Christine Schutt - All Souls

"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."

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.