All Souls (9 page)

“See how lifelike?”

Mrs. Van de Ven didn't think he should pay for the more expensive human hair; the synthetic felt real, and, besides, the wig was temporary. “If you touched her scalp, I'm sure you'd feel stubble already.”

Not stubble. He would feel the plates of bone. “I can't do this right now, Lettie.”

“David.”

“I've seen the wigs. I have to think about it. I have to speak to Astra.”

“Then I'll buy it for her, David.”

“Lettie, please.”

Mrs. Van de Ven moved toward the counter with the “Cindy” wig, explaining to the saleswoman that this was the wig she wanted. At the same time, Mr. Dell held out his credit card. He said to the saleswoman, “I'm paying for this, please.”

“David.”

“I can't let you.”

“And why ever not?”

He addressed the saleswoman, saying, “I'm paying,” and the saleswoman looked at him and then at Mrs. Van de Ven, and when Mr. Dell held out his card, the saleswoman accepted it despite Mrs. Van de Ven's saying, “No, no, no. This is my treat. I'm the one who's insisting you get it. Give Astra a choice.” She repeated this protest while the mechanics of the transaction went on between Mr. Dell and the saleswoman.

“Just sign here, please.”

Mr. Dell also signed for the lunch that followed with Mrs. Van de Ven.

She told Astra the latest. “Now that Dad has a serious boyfriend, he doesn't need me to pimp for him, which is why, I'm sure, he's discouraging me from coming to Paris. He says I shouldn't. He says he's heard about my health. I bet he's heard. Didn't send him rushing home for Christmas, though, did it? I don't think I am going to go to Paris. I don't want to go.”

Astra said, “Sometimes you do sound like the girl who uses her pusher too much, know what I mean?”

“Look, I know I'm being a brat, but I'm a seventeen-year-old American girl, Astra. I'm allowed.”

Was it as late as it looked outside?

Astra opened her eyes and said, “Time in here,” but she didn't finish before she shut her eyes again. “I want a warm bath,” Astra said. “The medicine makes me cold.”

“I'm sorry,” Marlene said. She was hurrying now, forcing folders into her book bag. Astra's otherworld voice scared her. She put on her coat and was almost at the door when Astra opened her eyes.

“It's too exhausting,” Astra said, and she seemed to see dimly. “I can't be personal all the time.”

Dr. Meltzer repeated the question just asked him, “Can I give you the format to the exam? Do you really think knowing the format helps?”

 

How many times did Miss Mazur have to say it, “Yes, you should know the part of speech. Okay, okay. If you can use the word correctly in a sentence, I'll give you half credit.”

 

“Extra credit? I never give extra credit.”

“Will there be multiple choice?” The girls asked, “Maybe?”

“Can we not have an essay question?”

“I hate essays.”

“I can't write essays.”

“I never do well on exams.”

“Even if I study for hours, I fail.”

“I always fail.”

“What if you can't read my handwriting?”

“Canweplease,pleasewriteinpencil?”

They were looking for Will Bliss again. They put on their lightweight coats despite the weather. They gave up on matching gloves but found good hats. They were
taking long steps up Park Avenue, midnight by the clock, Alex and Suki, walking into the wind with their tiny coats wide open. Tube skirts, boots, candy striped, goofy hats with pom-poms. The snow, another snow, another storm predicted, had begun to fall. The big flakes seemed to be swinging in their descent, seemed to splash they were so large, and the ticklish pelt of them made the girls laugh, and it was hard to see for all the snow caught and melting on their eyelashes, watery drops on their cheeks, tears. They had given up on chemistry and Dr. Meltzer. Blue books, pencils, boxes of Kleenex.

A—
I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll understand it now. Please do. Not everything can be funny.

I'm not even bothering to study.

kisses,

C

 

Mrs. Forestal told the school nurse that she was doing everything she could to get Carlotta help. Carlotta had
a nutritionist and a psychiatrist. “We have a cook. I sit at the table with her as often as I can, but I can't watch her every meal.”

“Yes,” the nurse said. “That's the hard part.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Forestal said. Why should she understand what the nurse was saying when she couldn't make sense of her daughter? The most recent poem she had been given to read didn't make any sense to her. So her daughter didn't like her body? Fine. Who did?

She reread her daughter's poem: “. . . and covering my eyes with tea bags, listened to the menagerie of bears, pigs, puff-white lambs, and crumpled tissues swarming the sheets.” What was this all about? And why would anyone in her right mind admit to a “zoo-ish fragrance”? It made her think of apes. Was Carlotta trashing her father's place again?
Now at least it looks as if somebody lives here:
Carlotta's defense. Mrs. Forestal felt helpless and a little bored with Carlotta's bullish enthusiasms and clumsy lows. Maybe after exams.

The snow that had fallen on Sunday was added to again on Wednesday, but by then Marlene Kovack had taken the math exam.

Miss F defended Marlene's grade, saying, “Marlene
must have studied. She sees Astra Dell, and Astra could have helped her with discrete math.”

Poor Astra Dell was the general feeling. The girl would have been in AP calculus if she weren't sick. “I mean, she's in it,” said Dr. D. “She just won't take the exam, I guess.”

Exams were over in a sentence and returned just as fast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marlene looked into Astra's letter basket and saw Car Forestal's hand, and she read the note because Astra was out of the room on some test. Marlene read:

 

A—

I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll understand it now. Please do. Not everything can be funny.

I'm not even bothering to study.

kisses,

C

 

Marlene was still in Astra's room, so she took up Car's latest letter, and she put it in her pocket. A note on a note card: It wouldn't be missed. Would it, would it, would it?

Sometimes when Astra turned the white radiance of her attention onto Marlene, when Marlene saw Astra considering her openly and clearly and fairly, then
Marlene knew what it was about Astra Dell that made her feel possessive of the sick girl. Marlene wanted Astra to herself and resented even the intrusion of Astra's father, although she was polite enough when she saw him.

“Hello, Mr. Dell. Astra's a little sleepy today.”

Lisa told Josh (he had asked was she gay or not) that she was only experimenting with Janet Wilkes and Queens and all of it. “It turned me on for a while, but my mother ruined it. What happened was I'd be with Janet somewhere and I'd think I'd see my mother.”

“What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?”

“A present for your girlfriend?”

“Try a bag of tests.” Whenever he spoke, Mr. Weeks smiled or seemed to smile or was just about to smile, and the little girls and big girls, girls of all sizes, loud and silly, guileless and gentle, smiled back. The youngest faces were clean as how they came; the older were subject to hormones. Oh, hormones! That klieg
light word they knew; hormones meant adolescence and suffering. “My hormones, Mr. Weeks!” Girls were bleeding all over the place, or that was how it sometimes seemed to him.

“Why are you crying?” one girl to another. “What did I say?”

“Why are you crying?” another to another.

“Why?”

“We didn't know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn't invite you; she could only have six friends.”

“My parents are going to kill me.”

“My grandmother is really sick.”

The hallway's backdrop of posters: roundly muscled, oily heroines on the GAA board, drawings of the family—
ma mère, mon père
—from French V class. In-school polls and graphs for math. Popular after-school activities: Look at the pie and see what the middle schoolers do after school.

“Mr. Weeks? Do we really have to have a test on the explorers?”

“We do the explorers every year, Mr. Weeks.”

“Why can't we just have a discussion?”

“You're so unfair!” said smiling.

“Why aren't you married, Mr. Weeks?”

“Do you have someone in mind?” he asked.

Tim Weeks said his best and favorite year in school had been sixth grade, and he still felt like a sixth grader, which went some way in explaining his delight in the company of sixth-grade girls of all sizes: middle school, a mishmashed time, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, class by class, grossly uneven rows of dangerous bodies, bodies in motion, sharply angled, full of feelings, bawdy, brazen children asking anything. “Was that your girlfriend?”—pointing to someone pretty when they had surrounded Tim Weeks on the street outside of school. In some ways, he was always in school. “We knew it was you on the street, Mr. Weeks.”

“It was your walk.”

“Sexy,” from someone in the back, in a small voice but heard.

“What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?”

“Is it something for us?”

“Yes.”
Yes, yes, yes, yes,
from many sides, and each girl laughing and jouncing closer. Mr. Weeks, ringed by girls, girls jamming sidewalk traffic. Everyone in the middle school knew that Gillian Warring, the Sarah Bernhardt of the eighth grade, was going to marry Mr. Weeks. Even Tim Weeks knew of Gillian's plans. He had seen Gillian in the lunchroom looking at him as she spoke, insisting on herself.
I am. Watch me.

He is so cute!
from the entire eighth-grade class.

Mrs. Archibald, head of the middle school, told Mr. Weeks that Gillian was too smart for her own good. Mrs. Archibald liked best the girls who still wore undershirts and read mysteries. If not mysteries, then something funny. Funny. As far as Mrs. Archibald could see, funny did not much enter into the English department's curriculum. Had Miss Mazur ever considered reading Wodehouse? Why did Miss Mazur insist on that depressing
Lord of the Flies
? Mr. Weeks, on the other hand, loved P. G. Wodehouse. He liked mysteries and crosswords, Scrabble and show tunes. He knew a lot about
Jane Eyre
because the eighth-grade girls read it every year, and they told Tim Weeks about it. They told him they did not think, as Miss Mazur thought, that every object was phallic. That was a sexy word to know, wasn't it? Some of the eighth-grade girls believed Miss Mazur was oversexed, and some of them believed she was really sex starved!

Tim Weeks told the girls he didn't want to hear them disparage their teachers.

“
Disparage?
What does that mean?”

“We weren't bad-mouthing her.”

“It's true though, Mr. Weeks. All we talk about are the sex parts.”

“Sex, sex, sex. Why do you girls think you can talk to me like this?” Tim Weeks asked these eighth-grade
girls, and they said, “Because,” and laughed. They had trailed him in school and out of school, girls past and present. Mr. Weeks! The best!

“Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?”

“You never liked us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!”

“You don't like us anymore.”

“That's right,” Mr. Weeks said. “I like the others better.”

Ha-ha-ha,
from all the eighth-grade girls, who said, “You love us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!”

 

“Mr. Weeks, be careful you don't disappoint anyone by marrying.”

Anna Mazur saw him surrounded by sixth-grade girls and eighth-grade girls, all of whom seemed to be teasing him at once for his new tie, the blue tie with hot-air balloons that he said was a gift from his mother. When he smiled, the under-folds of his eyes turned down sweetly. Anna Mazur watched as students pressed him, circled about, said, “We'll get you some elf shoes, Mr. Weeks.”

The middle-school girls laughed and laughed, but ask what seniors had thought of middle school, and they gagged and howled and said it was the worst time of their lives. Older girls would say they didn't laugh much in middle school, but here was middle school in front of Anna Mazur. Middle-school girls laughing; middle-school girls, an acquired taste, an age of elbows and
knees, at once knockabout and full of shyness, streakers on the sleepover, always out of fashion, over- or under-dressed—here they were laughing. Middle-school girls: Anna Mazur did not really love them, but Tim Weeks did and his love was returned.