The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove (15 page)

things.”

“Is she at Birch Grove?”

“She’ll be coming next year. She’s in eighth grade now at the Town

School, which is where everyone goes before the boys are girls are separated

because our parents believe raging hormones interfere with education.”

At the end of the hall was her room. There was a pink satin quilted cover

on her white four-poster bed, framed prints of dancers, and gilt trimmed mirrors.

Built-in bookcases were filled with paperbacks.

Lotions, perfumes, makeup and accessories completely covered the top of a

white vanity. A pile of clothes spilled out of the closet, and sheer white curtains

moved in the breeze from the open windows.

Her room made me think of those dreams I’d had of finding a big closet full

of new clothes, or discovering money scattered all over the ground. It had that

unreal quality, and I had an urge to grab an armful of clothes and run out of the

room before I awoke.

“What do you think?” Mary Violet asked.

“It looks like you,” I said.

“A mess!” she said with a laugh.

“No, pretty and comfortable. Feminine.”

“Yes, a mess.” She went to the pile of clothes on the floor and shoved them

inside the closet. “My mother says that one day I’ll be buried under an avalanche

of clothes and no one will ever find my body.”

Her comment made me remember what Orneta had said. “May I ask you a

question?”

“Yes, you may,” she said as she forced shut the double closet doors.

“I heard that someone committed suicide at Birch Grove last year.”

Her eyes went wide and she nodded. “Mr. Mason’s wife jumped from the

roof. Mr. Mason is shattered. Mrs. Monroe was devastated, too, since she and

Mrs. Mason were best friends from when they were both students.”

“Mrs. Mason was her friend?”

-97-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

“Oh, yes. She was really close to the Monroes,” Mary Violet said. “Mrs.

Mason was interesting --nervous and pretty. Well, prettyish. When she talked to

you, it was always as if thinking of something else.”

“Is that why the school’s called Bitch Grave?”

“Oh, no, it’s been called that
forever
. Although more polite people call it

Rich Loathe. Constance says that
I’m
not good at rhyming, but rich doesn’t

rhyme at all with Birch.”

I noticed the slim lavender aluminum case of a laptop on a mirrored antique

vanity table. “I can’t believe we don’t have access to computers at school.

Would you mind if I just checked in with some friends?”

“Go ahead, but don’t download anything because my mother checks all my

files constantly ever since, well, never mind…”

“Thanks.” I sat down and tried to log on to my City Central account, but I

got a message saying
ID Closed
. “Damn, the school must have cancelled my

account.”

“Don’t you use other sites?”

“No, I just had this one with my school friends. All my addresses were in

there.”

“It’s just as well. The Birch Grove PTA hires a tech consultant, whatever

that is, to spy on us online, and if anyone posts scandalous pics or disses Birch

Grove, she’d get suspended,” she said. “Come on and I’ll introduce you to my

mom. Try not to stare.”

“I don’t stare.”

“Uhm, maybe not stare, but you have a uniquely piercing look as if you’ve

got a very cynical interior monologue going. Quick, tell me what you’re

thinking!”

“I think you’re letting your imagination run amok,” I said as I followed her

out of the room and down the main staircase.

“That’s the fun of having an imagination, don’t you think?”

“No, I think reality is difficult enough to deal with.”

“Jane, it will be my life’s mission to funnify you.”

-98-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

“Now
I’m
the one living in terror,” I said.

The living room was decorated in white with sofas covered in aqua and

gray-blue armchairs. A gleaming black grand piano was placed by the window.

Above a beautiful white stone fireplace was an enormous painting in beiges

and rosy colors. After a moment, I realized that the blobs and streaks of color

were a nude woman showing all she had in far too much detail. It made the

graffiti at City Central look demure.

Mary Violet laughed and said, “You
are
staring! Wait until you see the

studio. It’s a nightmare. My mother uses words like vulva and labia like it’s

perfectly normal, so whatever you do, do
not
ask her about her
Art
.”

She took me down another hallway to the other side of the house. We

walked in a glassed-in sunroom flooded with late afternoon light. I let the

delicious heat of the room seep into me. All around us were easels with paintings

similar to the one in the living room. Nudes, nudes, and nudes of various women

and their private parts in hues of pinks, browns, purples, and reds. There was

even one in green.

I was so embarrassed by the display that I didn’t where to look or not to

look.

“Hello, sweetie.” A woman came from behind one of the tall easels. She

was wearing denim overalls covered in paint smudges. Her curly brown hair was

cut close to her head, making her look young and boyish. She was holding a paint

brush, and she dropped it into a glass jar of murky liquid.

She resembled her daughter’s, but where Mary Violet was pleasingly

rounded, her mother was all sharp angles.

“Hi, mommy. This is Jane Williams. Remember I told you she transferred

in? She’d like to interview you for a story she’s writing for the
Weekly
.”

“Nice to meet you, Jane. Are you here to talk to me about My Art?” She

said it that way, the way Mary Violet had mimicked.

“Hello, Mrs. Heyer. Actually, I’m writing a story about the scholarship

program. Mary Violet said that you wouldn’t mind.”

Mrs. Heyer looked a little disappointed. “Hmm, I suppose the subject

-99-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

matter of My Art is not quite appropriate for Birch Grove. I’m happy to talk to

you about the school fund, though. Come sit with me. Mary Violet, would you

get us some tea, please?”

“Everyone thinks she’s the boss of me,” my friend grumbled cheerfully as

she left us.

I wove through a maze of paintings to get to Mrs. Heyer, who was by green

wicker chairs and a paint-splattered wooden table in the corner of the room.

Mrs. Heyer sat with her legs crossed like a kid and said, “Now what can I

tell you?”

Sitting by her, I could see the small wrinkles radiating from the outer

corners of her gray eyes, as if she smiled a lot. After I took a notebook and pen

out from my school tote, I asked, “Why is important for you to donate money for

scholarships?”

She said the things I expected, that Birch Grove had given her a fine

education and she wanted to give back, and then she talked a little about her own

time as a student. I kept hoping that she’d mention running over a possum when

she was a frosh, but she didn’t mention it.

Then Mrs. Heyer caught my attention by saying, “Between us, no matter

how much I give, I’ll never be in the inner circle since I’m only a secondgeneration Grove girl. Hyacinth Monroe and her family go all the way back to

the founding of the school. They even follow the founder’s pasty white, no-sun

rules. They always do and say everything right.”

“Does it still matter to you?” I said, surprised. “Being in the ‘inner circle’

of a high school, I mean.”

“Birch Grove isn’t just a high school in Greenwood. It’s the center of most

of our lives in one way or another. Sometimes I feel, I don’t know,
left
out. I

wonder if I make these donations to be accepted.” Mrs. Heyer sighed and said,

“Even as ancient as you must think me, I still don’t know all the reasons I do the

things I do.”

“Why is it important to know
why
we do things as long as we do the
right

things?” I asked. “The result is the same – the school’s scholarship students

-100-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

benefit.”

She looked startled and said, “Alexander Pope said that the proper study of

mankind is man. In my case, it’s woman. If we don’t look inward, how can we

truly understand others? The internal and the external are all of a piece.”

“I’m more interested in what people do, not why they do it,” I said.

“You sound like a very practical young woman. But where’s the joy in

practicality?”

I hesitated then said, “Mary Violet has a plan to ‘funnify’ me.”

Mrs. Heyer laughed and said, “Come, let me show you My Art while we

wait for our tea.”

She tried to explain her paintings to me and talked about the “ripeness and

fecundity of the female body,” while I was cringing inwardly at the sight of

springy pubic hair and slick pink and purple folds and openings.

As she talked, I glanced away and saw a painting on the floor in the corner,

leaning against other canvases. It was black and white, with rich splashes of deep

green, yellow-green, and streaks of gray. “What’s that?”

“Ah, my
Lady of the Wood
series.” Mrs. Heyer moved to the painting and

pulled out the framed canvases behind it, displaying them all in a row. “I’ve

always loved the grove and the mythology about birches.”

The vertical shapes resembled the trees at night, with branches and roots

that suggested arms and feet. “They’re so beautiful.”

Mrs. Heyer looked happy. “It’s nice to hear that someone else appreciates

them.”

“Someone mentioned the folk stories, that the trees walk.”

“There are stories from all over the world about the birch. They’re a

symbol of fertility, spring and healing, and also seen to have a connection with the

world of the dead,” she said. These paintings honor the Lady of the Wood, the

myth of the benevolent female spirit who inhabits the trees.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but whatever I was going to say was gone.

My friend’s mother looked at me and I shrugged and said, “I forgot what I was

going to say. It was something about the trees. I get this sensation when I’m in

-101-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

the grove, like words on the tip of my tongue, and try as I might, I can’t remember

what it is.”

“Stop trying.” Mrs. Heyer, said, “It will come to you when you’re not

expecting it.”

Mary Violet returned with a tray of tea things and almond cookies and we

sat at the wicker table. She asked innocently, “Did you enjoy the vulva

paintings?”

“They’re very interesting,” I said as I kicked her foot under the table.

“Jane liked my
Lady of the Woods
paintings,” Mrs. Heyer said with a smile.

Mary Violet stood, knocking the table and making the tea cups rattle on the

saucers, and said:

“‘Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble,

Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet,

I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river,

Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it

My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.’”

We were all silent for a moment.

Then Mary Violet sat, bumping the table again. “That’s from James

Russell Lowell’s ‘The Birch Tree.’ I did a term paper last year on poems

dedicated to the birch and I should have gotten an A+, but I got an A-.”

“You knew you weren’t supposed to use purple ink,” her mother said. “I’m

sure your prose was purple, too.”

“It was violet, not purple, and that is my trademark.”

Her mother rolled her eyes in exactly the way that Mary Violet did.

Mary Violet chattered about her classes and teachers and I offered a few

comments about my own. It was only when Mrs. Heyer got up to switch on the

lights that I noticed how late it was.

“Thank you for talking to me,” I said to her. “I have lots of work to do. I

better get back.”

“You’re living in the groundskeeper’s cottage, aren’t you, dear?” Mrs.

Heyer asked. “That’s where Bebe lived. Too bad she left. Would you like a

ride?”

-102-
The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

“It’s only a few blocks. I’ll walk.”

Mary Violet went outside with me and said, “My mother’s an intellectual.

That means that she thinks it’s all right to discuss the filthiest things if she uses

their medical terms.”

I laughed. “She’s really nice. See you tomorrow.”

“
Au revoir
.”

I’d walked a little ways when Mary Violet came skipping after me.

“Jane!”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad Mrs. Monroe extorted us to hang out with you.”

“Me, too,” I said, feeling oddly shy. “See you tomorrow.”

The street lights had come on and glowed in that perfect moment when the

sky is the deep thick blue. Sometimes I heard faint conversation or the slamming

of a car door or a dog barking.

Mrs. Heyer wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met, and I wished she’d spoken

more about the internal and the external and used something besides her
Art
as an

explanation.

I turned into the drive that led to Birch Grove. Ahead, the school was a