All Souls

by Christine Schutt

  "Those in need can give others purpose" was what Theta had said at the time.

  Marlene looked at her as if she had farted, and the girl's expression scared Theta a little for being familiar, and for a few days Theta stayed later at work, didn't want to come home at all. Then Astra called to ask Marlene why hadn't she visited?

  Siddons

  "'Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.'" Kitty did a little dance in the lounge. "Tennessee Williams at last! Families in Distress!" She twirled and fell back onto the sofa. "Now blindness will only be a metaphor."

  Astra showed Marlene the mock-up of her senior page and the picture of Marlene that she had found to use—Washington trip, eighth grade, braces. Marlene said, "This makes me want to cry."

  "Oh, Kovack!" Astra said.

  Marlene said, "I've wanted this," by which she meant her place on Astra's page, there with Miss Hodd and Dr. D, Kitty and Edie, Suki and Alex and Car. Car, Car, Car, the two Elizabeths, Ufia, Ny and Sarah, Mr. Weeks and Miss Mazur. The minister from All Souls, summer cousins in Virginia, her favorite nurse at Sloan-Kettering, Teddy—the little boy with leukemia she loved—Dr. Byron, her horse Lady, Pitiful the cat, and Rye, her mother's dachshund. Grace Dell again and again, Mr. Dell and Mr. Dell. The dog was just a nose.

  Astra's quotation was from Emily Dickinson: "'Hope' is the thing with feathers."

  Fools

  CHF

  The front and back covers of Folio were black-and-white photographs. The first Car had taken and was of a boy, a slender boy from the waist up, white distance for a landscape. He is not wearing a shirt; his back is to the camera. He is a long-waisted, long boy, long enough to be fifteen, sixteen; cocksure and surely smiling, he clasps his hands behind his back. From youth to old age is the obvious arc of the magazine; an old man reclines on a bed in the photograph on the back. The old man is Alex Decrow's famous grandfather. He looks like Picasso in a lumberjack shirt.

  Elsewhere in the magazine were photographs Alex had taken of the old man's house on an island in Maine: an old door ajar, an assuring band of light; light across a ladder-back chair; lace curtains lifted in a window full of light: a clean, hard place. Car, at the literary festival assembly, talked about the photographs in the magazine. She quoted Mark Rothko, who said light was "indeed a wonderful instrument," then, as was custom, she gave the first copy of Folio to the head of school, Miss Brigham.

  Siddons

  "I'm sorry," Lisa Van de Ven said, and Miss Wilkes held out a box of Kleenex.

  "I'm glad to talk to you after all this time," Miss Wilkes said. "And I'm sorry, too, but it's not as if Brown's said no. People get off wait lists."

  "It's a courtesy."

  "You don't know that."

  "I do. They took Suki Morton—of course. And Elizabeth F. They never take more than two from our school."

  "The competition was stiff."

  "I'm smarter than Suki Morton any day," then, "I'm sorry."

  "It's okay; it's a disappointment."

  The girl's hand was white from playing with a piece of chalk, and she put the chalk down, set it carefully on the edge of Miss Wilkes's table, then turned away to slap her hands over the art room's industrial-size trash can. "I'm sending a check to Wash U," Lisa said. "It's farthest away from my mother." When Lisa turned back to face Miss Wilkes, she saw the chalk smears on her breasts made in the move to clean off her hands. "I'm a mess," Lisa said, and she beat away the dust.

  Nothing had changed in Edie Cohen's house. "I'll never be as smart as my brother" was what she said to Kitty Johnson over the phone. "I couldn't even get into my dad's school."

  Kitty said, "You have your own talents."

  "Really? Like what? And nice doesn't count."

  This new Astra was modern. Her hair was an orange fuzz, and she was dressed like a boy in sweatpants and sweatshirt, Dance Club's '97 sweatshirt, still new and stiff. The color looked as if it might flake off.

  Marlene said, "You've got the prettiest feet."

  "My mother got me hooked on pedicures. It's how I treat myself sometimes." Sometimes Astra sat in a little manicurist's shop on Second Avenue, and Judith did her feet, used a razor, massaged. "She doesn't speak English, but she's very sweet. Only Mrs. Kim speaks English and hers is hard to understand, but she knows who I am from the sound of my voice on the phone. She knows everyone's voice. It's amazing." Astra took a novel with her but always ended up reading gossip magazines. The busy, kitschy covers were in keeping with the whole experience of Pink Roses, next to the deli, a piecemeal salon: wall-to-wall carpeting, three chairs for pedicures, a back room for waxing, some tables for manicures, and a bigger table—big enough for three to sit with their hands and feet slipped into toaster-oven contraptions and there, while their nails dried, to look out at the traffic into the vulgar drugstore across the street. "I think the drug chains are ugly—don't you?" There were little dishes of hard candies on the glass table at Pink Roses and business cards and a photograph of Mrs. Kim with a famous TV newscaster, who was truly cute in a squinched-up way. "I admire people with lots and lots of money who yet know how to save it, don't you?"

  Marlene had never had much of an opinion about money. She knew she didn't have as much as many of her classmates. She knew what things cost and could usually distinguish elegant from cheap, but once she had tried on a designer jacket on a walk through Blooming-dale's with her mother, and it had seemed to her then the jacket looked as dingy as a discount. Her body was built for the clothes she was wearing now: tennis shoes, jeans. Car Forestal in her mother's vintage clothes—"the ice-pick toes on her sling-back shoes," Car's description when asked whose. Manolo Blahnik. Marlene knew designer names and logos. She had walked through Bloomingdale's with her mother on their way home from Dr. Bickman's office on more than one occasion. She had some polo shirts, but her closets were nothing like Astra's with the rainbow piles in their right cubbies.

  "My mother again," Astra said. "Thank you," and she put on the Chinese slippers Marlene handed her. "My mother was a stickler for organization. She had rules. She said etiquette was vastly underrated. My dad said she wrote thank-you notes on their way home from parties." Astra Dell said, "I like that she's everywhere." Then, "Mother helped me pick the colors for this room."

  Settled in the window seat in the orangey sediment of the sunset, Marlene saw how the dull roses at Astra's bedside, old sentimental valentines, still shook against the apple-green and white of Astra's room. The right colors for a redhead's room. Oh, that hair. Now was not the time to return the barrette, the same Astra lost at school and Marlene found so many years ago, the one Marlene rubbed in her pocket. Eighth grade: worst year of her life—Dad gone, ugly, loathed. Why did she still feel the need of it, the enormous hair clip, a relic, but she did.

  Suki and Alex

  Alex said to Suki, "Every time I say Tulane, they say, 'Good party school,' as if I didn't know that."

  "They just mean to be insulting."

  "Gee, thanks. I never thought of that."

  "I don't know, Alex. I don't know what you want me to say."

  "Look, I now know how to read and every once in a while I stop and have a thought."

  Mothers

  At the auction to benefit the scholarship fund, Lettie Van de Ven had bid on and won dinner for six in the sky tower at Daniel's. She had envisioned a celebratory graduation dinner with Nana V and Marilyn and Paul. Her own mother couldn't fly out from California. That would be a waste, especially since they were all going to California in July, but Bill's sister, Marilyn, was Lisa's only aunt; Paul was a third husband, so he didn't count as an uncle and Lisa called him Paul. I can't say "uncle." I think I'm being disloyal to Uncle Peter. Lettie Van de Ven had envisioned a celebratory dinner with Lisa in her graduation dress—the girls still wore white dresses—which if she had any say, and she did have a say, would be a short white dress, and now was the time to be looking for one.

  "No, I have news for you. We are not buy
ing a long dress. Save that for your wedding."

  "There are no short white dresses. They're not making short white dresses this year, Mother."

  "Well, we'll have one made, then."

  The girl at least had thick hair; otherwise, a bulldog's body for all her modern dance. Lisa looked like Bill, and clothes shopping with her had long ago ceased to be fun. She didn't have much in the way of an ankle, a heavy step. Maybe her eyebrows? They were thick and bossy—maybe if they were plucked just a little?

  "Mother, will you stop pawing me?"

  "I was only thinking you might think about your eyebrows."

  "Oh my god."

  "I'm sorry. Go in and try it on. I'll wait out here."

  "Mother, this looks like a nurse's uniform."

  Lettie Van de Ven did what she was famous for doing with her face.

  "Okay, okay, okay," Lisa said. "I'll try it on."

  When Lisa came out, her mother did that other thing she was famous for doing with her face. "You were right. Now you do look like a nurse."

  Unattached

  Tim Weeks and Anna Mazur walked a string of girls down Park Avenue to the Alford School to see some of their classmates with the eighth-grade boys from Al-ford in Our Town. I've read it too often. It's sentimental. Dated. Old-fashioned. Maybe, but on this day when Mrs. Gibbs said that "people are meant to go through life two by two. It ain't natural to be lonesome," Anna Mazur saw camels and elephants headed for the ark, and she felt sad. The boy playing George Gibbs had a voice that was soft as a fruit—too much saliva—whereas Gillian Warring seemed never to be surprised. She knew where the play was going and all of its players. "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me."

  Siddons

  The same subjects—Brown and Suki Morton and money—had been part of their conversation so many months ago in the Greek coffee shop. The Mortons were the soup people. Miss Wilkes remembered now. I'm not a nice girl. I'm growing more disappointed every day. That was how it had started—I'm not a nice girl—and for a few weeks, they had talked after school in the art room. Lisa had come on to her. She had not pursued the girl; rather, she had tried to keep her distance. Tried until she put her hand over Lisa's in the Greek coffee shop. She had put her hand over the girl's, but had she applied any pressure? You knew I was a take-charge person. The girl had called her Janet and had asked to visit. School was too personal—whatever that meant—but the single afternoon at her apartment with Taffy all over the place and Lisa's face, the mottled rash, the eyelids plump, reacting on the instant. Allergies. I think I may only be experimenting, Miss Wilkes. Miss Wilkes, Miss Wilkes, to be called Miss Wilkes in her own apartment, to be reminded of the awkward self that lurched around the lunchroom every day too early—the trays overturned on the salad-bar selections—too early, so she feigned interest in coffee, which gave her the jitters. She had the jitters in her own apartment. It was cold, of course, on that day in January when Lisa Van de Ven paid a visit, but this shaking came from the ever-hungry self at the teachers' table too early in the morning. Miss Wilkes, I think I may only be experimenting. The embarrassment of her appetite, and yet she had learned to restrain herself. For weeks now she had gone to the last lunchtime seating and missed seeing Lisa Van de Ven every time.

  Mothers

  "I leave you to your own devices" was what he had said on the morning he left, and Theta was late for work. Not the first time she was ever late in all the years—nine years, not so very long ago. The weird thing was that she remembered Bob at the door carrying a yellow suitcase. Theta said to Marlene, "I'm not an imaginative person particularly, Marlene, so this is strange. Don't you think? I see an old-fashioned yellow, a strong yellow, cardboard suitcase. I don't think your father was probably carrying anything. The way I remember it happening he is wearing a gray suit, which also seems preposterous. I can't remember him ever wearing a suit."

  Marlene said, "It has to do with maybe the way he wasn't or you wanted him."

  "Yes, it does. I know. I don't want to look at his face."

  "You miss people more when they're gone," Marlene said while she picked out nuts in a pint of ice cream. "No, that's not how it goes. You—no. People make a big impression on us for not being around, something like that. Astra and I have talked about it." She swallowed. "I love her. She's so great." The carton looked crushed for the heat of her hand, and the ice cream, Theta saw, was a soup when Marlene put it back.

  "No one's going to eat that, you know."

  "She's a saint. She finds something good in everybody. It's ridiculous."

  A girl with a healing touch, true, and for a moment Theta went missing. Something else there was she had meant to tell her daughter, but her daughter was swinging out the swinging door of their old kitchen. Lately it seemed Theta had time, more time to herself, which explained the lightness she felt—better posture—and it was not unwelcome. And the ice cream? Would she miss finding the refrozen melted ice cream with its skim-milk color and consistency? The same she threw away—not for being nutless but because it wasn't sweet anymore, wasn't salty but tasteless—would she miss the trail of her daughter in the house? She didn't know, but Theta Kovack was thinking of going back to school! For what? To finish her degree. And then? Something more.

  CHF

  The question was why she had included the story that had started as an essay about her father, the one where he sat looking small on a large sofa, with one leg crossed over the other, the leg swinging and swinging the wide bell of his cuffed, creased pants. Everything he wore looked soft enough to sleep in, and the plausive gestures—only his legs were crossed, the rest of him open, his arms opening as if to embrace him or her or him or anyone else who came near—these open arms deceived her, and when she bent to kiss his cheek, he looked into her breasts and said, "Too much French pastry, Carlotta." In front of the Dutch hostess, who knew so many languages and stood just behind in a pleated dress with silken cord, classic as a caryatid, in front of all the elegantly gathered, her father had said she was fat. A fat, bumptious teenager in a too-tight dress unbecomingly thrusting her breasts at the dowagers, at the drab and the dull she had expected to meet and trump. The problem with Car's story was that all the characters were ugly. Even Miss Hodd, who liked everything Car wrote, had said it was hard to sympathize with a judgmental narrator and discouraged her from putting it in Folio, however accomplished some of the descriptive passages.

  "I wanted to get back at him, of course. I want everyone to know he's an asshole and a fag." Car said, "I'm sorry." She said, "I'm just so sick and tired. I'm so mad. I wake up every morning in a rage."

  Nobody wakes up in the morning trying to burn was what she wrote him.

  Car said, "I can't help myself. My only excuse is I'm young." She said, "Please, don't look at me like that. I'm serious. Don't make me laugh. I don't want to laugh."

  Astra said, "So how was St. Bart's with your mother?"

  "I should have gone to Paris and endured my dad."

  Mothers

  "How does your father feel about Columbia?"

  "I don't know why you ask me these things when you know I don't know," Car said, and she let go of her knife, stuck upright in the meatloaf, to see if it might stand. It didn't.

  Mrs. Forestal startled. "Damnit, Carlotta," she said. "Must you?"

  Siddons

  "Ah," Ufia said, "the sad consequences of culturally motivated depilation."

  Alex was sitting on a bag of ice but she was leaking.

  "Sit on the floor!" Suki said.

  "I can't sit on something hard. I'm in pain!" Alex said. Brazilian bikini wax was the story Alex was telling over and over again to every girl who came into the lounge and asked, "What's the matter with you, what's with Alex, what's with the ice?" I was at the salon and bored and I figured, why not, but I didn't really know what a Brazilian bikini wax involved.

  Unattached

  "Honestly..." and then Anna Mazur didn't speak for a long time.

 
"Honestly, what?"

  "I don't know." They were nearing her building, and she couldn't say what she wanted to say because there was so much to say, but here was a chance, and she said, I don't know.

  "Yes," he said, walking backward away from her door, waving, saying, "Another day, another dollar," saying, "Good luck grading all those papers." And that was how the day ended, walking east on Eighty-second Street, past the barren beds around the twigs that passed for trees on the streets between Lex, Third, Second, First—all the way to her door. Anna Mazur knew what wishing good luck meant for her weekend. It meant the papers in her shopping bag, two classes of eight, one of seven, hours and hours of reading until she wasn't sure any more how to spell any word with doubled letters.

  "Lucky you," Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks, "your hands are empty."

  Siddons

  Madame Sagnier said the seniors in her AP French class were zombies, and she was not alone among the faculty at the class-twelve grade meeting with complaints. Absences, college visits, flagrant infractions, blithely walking down the hall with iced coffees, wearing sandals, wearing very high heels. Girls were late for classes or didn't show up for classes or abruptly left classes.

  "They just stand up and leave."

  "And you don't do anything?"

  Miss F agreed. Some of the seniors were sullen about assignments. "Marlene Kovack, for all the improvements, can still make a face."