All Souls (11 page)

Suki and Alex were late to class meeting.

“I thought we did this in October,” Suki said when she saw they were nominating speakers for commencement.

“We did,” whispered from the floor. “She canceled.”

Alex made the same suggestion she had made in October. Why not Al Pacino? Somebody had to know him.

“Great!” from the room. The same response made in October.

Suki said, “He'd be so great!”

Ny Song said, “Who we pick says a lot about us.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “It says we like sexy actors, older men.”

“Yeah.”

“Al Pacino is hot.”

Other suggestions were Sarah Saperstein's uncle, who happened to be a very important doctor at Sloan-Kettering, and Patricia Friebourg, an art historian at NYU, best friend of Edie Cohen's mother, and part owner of the Friebourg-Johannasan Gallery on Mercer. Someone called out, “Brad Pitt!” and there were other suggestions for anyone with only one name. Miss Brigham wanted the seniors to know the school had connections with Verlyn Klinkenborg, and he might agree to speak at commencement. “Great,” Alex stage
whispered, “but who the fuck is he?” Sarah Saperstein knew just who Verlyn Klinkenborg was; in fact, several of the girls knew who he was. Ufia pronounced, mock grandly, that his prose was pellucid.

“Will you turn the camcorder off?” Ny yelled at Alex.

“She's right.”

“Get serious.”

“I thought a reminder of who we were, the fat-headed class of 1997, would amuse Astra Dell.”

Sarah Saperstein was counting raised hands. Verlyn Klinkenborg was elected.

“Over Al Pacino! Unreal.”

“What did you expect?” Suki asked Alex. “We've got a lot of nerds in our class.”

“Oh god! I hate my class.”

“A little something on meatballs or snow, that's what some guy named Klinkenborg will talk about.”

“I just thought of Astra.” Astra Dell had not been mentioned in the class meeting. Astra Dell was very sick. The rumors of blazing radioactive rods being sewn into arms persisted. The futureless future their friend faced was horrible, so it wasn't any wonder Astra Dell was a nighttime topic and rarely mentioned in class, not this day, when the class elected its graduation speaker, or in the days that followed when yearbook ads were due.

Theta Kovack watched over the island of her station as Max Fuise fought the young woman who had brought Max to his appointment. The young woman repeated that Max was to come home with her. He could not visit his friend. They were loud, and Theta made a hushing gesture toward Max and his sitter and also toward the twins, the brothers Beller, who seemed to have the same crooked teeth and menacing hilarity. To the brothers Theta said, “This is an office, boys, not a playground.” Theta called out to them, and they shrugged at her voice:
So what?
All day Theta answered the phone and looked up records and sent out reminders.
Forget your teeth and they will go away.
From time to time, she reprimanded the rowdier children in the waiting room. Often she felt sorry for them, saw the children hopped up on sweets and overloaded with lessons. Their mouths looked sore; but at least they were young mouths, red and wet and young. An old mouth was death. Her own dingy mouth she hoped to keep shut, and Theta never looked directly at Mr. Scott when he came in. How could she? He was at least thirty. He looked like the kind of young man who should have experienced braces and private school, but when he opened his mouth, his family's economies were evident.

Wasn't he ashamed to have braces now? she wondered.

Theta was fifty; she had never needed braces—a blessing—but her daughter, Marlene, had needed them, so that Theta's job was a blessing when just the everyday expenses were wearing. Theta answered the phone and looked up records and sent out reminders and in this way kept up her own modest home and made payments on the money she was borrowing for Marlene's tuition.

Theta made some mistakes in the afternoon; a woman with an expensive camel-colored feed bag on her shoulder questioned the cost of a procedure. Theta was right, but she addressed the woman rudely. Theta penciled in a wrong date, then said it aloud, but a hooded sweatshirt with a mouth brace corrected her. Theta broke her pencil in a passing fury, one of the small rages out of nowhere that beset her; she misplaced a statement; she did not have lunch. Her biggest mistake of the day was when she walked through Bloomingdale's to get to the subway. Weaving through the mezzanine's bazaar could be cathartic and airy, especially in the summer, but in January, clobbered by the weight of her wet winter coat, the perfume halls were oppressively bright; every surface was a mirror, and her skin, she glimpsed, looked patchy and chapped; she felt dirty. Then on the subway, there was only one seat left between her and a young man. She said, “I've been sitting all day,” and it seemed he didn't doubt her because he took the seat. She was surprised at his alacrity, and
hurt. Someone at the Food Emporium took her place in line, but she was too tired to argue and went down another aisle sure that some product would beckon. She bought midget Brillos and Bounce fabric softener.

Theta's evening at home grew worse.

“Your manners!” Theta said to Marlene when she discovered her daughter had mauled the ice cream she meant to have for dessert.

Dessert already? After the grocery shopping, after the hazardous
whump
of the burners igniting came dinner, but she had no memory of dinner. What did they eat? Had they talked? Theta remembered what she had wanted for dessert was ice cream. After Bloomingdale's came the butter pecan. But what was butter pecan ice cream when all the pecans were missing?

“You've gouged out all the nuts and left a mush.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I mean really. Your spoon's been all over this. Who's going to want to eat it now?”

“I said I'm sorry.”

“But this is a habit of yours, Marlene.”

“I'll stop.”

“I was looking forward to butter pecan ice cream. I think more than anything else, I wanted butter pecan ice cream tonight.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Mother”—Marlene pushed away from the table—“get a grip,” and she pushed the swinging door open and set it swinging back and forth.

Theta did not move from the table; she stirred the ice cream to milk shake consistency and sipped it to soothe all that was sore. Now she remembered they had talked at dinner about Astra Dell's tooth, how it broke apart and powdered like a clay pot when Astra merely smiled. The kiln of chemotherapy had brittled every part, and she was fragile and feverish. All day Theta saw red, wet, young mouths, rawed by braces and retainers and bands, mouths tirelessly open in the way of good health. She did not want to think of a sick mouth, and she numbed her lips with ice cream and forgot the sick girl.

The two Elizabeths, yearbook coeditors, told Alex that so far this year's photographs of clubs and sports were clearer than in other years, and what the two Elizabeths had wanted all along were really, really clear pictures and fewer of them on a page. “We don't want another ugly yearbook.”

Alex said the book was going to be ugly no matter what they did. “If you'd just let me take candids.”

“I don't think you hear what we're saying, Alex.”

“Why, what are you saying?”

The two Elizabeths, sturdy students, knew enough not to argue with Alex.

“I don't have to get up too close for group shots,” Alex said. “The fat people are always easy to identify.”

“Don't we know it,” said the two Elizabeths, as alike and plump as pears.

“Yearbook ads are the best part of yearbooks, don't you think?” Suki and Alex were sitting on the stoop composing their ad to each other, a full-page good-bye. It was a matter of design. There wasn't any text.

“We've already said everything.”

 

Astra Dell took out an ad for Car, a modest quarter-page ad with a modest photo of two girls in front of a modest house. The girls are arm in arm in bathing suits. More text is on the page than photo. A long quotation from Virginia Woolf.

 

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one
thing or another thing about people, sealed as they
were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or
sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one
haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes
of the air over the countries of the world alone, and
then haunted the hives with their murmurs and
their stirrings; the hives, which were people.

 

Quirky the college counselor told Alex, “I'm going to mention your senior page in my letter to RISD. It's terrific.” Ufia, looking on, agreed.

On a white page, pleasing margins, was a dark cube made up of two pictures of Alex. The pictures were arranged so the little and the big versions of Alex looked to each other; everything converged in a satisfying cube reminiscent of a Rubik's Cube. One version of the two Alexes had been printed in some tricky way and looked silvered.

“Looks modern,” Ufia said. She read the quotation. “Serious,” she said.

“It was going to be Nirvana,” Alex said. “I was going to have ‘I think I'm dumb, or maybe just happy,' but then Suki showed me the Toni Morrison.”

 

Lisa looked at Kitty Johnson's senior page and pronounced it as good as Alex's page. Better for its simplicity. A mirror image of herself in a deeply shadowed modest profile. Lisa said she looked like Grace Kelly, which pleased Kitty because she did look like her—white blond pretty—and because Grace Kelly was one of Kitty's crushes. She and Edie were also obsessed with Jackie O. They had made Kitty's mother pull over to the side of the road in the country when the radio announced Jackie Kennedy Onassis had died. Edie and Kitty got out of the car and ran into a field and shouted and cried until Mrs. Johnson threatened to
drive away. Kitty bought up all the magazines from the time.

Kitty's yearbook picture had blue shadows and a quality like pearl.

“I guess it says it all about each of us, yes,” Ufia said, standing just behind. Ufia saw everything; she was the ultimate layout editor.

 

After the table of contents came the dedication. This year to Miss Hodd. Then a picture of the staff section and explanation of the theme. This year detectives. Alex in the picture is wearing dark glasses; Ufia, a beret. The background—a brownstone stoop, a bare tree—looked rained on. They carried umbrellas. “With perseverance and craftiness, we've uncovered every mystery and solved every problem we encountered along the way at Siddons.” Next page a double spread of baby pictures with clues to each baby's identity; then a “Remember When” section. The two Elizabeths, already fleshy, smiling in a tropical setting at a booth eating ice cream; Kitty as Amelia Earhart on Famous Women's Day; then the in-crowd again, Alex, Suki, Car, Astra, Kitty—the five of them seated on the edge of the stage, legs identically crossed, hair identically swooped to one side, long, side parted. Only the tights and tops are different. Astra is the smallest. A steeple of pictures had girls in twos, in school uniform, in party dress, and in costume.

“Who's the sexy six-year-old with the cigarette holder?”

“Alex?”

First-grade or second-grade class picture, all the girls with two hairstyles: pulled back or side parted. Ufia's is the only black face then; her hair is elaborately, tightly braided. The sisters and the cousins and the aunts in straw hats: Gilbert and Sullivan, seventh grade.

 

Alex took a half page and Suki took the other half to congratulate each other on surviving without Will Bliss and, it seemed, without parents. Where were their mothers and fathers? Only Mrs. Morton's arms appeared in one of Suki's ads holding out a cake with one enormous candle erupting from the middle. Under the photograph Suki had captioned: “Everywhere phallic!” Arrows, a small map of upper Park Avenue, pictures of the entranceway to 1088. A smudged head of what might have been a boy. More arrows. “The minute she walked in, Minta had her glow”—from Suki again. Alex's message is “Smootchies.” Even in black and white, the evening dress-up pictures from this year seemed lit up, two sticks in spangled tubes, Suki and Alex, bright as beads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Eighty-eight days of school until graduation!” This announcement, made by Suki and Alex at morning meeting, was greeted with a barbaric yawp from the class of 1997. So that was exciting, and after morning meeting the rumor that Astra Dell had been given an orange wig was confirmed by Marlene Kovack of all people.

Alex asked Ny Song if she had considered Astra Dell in picking the commencement speaker. Was it a good idea really to have a cancer specialist?