Christine Schutt - All Souls

A Daughter

"If it's not great sex, and it's not true love, then it's definitely worth my time because how else are you rife with passion and singing with hate all at once?"

Josh said, "Has anyone ever told you, you are a really scary girl?"

"All the time," Lisa said. "So are you interested?"

Siddons

Valentine's Day and Kitty's romantic life amounted to zilch, nada. "All I am doing is counting the days until AP physics is over, and Families in Distress — ha. Oedipus and his brood: our dysfunctional family of the week. I thought second-semester senior year was supposed to be fun." Sometimes Kitty wondered about the Ramsays. Miss Hodd had read the novel with them in junior year; it was one of the books in her elective on heroines. The Ramsays: Were they a family in distress or just a family?

Red sweaters, red tights, bows, bracelets, stick-on hearts, the red streaks of the middle school down the sixth-floor hall were as hectic as the drugstore's cheap displays. The sixth-grade girls had been on countdown since the first of the month, and now here it was Valentine's Day, and Anna Mazur, in pink, was putting an animal valentine on Tim Weeks's desk, this one a picture of a panting terrier with the message: Be my valentine, doggone it! His desk was already loaded with big cards from students, homemade some of them, stickers, doilies, pasted-on red hearts: I'm stuck on you! A rose, already blackened despite the plastic cap of water on its stem. Some Red Hots, some chocolate hearts, a bag of Twizzlers. Tim Weeks, ever the favorite. She had seen less and less of him since Astra Dell had come home from the hospital, but why did that surprise her when beyond visiting the sick girl, they had never had a date? A few weeks before, she had helped chaperone a sixth-grade outing through the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan. She had kept her coat on, though it was damp from the walk in the light snow that fell through the elm awning along Fifth. "Bear squares" the girls called the paving stones and skipped, and Anna Mazur had walked behind with Tim Weeks — Mrs. Nicholson was at the head — and Anna admitted, "I've lived here three years now and have not once gone to the Whitney. Isn't that terrible?" He said it was and they had laughed when she admitted the same was true of the Egyptian wing. "I've never been. Don't tell the girls." She stood with him in front of the Fragmentary Head of a Queen in yellow jasper. "How sensuous she is." The wonder of it was the way the face was there in full even as they looked at just the mouth.

Her own mouth was a string of pins. He'd never kiss it.

However did Edie Cohen manage to stick a valentine into every classmate's mailbox when she had been sick most of the week? That was the wonder in the senior lounge, as Edie's classmates discovered their "perfect" individualized, homemade, secretly delivered card with her fat script and XXXXXXXX's.

" This might be my last valentine from Edie ever," Krystle said, and she made a tearful face.

Lisa Van de Ven bought herself a pair of silk embroidered boxers with rhinestones, but she told her classmates the gift was from Josh. In truth, though they had talked and e-mailed, she had not seen him since that night after the Dance Concert when, still in her leotard and gauze skirt, she slid past him into his apartment—"I can't go home. You saw it. My mother's a drunk." She invited him to take a shower with her, but he was smoking up in his bedroom — she could smell it — and didn't answer, so she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hand outstretched for a toke, and she said, "I've never had sex with a man, but that doesn't make me a virgin." She said, "Do you have something I could borrow?"

He gestured to the closet behind him. "Help yourself."

She sat with him on the floor; she wore nothing underneath his jeans and soft dress shirt. They smoked. They smoked, and Josh got up to put on something she thought he called narcotics, wobbly music that made her sway, but her boobs were bags of sand and her face was doing something ugly. "Oh my god," she cried, and she cried and laughed and cried. "It's all over, I can't believe it, that's the last time I will ever dance on that stage, the last time with any of those stupid people, stupid, stupid Alex Decrow — could you see how we had to cover for her? — oh my god, my boobs weigh a ton," Lisa said, and she went into the bathroom and flung herself into a defeated halter with gymnastic support, and who cared if it was stinky and damp — that stupid stoner Josh was asleep, so where was his hairbrush, didn't he have a hairbrush, where was his hairbrush? "Ach! I look so ugly!" — and she took up a scrub brush he used on his back and banged it against her head. Everyone has an outstanding feature; yours is your hair. Her mother said all she needed was a good colorist; all she needed was Elie at Ishi. She brushed her hair and wondered at her face; she knew who she looked like, and it was not her mother. She's got my hair, at least. Not her mother's color, never her mother's fake, man-made, fake. "I hate my mother!" How much does Suki Morton weigh, do you think?… How tall is that Ufia Abiola?… What does her father research?… All those minorities, you know… Is she Jewish, is she rich, is she smart, is she Jewish, she must be Jewish, she must be Jewish or Asian. My manicurist's daughter is an anesthesiologist. What are you?

"'How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?…the hives, which were people….' That's such a beautiful passage," Car said when she had finished reading it in the yearbook proof of Astra's ad to Car. The picture of them, girls, arm in arm, in bathing suits. Astra and Car had both wanted sisters, had wanted to be sisters, had pretended to be sisters. In the photograph both girls are missing front teeth, but their smiles make out that the world is hilarious, especially to those with secrets.

What were they keeping from Mr. Dell, who took the picture, and from Mrs. Dell, who stood behind the porch screen at the lake house? How prescient that picture now seemed with Mrs. Dell scratched behind the screen. The picture was years and years ago, if Car were being dramatic, and lately she had been very dramatic. "I called my father to tell him I wasn't coming."

"And?"

"I don't want to talk about it, Astra."

The fantasy of a father, an impeccable appraiser, a cocktail-cool and lethal man with a shapely hand at the small of her back, guiding her through a clamor that seems to lean toward them, toward this man, this pretty father, whose concern is for her — and she? Car is not so demurely dressed as to be expected; the back of her dress is low, and her back, her shoulders, the stem of her neck, the upswept hair, and ears, visible and smally inviting, invite touch, touch, touch, touch, touch. Car, on her knees, put her head in Astra's lap and let the sick girl pet her weeping friend; Astra finger-combed Car's hair out of her face and around the small ear, and thus they sat in Astra's room in a month reduced to dusks. March, nearing spring now and spring vacation, and the enormous old window in Astra's room waggled in the high wind, and the easterly dark was not so complete as to obscure the bombast of the air-conditioning system on the rooftop play yard of the neighboring boys' school. "God," Car said, lifting her head to see how the school's addition had obscured Astra's distant view of the river. "When did they do that?"

"That," Astra said, "was finished just before school started last fall."

"When do the little boys come out to play?"

Mothers

The fat envelope that arrived just before spring break was from Siddons and not, as Theta Kovack had hoped, from the University of Wisconsin. The fat envelope was an invitation to the School Spring Auction and included a list of live and silent auction items and raffle tickets. Top of the live auction list was this: "A fabulous stay for five nights in a beautiful four-bedroom/five-bath private retreat on the island of Kauai, Princeville, Hawaii. The property includes a swimming pool, a staff of seven, and a cook." Next came a walk-on role in a Woody Allen movie, a sleepover for twelve at the American Museum of Natural History, a VIP table at the Hampton Classic Horse Show, a weekend getaway by private jet to Palm Beach and the Breakers, and a day of sailing on a forty-foot Dufour sailing yacht with captain. How tempting to sail away, and there were families that could do just that and did just that, and, to be fair, these same cheerful rich or many of the same also spent their Saturdays at the Family Service Morning, where students and parents could jostle in a good-cause direction: roll pocket change; bead a bracelet for a sick child; decorate and fill a toiletry kit for Women in Need. Time was Theta thought of herself as a woman in need, but Dr. Bickman had hired college consultants for her. (Theta, how many years have we been together? I know Kal. His kids are going to need braces soon) And Kal had come to the apartment and explained the forms: All Theta had to do was… and Kal would ink in the final forms, and college was affordable wherever Marlene went. Once or twice, Theta had considered calling Bob… but why? Why bother was always where she settled late at night when she could almost see the green that was the wider world of college. To think Marlene was about to embark on what she, Theta, had not quite finished. Dentist's receptionist was a good job but not what she dreamed of for Marlene, for Marlene… oh something. What we hope for our students is that each will find her passion. But friends, one can be passionate about friends; some have a passionate need of them. Not so long ago, whenever it was Astra Dell left the hospital, Marlene had said, "I can't visit Astra at her home. I never went there when she was well; why would I go there now?"