by Dan Josefson
When Tidbit had tired of playing with her cat, she went back to the dorm while her mother left to pick up some Chinese food. Then they went and sat in the garden together, eating noodles and fried rice under the willow by the Ornamental Pond. Talking was never a problem for them. They talked about Tidbit’s grandmother, about the house, about Fatface. Her mother wanted the whole story about getting moved up to Alternative Girls, so Tidbit told her.
“It was like a gift,” she said. “Even when Aubrey moved me, he didn’t say that I’d earned it. But that makes me even more feel like I don’t want to waste it, you know? I really want to make the best of this chance.” Tidbit looked over at her mother, who was leaning back on her elbows, her long legs crossed at the ankles.
Her mother closed her eyes. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how all it takes sometimes is for someone else to really believe in you?” Her head tipped back in the sunlight.
The word “believe,” coming from her mother, gave Tidbit the shivers. When their bikes had been stolen from their garage years ago, her mom had spray painted on their neighbors’ garbage cans, I BELIEVE, because she had been sure one of them had done it. Another time her mom had killed Tidbit’s pet snake because she believed that they should work to love no one but God. Tidbit came home to find her snake cut into pieces, its blood congealed in the sand in the terrarium. At least those are the stories that Tidbit told me.
“It isn’t so much that he even believed in me,” Tidbit said. “I think it’s that he was like ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to deal with this or not,’ and that’s what makes me want to prove to him that I can follow the process. And I have been.”
“How are the other girls in the dorm?”
“They’re kind of mean. Well, no, not mean, they just don’t like me much. I think they resent that they didn’t get a say about me getting into the dorm. But I’m on Reciprocity Detail all day anyway, for slashing the painting, so I don’t see them that much.”
“Like what do you do for that? What kind of work?”
“It changes. I fill up the bird feeders some days and feed the animals on the Farm. About once a week I mop the rooms in the Classroom Building. It’s nice to get to be alone here. That’s one of the good things about Alternative Girls not liking me much. It makes it easier being honest with them in meetings. This way I can just focus on me and what I have to do for myself.”
Her mother nodded. She had heard this from Tidbit before, everyone had, but she didn’t mind. It was nice to hear. Tidbit would figure things out eventually. She herself had no idea anymore what Tidbit needed. Or rather, over the years she had had so many ideas, tried so many things for her that didn’t work, that she no longer trusted any ideas she had.
Only when they were walking back to the Mansion did Tidbit ask her mom what she had been studying lately. Her mother’s religious ambitions had mellowed since their most extreme point, though not to the level of relative normalcy she remembered from when she was little. Her mom was drawn to particularly kooky strands of Judaism. But it was what her mother most enjoyed talking about, so she asked.
Tidbit’s mother had joined a new chavurah, she said, because the old one had gotten too traditional. From what Tidbit could gather, this meant they had acquired a building and were no longer meeting in members’ living rooms. But her mom liked the new one. She was part of a prayer group and was studying kabbalah. She told Tidbit about a favorite new thing she had learned, about a part of the soul called the tselem.
“Well, it’s not part of the soul exactly,” she said, “it’s separate. It’s not the soul and it’s not the body, it’s called the subtle body. It’s kind of like the personality, but not quite that. Tselem is like a sleeve that fits around the soul. If it wasn’t there, the body would be destroyed by the soul’s radiance, which makes such perfect sense if you think about it. I mean, there would have to be something there, right, to keep the body from burning up?”
Tidbit kicked leaves out of her way as they walked. After hugging her good-bye upstairs in Alternative Girls’ dorm, her mother pressed the paper bag of candy into her hand.
Marcy’s respite was coming to an end. Soon parents would be dropping their daughters back off in the dorm, and she would have to defend herself or the school against whatever accusations the girls might have made over the course of the day. If any of the girls or their parents broke any rules she would have to deal with it. She leaned back on the couch and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them, Beverly Hess was standing in front of her in a green gingham dress. Bev and the other girls who hadn’t had any visitors had spent the day quietly in the dorm.
“What is it, Bev?” Marcy asked. It occurred to Marcy that maybe Bev hadn’t been working to get unskirted because she just liked wearing dresses.
“I have a fib I need to turn in.”
“Well, it’s good that you want to turn it in. What did you do?”
Bev looked around to make sure no one else would hear. She whispered, “I licked soap.”
“What?”
“In the shower. This morning. I licked the soap.”
“Well,” Marcy said, “I don’t think there’s a specific rule against that, but it’s not very good for you. If you felt guilty about it, it’s good you turned it in. Why did you lick the soap, hon?”
Again, Bev looked around. She leaned toward Marcy conspiratorially and told her, “It smelled good.”
Left alone, Michelle wandered out of the Cottage and walked around the campus. The sun sat low in the sky, and the dimming light lent everything an edge of speed and harshness. Two young children ran by laughing sharply, out of breath but continuing their game. Michelle found a small piece of blue yarn in the grass, and decided to make a little bouquet to give Laurel before she left. She gathered some witchgrass and scattered buttercups and tied them together. Michelle checked her watch and realized that the hours for visiting were almost up. She took her little bouquet and headed quickly back to the Mansion.
She hurried to New Girls’ dorm. The lounge was crowded with families saying good-bye, and it again took her some time to find Marcy, who was sitting in the hallway talking on the phone. She shook the wildflowers in the air and pointed to Laurel’s room as if to ask, Is that all right?
Marcy shook her head and covered the bottom half of the receiver with her hand. “We’re kind of in crisis mode right now. Bridget’s parents took her back to their motel, and now she’s refusing to come back to campus.” She went back to talking on the phone, but later, when she noticed Michelle still standing there, she took the flowers from her and waved good-bye.
Michelle figured she should find Cynthia rather than go to the party alone. That seemed to be what Aubrey had told her to do. She wandered back in the direction of the Cottage. She found Cynthia standing by her car, wiping her eyes. She laughed when she saw Michelle.
“Those boys,” she said through her tears. “They’re just so sweet.” Cynthia took a dress draped in a plastic dry-cleaning bag from the hook over the backseat. Together she and Michelle walked back to the Mansion.
Zbigniew, Dedrick, and Spencer had all had a quiet day off. They got some Chinese food, rented a movie, and were now going for a walk outside, watching as parents said good-bye and then headed to the Mansion for another one of Aubrey’s parties. The sun had dipped below the line of hills and would soon, when it passed the horizon, spray yellows and pale pinks against the undersides of the clouds.
“Who’s that?” Zbigniew asked as they watched Michelle and Cynthia approach the Mansion.
Spencer shrugged. They watched Jenna and Kelly from Regular Kids carrying a crate of oranges and a crate of limes from the Cafetorium into the Mansion. Behind them, in the parking lot, a young boy of about six or seven was walking bent over, his hands scraping along the ground in front of him. The parking lot was lit at night by two bright lights, one in each corner. The boy had found a large frog, which he was shepherding in the direction of the small woods to the side of the parking lot.
Just pressing the frog forward with his hands cupped, so that it would jump in the right direction. The boy cast two shadows, one from each of the lights, as he moved toward the edge of the parking lot.
“Felix,” a voice called out, but it was impossible to determine from where. “Honey, let’s go.” It was a woman’s voice and called with a lilt.
“Just a minute,” the boy with the frog called back.
“Felix, we’ve got to get Zach back to his dorm. We can’t be late.”
“I’ve just got to free this frog. It’s in the parking lot. It could get smooshed.” He was almost at the edge of the woods.
A deeper voice responded this time. “Felix, it’s my ass if I’m late. Let’s go.”
Felix looked back over his shoulder, then scooped the frog up in his hands. He took one big step and hurled it overhand toward the trees, where it disappeared in the shadows. Felix ran back to his parents.
Spencer was laughing. “Did you see that?” he asked.
Dedrick chuckled. “An existentialist frog,” he said, “condemned to be free.”
Zbigniew added, “His dasein Geworfenheit forever.”
Inside, the sounds of the party had begun.
All this time, I had been back in the Cottage growing more agitated. Aaron encouraged us to have a relaxing evening. Things were always emotional on Parents’ Sunday, especially in dorms with new students, he said. I wondered where he’d gotten that. He’d hardly been at the school six weeks. William got back to his book, sitting sprawled out on one of the couches. Ross and Gary were sitting on the floor, trying to remember as many details as they could about a movie they had both seen before being sent to the school, a horror movie called Pedestrian Crossing. I had the other couch to myself. I sat, alternately crying and writing in my journal. The form my writing took was to hold a pen in my fist and tear through as many pages as I could, scratching back and forth with the pen.
Aaron tried two or three times to talk with me, to get me to calm down. Finally he figured that I would just have to get it out of my system, that I would tire myself out. “At least you’ll sleep well,” Aaron said, “and you’ll wake up much better tomorrow.” Again, I wondered who was feeding him that shit.
It wasn’t until we had been sitting around the dorm for a couple of hours that Aaron noticed that Ross and I, who had both gone outside to spend time with our parents, were still wearing our shoes.
“Everybody up,” he said. “Benjamin and Ross need to put their shoes away.”
“Can’t you let them drift?” William asked. “I’m in the middle of reading.”
“Nope,” Aaron said. “Parents’ Sunday is over. You guys need to be arms’ distance.”
“Shit,” William said. “C’mon.” We all stood and followed him to the back of the living room to put his book on its shelf, then all went to the other end of the room and waited while Aaron unlocked the door to the shoe closet. We walked in and everyone waited as Ross and I untied and took off our shoes.
The shoe closet in the Cottage was a lot bigger than the ones in the dorms in the Mansion, and unlike those, it was used for general storage as well. It stretched back, long and narrow, along the side of the trailer. On its deep wooden shelves were a number of pieces of luggage, an incomplete set of encyclopedias, a pair of stereo speakers, and a bunch of old sports equipment from when Roaring Orchards used to compete against other high schools in the area. It was on these shelves that Aaron had told the boys to leave the tools from that morning’s Reciprocity Detail, the saws and ax.
After putting my shoes next to those of the other New Boys, I looked at the tools laying there on the shelf. I picked up the ax. I didn’t do anything with it at first, just held it in my hands, feeling the weight of it, the smooth wooden handle against my palms. The rest of the boys, when they noticed, took a step away and watched me carefully. I was amazed by the power of simply holding it. There wasn’t any way for them to tell how far I would go. I might put the ax right back and laugh at them for getting scared, or I might swing it at one of them. They hadn’t seen me like that before. They hadn’t seen me let Roaring Orchard’s rules just roll off my back like rain.
I shook the ax back and forth a bit to better test its weight. I nodded at the other boys to take another step back, and they did. I gave the ax a test swing against the wooden shelves that held the sports equipment. I hadn’t swung hard at all, and still the blade embedded itself two inches into the plywood.
“What was that?” Aaron called as the other boys ran out of the closet. “Who’s in there, Benjamin? Benjamin? What are you doing in there?”
I took some wider swings at the shelves. I snapped through one of the posts so that a shelf of encyclopedias collapsed. A few volumes slid to the floor. Aaron had begun yelling, telling me to come out right away. I took a swing against the wall, and the ax put a deep gouge in it. Aaron was threatening to come in, but he sounded scared, and I didn’t think he would. I was surprised to be so confident about that.
There was a power box on one wall of the shoe closet, and I tapped it a few times with the ax. I had a brief thought about getting electrocuted as I took a deep breath, but I swung anyway. Raised the ax and swung hard at the box. Sparks went everywhere, and then I saw I had split the metal cover of the box and mangled whatever was inside. I swung again and once more, Aaron shouting just outside the closet. My last swing killed the lights in the Cottage. I was sure now that no one was coming in after me.
Aaron and my dorm mates asked some questions through the doorway, but I wouldn’t answer. Then I heard Aaron on the phone to the different dorms, asking them to send down whatever extra staff was around. Most of the Regular Kids were unavailable because they were preparing food or serving drinks at Aubrey’s party. Apparently Doris was dealing with Bridget and her family, who were still at their motel. But even when Brenda and Dedrick and Ellie had joined Aaron in the dark Cottage, they had no better idea of how to proceed. No one was willing to come into the closet, not as long as I wouldn’t respond and they couldn’t see me. Brenda and Dedrick thought they should get Aubrey; Ellie thought they should bring my parents down from the party to talk with me. Aaron worried that it was his fault the ax was in the dorm at all. When I heard mention of my parents, I hit the wall a few more times with my ax, hitting something that gave off sparks. I guess I was secretly hoping my parents would find out about what I was doing.
They decided to get Aubrey. “I’ll go,” Aaron said. “It’s my dorm, it’s my fault, I’ll tell him about it.”
“Yeah, but maybe you should stay with them,” Ellie said. “Because it’s your dorm.” They talked about this and decided that Dedrick would go.
The scene at Aubrey’s cocktail parties was always odd. Parents dressed casually for Parents’ Sunday, but many who had been to Aubrey’s parties before had brought a change of clothes. So there was a strange mix. There were new, suspicious parents in barn jackets and jeans, wondering just what it was they were supposed to be doing and how long they were expected to stay. And there were the old hands in formal wear, already tipsy and waiting for the Regular Kids to go to sleep so the party could really begin. Aubrey always opened up the empty rooms in the Mansion to people who didn’t want to drive back to their hotels, and if there were more than would fit in those rooms, the couches in the therapy rooms all converted into beds as well.
Dedrick found Aubrey in the middle of a circle of parents all in suits and dresses. Aubrey had put on a tuxedo. The only one in their circle dressed less formally was the woman he had seen before, with Spencer and Zbigniew, the pretty one they hadn’t recognized. She wore a pink coral pin on her gray sweater. Someone in the circle was telling an elaborate dirty joke, and Dedrick waited in the corner for it to be done. When it was, he approached Aubrey and tapped him on the shoulder. Aubrey turned fiercely and took Dedrick into the hall, reminding him that faculty members were not invited to these parties.
Dedrick explained the situation in the Cottage.
&nb
sp; “And none of you feel you can deal with this?” Aubrey said.
Dedrick shook his head.
“Don’t tell anyone here about this,” Aubrey said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Before leaving, he smiled and told Cynthia that he would be right back and asked her to see to anything his guests needed. He left the Mansion gracefully and then began storming down toward the Cottage. “That goddamn little pissant son of a bitch,” he said as Dedrick jogged next to him to keep up. Aubrey took off his jacket as he walked and tossed it to Dedrick. He began working on his bow tie. “Little fucker,” Aubrey said and muttered under his breath so that all Dedrick could make out was something about anyone having a good time without him. Aubrey only stopped when Dedrick asked if he wanted him to go and tell Benjamin’s parents. “Don’t you dare bother those poor people,” Aubrey said, and resumed walking to the Cottage.
I could sense the small crowd of New Boys and faculty members moving away from the door to the shoe closet when Aubrey arrived. He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, then walked to the open door. He began unbuttoning his shirt. “All right, Benjamin, you little bastard. This game is over in about two minutes. I’m coming in there after you, and if you want to fight, you damn well better be ready to kill me with that ax. Because I’ll tell you right now, I fight dirty. A clean fight simply doesn’t make any sense to me.”
He handed his tuxedo shirt to Ellie and stood at the entrance to the closet in his sleeveless undershirt. My eyes were well used to the dark, and I could see him in detail. He had a solid paunch and flabby arms. Tufts of white hairs sprouted from his shoulders. Then he lurched into the closet, and I let him take the ax from my hands. He pushed me out and, with the ax in one hand, asked, “Is there anybody in this room I can trust with this thing?” He looked directly at Aaron.
“I’ll take this and the other tools to the Mansion basement,” Ellie said, reaching for the ax and finally twisting it from Aubrey’s grip. She gave him his shirt, which he put on and carefully began to button.