The Other New Girl Page 4

  “I’ll meet you,” I spoke up and the others agreed. All except Faith. She wouldn’t smoke or drink. And no sex. But she also wouldn’t tell. She was fair that way. We set a schedule for starting out one at a time so none of the faculty or hall teachers would get suspicious seeing a group of girls wandering into the woods. We each took something to make it look like we were just going outside to study. We’d pick a spot near the edge of the woods, sit down and then in a little while wander farther away until we found the path through the woods that led to the pigpen.

  I took an American history book. It was a required course. I was also taking third-year French, algebra, second-year Latin, American history, English, and for a half credit, drawing. We had to do some sport so I tried out, and made, the girls diving team. I was a graceful and competent diver but nervous about boys coming to watch the meets. I’d been told at the tryouts that they came to ogle any girl who had a good figure and that made it hard to concentrate on the board and the pool. I was determined to ignore them but it was impossible and with every meet I developed a fluttery stomach that led to such serious jitters that for the rest of the season before and after every meet I considered quitting.

  Once a week everyone also had to take one extra class— Quaker Life—where we learned the history, tenets, beliefs, and practice of the Friends way. The other new girl, Moll, and I sat next to each other around an oval table. It was the only class where we didn’t sit in rows facing the teacher. I was surprised when it became my favorite class and maybe that was why I felt kindly toward Moll Grimes and encouraged her to think of me as her friend.

  And so it progressed. One rebellious act led to another. Brady drew us a map to where she said we should meet and we split up after deciding on a time. It was Saturday and there were no games scheduled yet so we had free time. We were supposed to use that time to study. But only a week into school, we were pretty confident so far. I didn’t realize how easy it was going to be to slip behind. Take one afternoon off, and pretty soon you were pushing the homework from one class aside and then another. It built until panic set in before a test or a paper was due. But that afternoon in early September, the sun was shining and I was still free. There was no study hall on Saturday and wouldn’t be until Sunday after lunch.

  It was hard to imagine it now, with rampant drugs and teen sex the norm, but back then, on the cusp of a young generation that would soon be at war with its elders, smoking cigarettes was the gateway to rebellion. I passed through that gate without a thought and, history book in hand, wandered off into the woods to find the pigpen.

  Daria was already there, lit cigarette in hand. She motioned me to enter, which was funny because this really was not much more than a shed with three sides and a sloping, low roof. The floor was dirt, rutted and uneven, and there were what looked like old stalls along one side.

  “Was this really a pig pen at one time?” I asked.

  Jan came up behind me and slid past. “Who cares?”

  I shrugged and sort of squatted next to her. “I don’t know. I just wondered.”

  “Give,” she said and held up two fingers for a smoke. When she’d lit it, she breathed in deeply, as if she’d been starved. “Ahhh,” she said as she let out a misty, gray stream. “Finally. God I hate Saturdays here. Almost as much as I hate weekdays. There’s not one damn thing to do.”

  I was about to ask why she came to Foxhall but at that moment Brady showed up and the ritual of lighting up repeated until we were all puffing away. So there we were, smoking like little locomotives, encased in the cocoon of our parents’ protection, glorying in our rebellion and thirsting for ever more dangerous chasms where we could plunge headlong toward anarchy.

  FIVE

  Whatever Happened to Daria?

  IN STARBUCKS, WITH SKETCHES OF SPAIN PLAYING IN THE background and a few laggards sipping on their Ventis and tapping away at their notebooks or checking their iPhones, I got around to asking Daria about herself. I guess I assumed she would be leading some glamorous life with yachts and trips overseas, maybe an apartment in Paris or London and a big house in Beverly Hills or possibly in East Hampton with a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. What other direction could Daria’s life have taken? Over the years I had lost touch with almost all the girls from Foxhall and had only heard about a couple of the boys. Based on what she’d been like back at Foxhall, I thought she and Tim Payton would have gotten married, that they’d be incredibly successful, probably in the thick of a Hollywood or Tribeca lifestyle, that she would still be beautiful, that life would not have dared blemish her.

  “So how are you?” I asked her. “Do you live out here? You were from Connecticut.”

  “Yes, Southport. On the Sound. A big old house with a huge lawn and a tennis court. We had a sailboat at the Pequot Club. My father used to take me out sailing every weekend. We raced in all the Atlantic regattas. Atlantics. They were a class of boat.”

  She’s explaining it to me as if I came from some other world, I thought. Not like I came from the next town down the Sound where we also raced sailboats in regattas and went to the club for dinner dances. But that was before. Then the sixties happened and the world changed forever. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Bobby Dylan, civil rights, the Kennedys, the assassinations. And The Pill.

  “I wonder if anyone still sails them,” her musing brought me back to Starbucks.

  She had the remnants of the bearing she’d had then, a nonchalance, as if she knew nothing could ever really touch her because she was beautiful and privileged. Yet she had lost the certainty of position, at least as far as I could sense from our brief encounter, and seemed more tentative than I remembered. There was a furtiveness at the edges of her eyes, a tiny squint and a downward glance, that I didn’t remember. She’d always been someone who would look you straight in the eyes, almost challenging you to stand up to her, which no one ever did.

  She didn’t answer my question directly so I asked again if she lived in San Francisco and, while she talked, I studied her face. It was the way it had changed that fascinated me. There was still beauty but where before it had been perfect in its symmetry and grace, now it was pulled hard, with deep creases at the sides of the mouth. Her hair was now the color of pale rust with white roots at her temples and it had no shine to it, the curls forced now where once they had cascaded as if caressed by a gentle breeze.

  “I’ve been out here a long time,” she said and held her mug in two hands. “I got married down in Monterey and we lived there for a time until we split up. I never go down there anymore. Have you been?”

  “To Monterey?”

  “Yes. It’s beautiful. Weather’s completely different. Here it’s all fog and wind and sun. Sometimes the wind and damp chills your bones. Changing all the time. Jacket and scarf weather. Down there you get micro climates every few miles.”

  “No, I’ve never gone that far down the coast. But when did you come up here? Was it for work?”

  “Yes work. I was still modeling then. A photographer asked me to come up for a catalogue shoot he’d lined up so I arrived up here with one suitcase and . . .” her voice trailed away and I could see in her eyes she was reliving something painful, or trying not to.

  I imagined her back then. Beautiful Daria with snow-like skin and light auburn hair that draped in casual curls below her shoulders. Piercing green eyes, tall, slender, elegant, she was the nemesis of every girl at Foxhall School, and the fantasy of every boy. But she was still talking now, and I snapped back to the present.

  “After my divorce came through—you know in those days divorce was not so easy and it took forever. I had to go to court. It was horrible. I borrowed the money for a lawyer and even with him there, this old geezer of a judge tried to talk me into going back and ‘working it out.’ Those were his exact words. Like I had done something wrong and it was up to me to make things right. My husband just sat there smirking. Oh, he wanted me to come back, all right. So he could get plastered and knock me around some more. But I was
one of the lucky ones because after the last episode—”she talked as if she was retelling a story she’d heard, using words like “episode” as if this had all happened on a soap opera—“I had the photographer take pictures for me and kept the prints to show that day in court. Even that antediluvian judge couldn’t deny what he saw. But he still asked if I could have possibly fallen down or been in a car accident. I could have killed them both that day. The judge and the husband.”

  “Why did you marry him? Not the judge . . .”

  She let out a little “hunh” sound. Not a laugh exactly. More like a way of saying, “If I only knew.”

  “Well, he was rich, the east coast heir to a canned ham fortune. His father had sold the business out to some huge food corporation and promptly dropped dead, leaving his fortune to his only son. He was handsome. And charming. And he said he adored me and would always protect me and that was important to me then. He lavished me with gifts before we got engaged. He took me on fabulous vacations all over the world. He never seemed stressed or upset. He was the perfect host and he threw catered parties where all the best people showed up. It was like some dream life. My father had died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother had remarried and moved to Buenos Aires. My brother was working for some big oil company and living in Saudi Arabia so we got married with a huge ceremony and, even though none of my family could make it, it was all just wonderful. On the honeymoon, he beat me so badly I couldn’t come out of our hotel suite for five days. He told me I belonged to him now and he could do whatever he wanted. And he did. For three years. It was like living in hell.”

  She stopped. Drank her coffee. Again that compressed look appeared on her face. I didn’t know what to say. Daria was the one who’d had the perfect life. The life we all wanted. There was nothing we wouldn’t have given up to be her. And then she added, “Except that in hell you expect to suffer, to be punished for your sins. What sins did I commit? Why did I deserve what I got?”

  I didn’t know what to say. If she was looking for an answer, I had none.

  “He wasn’t a Quaker then?” I asked, more to move away from her painful memories than to gather information.

  “But he was,” she said. “Brought up attending meeting, both parents Quakers. From an old Main Line, Philadelphia Quaker family. Pacifists. He went to lunch counter sit-ins with his mother. His father ran the old family business. I think his being a Quaker made me feel safe. Before anyway.”

  “Wasn’t Tim a Quaker, too?” I wondered what had happened to him—to them.

  “You have a good memory,” she mused softly. “Better than mine.”

  “You don’t remember Tim?”

  This is not possible, I was thinking. She and Tim were inseparable. I certainly remembered.

  “How is it you’ve hardly aged at all?”

  I laughed at that. “Thanks but I remember how we were back then.” I sighed and said, “I’m happy with my life now. I wouldn’t want to go back but I’d sure like to feel young. I guess you can’t have both.”

  “So you’re happy?” she asked as if it had never occurred to her that was possible. “I don’t remember you as happy at Foxhall. But who’s happy at sixteen?”

  Foxhall School, where they tried to create a microcosm of the greater world with a 1950’s notion of diversity. There were exactly four black students: one was the son of the ambassador to Sierra Leone, another was an exchange student from Liberia, the third was a Quaker girl from Illinois on full scholarship, and the last was the son of a judge from New Jersey. It may have been an institution attempting to be way ahead of the curve, yet all the kitchen and laundry workers were black men and women from the Philly ghetto. They came to work each day, crowded into a few cars and toiled in the background while the students attended class and played on teams in the afternoon.

  On Sundays, the few Catholic kids were driven to Mass two towns away because you couldn’t spit without hitting a Quaker Meeting nearby but Catholic churches were spread pretty thin near Foxhall. There were Jewish kids and Lutherans and even a few Presbyterians—one even a minister’s daughter. But in those years, the school was over 50 percent Quaker kids and much of the staff and faculty were Quakers, too.

  And where did I fit in with my Jewish father and Episcopalian mother? My parents decided before they married that ours would be a non-religious house. They saw sending me off to a Friends school as a way to get both a good education and some sort of religion without inundating me with doctrine. It was a good theory. A fine theory. The doctrine wasn’t the problem. It was the way some people practiced it and, at that time in my life, I was not overly concerned with nuance in my judgments so I came to the conclusion that even peace-loving Quakers could be harsh and cruel and ignorant.

  SIX

  Moll

  CLASSES BEGAN ON OUR FIFTH DAY AT FOXHALL. BEFORE that we went through Orientation. Like everything at Foxhall the schedule of student arrivals followed a pecking order. First to arrive were the football team members, a full week before everyone else. Teachers and coaches were already there. Next to arrive were the senior proctors—senior girls or boys who lived on each hall floor and guided and watched out for the younger students in their charge. Cool proctors were a bonus. Uncool, or sticklers-for-rules proctors were a drag. Finally new students arrived, looking bewildered and a little scared, or full of bravado to hide that they were bewildered or scared. I must have been a mixture of both.

  The football team was tasked with helping new girls and their parents carry trunks and furniture and whatever else they’d brought, up to their dorm rooms. Sometimes these rooms were on the fourth floor. You arrived in the beginning of September and it was usually hot. Carrying all that luggage and furniture up the stairs was not pleasant but the boys never complained. They were happy to show off their muscles and scope out the new girls. The prettier the girl, the happier the boy was to be her porter. Arrival day marked the beginning of the race to date the prettier girls.

  Moll Grimes was not one of those girls. I think I befriended Moll on that first day because I saw her struggling with a rather large ratty armchair and told the boy who was carrying a small suitcase of mine to help her instead. He took one quick look at her and was about to argue but I frowned and told him not to be a jerk, which, later on, got me a reputation as a smart mouth, and also placed a kind of bounty on my head. I later learned the boys in Hanniford Dorm had a pool going on who could get me to the mattress room first. But that wasn’t all.

  When I went out for, and made, the varsity dive team, Daria said, “You know the boys grade nipples, right?” She smiled that little snide smile of hers when she said it, and later it occurred to me that she was implying not only should I have known this, but that I probably was some kind of exhibitionist and wanted my nipples graded by a bunch of leering boys. Later a lot of stuff occurred to me but in that moment, I felt blindsided.

  So I blurted out, “What? Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not,” Daria was still smiling in that cunning way of hers. “Every year they have a list of girls on the swim team and the dive team and they wait until you get out of the pool and you’re cold. Then they write down in a log of the girls on the teams, who has the tautest, most pronounced, biggest, tightest, and maybe a few other categories. I’m not really sure. I only saw the list my freshman year and every year they refine it slightly. They appoint some boy captain of the nipple committee.”

  “That’s horrible,” I wailed.

  “Not really. If you have great nipples, you’ll always have a date for the dances.”

  “But that’s not the way you should get a date. I mean are the boys that superficial?”

  “Uh, yeah. They are. At least when they’re together. Alone some are really great, you know? But as a group, well . . . But there’s one more thing.”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “See at the dances, they’ll try to get your nipples to reproduce what they looked like coming out of the pool. That’s the whole p
oint. They bet on it that way.”

  “Crap,” I just shook my head. “So am I supposed to hope I have good nipples or lousy ones?”

  “Well you could go out for basketball instead. And think of it this way; if you get a star in their nipple log, one of the cool boys will be asking you to all the dances. You’ll be set for the year.”

  I had to wait to find out if a cool boy would win me in the nipple pool. But that was only one of the rites I had to get used to in this new world. Classes were another and the teachers who taught them still another. It was an irony that was not lost on me, even at age fifteen, that my favorite teacher turned out to be a pudgy, bald, quiet man in his fifties—at least that was what I guessed at the time—who spoke softly about the inner person of peace we all had only to get in touch with to find the true joy of life. He was a born and raised Quaker, from a family that had come to America in sixteen hundred and something and had settled in what was to become Pennsylvania when it was gifted to William Penn by King Charles II. His name was Mr. Brownell.

  In Quaker Life class, a dozen of us sat around an oval table, the only one of its kind I ever saw at Foxhall. I was sandwiched between Moll to my right and the light-skinned, black boy whose father was the ambassador to Sierra Leone, on my left. He was a quiet, studious kid, handsome in a rather effete way, and hardly ever spoke to me or anyone else in class. What he did beyond our classroom I couldn’t have said. I never saw him at a dance or on the sports fields or in the library, except once in a while at meals, if he happened to be assigned a table near mine. Yes, we had assigned tables, seven students to each square table and one faculty member or senior proctor. To watch over us and make sure we behaved properly, although I never saw anyone do anything even remotely subversive out in the open in the dining hall. But also Foxhall school wanted to create a family atmosphere so the teachers acted as surrogate parents, albeit ones who encouraged us to talk about meaningful topics at the table. We couldn’t have known it then but that ambassador’s son would, in less than ten years, become the leader of a Black Radical group that would refuse to serve in Vietnam and threaten to blow up no fewer than three federal buildings. The FBI would consider him one of the Ten Most Wanted and a three-year nationwide search would come up empty-handed as he simply melted away into the ether. It took another ten years for them to find him, having forsaken his radical calling, living a simple life in a small apartment in Los Angeles from where he ran a dog-walking and telephone-answering service. He didn’t even own a car, have a credit card, or keep his money in a bank. By the time they put him on trial, the country had moved on and he was acquitted because while they did prove he made a lot of speeches, his ACLU lawyer argued that free speech was protected, no matter what that speech was about, and he was simply exercising his right to practice what the Constitution allows.