Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  You know, I have at times considered shooting you in the gut just to see how differently you’d take the pain. The distinction, I think, would be enormous. Not wan, but angry. Your face alive with terse revenge until the moment it was not. Every second a mortal danger to me, as your precious blood drained out into a puddle round my feet. I would not want to cross you, Vera; it would be safer to kill you. You’re more formidable than I am. We both know that.

  Please write and let me know about your plans for the rest of the summer. I sit in tense anticipation.

  Zoya

  15.

  I was a student at the Donne School for a year and a half, spending my one interim summer mimeographing research notes for an anthropology professor before graduating without particular honors. Margaret, for reasons unknown, withstood me the whole time—perhaps it was the frequency with which she awoke to find me gone, staying out the entire day at Marie’s café, or in class, or at the library. Perhaps it was my clothes, never any competition for her own. On the rare occasions when we left the dorm together I looked like some downtrodden child she’d picked up on the street so she could warm me up with a cup of soup, which only made me avoid her more earnestly—as did the fear that Cindy or Adeline might tell her about my shadowing campaign, despite their promises to the contrary. Anyway it was embarrassing to be seen together. I was used to a discount-bin wardrobe, but not to being surrounded by so many people who could afford to do better. In the spring my green coat became too warm, and so I lost even that small piece of armor.

  It was a relief not to need a new roommate for my second year, though. Other girls pressed their foreheads together and giggled, plotting to get peak real estate in the towers, with garden views and proximity to the caf. Sometimes they exploded into spectacular arguments: one ingénue slapped another in our history seminar upon finding out she’d been dropped in favor of a rival classmate. For the whole hour, the slapped girl sat stiff and tall, her face shining red but still triumphant. I didn’t have any friends I could ask—it was exhausting enough to speak to strangers in a language I struggled to understand, never mind confidantes—and I didn’t want to learn any new behaviors around sharing toiletries and room temperature and ambient sound. In Moscow the heat was controlled by the state, turned on each fall to identical levels city-wide, give or take the functionality of your building’s furnace, so the idea that you could adjust a room to suit your exact—even momentary—pleasure was new to me, and I saw how quickly this power went to people’s heads. Temperature was at the heart of many domestic battles royale, with girls daily arriving to class covered in sweat, or shivering and wearing fingerless typing gloves. Girls came down with unnecessary head colds. Each room had a gas coil heater that clicked and hissed, burping out alarming sounds in the middle of the night if their settings had been recently changed, and I let Margaret keep ours a bit too high—“I have lizard blood,” she told me, “I need to sit on a hot rock”—because otherwise I couldn’t sleep for all the clinking. The idea of adjusting to a new and unpredictable set of preferences alarmed me.

  Still, Margaret had plenty of followers, and I figured she’d drop me as soon as she could. Social dynamics among the girls required constant maintenance, and choosing a roommate had the potential to elevate or destroy you, depending. Someone as popular as Margaret might choose a classmate with access to good contraband, or a pretty girl to decorate her room like a flower. Or a less pretty girl, to help herself shine in comparison. She was smart enough not to need a study buddy, or a patsy to do her homework, but everyone needs something. I figured she’d choose to room with her friend Sharon, whose father owned a plant that manufactured skin cream, or Lucy, who had a pert nose and a lisp. Or any of the other moon-faced things that scurried to vacate my bed when I came through the door every night. But no.

  “Oh, you,” she said one afternoon near the end of our first year together, returning from class. Always the tone of surprise when we ran across one another in the middle of the day. I was tearing apart my side of the room, throwing thin-elbowed sweaters onto the floor and shaking out textbooks by the spine.

  “Have you seen my form?” I asked, not bothering to stop in my search. “Room requests are due.”

  Margaret clicked her tongue and sat down in her desk chair, twisting her neck so she could still face me. “I turned it in for you,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

  “What?” I inspected the sock in my hand. Unmatched, and unmatchable. I balled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, technically I threw it out.” She flipped her hair down over her face and then back up, catching it into a voluminous ponytail. “You only have to submit one if you’re requesting together.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “Yeah, so because of your whole orphan thing, we got early pick. St. Paul’s Tower, third floor.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Not bad, right?”

  I gaped, speechless, and Margaret took this for agreement. Fair enough, I suppose, given our relationship pattern of silence and distance. She turned her back to me and propped open her French textbook, proceeding to read aloud in an atrocious accent about going to the cinema, meeting at the cinema, having been at the cinema, having met.

  When I arrived at the Donne School I thought I’d be embraced. Looking up at the tall stone halls after stepping out of the taxi that had been provided for me, I imagined hundreds of girls leaning out the windows waving handkerchiefs, streaming through the doors in white dresses, their hair in very American ponytails, all of their limbs long and healthy and tanned. They would throw their arms out, so many girls crowding around me at once that we’d move and shift like a flock on the wing, wavering back and forth in ferocious tandem. We’d lift up, our toes just barely scraping the ground. Instead, a single matron came out with a clipboard and showed me to my room, where I found Margaret, whose previous roommate had disappeared when her appendix burst without warning. Even after Cindy’s threats I occasionally held Margaret’s clothes up to my body, imagining what they’d look like on. She came back from the bathroom once rather quicker than I’d anticipated and found me trying on her lipstick—just a dab, as I wasn’t brave enough to wear much color. “No,” she told me. That was all she had to say. I gave in like a puppy, rolling over to expose the soft pink of my belly, hoping she might pick me up in her mouth and carry me with her wherever she went. Which is what I really wanted. Not the whole school in tennis whites, but Margaret at least.

  What I got was Margaret. And I was glad not to lose her, not to have lost her, to keep her at least for a while, to have kept.

  Donne Girls Spring Into a New Role

  From the Gosling Herald, April 15, 1927

  MAPLE HILL, NJ. Every year the Donne School student body is faced with a problem: how do you throw a good spring formal with no gentleman dance partners? This year, thrifty girls got into the spirit of making-do and decided to use the number-one resource they had on hand: other girls.

  A week before the Mix-n-Match Fling, every student entering the caf was asked to throw her name into a hat, and once a quorum was achieved, half the names were drawn to play the role of women, and half were drawn to play the role of men. The lists, posted outside the dorms after dinner that night, caused a great deal more excitement than your usual spring dance theme.

  Some girls (we aren’t allowed to call them sad sacks in print, but readers may draw their own conclusions) were disappointed to find themselves assigned to the male gender, though most (including this reporter) accepted the responsibility with the enthusiasm it required. The girls assigned as “girls” were also looking forward to the event. “I feel like I’m about to meet my new beau!” a sophomore from Rhode Island was heard to say, followed by a cascade of appreciative laughter.

  The night of the dance, Donne girls (and boys) were surprised to find the gentlemen better outfitted than the ladies—and slightly outnumbering them. It turned out that finding a decent “boy’s” outfi
t was such good sport that even some of the assigned “girls” got in on the fun. Never let it be said that our ladies don’t relish a challenge! When asked about the meticulous detailing on his cravat, one Donne “boy” (also known as Sharon Lisby) looked affronted and replied quite witheringly, “Of course I wore my very best. What else would be good enough for these young beauties?” Well put.

  In the days since this successful party, it’s safe to say that all the Donne girls are looking at their classmates with renewed admiration. Margaret Rathburn of New Canaan, Connecticut, described the suit she’d acquired as “one of [her] new favorite ensembles” and the dress she chose for her roommate, Zoe Andropov, as “entirely demure,” adding, “She sat there like a little angel and let me do her face. Turns out she has lovely eyes, once she lets someone line them!” Miss Andropov, tucked in the corner of the room as this reporter conducted her interview, was seen to blush. She did, indeed, look becoming with pink cheeks.

  The Herald is firm in our opinion that the Mix-n-Match Fling indicates triumphant future endeavors for the entire Donne School community. After all, if we can make gentlemen out of ladies, what can’t we transform to our advantage?

  Editor’s note: Found in the Andropov diary, with several passages underlined in felt pen.

  Zoya

  16.

  A few times in the following months, Cindy and Adeline badgered me back into the library to try and contact more spirits, though we didn’t have much luck. They pared down the people and the accessories, so it was just the three of us, and instead of candles they brought cigarettes. Mostly we sat around while they smoked. There was just one other occasion worth mentioning. It was early in the spring of my second and final year, when the grass was still covered with frozen dew in the mornings, and they made me show up before first bell, slipping a note under my door to indicate the time and place. I walked over with a scarf pulled tight around my neck, coat hanging off my shoulders, grumbling inwardly about missing breakfast. I’d become very fond of morning coffee, and without it I felt sluggish and low. Scratchy throat, itchy nose. Icy wind and early pollen. As I approached the library Cindy poked her head out of the door and indicated I should hurry, so I picked up into a jog and followed her to the basement, rolling my eyes just a bit.

  There was another girl there, no one I knew, who introduced herself as Caroline Geiss. A fellow fourth-year and an aficionado of field hockey, hailing from Minnesota. Her legs were covered in bruises, which she wore with pride.

  “What are we doing here so early?” I asked, throwing my bag down and shaking the cold morning out of my hair. “Grades? Peeking into the future?” I looked at Cindy and waved my fingers. “Woo-ooh?”

  “Why don’t you tell her?” Cindy said to Caroline. The girl colored, which was unexpected. All those muscles and wounds, she seemed like the type who could hold her own.

  “My friend,” she said. “I miss her.” Apparently, before her parents shipped her off to New Jersey, Caroline had been close with a girl named Laura Shipman, who she’d known since childhood. During the first week of classes at the Donne School, Caroline found out that Laura had had a bad reaction to a bee sting, and had died following a severe attack of anaphylactic shock. Her parents wouldn’t agree to bring her back for the funeral, for financial reasons or something else that Caroline wouldn’t go into. Now here she was, and as she looked at me her spine straightened out with hope and sincerity. “They said you could talk to her.”

  “I don’t know.” I frowned. It seemed unkind to promise anything when my past attempts had ended so badly.

  “But you can at least try, right?” Adeline tugged my hair until it hurt, and I slapped her hand away. Then I nodded. Because really, why not?

  “We better hurry, though, if we want to get out of here before classes start.”

  The four of us sat in a circle, Caroline fidgeting beside me. Cindy and Adeline started reciting that same strange poem that always sent me into a stupor, and I closed my eyes, waiting. I didn’t expect anything to happen, not again. I thought we’d sit there for five or six minutes growing increasingly bored, until someone stood up and said they were going to get an apple before the caf closed, and that would be that. But then there was a breeze on my face, the scent of clover and cut grass. I reached out and took Caroline’s hand, and she squeezed it, tightly.

  “Laura?” she asked. “Is it you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I knew it was really me, but then again, I didn’t. I was playing the game the way they wanted me to, and for a second it was sweet. A rush of familiarity and bubblegum, swimming pools full of chlorine and toys that could float. It fuzzed around my awareness, bleaching out parts of me I knew to be basic: language, history, loss. And the girls surrounded me with sudden interest, whispering, “Laura, Laura,” as if they all knew and adored me. When I peeked out at their faces to see again if they were joking, they opened their eyes one by one and beamed at me with total love. A moment in which we were infatuated with each other. And then, the room grew uneasy. Maybe I smiled too wide. Maybe they just came to their senses. When I started squeezing back on Caroline’s hand, I felt the bones beneath her skin crunching together like a fistful of crab’s legs, and she tried to tug it away. But I tightened my fingers and pulled her towards me, crashing her head into my shoulder a bit harder than I intended to, and holding her there.

  “Ouch,” she said. First a whisper in my ear, and then a yelp, a shout, as the others came to her rescue. “Ouch! Get off me!” I gave her one last tug, then let go.

  Those girls, they liked me so easily and so much the second they saw me as one of their own. Laura, Laura. A girl from their same world, where houses got drafty from size instead of poor craftsmanship, and your uncle came by just to take you and your girlfriends out for chocolate milkshakes, which you sucked up through colored straws. Where you slept in on Saturdays, and could accomplish anything you set your mind to, and where you were given a bright red bicycle with streamers on the handlebars, which whistled as you rode. They’d never known how to make do, to sew the covers back onto old schoolbooks. To sneak into the cloakroom at restaurants and gather tobacco from men’s coat pockets in order to make a cigarette with which to bribe the greengrocer. To watch their parents turn into strangers before their eyes, and then be told by those strangers that they didn’t deserve any more than what others had, because why would they? The girls didn’t want to know those things. And they were equally afraid of the fact that I did, and that I could shed the appearance of that knowledge so quickly. Like slipping out of a skin.

  Or maybe they were just scared about the tightness of my grip, the red lines I left on Caroline’s hand, and the bruise that formed there the next morning. Not my chameleon face but my strong fingers. None of them ever talked to me again after that. But it didn’t occur to me for some time how ordinary and impersonal their fear might have been.

  17.

  As it turned out, I had bigger problems at school that year than rooming or even ghosts. I had to think about graduation. A concept that had somehow never occurred to me until it was almost on top of me: a hasty exeunt to an invisible offstage. Where could I go? What expertise could I offer? Other girls, I knew, were planning on college or secretarial school, or being set up in New York by their parents. A few were going home to Boston to help their mothers throw DAR parties, and at least one from our class married a dentist and moved to Detroit, having first spent three months showing off her ring and moaning about the impossibility of wedding dinner place cards. One joined the circus, I think. The actual circus. She said she was starting out as a makeup girl but planned to work her way up to an acrobat. I couldn’t tell if she was serious, but like the rest she disappeared in a car after graduation and never came back.

  Whatever wartime good graces landed me in Maple Hill to begin with had long since worn off. As the date of my dorm eviction loomed I haunted the mailroom, hoping for a letter from the Office of Orphans that had paid my tuition. Perhap
s, I thought, they knew a wealthy benefactor. Perhaps they could set me up as someone’s assistant. I could make a passable campfire with twigs and leaves and a single match; I could negotiate black-market transactions using only nylon stockings for currency. There had to be something I could contribute to, but despite my fine secondary school education I had no idea what this might be. A university was out of the question, because it cost money, and I thought with some bitterness about the wealthy Moscow girls who’d fled ahead of me to Europe and the new world, their furs and jewel earrings one day scattering to the wind as if they expected to be next in line for a bludgeoning now that the Romanovs were gone. At first I had been glad to be rid of them, elated to skate through a Moscow magically lightened of its bratty debutantes. But as winter lifted and my father disappeared, I did come to find some pity for them, deep within me—pity that they had been forced to leave home and all that they found dear. Now, thousands of miles away and years later, I realized they were fine. Probably getting ready to matriculate at Radcliffe or Sarah Lawrence, or else perhaps the Sorbonne. The revolution having changed—nothing. Vera once took issue with me on this point, arguing about lost estates and bank accounts absorbed into the national fund, but I’m fairly certain she arrived in Paris with diamonds sewn into her skirt hems.