An Uncommon Education (21 page)

“I’ll take it,” a voice to my right said. It was Jun. Tiney handed the bottle to her and turned away.

I was surprised to feel as happy to see Jun as I did. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “Hey,” she said, grinning back. She looked into the room, watching Tiney retreat. She put down the bottle. “Do you want some tea?”

I nodded. She handed me a mug and chose one for herself. “Don’t let this intimidate you. It’s always a zoo, and most of us hate the teas, so it gets a little tense here; sometimes a little out of control.” A petite, mousy-haired woman was standing on my other side, pouring tea silently. “Hi,” Jun said cheerfully. The other woman smiled hesitantly. “Have a cookie,” Jun said. She picked up the entire platter and offered it in her direction. The girl took one, hesitantly.

“I’m Ellie,” she said, holding the cookie in her hand awkwardly. Jun nodded. “You’re in my econ class. Do you live in the new dorms? I think we’re in the same house.” Ellie nodded. I felt simultaneously included—Jun didn’t feel I needed the extra attention—and jealous, having felt the first tug of friendship, as if something sleeping and hungry inside of me had been gently kicked awake.

I turned from them and walked over to a small cluster of women standing a few feet away. The one nearest me was dressed in a deep-blue embroidered gown, her costume less frayed than the other woman’s and contrasting sharply with her freckled skin. She looked my way, grinning, her eyes a dark green, her kinky, almost black hair framing her face like a mane. Her smile was wide and sly and I liked her immediately. “Anush,” she said, offering her hand. “And this is . . .”

“Ruth,” I said.

Ruth was dressed in short black pants and a faded green cardigan, looking more out of place in her ill-fitting streetwear than she might have in one of the costumes. She grinned. “This is Naomi,” she told Anush. “Naomi?” Anush asked, affecting astonishment at the match our names made. “Feinstein,” I added. “Is it Feinstein or Naomi,” she teased. “Both, I guess. You can call me whatever,” I said. “I like Naomi,” Ruth said. “She pulled me out of the lake,” she told Anush triumphantly.

Anush nodded, nibbling on a carrot. “Want one?” she asked, offering me a carrot from her plate. I took it, which pleased her. “Call me A.J. No one can pronounce my name properly. So at school I’m A.J.” “Anusheh Jahedi,” Ruth said. “Well, Ruth can pronounce it because she’s Persian. And she likes the sound of her own voice. But she’s in the minority.”

“Half-Persian,” Ruth mumbled, her mouth half-full of cookie. “You’ve heard of my German grandfather,” she added conspiratorially to me. “Actually, one of the Wiefern tenets is that the strength of interbreeding between countries with dissimilar climates can be truly extraordinary.”

A.J. jabbed her sharply with her elbow. “Shut it, Wiefern.”

“My grandparents were sabras,” I said, probably too eagerly. “My father was born in Jerusalem.”

“Really?” A.J. asked, looking suspiciously at my face. “When did they immigrate?”

“Nineteen forty-one,” I replied dutifully. A.J. still looked doubtful. She studied my face, suspecting there might be answers there. “Actually, I don’t know much about them. My father grew up here.” I knew I was telling them these details to try to fit in, make them like me, but stating my vague family history out in the open only made me feel I was betraying myself, that I had just pulled my own anchor and was beginning to drift away. Sometimes that, more than anything, was what made me saddest about the little I knew about my family; it could be worked into almost any story, like a party trick.

A.J. nodded. “So, we’re doing
Hamlet
next semester”—she had finished her food and was wiping her mouth. She raised her smallest finger to discreetly pick a tooth. “You know all new members have to be in the play?”

I nodded, trying to look casual. It was getting noisier. I raised my voice, “I mean, I’ve never done much acting. But,” I felt boldness wash over me, “I’d join the play.”

“Laertes,” A.J. said to Ruth.

Ruth nodded. “Perfect.”

“Haven’t you cast him already?” It seemed like a role they might not want to give to a novice.

“No. Let me go find Phyllis.” Ruth walked away. A.J. put another carrot on my plate and followed her.

“So, I forgot to ask you last night”—Jun was suddenly beside me. “How come you didn’t try out for tennis again?” I sat down on the bench behind me.

“I’m premed,” I began, not knowing if I needed to explain any further. Jun brought a wave of warm air as she sat beside me; the window was drafty and I hadn’t realized I was getting cold. The interior of the room had been heated with bodies.

“You want more tea?” Jun asked. I shook my head. “You look cold.”

“I am cold.”

Jun looked at me for a moment and then said, “You know, I didn’t like you when I first met you.” Her head was down, her hands in her lap. I would come to recognize this as her at her most thoughtful, her kindest state. And in that moment, her confession, the implied retraction of her first opinion, felt like one of the first real gifts of kindness I’d received since coming to school. “I’m not sure why,” she added.

“Me, neither,” I said. I didn’t say that I hadn’t particularly liked her, either. “Maybe it was the tennis.”

“No,” Jun said, “something else.” Yes. There had been something else. She looked up at me. “Want a cracker?”

I took the cracker she offered and bit into it. “It’s a drain, anyway,” I said.

“Tennis?” she asked. She ate quickly, popping one cracker in after the other.

“Yeah,” I said. There was a very brief silence, long enough to make me notice the noise. “Truth is,” I said, “I don’t much like tennis.” I realized this to be true the moment I said it.

Jun frowned, looking at her plate. “Truth is,” she said, “neither do I.” She looked up, but not at me.

I nodded. “Seems the team has done well, though.”

Jun nodded briefly, wiping her hands on her jeans. “We’re okay,” she said. “Second in the division. Hey,” she looked at me. “Do you want to practice? You know, keep your game up?”

I didn’t. I wanted to run without worrying about being watched. “I don’t know,” I said. Jun looked away. “Okay,” she nodded.

I had disappointed her. The silence that descended was stiff, unlike the first.

I told her I guessed I could meet her at the courts. She smiled broadly. Her face was so open, such a contrast to what I had seen at the match. What else had I missed about her when we’d played?

Ruth sat down breathlessly. “Done,” she said, satisfied. With what, I wondered. “Did you get enough to eat?” she asked me. She leaned into the wooden bench as she would a comfortable chair. “Y’know, the Wiefern theory is more easily distilled than I explained previously . . .” I stole a quick look at Jun, but her face was a blank, apparently refocused on her food. Ruth gestured toward her, becoming in an instant the dramatization of her own point, like those videos we watched in the eighties that were made in the sixties—the light music, the smooth narrator, the dutiful subject—“People have evolved to eat more to protect themselves not from a literal cold but an emotional cold . . .”

“Ruth, shut the fuck up.” A.J. was there. She took a gentle hold of Ruth’s sleeve, “You’ll scare her off,” she explained to her friend, an unexpected tenderness in her voice. Somewhat to my surprise, Ruth looked hurt.

“It’s okay,” I protested, “Really, it’s interesting.”

Ruth beamed at me as A.J. let her go.

Sixteen

W
hen the entire society arrived, en masse, to stamp and shriek their welcome in my hallway that evening, Phyllis told me that I wasn’t the first future doctor they’d appropriated, nor would I be the last. I told her that I thought I’d appropriated them, not the other way around, and she nodded her approval. The truth was that I hadn’t any idea, really, why I’d joined, and I wasn’t sure I needed to know. I was beginning to feel that Ruth had extended the branch to me, and not the other way around.

The initiation to the Shakespeare Society was surreal and melodramatic, which relieved me from taking it too seriously. Each of the new recruits was led upstairs in the unlit house and left there for the better part of an hour. We sat there in the dark, only a little light coming in from the streetlights outside; I could make out only two of the other four new members. As my eyes adjusted to the weak light from the upstairs windows I realized that the woman nearest me was sitting underneath a framed portrait of Shakespeare; reactively I turned my head to look up and saw that I was, too, though it was a different rendering. The print was worn, casual.

There was something cool or sad about his eyes, I thought, but the expression of the mouth was almost coquettish, as though, despite all his sadness, the man sitting for it had held a great and private joke. The Shakespeare across the way was almost entirely different, with nearly a full head of hair and the expression and pose of someone who was worried he might be a philosopher. I tried to reconcile the two images to each other. Every photo I had seen of great men was categorically similar to the next: countless images of Einstein and his white hair, Kennedy in his suit and movie star smile. But Shakespeare remained enigmatic. I wondered if this was a reflection on the changing technology of capturing faces, or just of how we wished to see them. How many images of an unrecognizable Einstein or Kennedy lay tucked away in dark drawers? How much of what I knew of them, of what anyone knew of them, was a fabrication of perception? Could it be that genius was only an illusion, a hand-drawn portrait done by a myopic draftsman? I tried to shake off the thoughts that had begun to spiral in on me but instead I began to shiver, sitting there in the dark. How long had we been there? Twenty minutes, I guessed, not having a watch. I was almost ashamed of how relieved I was when the door to the next room opened.

A woman in a heavy, full-length dress gestured for us to come through. The entire society was there, fifty or more women on two benches. It was exactly like the great room beneath it, except for a stage at the far end. Phyllis stepped forward from a table in the center. She lit several candles that were waiting there.

I could only see a few of the members from where I stood, but each spoke in turn.

The first: “ ‘Let’s consult together against this greasy night.’ ”

Another: “ ‘Th’attempt and not the deed, confounds us.’ ”

A third: “ ‘O, were it but my life, I’d throw it down for your deliverance as frankly as a pin.’ ”

“ ‘I see a woman may be made a fool if she had not a spirit to resist.’ ”

The voices came scattershot; they were impressions, a patchwork story:

“ ‘O, a brave man!’ ” A few laughs after this one.

“ ‘Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love.’ ”

“ ‘For to be wise in love exceeds man’s might.’ ”

When the last voice had spoken her quotation, Phyllis stood again. I wondered if the candlelight from the room could be seen on the street below, if some future dignitary on her way to the library could guess that the lights illuminated a century-old ritual she had no idea existed. I myself had just learned that the society had been formed in 1877 by Wellesley’s very founders and that, despite an 1898 scandal involving the exposure of knees that hit the national news and prompted the college to monitor its activities more closely, had been honoring its iconoclastic ceremonies in private for the past 117 years.

Phyllis began a canned speech: “From here on out, in the tradition of the oldest female Shakespeare Society in this country, you will speak only in the voice of his women to the public of this place.” She was smirking, enjoying the terrible script. She continued: “We charge you to remember the words of one of our founding members, Alice Fae Childress, class of 1879: ‘Think not of what you cannot say. Choose instead to relish the words that are your lucky inheritance. May we join our voices in the verse of Shakespeare and so learn our own worth.’ Naomi Feinstein, please step forward.”

Startled, I did. “Repeat after me”—Phyllis directed my hand to rest on a tattered
Collected Works
—“ ‘It is to be all made of faith and service.’ ” I did as I was told.

I
auditioned for Laertes the next week.

“That was great,” Phyllis grinned. “Very stuffed shirt and virile. You’re a natural for Laertes. The girls were right. Have you ever acted before?” she asked. I shook my head, studying her from my vantage point on stage. She had pulled her hair up into a bun at her neck, emphasizing the angularity of her face. She had wrapped herself in a heavy cardigan. Even with the heat at full blast the room was very cold. But Phyllis looked unflappable, chic, in fact, dressed for a day in exactly such a room.

“One more thing.” She stood and walked toward the stage. “I want to see you read with someone else.” She pulled a pencil from her ear and gnawed lightly on the eraser as she studied the script in front of her. “In act one, scene three, Laertes has to take that direction from his father, you know, the ‘to thine own self be true’ speech.” She smirked as she said this, enjoying a joke I didn’t get. “Ruth”—she beckoned to Ruth, who had been sitting with her in the back of the room before she’d jumped up. Aside from the three of us, the only other person in the room was Tiney, who was serving as the stage manager. Ruth was assistant director to Phyllis’s director.

“Ruth will read Polonius’s speech, and I want to watch you while she does. I want it to look like you’re dutiful but condescending, too, like you think you know it all but wouldn’t dare interrupt your father. Let’s see it,” she marched back to her seat in the rear of the room.

Ruth had made her way up onto the stage and winked at me before launching into a grandiose, patronizing Polonius. “Fantastic!” Phyllis crowed when we were done. “You managed to look both constipated and full of yourself, no pun intended. Well, maybe intended. It works, anyway. Thanks, Naomi. You’ll be my Laertes.” She smiled. Ruth, once again, was beaming. “We’ll post the official cast list later tonight.” She strode toward the doors and opened them. “Next!” she called out, in the midst of a performance of her own.