Mothers
"I leave you to your own devices" was what he had said on the morning he left, and Theta was late for work. Not the first time she was ever late in all the years — nine years, not so very long ago. The weird thing was that she remembered Bob at the door carrying a yellow suitcase. Theta said to Marlene, "I'm not an imaginative person particularly, Marlene, so this is strange. Don't you think? I see an old-fashioned yellow, a strong yellow, cardboard suitcase. I don't think your father was probably carrying anything. The way I remember it happening he is wearing a gray suit, which also seems preposterous. I can't remember him ever wearing a suit."
Marlene said, "It has to do with maybe the way he wasn't or you wanted him."
"Yes, it does. I know. I don't want to look at his face."
"You miss people more when they're gone," Marlene said while she picked out nuts in a pint of ice cream. "No, that's not how it goes. You — no. People make a big impression on us for not being around, something like that. Astra and I have talked about it." She swallowed. "I love her. She's so great." The carton looked crushed for the heat of her hand, and the ice cream, Theta saw, was a soup when Marlene put it back.
"No one's going to eat that, you know."
"She's a saint. She finds something good in everybody. It's ridiculous."
A girl with a healing touch, true, and for a moment Theta went missing. Something else there was she had meant to tell her daughter, but her daughter was swinging out the swinging door of their old kitchen. Lately it seemed Theta had time, more time to herself, which explained the lightness she felt — better posture — and it was not unwelcome. And the ice cream? Would she miss finding the refrozen melted ice cream with its skim-milk color and consistency? The same she threw away — not for being nutless but because it wasn't sweet anymore, wasn't salty but tasteless — would she miss the trail of her daughter in the house? She didn't know, but Theta Kovack was thinking of going back to school! For what? To finish her degree. And then? Something more.
CHF
The question was why she had included the story that had started as an essay about her father, the one where he sat looking small on a large sofa, with one leg crossed over the other, the leg swinging and swinging the wide bell of his cuffed, creased pants. Everything he wore looked soft enough to sleep in, and the plausive gestures — only his legs were crossed, the rest of him open, his arms opening as if to embrace him or her or him or anyone else who came near — these open arms deceived her, and when she bent to kiss his cheek, he looked into her breasts and said, "Too much French pastry, Carlotta." In front of the Dutch hostess, who knew so many languages and stood just behind in a pleated dress with silken cord, classic as a caryatid, in front of all the elegantly gathered, her father had said she was fat. A fat, bumptious teenager in a too-tight dress unbecomingly thrusting her breasts at the dowagers, at the drab and the dull she had expected to meet and trump. The problem with Car's story was that all the characters were ugly. Even Miss Hodd, who liked everything Car wrote, had said it was hard to sympathize with a judgmental narrator and discouraged her from putting it in Folio, however accomplished some of the descriptive passages.
"I wanted to get back at him, of course. I want everyone to know he's an asshole and a fag." Car said, "I'm sorry." She said, "I'm just so sick and tired. I'm so mad. I wake up every morning in a rage."
Nobody wakes up in the morning trying to burn was what she wrote him.
Car said, "I can't help myself. My only excuse is I'm young." She said, "Please, don't look at me like that. I'm serious. Don't make me laugh. I don't want to laugh."
Astra said, "So how was St. Bart's with your mother?"
"I should have gone to Paris and endured my dad."
Mothers
"How does your father feel about Columbia?"
"I don't know why you ask me these things when you know I don't know," Car said, and she let go of her knife, stuck upright in the meatloaf, to see if it might stand. It didn't.
Mrs. Forestal startled. "Damnit, Carlotta," she said. "Must you?"
Siddons
"Ah," Ufia said, "the sad consequences of culturally motivated depilation."
Alex was sitting on a bag of ice but she was leaking.
"Sit on the floor!" Suki said.
"I can't sit on something hard. I'm in pain!" Alex said. Brazilian bikini wax was the story Alex was telling over and over again to every girl who came into the lounge and asked, "What's the matter with you, what's with Alex, what's with the ice?" I was at the salon and bored and I figured, why not, but I didn't really know what a Brazilian bikini wax involved.
Unattached
"Honestly…" and then Anna Mazur didn't speak for a long time.
"Honestly, what?"
"I don't know." They were nearing her building, and she couldn't say what she wanted to say because there was so much to say, but here was a chance, and she said, I don't know.
"Yes," he said, walking backward away from her door, waving, saying, "Another day, another dollar," saying, "Good luck grading all those papers." And that was how the day ended, walking east on Eighty-second Street, past the barren beds around the twigs that passed for trees on the streets between Lex, Third, Second, First — all the way to her door. Anna Mazur knew what wishing good luck meant for her weekend. It meant the papers in her shopping bag, two classes of eight, one of seven, hours and hours of reading until she wasn't sure any more how to spell any word with doubled letters.
"Lucky you," Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks, "your hands are empty."
Siddons
Madame Sagnier said the seniors in her AP French class were zombies, and she was not alone among the faculty at the class-twelve grade meeting with complaints. Absences, college visits, flagrant infractions, blithely walking down the hall with iced coffees, wearing sandals, wearing very high heels. Girls were late for classes or didn't show up for classes or abruptly left classes.
"They just stand up and leave."
"And you don't do anything?"
Miss F agreed. Some of the seniors were sullen about assignments. "Marlene Kovack, for all the improvements, can still make a face."
"Medusa."
"You know, don't you, what the girls do when they ask to go to the bathroom or when they just arbitrarily exit class? You know? I know. I've asked," Miss Hodd said. "There's a new hand dryer in the third-floor bathroom and they're in there playing with it. It's got jet power to make your skin jiggle."
"Please."
"I'm serious. Sometimes they go back to the lounge and complain about class, or they run errands, print out things for you, Mrs. Quirk."
"They've got college decisions to make."
Dr. D said he had found Alex Decrow in the computer room when she was supposed to be in class. "She said she was trying to get a date for the prom."
"Poor girls," Miss Hodd said. "Some of them have never had a date."
"Ellen," Phil Meeks said. Ellen, her name, Ellen Hodd. "Let's get out of the'D's," and he advanced the projector to shine the next report card onto the screen: Forestal.
"What's happening in French, Simone?"
"I told you," Madame Sagnier said. "They're the children of the corn."
Hives
Unattached