by Dan Josefson
“Any gossip in New Boys?” Tidbit asked.
“Not really. William Kay got moved up to Alt Boys.”
“Really? He’ll just get moved back. He’s a complete menace.”
“I know,” I said. The campus was dusted lightly with snow. There were puddles in the tire tracks on the side of the path, lacy with ice at the edges. “Do you think she’ll get far?”
“Who, Laurel? She can go wherever she wants. She’s nineteen.”
“Well, what’s the farthest anyone’s ever gotten?”
Tidbit lurched to catch some of the boxes that began to slide off the pile. “I never got very far,” she said. “But there were these two girls, Kim Henry and Cerelle something or other, who ran away from here once. They were away a couple of days, I guess, and then it was Sunday morning. And they were kind of a mess, but they went to this church over in Bilston. And they gave these people at the church their whole story, about how they’d run away from their school, and they’d been having this horrible time and they wanted to go back and all that but they’d spent all their money. Except they said they’d run away from a school in California and that they’d hitched all the way across the country. And the people at this church actually put together a collection for them and bought them two tickets to California. As far as I know, that’s the farthest.”
“Wow.” I had stopped the wheelbarrow.
“Yeah. But I don’t think anyone could do that again. At least not with that church.”
“What happened to them?”
“Cerelle got brought back here, but she ran again, and I think she ended up in a locked facility in like Wisconsin or someplace. Maybe Minnesota. I don’t know what happened to Kim. Maybe she’s still in California.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah. She was nice.”
On our way to the Dumpster we saw Zbigniew working on the fence to the pigpen. He waved hello. We waved back. Tidbit flipped open the lid of the Dumpster. When she tossed a cardboard box in, one of the campus’s stray cats leaped out. It was a skinny orange thing and bolted into the pigpen. Zbigniew looked up and over at us. The cat disappeared into a pile of hay.
“I miss Fatface,” Tidbit said.
We were quiet as we threw one flattened box after another into the Dumpster. This part was easy and went too fast. I turned the wheelbarrow to head back to the Cafetorium and break down more boxes, but Tidbit put her hand on my arm. “We should ask Zbyszek about where to leave the turpentine.”
For the past couple of days Zbigniew had made us clean the windows of the Classroom Building that New Girls had painted over at the end of the summer. He had given us a couple of rags and an old can of turpentine. We hadn’t been able to get the can closed right so we just left it in his office. Tidbit and I walked over to the pigpen to ask him about it, and he told us to bring him the can. So we headed to his office in the equipment shed to get it.
On the way, I asked Tidbit if she thought she would run away again. She didn’t know. It was difficult to imagine that she would stay at the school until she graduated. But then she said that no, she wasn’t going to run away again. We found the can and walked out, back down the narrow dirt path through a small copse of trees.
“Okay,” Zbigniew said when we got back to the pen. “Leave the can. I’ll take care with it when I finish the gate.”
Tidbit and I leaned against the fence to watch the pig, the goat, and the few chickens. The goat was standing on the pig. That was how they spent their days, the pig lying on its side, the goat standing on it, scaring away the chickens. The goat was small, but its ears were long and hung down past its chin. Its brown coat was long as well, and two pale, thin horns grew out of its head. The pig was pale and very fat.
“We still haven’t named them,” I said.
“They have names,” Tidbit said.
“It doesn’t count if no one remembers what their names are.” We had spoken about this before.
“They might remember,” Tidbit said.
“They don’t remember.”
“What do you want to name them?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could name the pig Napoleon, like in that other book,” Tidbit said.
“No,” I said, “the goat should be Napoleon. He’s small but he always stands on top.”
“Then what do you want to name the pig?”
We were quiet for a moment, as a breeze sifted through the small woods. Then we heard Zbigniew call out slowly, as though enjoying the sound of it, “Elba.”
There was an enormous fire already going in the fireplace as the faculty members wandered alone or in groups into the Great Hall for their weekly meeting. The first people began moving furniture, getting the low round table out of the center of the room, and dragging in mismatched armchairs from the Meditation Room and the Reception Room. When the seats were filled, teachers and dorm parents sat on the floor cross-legged or with their legs stretched out before them, completing the circle. Most had taken off their shoes, which was generally believed to facilitate more honest sharing. The Regular Kids were watching the dorms for the evening. Everyone began to quiet down.
“All right,” Roger said. He was squashed into a corner of the long couch, his right leg crossed over his left knee. “I think Marcy said she wanted to check in tonight, and Aaron. Anyone else?” He looked around. “No one? Okay, who wants to start? Marcy, where are you? Do you want to start?”
“Thanks, Roger.” Marcy settled herself in her chair. It was a black walnut armchair upholstered in light blue tartan. The legs ended in claw feet. “I just wanted to check in tonight to let everyone know how I’m doing. As some of you know”—Marcy smiled at a few faces around the circle that nodded in recognition—“as some of you know, the whole time I’ve worked here, I’ve continued seeing the therapist I was seeing in town before I took this job. I made an arrangement with Aubrey that I would have therapy on campus like everyone else, but I didn’t want to stop seeing my therapist from before. Especially since when I started here Aubrey told me it would never work out, that I wouldn’t last here, I shouldn’t even bother, I’d end up quitting, and so on.” Marcy laughed. “You know Aubrey. So I’ve been seeing two therapists, which hasn’t always been easy.” Marcy laughed yet again and rolled her eyes as if to say that she could tell some stories. She proceeded to tell a story.
Her old therapist had been working with her on learning to love herself. And the easiest way for Marcy to work toward this, he had explained, would be to begin by learning to love her inner child, whom he referred to as Little Marcy. The off-campus therapist even gave her a stuffed animal to represent Little Marcy, a kind of Raggedy Ann doll with brown hair like her own. And this had worked well for a while, Marcy said. She had felt a special type of affection for the doll, and she felt better generally as well. The idea was that if she could feel protective and compassionate toward Little Marcy, then why would adult Marcy deserve any less?
“I know this must all sound a little cuckoo. I mean, not just the doll and Little Marcy business, but I take care of a dorm full of Little Marcys every day! And that’s what I said: I’m very nurturing, especially when it comes to empowering young women. This isn’t something I particularly need to work on. But he was right—I started doing therapy with that doll, and suddenly I started feeling this change. I was so sad, but I was seeing things more clearly, I mean even visually I was noticing details and seeing distinctions more clearly. Honestly, I don’t care if it sounds silly, because it was real and it was important, so I’m willing to risk whatever people might think. And emotionally it was like this great weepy clot in me was dissolving, and I was really feeling everything. I was so sad about how I had treated myself for so long and so excited about doing a better job from now on. Some nights before going to sleep I would just hug Little Marcy and cry.
“And then it stopped. The feeling just disappeared. It wasn’t gradual, it was all at once, and I went back to feeling even worse than I had been before Doc
tor—before my therapist had given me Little Marcy. I didn’t know if it just felt worse because I had a glimpse of how much better I could feel or be or what, but this doll went completely inert to me, I couldn’t muster any sympathy for her or anything.”
Marcy was sitting cross-legged in her armchair. She raised her knees so that she could hug them. “I didn’t know what had happened, so I told Simon, who’s my therapist on campus, the whole story I just told you. And he was, like, really annoyed. Like he was mad that I told him about it or that I hadn’t told him about it till then, I don’t know. But it upset me, and he wouldn’t really talk about it, so I tried to talk about it with my other therapist, and that helped some, but now I’m like spending most my time, with either therapist, talking about the other one. And I don’t know how to get out of it.”
When it was clear to everyone that she was done, other faculty members began gently offering comments or asking questions, carefully avoiding making any suggestions about the problem with the two therapists. For reasons she couldn’t articulate, Marcy became more and more frustrated.
“And this doll,” Marcy said, “Little Marcy. Maybe I didn’t make clear that that’s still really a problem. I mean, I actually find her kind of chilling now. Wherever she is in my room I’m aware of her. I’ll hide her in a drawer or something so I can sleep, but I know she’s there. And I feel guilty, but if I go and try to take better care of her, as soon as I see her I’m disgusted or terrified or I don’t know what.”
Marcy looked out on a roomful of concerned, nodding heads. She was slightly out of breath. Dedrick was writing something down in the little notebook he kept with him. After a few people had said what they could to help, Roger thanked her and suggested they move on. Jodi fed the fire more logs. It’s so strange to think that I’m older now than many of the faculty members were then.
The faculty shifted its attention toward Aaron, who sat in the middle of the long couch with other dorm parents on either side of him. He twisted his hips off the couch to retrieve a folded piece of loose leaf paper from his back pocket. He looked to be enduring a dull, obliterating pain.
“Thanks, Roger, everyone. Okay. I haven’t done this before, and this isn’t easy but. Well, this morning. Whoa.” Aaron took a deep breath and rattled open his piece of paper. For a while he stared at it. “I had a meeting with all the dorm parents this morning and we talked about, I guess a lot of you know that I’ve been having a tough time lately with my job. Feeling overwhelmed. Messing up. And I admitted this morning that I had missed giving my dorm their meds a couple of times, and I hadn’t filled out the med error reports, and we talked about that.”
Aaron looked up upon hearing some hushed reaction but immediately looked back down at his page and continued.
“I wanted to probate myself for it, but we talked about it, and I guess I wasn’t entirely clear about what had happened, and Roger said he thought, or it sounded like to him, that I had fibs. So we decided that I should spend the day writing down my fibs, and I want to read them and probate myself here with all of you to show that I’m really serious about fixing these things and doing a better job. And I want to thank the people who covered my dorm today while I was doing that. So, okay. Well, most of you know that I was the one who was covering New Boys on the Parents’ Sunday when the ax didn’t get put away. I probated myself for that with my dorm staff. But I thought I’d mention it here. And there are the missed meds I was talking about this morning.”
As Aaron tried to be more clear than he had been in the morning about the circumstances under which he failed to administer medications, the rest of the faculty noticed that Aubrey had quietly entered the Great Hall and joined the circle. He stood standing next to Spencer who was sitting in a Windsor armchair with his back to the fire. When Spencer saw Aubrey he stood up and offered his chair. Aubrey nodded and sat down. Only then did Aaron become aware of him.
“No, please don’t stop,” Aubrey said. “I’m just joining the circle. Ignore me.”
So Aaron did his best. He continued hesitantly, “Another fib is that one Saturday when I was covering Alternative Boys during cleanup I had the radio playing in the lounge and I turned it up so the kids could hear it. And then they started asking me to change it or put on this kind of music or that kind, and I did. Another fib I had wasn’t exactly a broken rule but something I’ve felt guilty about. When I was first working here I was talking to Carly Sibbons-Diaz, and she was asking me about what kind of drugs I’d done, and when she asked me if I’d ever done heroin I told her I had, even though I never did. I just thought I’d have more authorit—”
“Enough, enough,” Aubrey said. “Now I remember why I don’t come to these meetings.” He stood up. “Aaron, you poor thing, please, sit down over here by the fire.” He tapped the short, spindled back of the armchair he had just been sitting in. Unsure whether it was some sort of trick, Aaron looked around and walked over and took the seat Aubrey offered. Aubrey motioned for someone to give him a chair facing Aaron.
“Now, I missed how you began. Why on earth is it that you were reading through this litany of nonsense?”
“I’ve been, you know, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes with my job. The responsibilities? And I talked about it with the dorm parents’ group and we decided that if I got clean of all my intimacy blockers before probating myself—”
“Probate, schmobate, you’re a wonderful man. How long have you been working here Aaron?”
“About five months.”
“And in that time everyone here has taught you all the vocabulary, but they haven’t taught you what any of it means, because apparently they have no goddamn idea. To see a fundamentally decent man struggling to do a better job here and then have a roomful of his colleagues sit and watch him flagellate himself … it wouldn’t be any different if you were cutting yourself with a knife and they didn’t do anything to stop it, or if they sat around and watched you put a needle in your arm, because you get the same rush from tearing yourself down, don’t you?”
Aaron didn’t know how to respond.
“Tell me what you’re feeling, Aaron.”
“I, uh, I’m a little confused right now.”
“Good. That’s an honest start.”
“I guess why I’m confused is that I thought that if I turned over all my intimacy blockers then maybe I wouldn’t screw up so much any—”
“My God,” Aubrey said quietly. “He must’ve been a real bastard.”
Aaron nodded, then asked, “Wait, who?”
“Your father. He must’ve been a real bastard. An impossible man to satisfy.”
“I don’t—”
“Aaron, let’s start with something simple. Can you feel the fire behind you?”
“Sure.”
“Tell me about it.”
“About the fire?”
“Yes, do you feel the heat from the fire?”
“Sure.”
“So talk about that for a minute.”
“Well, my back is warm, especially my shoulders.”
“Okay.”
“Because there’s just the wood bars. And the back of my neck, that’s where the heat’s strongest, I guess that’s because my skin’s not protected. I can feel the heat against the backs of my legs, my calves, too. But not as strong.”
“All right, now let’s move to something slightly more abstract. How are you feeling more generally, Aaron?”
Aaron sighed. “I just don’t feel like I’m doing a very good job here, and I don’t know—”
“But, Aaron, that isn’t a feeling. You might be doing a good job, you might not be. Would you like to check that out?”
“How? You mean ask?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“Uh, okay. Do you think I’m doing a good job?”
“No, I just keep you around because every month your parents send me a little of your Bar Mitzvah money.” When Aaron saw that the rest of the faculty members were chuckling, he laughed, too.
“Now, Aaron, let’s move on to that. Tell me how you’re feeling.”
“Well, in general I’m feeling better, but I guess I’m a little upset about what you said about my dad.”
“Very good. Go on.”
For the rest of the meeting, Aubrey continued his demonstration with Aaron. When the meeting was over, everyone put the furniture back where it had been.
There must have been a morning when Roger’s alarm clock buzzed through the silence, when Ellie slapped at it a few times before finally hitting the right button and was left staring up into the dark, her pulse raw and throbbing. Roger rubbed his face against his shoulder and slept. Ellie sat up and pulled the wool blanket around her. It was sickeningly cold. She groped along the cord of the bedside lamp to find the flimsy dial and turn it on. The window gave back to her a paler version of herself.
The windows were bare because window treatments were the school’s responsibility, not Roger’s. More than once now he had explained to her that this had been decided in a meeting with Aubrey and that he, Roger, was waiting for the school to take care of it. Ellie looked at him. He didn’t have to be up for another hour and a half. In the lamplight Roger’s back seemed a perfectly smooth white expanse, like cheese or uncooked dough. His shoulders were lightly dotted with freckles the same ginger color as his hair. Ellie caught herself thinking of something she had read once, that in Japan, ghosts have no feet. She had no idea why she thought of that. She climbed out of bed and gasped at the coldness of the floor against the soles of her own two feet.