An Uncommon Education (25 page)

Tiney was on the way down the stairs when Jun took her seat, so instead of stepping around us she sat down on the step just above. I knew she didn’t like me, that she had settled in to be near Jun. She regularly pretended at an intimacy with Jun that seemed to make them both uncomfortable. Tiney leaned in between us, smirking. She lifted her chin in Ellie’s direction as she addressed Jun: “Still weepy, huh?”

Jun didn’t say anything, but Tiney nodded as if she had. “She’ll get over it soon. Probably sleep with Lulu’s roommate. I hear it’s a long time coming.” I knew nothing of Lulu or her roommate. Tiney went on: “ ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ Leave it to Will to know.”

I studied her expression, the way she didn’t attempt to hide the cruelty there. I had thought Tiney more confident than she was. Wellesley wasn’t known for its shrinking violets, but there were a few notable standouts: the very wealthy, very well connected women who seemed to subsist entirely on beauty and grace, and the unusually brilliant. Tiney fell into the latter group. She had won a rare merit scholarship to the college and had been the only freshman to be invited to join the White House Internship program. By her sophomore year she was a TA for Roger F. Chang, dubbed “the most influential economist of our time” by the nickname-hungry media of the nineties. Jun was an economics major, too, with similar laurels, though I know now that she was focused on returning to her father and his business rather than on public recognition. Their friendship was never easy. Even with the people she liked the most, Tiney was standoffish, flippant, letting her wittiness stand in for affection. At times her paleness made her seem otherworldly, of an ethereal kind of presence or mind. She was truly one of the fairest people I had ever seen, her hair so light it was almost invisible, her eyes so nearly colorless that they were difficult to follow, even if she was looking right at you. At other times she could appear a thorny, conceited girl, as insecure as she was accomplished, latching on to whoever she thought had the most power at any given moment with the tenacity and loyalty of a wounded soldier.

“Will never said that”—A.J. breezed by en route to the makeup table, trying to hold a carefully balanced crown to her head and pin it there as she walked. Phyllis had asked for a rerun of a few scenes that had been uncomfortably slow. “At least not our Will. It was William Congreve, that weird playwright who lived, what, like a hundred years after Shakespeare? Wasn’t he a total perv, Calbe?”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Tiney said, looking again at Jun.

“Congreve. I’m sure of it. Not the Will you meant, hon. Congreve said that thing about women scorned—right, Calbe?” Calbe was reapplying spirit glue to the back of a small piece of facial hair, her nose wrinkled at the smell. “Congreve,” she said, “1697.” She rolled her eyes at me in the mirror. Of our fifty-three members, Calbe had already chosen me as her first pick for Popeian disciple. I’d turned her down, but she couldn’t get past the opportunity of using me as a human reliquary of accurate Shakespearean data. It would never work, I told her, I wasn’t interested in using my memory for archival purposes, but she kept at it, knowing I was flattered.

“I know which Will it was,” Tiney spat. She was woven that night even more tightly than usual. She turned and acknowledged me for the first time with another smirk, as if daring me to contradict her. “Everyone knows which Will said that.”

“Tiney”—Ruth, as Guildenstern, was studying herself in the mirror, grooming her eyebrows into place—“you should play one of the three witches if we do
Macbeth
next. You look exactly like a fairy, and no one would expect someone so delicate to make such a great witch.”

“I would make a great witch,” Tiney said, her grin stretching into a leer. “But I want to be Macduff. Someone more noble. Or maybe we could do Lear. Then I could be Regan. She gets to do the eye-plucking scene.” She stood and walked to A.J., pulling her thick, dark hair up at the neck. “You need to pin it back first so the crown will stick better,” she said.

Phyllis breezed in, examining us. “God, you make a hot guy,” she told me. “You’re even hotter than my current boy, and he’s something. Wow. I always felt Laertes should be super hot.” She frowned at my chin. “But your facial hair looks pubic. It’s been bothering me. Take it off.” She handed me the rubbing alcohol as I leaned forward toward the mirror. “Jun, you’re okay. Damn. I can’t decide who’s hotter, Laertes or Hamlet. The audience is gonna go into heat when you guys kill each other.”

“Jun, definitely,” Tiney grinned. She intercepted the rubbing alcohol and fetched the cotton. She sat down beside me, working alcohol into my chin with a cotton ball in small, persistent circles. The careful attention made me feel like a very young child, tended to when asked to do something clearly beyond her capabilities.

“Jun’s always the hottest,” A.J. remarked, studying her.

“You think all the girls are hot,” Phyllis told her.

“Some are hotter than others. I’m just waiting for Jun to come out of the closet so I can get in line,” A.J. grinned.

Both Tiney and I looked quickly to Jun, in the mirror. Her face remained impassive.

“She’s got a boyfriend, idiot,” Tiney said. “George, right, Jun?” she asked. Jun gave her a look, put down her brush, and made a pretense of straightening her shirt as she walked across the room. “He’s back in Japan,” Tiney continued. “You should mind your own business, Anusheh.”

A.J. laughed lightly, studying her reflection once again, and pulled gently at the pins underneath her crown so they wouldn’t prick her.

Jun returned to the stairs and climbed them, leaving the room.

“Christ, Ellie”—Phyllis was on to the end of the row—“you need to be re-bound. Have you put on weight? Ruth, give me a hand here.” Ruth stood as Ellie lifted her shirt, then grabbed the edge of cheesecloth and walked to the end of the room as Ellie slowly unwound, a doll on a spit with a tear-streaked face.

Phyllis and Ruth went back to the stage, and the room was silent until Ruth returned in a hurry, demanding that Tiney help her find Ophelia’s missing weeds. The run-through was over and the hired photographer had arrived, a smirking graduate student from MIT. We had a half hour to get every photo Phyllis wanted, both for posterity and vanity’s sake. Tiney didn’t move even as Ruth and I dove into a pile of detritus—fake hair, broken masks, spirit glue, torn binding. It was the first time I began to wonder at exactly how cold she could be, and I stopped searching with Ruth long enough to make a picture of her face: calm, untouched, determined. The lights flashed, signaling Phyllis’s impatience. Jun appeared at the top of the stairs a few minutes later, covered in blood. Tiney ran up to her, handing her a towel. Jun took it without looking at her, reminding me in a flash of the way her mother had stood at her father’s command and followed him.

I
had told my parents about
Hamlet
but took a while to call again to invite them to a performance. I hadn’t been able to diminish my father’s concerns about the time it would take to be involved in a nonmedical procedure, as he tried to joke, so I had tried to avoid the subject in the few calls I’d had with him since. Our weekly phone calls had become more infrequent due to the constant rehearsals and the informal dinners a few of us would put together after a run-through of the final act. During the final weeks of rehearsals, I often didn’t get back to my dorm room until the early morning.

I don’t know why I even asked for my mother when I eventually did work up the courage to extend an invitation for them to come to the play. I suspect my excitement surged into an enthusiasm I thought might be contagious, it whispered possibilities I would never otherwise entertain: I could wheedle my mother into something more hopeful; hope itself could be doctored. I fiddled with the bracelet on my wrist, which I had begun wearing again, inspired by the more decorated members of the society, though I loved the hidden intimacy of the engraving against my skin. I’m not sure I believed that God was closest to those with a broken heart, but the beauty of that line and its connections to my mother helped me to pretend that I knew her better than I did. As I listened to my father make halfhearted excuses about why she couldn’t come to the phone, I reassured myself that there was still the possibility that she might show up to see the play. Flipping through the pages of a partially finished lab report on my desk, I reminded myself that most biological organisms gravitate more toward joy than drudgery, but the reasoning felt empty.

I realized suddenly that my father had been quiet for several moments on the other end. I could hear him busying himself with something, the dishes he told me, and it was then that I knew.

Maybe I had known somehow before; maybe it had already been creeping up on me in the form of an added uneasiness that I was only too eager to distract myself from. Maybe I had known because of those years before I left home, when she had begun to be even more withdrawn, her increasingly quiet body the harbinger to a more permanent deterioration. Maybe I already sensed that certain diseases simply do not respond to the modern conventions of healing, or perhaps that the carrier of a disease is just as significant as its prognosis.

“It might not be cancerous,
ketzi
,” my father was still speaking, soothing.

It was in a good place in the brain, he told me, behind the left ear. She was an optimal candidate for surgery, but she had lost some of her hearing, and her balance would be permanently compromised. There would be an operation in the next few weeks.

I would be home, I told him. I would be home that night.

“No.” He stopped me, and it wasn’t concern for me that made him do it. The rushing in my ears made it difficult for me to hear him. “You know your mother, Naomi.” He cleared his throat. I could hear him playing with the neck of the phone cord. He always played with it, our phone cord at home was a mess, but the worse he felt, the nearer his hand came to his mouth. “She needs her privacy. That’s why I held off from telling you.”

“How long have you known?”

“Not more than a week,” he assured me, but his quick soothing raised my suspicions. “Just let her be. She’ll call you in a few days. She’ll call you tomorrow. You can talk to her yourself.” He was rushing me off the phone.

Even if I hadn’t suspected that there was a break in his voice just then, I would have hung up the phone when I did. Though afterward I could see him standing in his stocking feet, the cord still in one hand, his eyes on something else.

I closed the text I was supposed to reference for the report,
Molecular Biology of the Cell
. I had only retained the words, not really understood them. I had learned this was more than enough to pass most of the exams, had used it as a way to make exams more interesting, in fact: understanding as a rush, a last-minute game.

I stood up, went to the closet, pulled out my jacket, put it on, and walked out the door and down the hallway. I walked past the woman at the front desk, who looked up at me, bored, before returning to her reading. It was unseasonably warm, even for late March, but the sun was setting. I walked out the door, down the driveway and down the street. I was at Freeman before I’d thought of where I was going. I walked by the woman on bells duty chatting at the front desk, down a hallway, to Jun’s room. She answered on the first knock.

“You have a car.”

She looked at me blankly.

“Please,” I said, trying to control my voice, “can I borrow your car?”

She didn’t hesitate, only retreated into her room and pulled her keys from a pair of pants before bringing them to me. “What’s going on?” she said quietly. I shook my head. She told me where the car was. “Do you want me to go with you?” I shook my head. “All right,” she said, “I’ll see you later.” I nodded.

I found her car in the student lot, a mile from her dorm. It took a minute to warm. In another minute I was driving down Campus Road, it took me less than that to drive under the gates of the college, a little more and I was out of town, and then, finally, thankfully, I was on the highway.

M
y parents hadn’t changed the front lawn since I was a kid, though the trim on the house had been repainted since Thanksgiving. It looked nice. The dogwood was blossoming, the maple trees beginning to fill out again. There was a light on the second floor, a few on the first. I parked the car across the street and cut the lights. I watched the house in the dark, trying to see them move through the windows.

I got out of the car. The street was completely silent. I stood on the sidewalk, thirty feet from the front door, and could see my mother in the living room, reading. She was wearing her glasses. I couldn’t see my father. I heard something move to my right; a dog that trotted home at the sight of me. My father walked into the room where she was. They were speaking to each other. He left, and one by one I saw the lights go out in the other rooms as he turned them off. I checked my watch. It was a few minutes past nine.

I lost him for a moment, and then the front door opened. He had a trash bag in his right hand and was closing the door with the other. I crouched down quickly, behind a bush. He startled and then stood looking out toward the place where I’d been. I heard my mother call him. I stood up, but he didn’t move. The porch lights were on. Maybe they were in his eyes. I had just learned that an actor must play into the light and trust that the audience is beyond it. I remained standing, watching him. He didn’t move. Finally, he placed the garbage to the right of the door instead of walking it to the trash can in the garage and dragging it out to the curb. Had he been afraid of what he had heard? He turned around and closed the door behind him.

He returned to my mother, still reading, in the living room, and took her arm, helped her up. The tears came, as much as I didn’t want them, and I stuffed my fists into my jacket pockets as though I might squelch them. It didn’t help. They only came more quickly. The light went out in the living room, and then, a few minutes later, in their upstairs bedroom. It was like watching a play not yet meant to be seen. I returned to the car, then got out again. I walked as quietly as I could to the porch, picked up the trash, brought it to the can in the garage, and dragged it to the curb. I got back in the car and sat there until I fell asleep.