The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  Ruth sat on the edge of the desk and glanced at the report again. “It’s my fault anyway. I should never have let this happen.”

  But this absolution was no more welcome. “How is it exactly that you made it happen?”

  “You need a tutor, Audrey. We’ll get someone really great. Please agree.” Ruth leaned forward and kissed Audrey on the head just as footsteps sounded out in the hall. Ruth and Audrey looked up tensely and saw Henry Winter approaching at a leisurely amble. As he continued around the corner, he gave them a little nod.

  When he was out of sight, Ruth handed the report card back to Audrey. Then she stood, and as she pulled on her own coat, she gave Audrey an impatient shove in the direction of the door. “Look, you should go. The last thing you need now is to be late for Larissa.”

  IN THE OFFICE, AUDREY waited for ten minutes before Larissa McAllister was ready to see her. Ms. Moss sat at her desk, alternately typing and filing papers. In what seemed an ostentatious show of avoidance, she scarcely acknowledged Audrey’s presence. No sounds emerged from within the chamber, but when the door finally opened, a grade seven girl exited, looking red-eyed and chastened.

  In stately silence, Ms. McAllister ushered Audrey inside and gestured for her to sit in the ladder-backed chair. For some moments, she relished the hush her office produced. The last of the day’s sunlight poured in through her pristine windows, slanting across her tidy desk. Audrey had last been in this room for her entrance interview, and she was no more at home now than she had been then. Still, this was the room in which all her deficiencies were brought to unsparing analysis. Still, this was the room in which her most graceless self came tripping out into the spotlight.

  “I have always been loath to make exceptions,” Larissa McAllister said at last. “Second-guessing is for the halting mind. In life, as in an examination, my approach is confident. Never have I changed an answer on a test paper.”

  Audrey studied her hands, waiting for more.

  “I was not,” she continued, “under the impression that you would be one of our star pupils. Our entrance examinations serve the very important purpose of helping us to assess a potential student’s intellectual promise. Your results on these tests were telling. And I fear that I predicted you and I would end up exactly here.”

  She primly adjusted her glasses and leaned forward, hands folded, a pose that might have seemed confiding had it not been for the sparkling hostility in her face. Audrey’s own face burned. Larissa gently tapped the tiny gold cross that lay just below her jutting collarbone, as if calling on divine sustenance.

  “In what has been proven to be a regrettable error,” she said, “I set aside my own sizeable misgivings because of your mother. She had high hopes for you.”

  Audrey noted the past tense.

  In spite of Ms. McAllister’s repeated allusions to her displeasure, there was nothing in her demeanour to suggest upset. On the contrary, exhilaration coursed visibly through her. Her face was bright and hard, her dry cheeks flushed. The battle against academic apathy was a terrifying one, she declared. They were in the trenches, all of them, fighting for a mandate on which the whole world seemed to depend. And could there be a more critical mission? Could there be a nobler cause? Audrey knew that her desolation must only remind Ms. McAllister of the passionless masses, that it must make her angrier, hungrier, but she couldn’t speak. She had no self-defence.

  “I’m sure you realize that your mother’s position as a teacher makes your results even more distressing,” continued Ms. McAllister. “Do you understand how badly it reflects on George Eliot Academy for the daughter of a teacher to produce such substandard results? Have you anything to say for yourself?”

  “I’m going to get a tutor,” Audrey answered. “I know I should do better.”

  “It goes without saying that you should do better. The question, I suppose, is whether you can do better.” Here she swung her chair around to face the window, leaving Audrey to stare at its tall leather back. After a moment, she circled back to Audrey, her hands folded in her lap in a prayer pose. “Tell me. Why did you want to come to George Eliot?”

  Audrey considered this question. In truth, she no longer knew why she had wanted to come to George Eliot. It had something to do with a memory she scarcely understood. A floating red balloon wending its way over the clock tower of Devon Hall, that murmur of magic in the place. From earliest childhood, her desire for Eliot had an inevitability she never thought to probe. She had championed Eliot’s progressive feminist agenda. She had trained for the entrance exams and engaged in practice interview sessions with Ruth. She had visited the school and roamed its wide corridors in aspirational wonder. Never had it occurred to her to analyze why she might want to go there, any more than she could now explain why she wanted to stay there. Before that final round of entrance exams, trudging to tutoring every day after school, she had never considered opposing her mother’s wishes, so indistinguishable from her own. Even now, as daily life involved no satisfaction greater than mere survival, the Eliot dream was not an easy one to relinquish.

  “It’s the best school there is,” Audrey said feebly.

  “Indeed,” replied Ms. McAllister. “The question now is what will you do to be the best you can be?” She rose from her chair and crossed to the door. “You have much fodder for thought. Introspection is to be the order of the day.”

  As Ms. McAllister opened the door, Audrey saw Kelly Stiles, a grade twelve who had reputedly once been paid a hundred dollars by a UCC boy for a blow job, waiting her turn, looking pre-emptively chastised. Ms. McAllister gripped Audrey’s upper arm firmly with her bony hand and said, “Per studia mens nova.”

  Out of the burnished library light of the office, Audrey shrank in the exposure of the wide corridor. Head down, she hurried to her classroom. All she wanted was to get out of the building. She felt watched, overheard. There seemed no privacy to her failure. Surely everyone knew. A stronger person, she thought, would have been motivated, determined to prove herself, but all she felt was a sinking inside. She wanted to cry, not so much in embarrassment as in regret. If only she had refused to take that last entrance test. If only she had summoned all her strength, corralled every rebellious impulse she had never acted on, for just one moment, a millisecond, really, to say no. How could she have neglected to foresee this mess? In a haze of humiliation, she made straight for her desk and began throwing binders and pencils into her bag.

  She became aware of the sound of quiet music only after it stopped. Looking up, she saw Seeta lounging in a window seat, strumming her guitar.

  “Hey,” Seeta said, jumping down. “Just practising a new tune for tomorrow.”

  Audrey returned a thin smile.

  Seeta set her guitar down and let out a sigh heavy with the troubles of the world. “So, I’m glad you’re here, actually. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  The first thought that entered Audrey’s mind was that Seeta was going to make a direct plea for friendship. Maybe invite her to her house. Audrey was stricken with panic at the prospect of this confrontation. She could bear going on as they were, but the thought of formalizing their association, intensifying it, making a public declaration of sorts, was unthinkable.

  “This is difficult,” Seeta said, sighing again. “Look, yesterday, we had that math test. I think you know where I’m going with this. I thought of telling Mr. Marostica, but that didn’t seem like the honourable thing to do if we could sort it out ourselves.”

  Audrey looked at her in confusion.

  “Are you going to pretend you don’t know what I’m saying?” Seeta asked.

  The hesitance in Seeta’s face was retreating and in its place grew something harder and more formed. Audrey searched her mind for a clue. “There’s no pretending. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “The math test,” Seeta said emphatically.

&nb
sp; “The math test?”

  “You cheated. You were looking at my paper. I saw you. If you’re going to deny it, I might as well just tell Mr. Marostica.”

  Audrey was astounded. She and Seeta sat in the front row, right under Mr. Marostica’s nose, and even if it had occurred to her to cheat, she would never have dared.

  “I didn’t cheat,” Audrey said. “I didn’t look at your test.”

  “I saw you.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “I see your marks when you get tests back,” Seeta said. “I know you need help. I saw your report card, no matter how you tried to hide it.”

  “My report card is none of your business!” Audrey exclaimed.

  “It is if you’re cheating off me.”

  Audrey turned her back and Seeta came around so that they were again standing face to face. “I have rights here!” Seeta said. “My work is private, and just because I got stuck sitting next to someone who can’t calculate the value of x doesn’t mean I should pay—”

  “Just fuck off, would you?” Audrey burst out.

  Seeta blinked at Audrey as though she had never before heard the word fuck. She looked almost dizzy with shock, her eyes wandering, her face washed of all expression. For a second, she teetered on the spot, then lurched forward, grabbed her guitar, and fled from the room. Audrey sat at her desk and pressed her forehead with the heels of her hands. Now Seeta would tell on her. Swearing was an infraction that incurred demerits, but given her academic performance, the punishment might be worse. Detention? Such a penalty seemed so crude. Did detention even exist at Eliot?

  She sat in worried silence for some minutes, half-expecting a teacher to thunder through the door any second. Finally, she gathered her things and made her exit into the early evening.

  This was how so many days ended now, in an orchid dusk whose descent she had scarcely noticed. The streetlights had come on in the quiet avenue beyond the tall Eliot gate, and it was there that she wanted to be, on the roads that streamed in every direction away from here. For the first time in her remembered life, she longed to be on the other side of the enclave. But it was the ultimate escape she desired, not just a departure, but a purging: her mind capsized, emptied of all its knowledge of the place. She couldn’t leave, though, not now. It was too late.

  A few girls milled around on the front steps, waiting for late rides, but no one noticed her. No one said goodbye. Down the long driveway she started, under the spartan coverage of the winter-ready trees. She walked quickly, paying little attention to the dirty black SUV pulling up alongside her. On its passenger side door, someone had traced “XOXO” in the thick dust, and when it screeched to a stop, the rear window opened. Low hoots and soprano shrieks of male and female laughter flooded the air like a gale of smoke. Audrey looked up to find Arabella sitting in the back, packed in tightly with five other people.

  “Yo, yo!” called out a Crescent boy in a mocking tone.

  Whitney was sitting on a boy’s lap, nuzzling his neck, at the far end of the back seat.

  “The walk of shame?” Arabella said with an imperious lack of sympathy.

  “I guess,” Audrey replied.

  “Larissa’s probably up there smoking a cigarette as we speak.”

  Audrey forced a little laugh. For a second, she wondered if they were going to offer her a ride, but then the driver revved the engine, and Arabella let her hand flop out of the window in a throwaway wave. “Well, ta-ta!” she cried. The window rose, and she became again an unidentifiable silhouette behind the tinted glass. A spurt of exhaust clouded the air, and the SUV was off, speeding towards the front gate and screeching out onto the road, leaving too much silence in its wake.

  Chapter Nine

  RUTH OFTEN HAD FLASHES where she felt that she had been transported to an alternate reality. She would tune out for no more than seconds, and when she returned to herself, everything looked just a little different, in no way clear enough to articulate. She might be sitting at a red light, the stream of pedestrians drawing her into a meaningless daze, a welcome moment of emptiness, and when her senses reawakened, there was a film between her and the world. It was as though she had been hit by a temporary, mild myopia. The trees and the sky seemed to have withdrawn slightly, and all the objects in her vision were vaguely hazy. Her sense of unreality was so strong that she would wonder if something terrible had happened, if she had been catapulted out of the known world and was suspended in some liminal psychic space, that maybe she was not sitting, as it seemed, at the red light, watching all the pedestrians walk past, that in fact she had ploughed straight through them all and simply didn’t know it yet, that she was caught in a chasm between before and after and it would take some time for her mind to catch up to what her body already knew. She’d had such flashes often when Audrey was a baby. She would be walking down the stairs, baby in her arms, and her sleeve would catch the top of the banister, or she would lose her footing and almost trip, and when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she would wonder if she really had fallen, if now in reality she was screaming over the broken body of her baby while her mind remained in the protective realm of what was supposed to be.

  So did she feel as she walked into George Eliot the morning after Henry came to her in the staff room. Nothing looked quite as she remembered it, and nothing looked altered. She could see the school from the road, through the newly leafless trees. In every definable way Eliot looked as it always had, but the clear day allowed the sun to fall unobstructed across the buildings in such a way that she felt alert to them for the first time in years. There was an unworldly precision to the buildings’ outlines that gave her the sense of a sophisticated film set, as though she were looking at mere façades that would topple in a strong wind.

  All day she had seemed to be on the verge of seeing him. She looked for his little Saab in the parking lot when she arrived and didn’t see it, but minutes after she settled in her classroom, she heard his voice in the hallway. On Wednesday mornings, Junior and Senior school assemblies were separate, and when her class was filing into the gym, she saw the back of his head as he ushered the grade elevens out the side door to the chapel. She was irritated that each time they nearly collided, it was she who had heard him, she who had seen him, while to him she remained unobserved.

  The night of the kiss she had not slept. She had lain in bed on her back, eyes closed. She was not exactly replaying the kiss, for she could not have replayed the scene even with great effort—she was living, still, too much inside it to confer on it such objective study. It reverberated inside her with its obscure sensory power, and she relived it as miniature explosions in her consciousness. Now and then, a punctuating snore from Richard startled her out of her reverie, but when all was quiet again, she resettled in the absorbing private regions of her mind.

  In the pale grey clarity of the morning, however, she found that she was no longer able to summon the sensations of Henry Winter’s insistent lips, his long fingers on her skin, the aftertaste of apple in his mouth. The more she thought about the kiss, the more she was taken away from a conviction in its reality—the less plausibly it seemed to be anything but a construct of her hyperactively wishful mind. It could not have been Henry Winter—Henry Winter, who had coolly informed Larissa McAllister in front of a staff room full of teachers that he preferred not to overuse the word brilliant when she had just applied it to an award-winning grade twelve English essay—it could not have been that man who embraced her with such crushing warmth. His advance on her conflicted with every impression she’d ever had of him. The change was incomprehensible and destabilizing.

  And then there were her lies to Richard. As soon as she got home, before he could notice its absence on his own, she told him that her wedding ring had rolled down a sewer. She described, without suspiciously excessive detail, how she had placed the ring on the hood of her car while she applied hand cream, then acc
identally knocked it off when she reached for it, how it had rolled neatly, as if along a track, and then through the grate before she knew what was happening. The story made very little sense, but Richard wasn’t prone to doubt and analysis. The earrings and the necklace he would never even notice.

  The reason she had lied to him about the mugging was not particularly clear to her. It had something to do with the attention he would heap on her if she told him the truth. She didn’t want the plans and solutions and rehashing, the concerned awe, the husbandly indignation and the overprotection that might follow, the whispery comfort he would offer in bed. She just wanted to be left alone with her thoughts of Henry. Richard had given her a short lecture about carelessness, while she sat at the table with her head bowed, not listening to a word, and then he left her alone because he was irritated. He thought she was quiet because she felt guilty about losing the ring.

  But she felt guilty about nothing.

  She was as aware of guilt as she might be of any obligation that was a drag. The unwashed dishes piled in the kitchen sink when all she wanted was to sit down with a book. The plate of broccoli, the snow needing to be shovelled, the yard full of dog shit. Her compassion for Richard and her marriage was crowded out by her desire to see Henry again. Guilt was nothing more than a principle, honourable and valid in the abstract but sterile and useless in application to her specific needs.

  On the day of Henry’s and her shared break, she nearly avoided going to the staff room because she didn’t want to appear to be seeking him out. The prospect that he would apologize terrified her. If he showed remorse, if he were cautious with her, she didn’t think she could bear it.

  He entered while she was preparing a cup of coffee, and when she heard him laugh at a remark made by Michael Curtis, she became so agitated that she upset her mug on Lorna’s loaf of gluten-free bread. Muttering to no particular audience that she’d forgotten something in her classroom, she mopped up her mess and made a bashful exit.