on, no innovation this, the wheel, after all. A matter of history. Oh it feels so good, the cool damp rubber, it has the weight you long for. But you would rather fly down that hill yourself. Ah, the tire goes for you, the man burps up and sails like you knew he would if you ever let yourself finish an idea to its logical conclusion. And now. You won’t let it go. You see the tire where it isn’t, coming around corners, in your sleep. It is not there, American girl. Nothing is. Which frightens you more. She’s gone. You left her in America. No tire, not even four, will bring her to you.

  GIRL

  I can see the flamenco dancers kept in her mirror and the way—

  WHARTON

  Oh, enough on this Isabelle already. She botched the auditions.

  GIRL

  Then tell me about my father.

  A BRICK

  You are not the first to compare his hand to a trout. Do you ever think back to a time when all you knew of this country was the word sweets.

  GIRL

  My father. My father. You sat next to me, we leaned against Brinton you told me you feared for me, my shoes. First you said you had nothing on me. Then you looked out to Sophie sailing over the horizon and revealed, Our fathers.

  IAGO

  A common theme, the death of fathers.

  WHARTON

  Gredville!

  Rebuked, the villain scuttles o fstage.

  Wharton throws an arm around the Brick.

  WHARTON

  Watch her turn from you to see the laundry harridans share cigarettes, what a hash they make of it, the trickery, there is art to lighting matches in the wind, an art they do not have, but stay, no matter, look at this girl and her delight in the wind, sun, in the morning cast to the brickwork there, how red it glows. She is not hurried to anywhere, yet you tremble on the balls of your feet, appear ready to flee at any moment. When you do, will you name it she who walks away?

  BRICK

  What do you find so interesting in those biddies?

  GIRL

  Look how they enjoy the wind. Although it feels cold to us out here, to them, after a night by the presses, it must refresh. I lived in America in a town where summer lasted, where children baked in cars as they waited for mothers. We seldom wore shoes even on the hot tar, even riding bicycles—stay, I barely have it. But I remember the library where we watched films. How the seats were six lines of six. Books to be shelved lay piled against the walls. I remember seeing them as I surfaced from worlds of chariots and trenches. The books were talismanic in their ordinariness. You are just a girl in a library, they suggested. Did I think I lived an epic life? Did I think consequences restricted to celluloid?

  HAMLET

  If I may just interject here.

  THE BRICK AND THE GIRL

  No.

  HAMLET

  I had a similar experience myself. Dislocation. Upon my return from a place with the marvelous name of Wittenberg (pronounce that w as a v if you will), I learned of my father’s death at the hand of my uncle. I was home but nothing was the same, for my mother married my father’s murderer, yes my uncle one and the same. Mother indulged her new husband something terrible and began affecting a certain giggle that new brides acquire but really is quite unfortunate in a woman over thirty. Now hold on, there’s a point, I’m getting to it. There I am, back des vacances, Father? Dead. Mother? Giggling. Uncle? Dad.

  BRICK

  Our fathers are quite well.

  HAMLET

  It’s the mothers we have a problem holding on to.

  BRICK

  I have a mother near London. When I went home at break she made me a marzipan cake. In the shape of something, rabbit or train.

  HAMLET

  Oh, well then, shall I kill myself, yes or no. As I was saying in regards to dislocation, to say the least, you can imagine coming home for the holidays and finding not only is your father dead but perhaps your uncle (now dad) had a suspect hand in that translation.

  JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

  I told her I was too old for cakes in shape
s. She said the Ambassador might take us to Denmark as part of his job.

  HAMLET

  Denmark’s so dreary. What about Mexico?

  BRICK

  I thought how much easier it had been in junior school, when I could tell her about sports, she loved my re-creations of important matches, hockey, cricket, tennis. I was on all the teams.

  WHARTON

  (throwing down script)

  I can’t keep up with this.

  GIRL

  You played cricket. I was off the boat, touring. You leaned outside the door to the day scholars’ cloakroom, though to me it was just a door. You wore cricket whites stained with red, I must have wondered had you bled or picked cherries for I did not know then the color of a cricket ball, nor a bowler’s propensity for rubbing it against his his—

  WHARTON

  Pullover? Jumper?

  BRICK

  I developed a hacking cough from cigarettes. I couldn’t run as quickly and subsequently lost my place on the team. Not that I cared. Who would play simply to have subject for a mother?

  GIRL

  You made my father nervous. You stared out from under your hair. You had the eyes of a bastard, cold, hard and black as wells.

  HAMLET

  You spoke to your mother of lessons you had never studied, it was the cover of a book you glanced at in WH Smith’s while you waited for the train. You improvised stories, conceived friends you don’t have, tales your teachers never told you.

  BRICK

  I didn’t want to disappoint.

  HAMLET

  You knew you already had.

  GIRL

  They’ve gone in, the women who smoked in the sun. What I miss most is anticipation.

  HAMLET

  To extrapolate?

  GIRL

  To want.

  BRICK

  I was in a chemist’s shop in autumn. A salesclerk was working there, she had brassy hair and a nature to match. She wanted me to act differently. I couldn’t help her, for it was my nature as a schoolboy to act so, hers as a salesclerk to act là. I followed you, of course I did. I wanted your. Attention.

  WHARTON

  You’re jumping to the conclusion. She has nothing yet to give you.

  Enter OPHELIA, late for breakfast, hair still wet.

  WHARTON

  Oh for God’s sake. You can’t just pop up out of context.

  OPHELIA

  The boy wants your reflection. He watches you take your books from the small wooden locker, notice you are missing one, one you have need of at that very moment. You walk to the rubbish, the radiator, the inkwell, the empty lockers below the window to find where they have stashed it. For, no matter how often you fail or how acutely you display disinterest, you reveal an ugly sort of fascination for your studies. This must be punished. Lo, you find the book underneath an old football bag that’s remained unmoved for weeks. You walk to your desk. You open the lid because you like the smell of wood. There’s nothing inside but pencil shavings. You wait for the Preptaker it’s six oh three. You wait for the Preptaker it’s six oh five. At the sound in the doorway, you turn. You see him watching, how you stare at one another. You will turn first because that is how it has to happen.

  HAMLET

  Wait a minute, there are times I turn first.

  OPHELIA

  You will go to fill your pen more times than necessary. Once you need the blotter, now the ink didn’t take. You have a cartridge pen. Why not use that? What do you think will happen if she sees you shamble past?

  HAMLET

  I don’t expect anything to happen, it’s a force outside myself that propels me. I have no way of stopping it.

  GIRL

  When we returned to London I thought of him again. At night I stitched my A lines into I lines because I saw that is how they are here. My bedroom in London, in the flat I call the plastic flat, looked onto a cobblestone street. I hated that street for its age. I don’t know how to sew, my fingers soon were cramped and pricked. I looked out the window, I stuck my fingers in my mouth for relief. Down the street, a figure huddled against the night. I thought of him then, this boy against the doorjamb. I do not know why, nor how memory works. That night I slept in my jumper, I called it a sweater. I wanted the creases out, wanted it rumpled. That’s how I had seen the others.

  OPHELIA

  If you think on this boy so much, farewell to university.

  Enter FOOL, in his hurried but vague manner.

  FOOL

  We all know you here as the cynical girl, the American girl. We were told you were coming, our men were instructed to watch for you on the cliffs, to report back when they saw your blue and red mast tip the horizon. They said we would be visited by a host of plagues. We knew you would bring this on us. Around you, a boy meets the dangerous city, a girl burns our history to the ground. Clearly these incidents cannot be separated one from the next when you stand at the center.

  HAMLET

  Tell me, girl, why did you think on me that night you sewed?

  FOOL

  Oh now, look you. Such unspeakable acts has this American done. Her brutish manner, her brooding. I know that the memory of her mother may yet be green, yet since her arrival, something rots here. There is a room at Monstead where her deeds unravel. I tell how I find her loping across the hockey pitch, slavering at the zips of older boys. They laugh, I think it less than funny. Pornography runs deep in this one’s veins. I have not yet reported finding les amants surpris, the girl recumbent, provocative, on the balcony of Harrington with our own master of science. But look you, it is not only I who notices her seductive ways.

  GIRL

  I thought only that you stared.

  OPHELIA

  Girl, let your interest in these matters fade. If only we had burned it together, watched the hockey bibs blacken to ash. Remember Maggot, her pinched face handing them out before a game, red or blue. Never to wear bibs again, imagine.

  FOOL

  I tell you when I saw her, a girl that age, burlesquing on fields where our innocent play their hockey, inciting those boys, it unsettled my stomach. If the parents of Hopkins, Trethorn or Stevens witnessed the perversion I endured, our doors would be closed today.

  Enter the MAGGOT, slick body bound in sweaters.

  THE MAGGOT

  It’s the edges that want taking off. There’s some way of breaking her.

  BRICK

  You have already in the shoes she wears.

  THE MAGGOT

  I gated you once with Sophie Marsden. You were on your way to lunch after Cookery, after failing quiche lorraines. Running, you took shelter from the rain under a piece of dirty plastic. The plastic shifted, slopping dirty water over the two of you. Ill met under the arch, I punished you to remind you to behave like ladies.

  OPHELIA

  I hoped it was too late for that.

  THE MAGGOT

  You think I am contrary, rank, maddening. The phlegmatic crone who wishes only to vex her girls. I am plebeian, spinster, dried and unreasonable. No tears, no joy. Certainly, no smile has crossed my face in fourteen years. How odd am I with my gin to be mocked, my underlit flat and overfed fish. Has she ever been found out of antique skirt and cardigan these twenty seasons or off school property? Think you she has a home save our school? And which would make me more abhorrent?

  BRICK

  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

  THE MAGGOT

  On bath night, three weeks or so after you arrived, I came in from doing a turn around the grounds where the night smelled sweet and young. I expected your dorm-mates to provoke, but strangely, they were docile. There was a sense of lightness, was it me or the evening. I was a girl, visiting Marco, seeing a fresco for the first time. In the washroom I checked down the row of baths. A quarter hour later I checked again. I opened your stall, you floated underwater. There in the river, your narrow naked body shivered like a leaf. You did not know
I watched from the door. On the wall, your dressing gown hung, draped from a hook, it was blue and all wrong. Next to the grate, your slippers waited one by the other. Tartan slippers. Tartan. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of fondness and grief. I wanted to rip you from the water, to clutch you against my chest. I wished for words. Words. Which words would fresco our washroom ceiling. None could.

  OPHELIA

  So you closed her door.

  THE MAGGOT

  I said nothing.

  OPHELIA

  Then you betrayed Marco.

  THE MAGGOT

  Yes, yes. That’s right, I did. My god, I always have!

  WHARTON

  Pipe down, Maggot, this isn’t your epiphany.

  THE MAGGOT

  Sorry.

  FOOL

  Tell me girl, your thoughts and wishes, bend they toward France?

  GIRL