The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  Ms. McAllister frowned and held up her hand. “I must stop you here, for I can’t comprehend the purpose of this vile charade. If there’s one way to redeem oneself, it’s through honesty and repentance. Evasion is an extension of the original sin. To commit such an inexcusable offence is bad enough. But to show no desire, no ability, for atonement is quite unthinkable.”

  It was at this point that Audrey realized they weren’t talking about the same thing. Dizziness washed over her, a nostalgia that was avoidant but entirely without comfort; every ounce of her wanted to return to a time, even just seconds before, when she had considered bad marks a problem of any magnitude. It didn’t occur to her to wish for the chance to do everything differently, but simply to revisit the hour when she didn’t know the outcome would be this: the restoration not of innocence, but of ignorance. She felt her face crumpling. “I don’t—”

  “Enough. Do you truly propose to deny the charges against you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her quivering voice allowed her no dignity and was a reasonable enough indication of guilt.

  “Dr. Winter caught you in the act you now mean to disown. Caught you red-handed at your victim’s locker.”

  Audrey fought the insight threatening to submerge her.

  “Ah. Now we’re getting to it.” Smiling spitefully, Ms. McAllister exited her chair and began to pace stiffly in front of the bookcases. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Audrey muttered a hushed no. Even this single, inadequate word took considerable effort to get out.

  In the middle of Ms. McAllister’s desk was the remainder of a reheated Lean Cuisine lasagne, sitting in its plastic dish on top of a chipped white plate, emitting a powerful smell of tomato sauce and cheese. Nausea swelled inside Audrey. Ms. McAllister was standing to the side and just slightly behind her, so that Audrey could feel, but not see, Ms. McAllister staring at her. She turned, compelled to witness the loathing she would find there. Ms. McAllister’s lips were pursed and the studied restraint in her face had been replaced not by simple antipathy, but by triumph. She seemed not merely satisfied to have caught the culprit, but pleased at the outcome, at locating the trouble in Audrey, about whom she had always had doubts. There was a resurgent gleam in her eyes, a twitching at the corner of her lips that suggested a smile suppressed. She was vindicated: Audrey’s crime was proof not of the failure of her instincts, but their success, her distaste for the girl evidence not of pettiness, the random targeting of snobbery, but of her powerful insight. The exams, the interview—the meticulously erected structures of assessment—were proven effective, Audrey’s multiple failures clear warning signs that she did not heed for one reason only.

  A quiet knock came at the door.

  “Enter,” called Ms. McAllister.

  In the doorway stood Ruth.

  “Oh!” she said, spotting Audrey.

  “Take a seat, Ruth.”

  Ruth obeyed swiftly and solemnly, as though already under the weight of punishment. She looked at Audrey searchingly, but Audrey refused connection.

  “It is my unfortunate and unusual burden to call you here today,” Ms. McAllister said. “I won’t waste time on preamble. The culprit has been identified in the recent crimes that have victimized our school. She sits before you.”

  Ruth’s face was as blank as if nothing had been said. Audrey dared to look at her mother, but saw no cascading recognition, no identifiable emotion. Ms. McAllister seemed content to witness Ruth’s immobility. Firmly rooted, she made no movement, even as the phone on her desk rang.

  In the jarring silence that followed, Ruth finally awoke. “No,” she said, a laugh skirting the edges of her tone, as though a joke had been made that she didn’t quite get.

  Ms. McAllister was visibly annoyed. “Did I ask a question?”

  “No, it’s just…Audrey? No. She can’t have.”

  “I’m afraid she did.”

  “It’s totally unlike her.”

  “I don’t doubt that your maternal bias prevents you from being able to accept this news with equanimity. However, accept it you must.”

  Now Ruth appeared to have altogether forgotten Audrey’s presence. A strength was gathering in her body. She raised her eyes from the large mole on Larissa’s right knee, visible through her tan pantyhose, to her expectant face. Ruth’s voice was tight. “I won’t accept any such thing. Not until you give me good reason.”

  “Mom, I—”

  Ruth put out a hand to silence her daughter. “Larissa, I’m—”

  “Ms. Brindle, don’t forget yourself.”

  Ruth smiled angrily. “I’m quite certain there’s some sort of explanation here for whatever conclusion you’ve drawn. Ms. McAllister.”

  “This isn’t about any conclusion I’ve drawn. Audrey was caught red-handed in the act.”

  “You must be confused.”

  “Dr. Winter witnessed the atrocity himself.”

  Ruth’s eyes cast around confusedly, as though scrambling to spot an alternative. “Henry?” she said.

  “I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s as reliable a witness as can be.”

  “Henry.” Ruth nodded slowly.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so personally attacked by misbehaviour,” Ms. McAllister said. “For months, Audrey has terrorized not just one girl, but an entire school. In the history of Eliot, no comparable villainy has been perpetrated against us. Clearly, this act will not be treated as mere sophomoric hijinks.”

  Ruth was still clinging to the fight, Audrey could see, but she herself had let it go. She was exhausted by the decade-long struggle that had been her relationship with Eliot. Late one afternoon about a month into fall term, she had gone into the grade one classroom to see if the desk Ruth had marked so many years earlier was still there. Of course it wasn’t. All the old schoolhouse desks had been replaced with roomier, more practical models. At first she had remarked the changes bleakly. But then another part of that old memory—the part she usually excised—surfaced. On their way out of the room, her mother had hoisted Audrey up to a world map on the wall. “How many countries does the Danube run through?” Ruth asked. All the excitement Audrey had been feeling drained out of her. “I don’t remember,” she replied, squirming to be put down. What telling throb of intuition had she forced herself to ignore?

  “I can’t begin to understand what motivated you. You came here from an ordinary public school, true, but you were given the chance to make yourself more than ordinary. To take your place in a league of exceptional females. To be elevated by them. You could have been part of something great.”

  Ms. McAllister continued to speak, but Audrey was barely listening. What she didn’t want—what she couldn’t bear—was for Ruth to ask her why. From the beginning, she had avoided directing too much insight towards the Seeta notes, her own desire to participate. She had always known what Arabella and the group’s professed reasons might be, or at least what they would tell each other, but that crude patchwork of logic still only covered the surface of it. Audrey wasn’t sure she even wanted to place it in the clear light of her scrutiny, to understand what was best left ignored. All year, there had been signs of an ugliness she wanted to deny. Seeta repelled her, repelled all of them, but the nature of that repulsion was a tricky thing. It was imperative that the cause be insignificant, that it should stem from nothing more malignant than Seeta’s refusal to recognize the rules that governed them.

  Audrey could see Ms. McAllister gluttonously suspecting, desiring, the worst. It was clear in her thinly victorious smile, that septic pleasure. How desperately she wanted it on her own behalf, how plainly the desire shimmered in that vampiric face.

  “Not everyone is capable of elevation, of course,” Ms. McAllister was saying. “The lowest common denominator will seek to drag others to its level.”

  Ruth sh
ook her head. “I understand, of course I do, that there must be some punishment, some atonement. But Audrey can’t have been alone in this. Ms. McAllister, all this mess can’t have been the work of one girl.”

  “You must open your eyes, Ms. Brindle,” Ms. McAllister replied. “Really, you must.”

  “My eyes are open. Are yours?”

  Ms. McAllister smiled coldly. “That Audrey was not an appropriate candidate for George Eliot Academy was clear from the beginning. For years, I chose to spare you the full assessment of her entrance exam results. Suffice to say, my judgment is unerring.”

  Audrey looked her mother. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. No!” Ruth exclaimed, standing up quickly. “You’re not sorry for anything!”

  “Think about what you are saying, Ms. Brindle.”

  Roughly, Ruth swung Audrey’s knapsack onto her own shoulder, accidentally knocking onto the floor a row of framed photographs of Eliot that adorned the edge of Ms. McAllister’s desk.

  “Get up, Audrey. We’re leaving.”

  Ms. McAllister’s polished penny loafers formed a perfect plié as she stood by the door, looking very much as though she were hearing music in her head. Audrey looked down at the jumble of photographs by the principal’s feet. On top was Martha McKirk, before a screen of library books, smiling blandly for the picture-day photographer, the dates of her birth and death inscribed on the cream mat. Another Eliot girl of the past.

  Ms. McAllister was waiting to escort her into the disgrace of her expulsion. But Audrey had already vanished into her future.

  THE IMPRESSIONISTIC FORMS OF the known landscape sailed past, but Ruth remarked none of it. Her sightline had become a tunnel. Her hands gripped the steering wheel at some distance in front of her, but she couldn’t have said how near or far they were. In this distortion, reminiscent of a childhood fever, the only thing she was truly aware of was the acrid odour of the antibacterial soap from the school bathroom, where she had stopped before leaving. The drive home, away from this place, had seemed impassable—all at once too long and too short. How would she manage the mechanics of driving? Hurtling vehicles, red stoplights, weaving bicycles—the world was full of things that required her to command and coordinate her senses, which seemed to exist just outside of her reach. But the alternative, actually being at home, was equally incomprehensible. What would she tell Richard?

  There had been no reason to linger at school, there was every reason to get out, but she had stayed as long as she could in the cold brilliance of the empty staff bathroom turning her hands under the warm water. How was she to return to her ordinary life and eat cilantro-encrusted halibut for dinner as if nothing was wrong? No, she would rather stay in the school, as odious as it now was, because entering the aftermath meant admitting that the events had happened, that they were no longer unfolding, fluid, changeable. It meant that the outcome was settled.

  So she had turned her hands under the water, pumping that awful soap again and again, and looking at her face, studying it even though she knew she couldn’t really see it. She could never see what others saw, never see her true face, only its reflection. She stared and stared, the way she stared at herself as a girl, thinking she’d discover the trick of how to be beautiful, the angle that would show her as her best self, her true self. But she had never mastered the control that consistent beauty required. The best she could do was accept familiarity. And sometimes in rooms with lighting this awful she could bear how ugly she was, sometimes she could ignore it and go about her day, sometimes she could forget about the shadows and wrinkles, the incipient drooping, the failing radiance. And sometimes she couldn’t.

  She could only get used to things.

  What things had Audrey grown used to? Across the car, she was silent, whether in shame or in anger Ruth couldn’t say. There was no telling what Audrey was thinking. Her daughter had become as opaque to her as any girl on the street—more, in fact. Girls revealed something of their desires, as they rode their bicycles in sweet summer dresses, as they rambled down the sidewalk in cut-offs–clad packs. Even the hidden ones, clothed drably, blemished faces cast down, betrayed a flicker of selfhood, a prejudice, a proclivity, in their hiding. Ruth had spent her life around young people. Yet the most basic drift of her daughter’s mind was a mystery to her. Audrey still looked like Audrey, but the face Ruth had once considered so expressive—too expressive (how helpless she had felt, observing its dazzling nakedness)—had gone blank. Somehow Audrey had disappeared behind the cloak of her school uniform.

  As they descended the Bayview Extension, cars sped past on the right, a white SUV bore down from behind. At the light, Ruth glanced at Audrey staring out the passenger window, and her heart began to thud wildly. A fearful, cornered feeling overtook her. Was life as she knew it over?

  She turned onto Pottery Road. Just past the small bridge over the Don River, she pulled abruptly into the gravelly crescent fronting the converted stables of Todmorden Mills. There she got out of the car and paced for a moment by the bumper before going around to Audrey’s side and opening the door.

  “Get out,” Ruth said. “I don’t trust myself to drive while we’re having this conversation.”

  Looking stunned, Audrey obeyed.

  In the distance behind them, the hazy grey rectangles of downtown, relieved by the peak of the CN Tower, spread across the horizon. Restlessly, Ruth took several steps away, then back, churning the gravel under her silly stilettos. “Tell me,” she said.

  For a moment, Audrey looked chastened, perhaps on the brink of tears, but then a flicker of resolve steeled her features. “As if any of it matters now anyway.”

  “Tell me! I know you weren’t alone in this.”

  Audrey looked around, as though fearing witnesses, but the only people nearby were faceless figures contained in the cars slowly ascending the long hill. A cyclist, made safely anonymous, androgynous, by a spandex one-piece and a bike helmet, whizzed down the opposite side of the road at breakneck speed. “Ms. McAllister already told you everything,” she said.

  “Do you think I’m buying that?”

  The only response Audrey produced was one infuriating shrug.

  “God!” Ruth exclaimed. “Can this apathy be real?” She felt a flash of rage, but too quickly it was succeeded by despair. Was Audrey’s neutrality not final confirmation of her own irrelevance? How could Audrey not feel as trapped and petrified as she did? In mere months, she’d overturned the life they’d spent years building towards. Did she not balk at the unknown that lay before her? Ruth threw her arms up. “I can’t believe it. I don’t! Do you completely lack the capacity for forethought? Have you not thought about going back to your old school, months before the end of the year? Are you not aware of how that smacks of failure? Have you considered what it will be like to tell your father? You’re acting like you just got fired from the Gap!”

  The more listless Audrey’s expression, the more Ruth felt her own pulse quickening. She couldn’t tell whether Audrey was even listening to her. No word seemed to penetrate. “We worked so hard to get you into Eliot,” she continued.

  “Did we?” And now it seemed that Audrey might even be smirking.

  “Oh, wonderful!” Ruth said. “I’m so glad my emotion has provided you with some pleasure on one of the worst days of my life!”

  “The worst day of your life?” Audrey laughed. “Look, you think there’s so much to say. But there’s nothing to say. Let it go.”

  “How can I do that? I don’t even care, not really, about the notes. Seeta’s a pain. I see that. But why do you have to be so unemotional? Why are you so secretive?”

  “I really think it would be best for you to let this go,” Audrey said in a low voice.

  Ruth wrung her hands. “Just tell me who else was in on it. We can start from there. Why are you making me beg? Does it give you pleasure to see me this way? Are you trying to be h
onourable? I think you’re well past that.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes.

  “Was it really the only way you could make friends?”

  Audrey looked at the ground, and Ruth thought perhaps she had scored a victory. But then Audrey raised her eyes again. In them had awakened an anger unlike any Ruth had ever seen in her daughter. Without a word, Audrey turned around and slammed her car door so hard that Ruth expected the window glass to shatter. Then she turned on her heel and began walking up the hill.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth yelled.

  Audrey didn’t break her powerful stride.

  Tripping over the gravel, Ruth started to run after her daughter. But on the most basic level, this was problematic. Those heels again. How was she to run in them? Certainly not with dignity, if running after one’s daughter could ever be done with dignity. At the end of the driveway, she took the shoes off and, holding one in each hand, started up the hill in her stocking feet.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “Audrey!”

  To Ruth’s surprise, Audrey did stop, though her desire to avoid a scene was the clear motivation for this obedience. Glaring, she gestured for Ruth to be quiet.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth called.

  “I’m going home.”

  “You’re walking home? From here?”

  “I refuse to sit in that car with you for one more second.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “No,” Audrey said. “You’re the one who’s ridiculous.”

  “Don’t speak to me that way, Audrey. I don’t deserve that. You know I’ve only ever wanted the best for you.”

  Audrey laughed again, that dismal, knowing little laugh. “The best for me? It’s amazing to me that you can still make that argument.”

  Audrey’s face danced with defiance. Ruth prayed that this was just empty bravado.