“Why don’t you introduce yourselves?” Hannah said cheerfully.
They said their names with paint-by-numbers politeness.
“Jade.”
“We’ve met,” said Charles.
“Leulah,” said the Peasant Girl.
“Milton,” said the Old Mill.
“Nigel Creech, very pleased to meet you,” said the Master with Foxhound, and then he flashed a smile, which disappeared instantly like a spark off a defunct lighter.
If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah’s were just that, or, to quote one of Dad’s treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”
I sort of like to think the same was true back in those days at Hannah’s (Visual Aid 8.0). (Forgive my regrettable rendering of Charles — and Jade for that matter; they were much more beautiful in real life.)
Charles was the handsome one (handsome in the opposite way of Andreo). Gold-haired, mercury-tempered, he was not only St. Gallway’s Track and Field star, excelling at both hurdles and the high jump, but also its Travolta. It wasn’t unusual to see him sliding between classes engaged in a shameless, campus-wide soft shoe, involving not only known Gallway beauties but also the less physically heralded. Somehow he was able to twirl one girl away by the Teacher’s Lounge just as another rumbaed over to him, and they pachangaed down the hall. (Amazingly, no one’s feet were ever stepped on.)
Jade was the terrifying beauty (see “Tawny Eagle,” Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993). She swooped into a classroom and girls scattered like chipmunks and squirrels. (The boys, equally afraid, played dead.) She was brutally blond (“bleached to the hilt,” I heard Beth Price remark in AP English), five-feet-eight (“wiry”), stalked the halls in short skirts, her books in a black leather bag (“Guess she’s Donna fucking Karan”) and what I took to be a severe and sad look on her face, though most took it for conceit. Due to Jade’s fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening, but flat out wrong. Although Bartleby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturds’s three-member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, “You Can’t Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk” and “All Airbrushing”), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers, to reveal a disturbing truth: you could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact you’d only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.
VISUAL AID 8.0
Nigel was the cipher (see “Negative Space,” Art Lessons, Trey, 1973,p. 29). At first glance (even at second and third), he was ordinary. His face — rather his entire being — was a buttonhole: small, narrow, uneventful. He stood no more than five-feet-five with a round face, brown hair, features weak and baby-feet pink (neither complemented nor marred by the wire glasses he wore). At school, he sported thin, tonguelike neckties in neon orange, a fashion statement I guessed was his effort to force people to take notice of him, much like a car’s hazard lights. And yet, upon closer examination, the ordinariness was extraordinary: he bit his nails into thumbtacks; spoke in hushed spurts (uncolored guppies darting through a tank); in large groups, his smile could be a dying light bulb (shining reluctantly, flickering, disappearing); and a single strand of his hair (once found on my skirt after sitting next to him), held directly under a light, shimmered with every color in a rainbow, including purple.
And then there was Milton, sturdy and grim, with a big, cushiony body like someone’s favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering (see “American Black Bear,” Meat-Eating Land Animals, Richards, 1982). He was eighteen, but looked thirty. His face, cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn’t what it’d once been. He had an Orson Wellian quality, Gerardepardieuian too: one suspected his large, slightly overweight frame smothered some kind of dark genius and after a twenty-minute shower he’d still reek of cigarettes. He’d lived most of his life in a town called Riot in Alabama and thus spoke in a Southern accent so gooey and thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls. Like all Mysteriosos, he had an Achilles’ heeclass="underline" a giant tattoo on his upper right arm. He refused to talk about it, went to great pains to conceal it — never removing his shirt, always wearing long sleeves — and if some clown during P.E. asked him what it was, he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price Is Right rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: “Nunna ya goddamn business.”
And then there was the delicate creature (see Juliet, J. W. Waterhouse, 1898). Leulah Maloney was pearl skinned, with skinny bird arms and long brown hair always worn in a braid, like one of those cords aristocracy pulled in the nineteenth century to summon servants. Hers was an eerie, old-fashioned beauty, a face at home in amulets or carved into cameos — a romantic look I actually used to wish I had whenever Dad and I were reading about Gloriana in The Faerie Queene (Spenser, 1596) or discussing Dante’s love for Beatrice Portinari. (“Know how difficult it is to find a woman that looks like Beatrice in today’s world?” asked Dad. “You’ve a better chance running at the speed of light.”)
Early in the Fall, when I least expected it, I’d spot Leulah in a long dress (usually white or diaphanous blue) strolling the Commons in the middle of a downpour, holding her little antique face up to the rain while everyone else streaked past her screaming, textbooks or disintegrating Gallway Gazettes held over their heads. Twice I noticed her like this — another time, crouched in Elton House shrubbery, apparently fascinated by a piece of bark or tulip bulb — and I couldn’t help but think such faerielike behavior was all very calculated and irritating. Dad had carried on a tedious five-day affair with a woman named Birch Peterson in Okush, New Mexico, and Birch, having been born outside Ontario on a “terrific” free-loving commune called Verve, was always entreating Dad and me to walk untroubled in rain, bless mosquitoes, eat tofu. When she came for dinner she said a prayer before we “consumed,” a fifteen-minute plea asking “Shod” to bless every slime mold and mollusk.
“The word God is inherently male,” said Birch, “so I came up with she, he, and God rolled into one. Shod exemplifies the truly genderless Higher Power.”
I concluded Leulah — Lu, as they all called her — with her gossamer dresses, reedy hair, decisions to skip daintily along everything but sidewalks, had to have Birch’s persona of bean curd, that esprit de spirulina, until I discovered someone had actually hexed the girl, cast a powerful spell, so her oddities were eternally unthinking, careless and unscripted, so she never questioned what people thought or how she looked, so the cruelties of the entire kingdom (“There’s something sour about her. She’s totally past her Eat-by date,” I heard Lucille Hunter remark in AP English) dissolved miraculously — never reaching her ears.