The Other New Girl Page 8

  “Nice diving,” Daria said in the locker room. We were drying our hair.

  “You too.”

  “Yeah, but can you do the same tomorrow at the meet? You’ve got to ignore the guys. They don’t mean any harm. It’s just a game.”

  “How do you ignore them?”

  “I just think of their dicks cold and wet and shrunken like little beans.”

  “I’ll have to keep that image in my mind.”

  She didn’t say anything else and when I looked over she nodded toward the door. Moll was standing there, just sort of looking lost so I walked over. My hair was dry by then and I had gotten dressed before. All I had left to do was put on my shoes.

  “Hi,” I said to Moll.

  “Hi.”

  She looked down at her feet and didn’t say anything else. I waited. Finally she looked up at me and said, “Good luck tomorrow.”

  “Are you coming to the meet?”

  She shook her head.

  “You should come out. It’ll be fun. And anyway, if I can face the crowd, you should be able to.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked confused.

  I didn’t want to tell her about the nipple pool so I just shrugged and said, “Oh, you know, all the people and everything. Come out, though. I’ll look for you.”

  “You will? Really?”

  “Sure. Hey I’ve got to go. Dinner’s in half an hour and then I have study hall.”

  “You’re still on study hall. I know.”

  “Yeah, well, what are you gonna do?”

  “It was very moral of you.”

  I smiled at her and she beamed. It was the only time I ever saw Moll smile.

  It was worse than I expected. Twelve boys showed up for the meet together and sat in a group in the bleachers. At meets the team sat on a bench to the side of the pool. I kept my swim jacket on until it was time to get up to dive. You got two chances. If you thought you could improve on the first dive, you got a second chance and the judges took your average score. My stomach was in such a knot I thought I was going to keel over. The problem was that the ladder to get out of the pool faced the bleacher side so you had to climb up and when you got to the top you’d be facing all those boys straight on.

  When my turn came to dive, I stood up and shucked my jacket, walked fast to the board, and then something just kicked in and I forgot all about the boys and the gym and Bleaker and study hall and everything. Before I took my three steps, I looked out and there was Moll, sitting at the very end of the bleachers all alone, watching me. I took my three steps and jumped as high as I could and hurled myself off into the air. My dive was perfect and deep down at the bottom of the pool, all alone in the stillness, with the buoyancy of the water tumbling me slowly, slowly to the surface, I came up with an idea.

  When I broke the water surface, knowing I’d nailed the dive, I turned to face the boys. They had their little pads out and their pencils and were all glued to my face, just waiting to see me emerge all wet and cold from the water. I bobbed up a little, and then turned to face the other way. With quick strokes I swam to the edge of the pool and hoisted myself up onto the coping and out of the water. All they got to see was my back. I slipped into my jacket and heard them yowling and muttering. Daria grinned and gave me a thumbs up.

  “Now why didn’t I ever think of that?” she whispered as the judges flashed my score. I didn’t take another dive that day. Moll left before the end of the meet. The boys drifted away. My stomach settled down. And that was that. Or so I thought at the time. I had no idea they dubbed me “Watery Ice Queen” that day. It would stick for the semester.

  ELEVEN

  Daria’s Life

  I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH OF A STARBUCK’S DEVOTEE SO I nursed my one chai latte while Daria got up and ordered a second skinny mocha. She was very thin, I noted, the way some women are in their sixties. It’s funny, although I think I have the average level of female vanity, I’m not nearly as concerned with how I look as I used to be. Age does have certain advantages and that’s certainly one of them.

  Daria seemed in no hurry to leave. When she came back and sat down with that second coffee, I did want to hear the rest of her story, although it’s always chancy to delve too deeply into people’s pasts, especially when you haven’t seen them in a very long time. They tend to give you all the wrongs that have happened in their lives in a form that makes it seem as if a tsunami of grief just washed over them all at once with no warning. I think they’re so relieved to be able to off load all that pain that they just can’t stop. Still, I assumed the terrible marriage must have been a long time ago by now so she must have remarried and pulled her life back together, which is what I would have expected of Daria. Still there was the haunted look. The darting eyes. The lines at the corners of her mouth. The nervous laugh.

  “So what about you?” Daria asked as she slid the chair closer to the little table. “I just went on and on about my sorry self. And anyway what happened so long ago, well . . .” She made a little gesture with her hand as if waving away a gnat.

  Her question caught me off guard. Ever since Foxhall I had made a vow to live in the present and prepare for the future because, no matter how many times you go over what might have been and what different decisions you could have made, you couldn’t reverse the clock; you couldn’t redo what had been done and only in science fiction stories could you time travel. No. We swim in the soup we’ve made.

  “You said you’ve been happy,” Daria stated rather than asked. “Isn’t that what you said? Or did I imagine that?”

  I told her that’s what I’d said.

  “I don’t think I know anyone who’s happy.” She shook her head and sipped her mocha.

  “Happiness is all about how you define it,” I told her. “If I defined being happy as depending on great wealth or staying young forever or being queen of the universe, then I’d be unhappy because none of those things would have happened for me.”

  “What did happen that made you happy?”

  So she wasn’t going to talk about herself anymore. I wondered if she felt she’d revealed too much or if maybe she felt like I was challenging her.

  “Well, this, for one thing.” I held up my phone with the picture I’d taken at the hospital of tiny JJ all swaddled with his little hospital cap, saucer eyes wide open, lying next to my exhausted daughter, her husband leaning over the two of them, smiling as if he’d just been beatified.

  “Oh,” she said. “Grandchild?”

  “You know, I’d been told what a wonderful thing it is to become a grandparent but no one could possibly have prepared me for the actual feeling. I’ve been literally floating all morning.”

  She looked at me then, a look that told of losses unimaginable. And her story poured out. About the plans she and Tim had when he went off to college. They were going to be the storied high school sweethearts who stayed together for life. And then Vietnam happened and Tim, who felt obligated, with all the turmoil swirling around his generation, to support his country by serving in the ambulance corps, especially since he’d decided to apply to medical school later on after he came back.

  “But he never came back.” She said it in a flat voice, as if she’d said it so many times before, she’d become inured to any weight it had once carried. “That’s why I married the ham hock heir. I thought he would protect me from ever again having a broken heart.” She shrugged a pathetic little shrug of one shoulder, her head tilted to the right, a rueful expression on her face with one side of her mouth curled up slightly. “I think that’s one of the reasons he beat me so badly. He knew I would never give him my heart. And, it so enraged him that he wanted to break it permanently. But, that had happened long before I met him. He just didn’t know it.”

  She sighed and sat back holding her coffee mug in both hands and I noticed that her nails were bitten down to where I thought it must have hurt. She was a walking reminder of those girls who become anorexic. We’d had none of that back at Foxhall. It
seemed to me we all looked healthy. But I probably didn’t know half of what was going on back then.

  “There was so little left of Tim, they couldn’t even send home a body. Just his dog tags and a small box of bone fragments.”

  “That’s awful, Daria. I’m so sorry.”

  I really was sorry. I’d had no idea they were that committed to each other beyond Foxhall.

  “I was nothing without Tim,” she said.

  “But you were the girl who had everything. I mean we all envied you.”

  “I know. I think that fed me, kept me going. I needed to be envied. Tim was the only person on this earth who really saw who I was. He knew my soul. And he was willing to look beyond it.”

  At that moment, I finally realized what had bothered me about Daria all those years ago, what had stuck with me, why I had remembered certain things she’d said long after they had any meaning or import. She was like one of those cutouts of a famous person you could stand next to and have your picture taken. It looked real. But it had no substance. I saw Daria now, sitting in front of me, still with a kind of beauty, but now she seemed somehow transparent.

  “So how about you?” she asked. “About being happy. I’d like to know someone who’s happy.”

  When she looked at me, I could see such longing in her eyes, so I told her about my marriage, about the event of that morning before I ran into her, about my other three daughters, my work, my husband, who would be arriving that night to meet his new grandson.

  We didn’t talk much after that and I started to fade, the enormity of the previous night having finally caught up to me. Outside the Starbucks, she hugged me and held me for a long time like someone who felt she was falling with nothing to grab onto for support. We exchanged emails and phone numbers, said our good-byes and keep-in-touches but I knew we would never see each other again. Whatever had united us all those decades before was long gone and all that was left was the memory of what each of us had experienced in our own ways.

  TWELVE

  Falling in Love (or something like it)

  AFTER THE SWIM AND DIVE MEET AND DINNER, THERE WAS a Saturday night dance scheduled. But at dinner something else happened that completely surprised me. I was sitting at my assigned table as usual. Here’s how seating in the dining room worked. When you first arrived at Foxhall during orientation, you could sit anywhere because not even a quarter of the school had arrived yet. The football team generally sat by themselves and the senior proctors for the halls mixed in with the new arrivals, almost all freshmen, except for Moll and me, of course. Then there were the other fall teams— girls’ field hockey, cheerleaders who weren’t necessarily the cool girls the way they were at big high schools, and the teachers and coaches and hall teachers and all the boys and girls deans were there. So, until the rest of the students arrived it was pretty much a free-for-all at the dining room.

  Once school started and everyone was there, you had assigned tables. It was supposed to be a time to meet and mingle with kids you might not ordinarily talk to and to get to know teachers outside the classroom. There were a few meals each week when you could sit where you wanted—Friday and Saturday lunch and Sunday dinner, which was the only meal without required attendance. To police attendance at meals there were roll takers, always girls, who would eat early and then walk around the dining room marking people off on a long list. Two roll takers handled the entire dining hall, each taking one side. The roll takers worked shifts of eight weeks each, which was how long the table assignments lasted before you were rotated to a new table with different people. In this way, the school always knew just where you were three times a day.

  If you had to leave school for any reason, or you were in the infirmary, or had an absence for some other legit reason, your name was on a list at the deans’ office and the roll takers had access to it. After they finished accounting for everyone in the dining hall, the two roll takers retired to the deans’ office to add up their numbers and check off names on another long list. If these didn’t add up, the school knew someone was either missing or skipping, which was not allowed. If you were a roll taker, you got to know everyone at Foxhall and everyone got to know you. There were four sets of roll takers. Once you had put in your eight weeks, you didn’t have any other chores for the rest of the year.

  So everything was tidy and neat. Just like The Foxhall Handbook of Rules. Uh huh. Thing was, being a roll taker was the only plum chore at Foxhall. Everyone had some assigned chore. Most involved sweeping floors or stairs in the dorms, or, God help you, working the early morning kitchen chore which meant getting up in the dark so you could spread plates, glasses, cups, and silverware on tables for five hundred plus people who’d rush the doors the minute they opened. Or you could be even unluckier and get the weekend dinner kitchen chore, which meant while everyone was already at the dance or the weekend entertainment you’d be scraping half-chewed chicken wings and gummy macaroni off about a thousand plates and stacking them in the huge industrial dish washers that looked like they’d been recycled from Fort Dix.

  Yeah, roll taker was way better than that. And here was why. Roll takers didn’t have to sit at assigned tables. They got to eat before everyone else and they could fudge the numbers. If their friends wanted to sleep in or disappear for a day, the roll takers could make it happen. And then there were return favors. I wouldn’t say roll takers ever exacted actual kickbacks, but there was an understood arrangement that roll takers took care of their own because at the end of each year, the roll takers assigned who would take over for the next year if any of that year’s roll takers were graduating. See, that was what I meant by tidy and neat. If you were selected for your sophomore year, you could be a roll taker until you graduated. It was a position of responsibility, like a senior being chosen as a hall proctor. Because the school had to know where everyone was at all times. Classes were small, and missing a class didn’t mean much because teachers didn’t necessarily keep track or hand in reports about an absent student unless it became routine. But meals were the leveling field.

  So that Saturday at dinner, I was at my assigned table and the roll taker, who just happened to be Brady, slipped a note onto the napkin on my lap and gave me a stare that said, “Open in private.” I excused myself in the middle of dinner and nearly ran from the dining hall to the girls’ bathroom. Once I got inside, I checked under all the stalls to make sure I was alone before carefully unfolding the crumpled piece of paper, which looked like it had gone through the button crusher. All I could think was someone was in trouble and didn’t want any of the deans knowing about it and Brady had marked them in. But who?

  This wasn’t like one of the bathrooms on the halls where we lived. Those were a big, open room. But in this bathroom on the main hall there were only three stalls and a sink so I had the place to myself. It had a cloying, closed-off feeling and the light was bad but I leaned against the wall and slowly uncrumpled the paper.

  Scribbled in pencil, it said “Would you go to tonight’s dance with me?” and was signed “Wes.”

  Wow, I thought. Wes Ritter. Me? Okay after I got over the initial shock, I started to wonder why, out of the blue, Wes Ritter was asking me to the dance. I mean he was cute. Very cute. And popular. Very popular. And kind of shy in a way that was still confident. He was one of those boys all the girls thought had a lot going on inside, like in his head, that he wasn’t necessarily going to show everyone. Only someone special. Like James Dean or someone like that.

  I hadn’t noticed him at the meet that afternoon, so he was probably not in on the nipple pool so that couldn’t be why he wanted to take me to the dance. So maybe he liked me. But usually when a guy liked you he showed it in some way. Not like with Daria and Tim. They were special. But other ways. You heard about it from someone. Some little hint dropped, maybe by a friend of his. Or of yours. Like a go between to feel you out. But this? I studied the paper in my hand as if it were a treasure map with hidden clues. The crumpled paper— well, that could
mean he asked someone for a piece of paper because he was in the dining hall and just used whatever someone gave him. And that could mean it was a very last minute thing and he hadn’t planned it at all. But maybe he’d been carrying this paper around in his pocket for days and finally got up the nerve to ask Brady to pass it to me. Okay then, maybe it was still last minute but should that matter?

  It was kind of a big deal if someone actually asked you to go to the dance with him. Most of us—at least the ones who did go every week—went on our own in groups. We’d stand around until some boy asked one of us to dance. Usually you didn’t dance with him the whole time. Maybe a couple of dances. Then a dance with someone else. Or you’d stand around and just talk and joke and stuff. Sometimes there were break-ups at the dance. Those were pretty rough be-cause it was never mutual. So someone always left hurt and confused. Then all their friends would group together and tell them he or she wasn’t worth getting all upset over. But if you went with someone who’d asked you, that was it for the whole night. You’d be at the dance together and then you’d sit in the Assembly Room together for the Saturday entertainment, which was usually a movie.

  I personally saw Friendly Persuasion three times—once every year. The kids who started as freshmen saw it four times. Gary Cooper was pretty great and there was some actress who had two ugly daughters she was trying to marry off. She was funny. She traded her horse for Gary Cooper’s because her horse liked to race and wouldn’t let any other horses pass and she thought that was keeping suitors from being able to catch her daughters. But that was a sub plot. The real point of the movie was that the Civil War was coming and Gary Cooper’s family were Quakers and that presented a moral dilemma for their community. Also, a black man worked for them on their farm and, although he was free, it presented a different dilemma for him. So there was the issue of slavery—albeit oblique—and the issue of war, and there were a couple of other sub plots about love and sex and horse racing and betting. And of course, Quaker Meeting, which was heavily covered in the movie. The only other movie we saw that had a Quaker in it was High Noon. Also Gary Cooper. But Grace Kelly played his new bride, a Quaker who would not stand by him in his hour of need when he chose to stand and fight. Later, after Foxhall, I saw another movie with a Quaker in it—Angel and The Badman. John Wayne was the badman. He got shot and a Quaker girl nursed him back to health while convincing him that shooting people would kill his soul—or at least damage it beyond repair. In the movie she actually used Quaker terms like thee and thy. Same with Gary Cooper in Friendly Persuasion. Because so many Quaker kids went to Foxhall, and many of them used the familiar thee and thou and thy to their friends, we were used to hearing that so it didn’t seem odd in the movie.