"They weren't Astra Dell's friends."
"A lot of people aren't really crying for her; they're putting on an act."
Marlene
Marlene's head was at a whistling boil when she waved good-bye from behind the window to Astra's room — and Marlene was wearing paper shoes, cap, and gown — so what did the nurses wear? she wondered. Someone had to go into that room. Marlene waved good-bye, mouthed, "Merry Christmas," then shuffled away in those paper shoes, relieved to be well and leaving the sleepy, balding creature in a pom-pom hat Kitty Johnson had knit the sick girl when it went out at school that Astra was losing her hair. First lines to college essays occurred to Marlene: "Walking along the hospital corridor to see my sick friend was an unsettling experience." Possible, but there was her dad essay, the one she had started: "My father looked me in the eyes and asked, 'Are you ready?' 'No,' I replied, and he pushed me overboard, and I sank deeper and deeper into a cold, enchanted realm." Her father had pushed her into China Lakes, but Marlene had always wanted to go scuba diving, and who was to say she had not?
Siddons
Five of the graduates from the class of '96, home from college, came to see the last day of school and the Christmas spectacle when 536 girls from grades k through twelve gathered in the auditorium, the seats retracted for the occasion, and in the middle of the room, the fake Christmas tree with its paper-chain decoration. The fifth, sixth, and seventh graders gathered in the balcony with their teachers while the other grades filed in: big sisters and little sisters, starting with the seniors and their kindergarten charges, hand in hand, an endless coil of girls wearing red and green accessories, candy-cane tights, and tinsel in their hair—"I'm one big present, just for you!" Gillian Warring mouthed to Mr. Weeks in the balcony. Around and around, the elevens with the first grade, the tens with the second, on and on, the students came while most of their teachers sat on the stage of the auditorium. A few of the old favorite Christmas and Hanukkah songs to begin—"You would surely say it glows, like a lightbulb!" — and then Miss Brigham in a Santa's hat, front and center on the stage, read from The Polar Express. Then some more songs until everyone's favorite moment: "The Twelve Days of Christmas," when the first grade began, "On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me," and the kindergarten girls, no bigger than feathers, were held up by their senior sisters to squeak, "Fa la lah." The dreaded moment, of course, was "Five golden rings," when the fifth-grade girls leaned over the balcony with their wagging hands outstretched and shrilly pitched the song. The sixth and seventh graders tried to outshout each other, and the teachers, predictably, frowned, but "Five golden rings!" always put the song on high, and there it stayed with some slight mumbled diminishment in the upper grades as the ninth grade mimed nine maids a-milking until, the moment anticipated, and the seniors stood, some of them already crying, and began their own Christmas medley — playful digs at teachers and Quirk, of course, and college horrors. The girls were often off tune and uncertain of the lyrics so recently composed. "Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock, you might just think our essay's a crock…"
January
CHF
What could she write to Astra in the moment that would not be wrong?
Dear A,
Maybe you feel like it has been a waste to have spent your life practicing for what turns out to be nothing. But you are lucky in some ways because you will know what it is like to die, and the rest of us will spend our lives wondering. I know that this isn't comforting at all, but I'm sure you'll be getting enough of that from others, and soon it will stop meaning anything. So I want to talk to you about your dying. I know you have envisioned your own funeral before. People missing you. People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent.
Car had faltered over other letters, but this one she sent.
Siddons
Mr. O'Brien was wearing his Irish pants, the thick Donegal tweed number that Suki and Alex always said must have made him sweat in manly places. In the overheated classrooms, Mr. O'Brien was wearing these pants, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up.
"Oh," Suki whispered, "he is so hirsute."
"You know the ugliest words, Suki."
Mr. O'Brien was reading aloud again, "'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / and Mourners to and fro…'" He was leaning over his desk in his scratchy-looking pants and plaid shirt and talking about the speaker's point of view, asking his students if they had contrived an afterlife or heaven for themselves. "What does Emily Dickinson seem to be proposing here? The floating then, the narrative word, at the end, by itself, in the poem with lead boots and space, what does that lonely term suggest?" And he repeated the lines, " And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down— / And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing — then—'" and he said again, "'then.'" Mr. O'Brien was asking the seniors in English, section Z, what was Emily Dickinson saying about the prospect of heaven? Kitty Johnson was taking notes, sensing her own funereal headache was on the way, not quite looking at Mr. O'Brien, but listening to Ufia hold forth on how scary the poem was because there was no satisfaction for the dead. No eulogy overheard, only scraping chairs and shoes.
Alex whispered to Suki, "I got up at seven to make this class only to be informed there is no fucking heaven." Alex was circling a circle in the center of her notebook, a vacancy, a black hole that grew larger as she spoke. "I mean, this is swell. Nothing to look forward to. I should have guessed."
Nothingness again, that odorless gas again; Marlene, in the back row, felt sick. She wasn't reading this poem with Astra. This poem would be an assignment Astra could do with someone else. Let someone else, let Car explain it, for Astra would insist — did insist, asked for whatever was said and done in class — because she planned to graduate with her class. "My minister visits. He keeps my spirits up," so Astra had said to Marlene, and who was she to suggest a darker outcome?
CHF
Dear Astra,
Maybe I am being morbid, but I'm not going to lie. So you won't go to college or have a family, but wouldn't you get tired of that? There are songs about people like you, making you heroic just because you're young but near the end. You can't stop this.
All you can do is pretend to be sad that you are leaving and smoke your medicine and hide your skill as if you are ashamed, but I know that you are happy this way. The only thing you have to excel at now is leaving, because you only get to once.
Another letter Car suspected she should keep in her drawer, but she didn't.
"Carlotta, are you going to eat that or not?"
"I'm cutting it, aren't I?"
"Have you talked to your father about spring vacation?"
"I don't know why you ask me these things when you already know the answer, Mother."
"Why would I know the answer?"
Mrs. Forestal crossed her arms and caressed herself and was soothed by how thin she was. St. John Knits were made for thin women; their close-fitting jackets showed off long arms. Car had the same long arms, although her mouth suggested she could be a larger woman. Was it any wonder then her daughter would cut and cut and cut her meat until not much of it seemed left?
"Don't bother," she said as if speaking to herself.
"'Don't bother' what, Mother? What are you talking about?"