by Andrea Lee
Classes were easy for me, but friends were hard. A few years earlier I’d seen a picture of a southern black girl making her way into a school through a jeering crowd of white students, a policeman at her side. Prescott didn’t jeer at me—it had, after all, invited me—but it shut me off socially with a set of almost imperceptible closures and polite rejections. If one waves a hand through a tidal pool, one finds the same kind of minute and instantaneous retreat. The first time I recognized it was in the seventh-grade locker room; I came in to change out of my sneakers and heard a cheerful din of questions and answers: “What are you going to wear?” “My blue!” “My green!” “The pink satin sash!” “The patent pumps from Altman’s!”
“Where is everybody going?” I asked Nan Mason, who had the locker next to mine.
Nan had pinkish hair, pale freckles, and the white eyelashes of a rabbit. I had often pitied her for being so ugly, but now she looked as if she pitied me. “To Friday Evening,” she said, and had the grace to drop her eyes. “The dancing class.”
“Friday Evening?” I asked, but Nan was looking for something in her locker. For several weeks after that I was certain that the mothers who organized the Friday Evening dancing classes for Prescott girls and Newbold Academy boys had simply forgotten to invite me.
Gretchen Manning, my closest friend at school, didn’t attend Friday Evening, either; it was not because she wasn’t invited but because her father, Oswald Manning—famed ban-the-bomb curmudgeon of the Penn history department—thought it was nonsense and refused to pay the fee. Gretchen, whose real name was Margarita, after Bulgakov’s heroine, was tall and plump, with waist-length flat black hair, which she seldom washed, a luminous pink complexion, and a pair of small, sharp hazel eyes. Her uniform tunic, faded and too tight over her expanding breasts, was generally covered with spots of food and of paint from art class and she was lamentably bad at sports. We became friends when we were both assigned to Squad Six, the hockey team for athletic pariahs. In the free-and-easy atmosphere of my former school, I had been considered somewhat of a star of girls’ gym, but at Prescott, on the verge of what was to be a quirky and secretive adolescence, I turned into a willful misfit on the playing field, hungry for glory but unwilling to exert myself. I looked with interest at Gretchen, who made her way down the field with a certain monumental grace but a dead slowness.
“I’m an endomorph,” she announced the first time she sat down next to me on the leaf-strewn grass (we were awaiting our turns at an exercise—dribble, dribble, dribble, pass). “And you’re an ectomorph. That means that no matter what we do we’ll never have muscles like those cows out there. What I’d like to do is to join a harem and do nothing but eat Reese’s Cups and make love with the caliph once in a while.”
“I’d rather join the Navy,” I said.
Gretchen stretched out on the grass, propping herself on one round elbow, and peered at me through an oily fall of hair. “My father knows yours,” she said. “Your father is James Forrest Phillips, the civil-rights minister. My father is very interested in civil rights, and so am I.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I said in a tough, snappish voice I had learned from Dragnet.
Gretchen looked at me admiringly. “Don’t you think it’s rather romantic to be a Negro?” she asked. “I do. A few years ago, when Mama and Daddy used to talk to us about the Freedom Riders in the South, my sister Sarabeth and I spent a whole night up crying because we weren’t Negroes. If I were a Negro, I’d be like a knight and skewer the Ku Klux Klan. My father says Negroes are the tragic figures of America. Isn’t it exciting to be a tragic figure? It’s a kind of destiny!”
For the rest of seventh grade, Gretchen and I made a comic duo: the fat and the lean. We were close with the cranky, stifling closeness possible only to a pair of hyper-educated pre-adolescent misfits. We jockeyed for supremacy in the English class taught by the red-haired Miss Whitaker, fresh from Bryn Mawr, and we determined that Gretchen was the philosopher, I the poet. We wept together over Katherine Mansfield stories and, having studied my mother’s copy of Summerhill, introduced profanity into our conversation so that we could be free children. (“I’m afraid it’s too late,” said Gretchen. “We’re both doomed to frigidity.”) We formed a two-member society of revolutionaries, who sang a backward version of the school song and with private signals indicated which members of the Prescott Athletic Association and Charity League would be executed in the first round of purges. Gretchen despised the school and often condemned it, using what she knew of her father’s Marxist rhetoric. I aped her, but I had a secret: I wanted to fit in, really fit in, and if Lissa Randolph or Kemp Massie, rulers of the Olympian band of suntanned, gold-bangled popular girls, shimmering in their Fair Isle sweaters, had so much as crooked a finger at me, I would have left Gretchen and followed the way the apostles followed Christ. No one knew my secret—not my parents, who bragged with relief about my levelheaded adjustment; not my brother, Matthew, who might have understood. At night I gloated over a vision of myself transformed by some magical agency into a Shetland-clad blonde with a cute blip of a nickname; reading the Sunday paper, I searched out references to Prescott in the society wedding announcements.
It was Gretchen who introduced me to the secret places at the school: the dusty caverns behind the Flemish tapestries in the Assembly Hall; the muddy bank, downstream from the boathouse, where you could find arrowheads; the heap of fieldstone near the crafts barn that was supposed to cover an Underground Railroad tunnel; the basement under Carroll Theater that held the remains of Prescott stage sets from the twenties and thirties.
After lunch one afternoon, we dared each other to climb up to the top floor of the main tower of the Great Lodge—above the dining hall, the two floors of the Middle School classrooms, and the floor where a few lucky senior boarders had suites. There was no reason for us to do this except that the highest floor was off limits to students: Gretchen and I, good revolutionaries, had the ambition to break every rule in the school at least once. Moving fast to avoid Miss Netherlander, the Argus-eyed old woman who patrolled the halls, we climbed the stairs through the floors of classrooms and the pleasant level full of stuffed animals, ruffled curtains, and Beatles posters that the boarders referred to as Cellblock Ten. One flight above this, we found ourselves in a bare-board corridor where air and light seemed to have been excluded as needless luxuries; there was something mean and meager in the look of the unlit electric bulbs over our heads. We moved cautiously along, peering at narrow doors with numbers on them, until we came to a door that opened onto a room the size of a closet. The room had stained green walls, a small, barred window that seemed grudgingly to allow a view of the back courtyard, a tiny radio on the windowsill, and a black woman seated on the bed.
I was stung by three separate shocks: the deadly bleakness of the room; the fact that people lived on this floor; the fact that contiguous to the bright, prosperous outer life of the school was another existence, a dark mirror image, which, like the other world in a Grimm’s tale, was only a few steps off the path of daily routine. I recognized the woman as one of the maids who cleaned the rooms of the boarding students; in a second, she looked up and saw us, the strands of her straightened hair standing out a little wildly around her head, an indecipherable expression in her eyes. Another door opened and another black face looked out. Gretchen and I took to our heels, plunging down the stairs as if we’d just seen a crime.
Gretchen was indignant about the conditions on the top floor of the Lodge, but I tried to forget what we’d seen. Thinking about the black people who worked at the school made me uncomfortable; I didn’t know what to feel about them. I put the incident out of my mind, but after that the school reminded me of a print my brother had hanging in his room: it showed a flock of white geese flying on a strong diagonal against a dark sky—except if you looked at it another way it was a flock of dark geese heading in the opposite direction. You couldn’t look at the poster and see both without a spinning feelin
g in your head.
The following September, in eighth-grade English, we dissected Macbeth, and Gretchen and I were stagestruck. We bombarded each other with soliloquies each morning when we met on the train to school, and studied from afar the gestures of Miss Wold, the drama teacher, who, with her fluttering Pre-Raphaelite hair and clothes made of murky, nubby fabrics, was the closest thing to a bohemian Prescott could boast. Gretchen and I determined to try out for the Middle School play, which that fall was the Kaufman-Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You. Gretchen, who had lost weight over the summer, had set her heart on being Grandpa Vanderhof, and she convinced me that I, with my spidery legs, ballet training, and hysterical laugh, would be perfect for the pixieish dancing daughter, Essie. It is curious that I never questioned the idea. I read for the part on the dusty stage of Carroll Theater and felt something like electricity racing through my body and voice; I drew huge, controlled breaths of excitement, and afterward there was quite a lot of applause from the other girls waiting to audition. Mimsy Davis, a tall, drawling girl whom I admired desperately because she was head of the Middle School Players, came up to me and said, “You know, you were really good!”
I went home that afternoon with a pounding heart and the wild surmise that the gates of paradise were suddenly going to open for me. When the cast list went up the next week, Gretchen, who had auditioned splendidly, did not have a part, but I did: I was to be Rheba. Who was Rheba? Somehow, neither Gretchen nor I could recall her. I leafed through the play and read aloud, “(From the kitchen comes a colored maid named Rheba—a very black girl somewhere in her thirties. She carries a white tablecloth and presently starts to spread it over the table.)”
Gretchen snatched the play from me, looked at it, and then threw it on the floor, startling a group of Lower School girls, who stared pertly at us as they trotted by on their way to the playground.
“Pigs!” said Gretchen in a trembling voice as I retrieved the book. She had an operatic way of wringing her plump hands when she was excited or upset. “You’re not going to play that part, are you?”
“Of course I’m not,” I said. I had to dig my knuckles into my mouth to control a fit of giggling that had seized me; it was laughter that burned my insides like vinegar, and it felt different from any way I had ever laughed before.
That afternoon, throughout Mme. Drouot’s eighth-period French class, I was seized by involuntary recurrences of those giggles, so that Madame was cross, and my classmates looked at me strangely—but they had always looked at me strangely.
After that, life at Prescott was easier for me. It was simply, as Matthew remarked when I told him about the play, a matter of knowing where you stood. (I declined the part of Rheba without mentioning the matter to my parents, reasoning, quite rightly, that they would make a fuss.) I had settled into being twelve, and the new way I had learned to laugh seemed to bring me closer to growing up than the small breasts that had appeared with such fascinating suddenness on my chest. In the weeks that followed the casting announcement, when Gretchen and I walked by the cook who waved to us I didn’t return his greeting as Gretchen did, but I looked seriously at him, as if he had something to teach me. Over his head, through the yellowing foliage of the chestnut trees, rose the brick towers of the Lodge. As girls’ voices floated faintly from the tennis courts and playing fields, I would look up past the top floor and imagine dark geese making a pattern on the sky.
Matthew
and Martha
One Sunday there were six of us sitting around the dining-room table: Daddy, Mama, Matthew, Cousin Polly, Martha Greenfield, and me. We were eating one of the extravagant meals my mother could produce in fits of joy or pique, and because it was a warm spring afternoon we were drinking ice water from the crystal goblets that had belonged to Grandma Phillips. When I was very small, I had liked to tap the thin scrolled edges of those glasses gently and secretly between my teeth as I drank; the feel of the hard, impossibly delicate crystal seemed to me the feeling of everything fragile and elegant in the world. Once at Thanksgiving dinner, however, I had bitten down too hard and ended up with a mouthful of blood and glass that earned me a trip to the emergency ward and a stitch in the tongue. After that, nothing that happened at a family dinner could surprise me.
“Will you have another roll?” said Mama to Martha Greenfield. She had a way of looking past Martha when she addressed her, as if the actual person she was speaking to were standing six feet farther away.
“No, thank you,” said Martha. “They were delicious.”
“She eats nothing!” remarked my mother to the table at large, and Matthew flushed angrily. He opened his mouth to say something, but Martha Greenfield intercepted him, leaning forward with a smile that won no answer on my mother’s face.
“Oh, Mrs. Phillips, you mustn’t think that I don’t love your food. I’ve already had two helpings of everything, and I’m afraid a third might be fatal—I might eat four or even five! Matt can tell you that at school I can really make a pig of myself. Isn’t that right, Matt?”
“It all goes to your legs, and I hate fat legs,” said Matthew, scowling possessively at her across the table. “If you’re not careful, young woman, I’ll put you on a diet!”
Martha Greenfield made a little moue in Matthew’s direction, and I thought, oh, to look like that. She would never need to go on a diet: she was small and slight with a fascinating swiftness to her movements; a fierce vitality gave beauty to her thin face, where the features, taken separately, were a little too strong, too large. Her hair was chestnut-colored and her eyebrows were black, and when she came to visit us, she wore wonderful patterned stockings, bright-colored Italian shoes, and dresses with skirts much shorter than those worn in Philadelphia in the late sixties. She was from New York and, like Matthew, was a freshman at Swarthmore.
At the table she was seated with her back to a buffet that held an elaborate silver tea set. The set had been given to my father by the congregation of the New African Baptist Church to mark his tenth anniversary as minister; above it hung an enormous and hideous painting done in the twenties by an aunt of Daddy’s, who had claimed to be one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance. The painting had a massive, faded gilt frame and depicted two French dolls—a black pickaninny and a white lady of fashion—lolling loose-jointedly against each other on a velvet stool. The effect was Gothic; Matthew had long ago named the picture “The Coon and the Courtesan,” and its somber presence had dominated the striped wallpaper of the dining room for as long as I could remember. Sitting in front of it in a short tuniclike spring dress printed with orange flowers, Martha Greenfield looked as if she belonged to a different universe.
“What did you kids do this afternoon?” asked my father, helping himself to more baked squash. Mama had provided a surfeit of vegetables, as if she wanted us all to die of apoplexy: besides the squash there were string beans, collard greens, asparagus, eggplant casserole, pickled cucumbers, and sweet potatoes.
“They didn’t go to church, that’s certain,” mumbled Cousin Polly, her mouth full of cucumber, which she was chewing cautiously. Cousin Polly was an ancient, opinionated, and nearly blind cousin of my mother’s, who came to Sunday dinner every week.
Matthew looked over at me and made the grimace with his mouth that in our private childhood language meant “Adults are idiots” or “Let’s get out of here” and usually signified both. I grimaced back at him, trying not to worship him too much. Since going away to college last fall he had changed from a round-cheeked kid who looked about twelve to a tall, bony young man with a mass of frizzy curls tumbling over his high forehead and a handsome thin face that was alternately tense and vibrant.
“Martha and I went with Sarah down to the art museum,” said Matthew in a patient voice. “There was a free concert down on the parkway.”
“A rock-and-roll concert?” asked Daddy, his little dark eyes gleaming with earnest interest. I had to admit that on these difficult weekends when Matthew brought Martha h
ome, he really did try to make things pleasant. “Did you have a good time, Sair?”
“Yeah, it was great,” I said. Actually it had been a sort of misery for me to be there, a skinny overgrown fourteen-year-old among all the hippies and the dashing revolutionary types, and the loving couples kissing and smoking dope to the strains of electric guitars. I had tagged behind Matthew and Martha, who had strolled along talking earnestly about Vietnam, and about their plans to work for a black-voter-registration campaign that summer in Mississippi. They’d constantly been pointing out other interracial couples, laughing smugly, as if they all belonged to a sophisticated club. Later we’d walked down the river, past the faded pink neoclassical buildings that had been the old Philadelphia waterworks and aquarium, under the budding sycamores, to a little pillared pavilion, where Matthew had grabbed Martha and said, “Hello, beautiful!” and my heart had ached with jealousy and with the shame of being fourteen and so ungainly that no one would ever love me.
“I don’t like the music they play these days,” said Mama.
“I agree with you, Grace,” said Cousin Polly. “It’s just a hooting and a carrying-on!”
“Did you visit the museum?” Daddy asked Martha.
“Unfortunately not,” said Martha. “Matt dragged me away just as I was about to dash in to see the Gauguin murals.”
“Well, I brought you to dinner here,” said Matthew. “This is a kind of museum.”
“That’s a nice thing to say about your own home,” said Mama.
“It’s true,” said Matthew.