“Why are you here?” she hissed.
“Lunch?” The confusion must’ve shown on my face, though a dim glimmer of awareness was starting to break through. All around the room, groups of students and even a few parents were taking peeks at me from the corners of their eyes.
“But not now,” Hilda said. “The vultures are out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I tucked a napkin—cloth, for today only—onto my lap and took a bite of pie. As a graduate I felt quite adult, and had decided I was allowed to eat dessert first if I wanted. “Who’s a vulture?”
“Hmm,” said Hilda. She watched me eat the pie, my face growing pinker with each mouthful. Leftovers, the girls to the right of us whispered. So sad. So pathetic. It’s putting me off my appetite. I finished the pie and turned to my proper lunch, but before I could make much headway an entire table of third-years walked up and clattered their trays down next to me, a few scrapings left on each plate. My cheeks were now quite red and hot.
“The kitchen’s right there,” I said. The bus tubs, where you were supposed to place your dishes for washing, were still almost empty.
“Ohhhhh.” One of the girls, who I thought was named Kay, stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “We knoooooow, but we just thought you were looking for scraps.” She smiled, her eyebrows aloft with innocence. “We wanted to help!”
I looked down at my food, and then over to Hilda. Her face was stern and set.
“Come on, you ninnies,” she said. “Do your own dirty work.”
Kay smiled wider, coming around to retrieve her tray. Her hair was yellow and tied back in a braid, which she flipped over her shoulder like a mink.
“You know,” she said, “we thought we already did.”
Hilda and I watched each girl flounce up and remove her tray, scraping the extra food carefully into a trashcan before placing their plates in the tubs. They tsked about the waste, but we didn’t make another sound until all of them were done and gone. It was only then I realized they’d taken my tray, too. My eyes stung, but I blinked and kept my gaze steady.
“You know, Nadine used to be a Donne Girl.” Hilda spoke with a casual air, as though the idea had popped into her head for no reason. She looked at Nadine, who was back in the kitchen, then nodded at me. “Scholarship, like you. Her people are from Appalachia.”
“Really.” I didn’t know where Appalachia was, but I could guess its character. Barren. Blighted. Or anyway nothing like the glittering towns that gave birth to Kays and Margarets. Farm horses instead of dressage. Oatmeal by necessity instead of for improved digestion.
“Mmmhmm. She liked art history. Still does, as a matter of fact. Sometimes goes into the library museum after hours to look at the prints. But anyway,” Hilda swatted aside the idea of the school’s prize archival collection, “when she was done with her studies, she didn’t have much in the way of options. Go home to her momma. Try and find some work. She always used to cook for her cousins, and that was how she ended up staying here.”
We both watched Nadine in the kitchen for a moment, humming to herself as she dropped plate after plate into a sink of soapy water. Something must’ve told her she was being observed—a tickle behind the ear, or a twitch at the base of the spine, goose over the grave—because she looked up all of a sudden and caught my eye. Her expression was hard to read.
“Things can go ugly fast,” Hilda mused. “People can be ugly.” I thought she might say more, but she didn’t. Just put a hand on my shoulder before standing up and retying her apron, then disappeared back through the kitchen’s swinging door to help Nadine finish up the wash.
Thank god Margaret wasn’t there amidst the vultures—she’d never see me this way, through the eyes of these girls. As far as she knew I’d picked up my bag and left town at the same time as the rest of our classmates, landing days later in a whole new life. She and I had discussed our post-graduation plans just once, and she accepted my vague answers with disinterested poise, perhaps filling in the details for herself. That’s what I hoped now. Her expectations of me naturally weren’t too high, but maybe she pictured me doing something secretarial. Not in New York, but maybe Pittsburgh or Detroit—big, if not the biggest. Not the finest, but still fine. I knew she planned to spend the summer on Cape Cod helping her mother decorate their new beach house before heading to Sarah Lawrence in the fall. My name would be disappearing from her memory by now, reduced to a faint buzz in the back of her brain. But at least the buzz would be a pleasant one. Oh, you, she’d think. And then she’d turn to the next topic. Something with a little more zip.
I hurried back into the greenhouse, shutting the door behind me with a slam and leaning against it to catch my breath. John turned from the length of sprinkler pipe he was fiddling with, and gave me an assessing look.
“That bad?”
“Why,” I asked, “didn’t you tell me it would be like that?”
“I thought you knew.” He shrugged. “You lived here for two years. You didn’t notice they were all stuck up?”
I went over to the table of seedlings and ran my finger along a green bean vine curling up a thin stake in its terra-cotta pot. The stake, piked deep. The vine, slowly strangling the pike. Yes, I knew the Donne girls were snobs, but I didn’t realize they were cruel. I’d never worked for them before. I don’t know if I can do this, I almost said, but my thoughts were interrupted by a honk from outside, and the rumbling of an engine, cut short. My exotics. I took a breath and tied the bandanna back around my neck for protection from the afternoon sun.
The next few hours passed quickly. We organized the plants not just by color but by region, creating biomes in each corner. One full of palms and banyans and birds of paradise, African iris and beehive ginger. One for the American southwest desert with ocotillo and aloe and agave, and even a small saguaro, which would cause me endless stress. For the southern belles we had orchids, honeysuckle, and a few tobacco plants—plus a Venus flytrap, which I’d assumed was from somewhere with deep jungles, but I learned was actually from North Carolina, and simply couldn’t resist. I was reminded of childhood summers, when heat and effort erased the very hours from the clock. Spot-checking the sugar beet leaves for insect eggs, turning the soil, beginning the harvest, my mother handing out jugs of cold water with a hint of lemon and a breath of vodka to encourage the blur of minutes into days.
John and I ran around, wrangling both citrus and rhizome. While we worked I had no time to think, though I wouldn’t realize this until later, and wouldn’t learn to cultivate it as an escape for longer still. My body, though, must’ve felt the relief and grabbed hold of it. By the time everything was in place I was breathless—from exertion, yes, but even more so from excitement. Snobs or not, the students and parents would have no choice but to be bowled over by our display. As the sun fell low, the greenhouse filled up with pink and orange light, burnishing the already rich colors and softening the edges of the leaves. I half expected to dissolve into the haze, leaving no trace behind but a pair of dirty shoes.