The Other New Girl Page 6

  Even a cursory glance at our weekly schedule made it clear that the school routine was designed to keep us hyper-busy. That we also found time to lead our below-the-radar lives shows just how creative we could be when what we couldn’t do was explicitly stated. Daily life at Foxhall was regulated by bells. Not chapel bells nor Santa’s sleigh bells, but the kind that rang on every hall in every dorm, outside every classroom in every academic building, in the library, at the art center, even outside the greenhouse where we worked on botanical projects. The only places where we did not hear those bells were in the boys’ gym, the girls’ gym, and the pool that was connected to the girls’ gym.

  The first bell of the day rang at six fifteen in the morning. My room was in the middle of the hall so the bell was some distance away. Pity the poor girls whose room at the end of the hall was closest to it. Ten minutes later, another bell let everyone know it was really time to get up. The dining room doors opened at seven and closed at ten past. There was a mad rush to get in and out of the bathroom before everyone on the hall was up. There were eighteen girls on my hall and only six sinks, four toilet stalls, three shower stalls and one bathtub with a plastic curtain. We all had a small bathroom shelf where we could store a few personal toiletries and a hook below it for a washcloth but anything else you had to carry from your room.

  At the sinks, which had a hot and a cold faucet, you had to push a square thing down to get water and it only stayed on for about twenty seconds and then you had to push it again for more water. You couldn’t mix them so you had to fill the sink if you didn’t want to scald yourself and wanted warm water. I took to getting up before everyone else just to get a clean sink and shower stall—at least, as clean as possible. At seven, a bell told everyone they had to be in the dining room seated at their assigned tables. The doors were shut, and all but one locked. Anyone coming in late was marked on a sheet by one roll taker stationed by that door. Too many lates for a student meant study hall or extra chores. Breakfast was over at seven forty-five with a lot of scraping of chairs against the old wood floor. What had begun with a minute of silent prayer before the food grab, ended with another bell and a rush for the closest doors.

  On weekdays you had to get back to your room, clean it and make your bed for inspection by the hall proctors or your hall teacher, gather your books, and head to the Assembly Room. If you had a morning assigned chore, you also had to get that done by the next bell, which rang at eight fifteen, when the whole school trooped into the huge, two-story room with the wraparound balcony seats and the audio-visual booth at the very top of the balcony facing the stage below, to listen to announcements of various interest levels, sing some uplifting song like “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and maybe watch a skit performed by students, or hear a speaker or some other short program, which sometimes included responsive singing or yelling from the audience, usually by boys.

  Except on Wednesdays when we had the announcements and then a twenty minute Meeting For Worship. Meeting began with a general shuffling into the Assembly room, taking seats—thankfully these were not assigned so you could sit with your friends—and getting settled in. You were not allowed to bring books, except that a few kids brought Bibles, which were allowed, King James version in all the cases I ever saw, opened to some personally meaningful passage which a student could read silently, or stand and read aloud for a minute or two (they had chosen their passages carefully ahead of time so as to have something spiritual to convey to the rest of us) and then sit down. I guess we could have brought the Koran or a compilation of Buddhist prayers or The Bhagavad-Gita but I never saw anybody with those.

  On the stage was a single row of about eight or ten chairs, known simply as the facing bench. In many Quaker Meeting houses, it is simply a wooden bench, sometimes with a pad, sometimes not. People who attended Meeting either volunteered to sit on the facing bench, or sometimes there was a predetermined lineup—or some combination. At Foxhall usually the headmaster, a few teachers and a few invited students—always high-performing ones like Faith—would occupy the facing bench.

  Meeting always began with a general quieting of the group. No one actually started Meeting. It was done by silence falling and the spirit entering into the space. This was a lovely concept to me. The existence of a spirit that resided inside each person, that when quiet descended, evidenced itself from inside to the outer world. Anyone moved by the spirit could stand and speak. Sometimes a person would simply sit and say something, usually short, spiritual in nature, or a comment on a particular state of the world or of their personal world. That was the only way the silence was broken. When the person finished speaking, there was only silence. Sometimes someone else would stand and expand on what the speaker had said, or go off on a related tangent. Or sometimes no one spoke at all and the twenty minutes moved slowly. Sometimes people fell asleep. Or passed notes. Not everyone had a spirit that was easily moved.

  I had high hopes for Quaker Meeting, probably because it was going to be so different from any of the other forms of religion I’d dabbled in. At that first meeting, some girl I didn’t know spoke about her missionary parents serving in Ghana. I didn’t know it then but this girl would be a frequent speaker at Meeting. Not that anybody had the slightest interest in what she had to say. She was very short, had a face that looked as if perhaps it had been squashed in at birth, she wore thick glasses with decidedly uncool, powder-blue frames, and her clothes looked like fourth-gen hand-me-downs. I didn’t think any boy ever spoke to her and I never heard she was particularly smart. It occurred to me later that maybe Meeting was the only chance she had to talk to anybody.

  Just about eighteen minutes into that first Meeting, Mr. Brownell got up and said, “We often question our purpose in life, especially those of us who are early in their life’s journey. Purpose is something found in the service to others and in that quiet service, purpose becomes less important than serving.” He sat down and in less than two minutes the headmaster, Mr. Williamson, sitting on the facing bench, turned to Mrs. Roberson and shook her hand. The rest of the people on the facing bench turned to their neighbors and in a few seconds everyone was shaking hands with their neighbors and Meeting For Worship was over. No hymns, no responsive reading, no preaching, no talk of sin or hell or damnation or heaven or interpretation of what Jesus said or did or meant. It was rather anticlimactic but also comforting in a way that made me feel we were all in this together.

  Jan leaned over as I was about to stand and whispered to me and Daria, “Blah, blah, blah, just one of these times why can’t she talk about the missionary position instead of her sainted missionary parents?”

  When Daria giggled, I realized this particular moving of the spirit, sincere as it had appeared, had been something less than a spontaneous spiritual moment. Was I disappointed? I didn’t think so. No matter what I had expected, the spirit had not moved me even one inch. I would wait for it, though. Maybe given enough time, whatever spirit was inside me would find a way to express itself.

  EIGHT

  Another Chore

  I MADE THE DIVE TEAM WITHOUT MUCH TROUBLE. FOXHALL wasn’t like some big competitive high school with a huge budget for sports. We competed in the Quaker league with signs in the gyms that said things like: “Root for your own team but never say disparaging things about your competitors.”

  There were a dozen girls trying out for five spots. Daria made it with me, or maybe I made the team with her because she was the best diver of us all, of course. Her swan was like an angel taking flight. There was a moment after she took off from the board and tilted up into the air, her arms spread wide, her neck arched and her face gazing toward the sky, that she seemed to suspend; it made the audience gasp with glee and awe, and even the boys stop ogling her body as it collapsed into one slender line and entered the water with the grace and power of a diving gannet.

  We didn’t have a platform, only a springboard. I had grown up swimming and diving at an Olympic-sized pool that had a springboard a
nd two levels of platforms, so I was used to climbing up the board ladder and teetering on the edge of the platform before hurtling out and down. I liked those boards better. From a springboard, there was always the chance of cutting your approach too short or taking your bounce too high or cutting the bounce too soon and hitting the edge of the board on your way down. I’d had a few of those and it was the one thing that made me anxious during a dive. But the whole point of a springboard was to get as high a bounce as you could to make your arc clean and then come as close to the board as possible for your entry into the water straight down, leaving almost no disturbance so you’d just glide in as if a path had magically opened to let your body slip through unnoticed.

  We tried out over one week in the early fall so we’d have plenty of time to practice leading up to the meets. During tryouts, I didn’t have to worry about any spectators. No boys ogling my nipples or whispering who knew what up in the metal stands. Later I’d have to face the betting pool and hissed catcalls—at least until one of the coaches glared over at the boys to hush them up. But there was one spectator for the first two days of tryouts. Moll Grimes slipped into the pool area and sat over on the bleachers in the farthest corner. She watched for the first two days and, after I was assured a place on the team, I decided to ask her why she’d been hanging around the pool, which was hardly a pleasant environment unless you were in a bathing suit in the water. The building had that chlorine mixed with humidity smell, even though the pool water was not actually warm to the touch, moisture hung in the air with a cloying weight. We got used to it. Used to our fingers feeling wrinkly and our hair frizzy and that slight sting of chlorine in our noses.

  “Hey, what’s up with her?” Daria whispered between dives.

  “She’s okay. I don’t know what she’s doing here, though.”

  “She’s been watching you.”

  “We sit next to each other in Quaker Life class is all. She’s very smart.”

  “Of course she’s smart. God doesn’t give out looks like hers for nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that there’s always a counter balance. Like in nature. If an animal is not fast enough to outrun a lion, then it has some other really powerful defense like a strong kick. So of course she has something else going for her. She’d have to.”

  “Why are you so down on her? She can’t help how she looks.”

  “She could try. I mean look at her.”

  We both glanced over at Moll hunched in the corner, her hair, from the greenhouse atmosphere in the gym, stringier than usual.

  “She can’t help the way she was born. Not everyone can be beautiful. You were just lucky.”

  I was taking a chance. Looking back now, it didn’t seem like much of a chance. So what if I got drummed out of the cool girls set? But back then, even at a school that preached respect for individuality and independent thinking, even there, the cult of adolescence was powerful. We may have studied Lord of the Flies in English class but that didn’t prevent us from casting about for powerful leaders and powerless victims outside class.

  “Hey, Other New Girl,” Daria called above the sounds of splashing and thrashing as girls swam their laps. “Hey, why don’t you try out? I’ll get you a suit if you don’t have one.” She grinned over at me and nodded toward Moll. “Look at her. She doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Daria, leave her alone. She’s not hurting anyone.”

  “It hurts me just to look at her. If she’s not going to try out with the rest of us then she shouldn’t be here. Put up or shut up, I say.”

  “Your turn, Susannah,” Miss Alderton called out.

  I jumped up and tossed my jacket onto the bench. Before I hit the water, I looked over for Moll but she was gone. There was a ghostly quality about that girl, the way she faded out of sight.

  Miss Alderton was our coach and one of the freshman hall teachers. She was also an assistant dean. One of three. Everyone liked Miss Alderton. She was young, sweet natured, and she never gave out demerits. Rumor was she was dating Mr. Hempstead, who taught American history. He was a hall teacher in one of the boys’ dorms. He was also young and known for his Friday night pizza parties. Among the students there was an unofficial list of cool teachers, uncool teachers, and downright to-be-avoided-at-all-costs teachers.

  Bleaker was at the top of the to-be-avoided list. Still I’d had to get special dispensation from her so I could try out for the dive team. It was pretty humiliating to have to grovel to Bleaker but it was the only way. Even Miss Alderton said I had to do it. So off I went because it was either that or be stuck with nothing but study hall in my life until Christmas break.

  It’s funny, the second time you see a person, what you notice about them that you didn’t see before. Sitting in that spare office again, with Bleaker standing to the side of her desk—this time it had only a couple of pieces of paper on it and one pencil—I noticed her hands. Maybe because her hands were clasped in front of her as if she’d been caught praying. In that position, I couldn’t avoid looking at them. No rings of course. And certainly no nail polish. Or was there some? Her nails looked shiny to me. I tried to sneak a look every now and then, tried to see if the light was playing tricks on my eyes. And yes, her nails were actually shiny. No color though. As she lectured me about being influenced by the wrong values, I imagined her in her little school apartment, long after lights out for everyone else, washing her dainty underwear and hanging it carefully from plastic hooks, imagined that she, underneath all the puritanical trappings of her dean-of-girls outerwear, like the rest of us, longed to be a cool girl, pretty, admired, courted, and desired. Maybe she even read steamy romance novels late into the night. Maybe that was why she always looked so rigid. She was holding herself in like a corset.

  “Are you listening to me, Miss Greenwood?” She stepped forward. I flinched slightly, my reverie abruptly interrupted and wondered, for the briefest instant, if maybe she could somehow divine my thoughts. It was a pure moment of paranoia that passed as fast as a shooting star.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I answered, sounding as dutiful as I could, knowing that I was only following proper form to get what I wanted. I was not going to learn any lessons from her nor would I bend to the rules any more than Daria and the other girls had shown me they would.

  “In truth, I should extend your study hall demerit by the number of hours you’ll be at practices.”

  She waited for me to react. Maybe beg or cry. I’d heard of girls breaking down in her office, pleading, promising just about anything to get her to relent. But then, inside my head, there were all those years with my mother screaming at me, blaming me for all sorts of behavior I’d never committed. Well, at least here at Foxhall I had participated in this infraction. So I felt justified, in some weird, crisscrossed way in my refusal to bend to Bleaker’s will.

  Instead of baring my soul to her I simply said, “You could do that. That would be a fair and even trade.”

  To my surprise, and perhaps to my slight disappointment, she said, “It might be, but instead I’ll give you an extra chore. You’ll sweep the Assembly Room aisles every Friday morning after breakfast, before Assembly begins. That’s all. You can go to practices.”

  With that, she turned away from me as if I was nothing more than a piece of dust on her floor. The door to her office was situated just opposite the telephone operator’s room, a small, square, affair where Mrs. W. sat at her console of wires and metal plug gadgets. It was Mrs. W. who transferred calls that came from parents wanting to speak to their kids in the hour and forty-five minutes between study hall and lights out during the week, or on weekends almost any time of the day until ten at night when she went off duty. And Mrs. W.’s telephone room was where everyone who entered Fox Building passed on their way to the deans’ offices, the dining room for all daily meals, or up one flight to the second floor assembly room.

  The Quaker way was alive and functioning at Foxhall—our daily life was informed by it in w
ays large and small. What I had just experienced in Bleaker’s office was not called discipline. In the Quaker lexicon, it was known as “Getting Guidance” which had an accumulated effect of both discipline and learning lessons on the value of further self-discovery in the light. Students shortened this to simply “guidance” and, if you had just come out of a dean’s office or, of even more significance, the headmaster’s office and another student gave you a look that meant what happened in there? you would simply mouth guidance and that would explain it.

  Lining the main hall of Fox were bulletin boards plastered with messages about work camps, sit-ins, service projects, overseas American Friends Service Committee offerings, soup kitchens, donation sites, service opportunities in schools and at elder care facilities. It was endless the ways you could serve others in a Friendly capacity. You could spend every weekend serving others, every break, every summer, even half a year for juniors. Many of these opportunities were also touted at morning assemblies during announcements, sandwiched between the daily hymn or uplifting song, and silent worship, allowing you time to consider your own place in the scheme of service to others.

  Sunday meeting for worship was a different matter. No announcements. No hymns or songs. We simply walked in, took a seat, and quieted down while the facing bench on stage filled up. When the two people seated in the middle chairs on the facing bench lowered their heads, it was understood by everyone that Meeting had begun. A hush would fall over the room. A few coughs. Some shuffling of feet. One or two latecomers would hurriedly take seats in the back, and, until someone was moved by the spirit to rise and speak, which happened sporadically or not at all, we were in “silent prayer.”