Invitation to a Bonfire Page 4

  I watched, and I calculated the ways I could pick up her American habits: walk like she walked, smile like she smiled. Still, something was lost in the translation from her body to my own, the dialect of my limbs never quite tracking the lilting way she tossed her hair. To be American was to take what you wanted; to be American was to sit and laugh just so. Early on in my first semester the cafeteria served fries alongside their “famous” chicken-fried chunks of steak, and I noticed that Margaret alone ate them with both ketchup and mayonnaise, dipping one end in each sauce before taking alternating bites. I thought it was elegant, or maybe just efficient. Clever, in any case, and I found I liked the taste. Ketchup on its own was too sweet for me, but Margaret’s method simulated the mayo-thick salads I was used to from home, served as treats with our most celebratory meals—I never did quite get used to the idea of “salad” denoting iceberg lettuce and cold tomatoes arranged on a plate. Following Margaret, I dipped once, twice, with perfect confidence, savoring the bite of oil and the kiss of vinegar on my tongue. That is, until a girl named Sandy turned around to ask me for the salt and pepper shakers and visibly blanched at my behavior.

  “What in God’s name,” she asked, “do you think you’re doing?”

  I went still, one half-doused fry hovering above my paper ketchup cup. “Eating?” I said. But since she caught me off guard, I didn’t have time to affect the cool voice I was piecing together from Margaret’s intonation, and so it sounded like I suggested I was Yeeting? Which likely didn’t help my case. Sandy squinted, taking in the ketchup, the mayonnaise, the little piece of potato pinched between my fingers.

  “How very European,” she said, at last, making it clear that she did not consider Europeanness a compliment. After that, I endured several days of girls piping up in the halls with whatever little foreign phrase they could pin down, their aim so broad that I got as much Parlez-vous français? and Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? as I did hearty shouts of Comrade! accompanied by punishingly affable smacks on the back. Only Margaret kept out of it, responding with a mild shrug to any comments made about me in earshot of her.

  We all talked about ourselves in terms of colors and seasons that year, a game thought up by a rising senior that quickly spread throughout the school: I was a spring, what with my light hair and the green undertone of my skin. Margaret considered herself a winter, but she was more accurately late fall. Soft browns, mustard yellows, certain shades of roseate pink all set off her skin and hair, turning her from a spirited girl into a kind of forest nymph. She tied her loose curls back in a ponytail, or let them tumble down over her shoulders with delicate twists pinned up behind her ears. She often wore tartan skirts and polished oxfords, pressed white shirts with pearl buttons that somehow managed not to look too sweet. In vain I tried to read her like my personal Rosetta Stone, but no matter what I did to emulate Margaret, it wasn’t enough. My true self always leaked through to the surface, sometimes frightening even me.

  10.

  “You.”

  I was in the library one late-winter afternoon, grinding my teeth and trying to read Schopenhauer in an English translation. Marie’s café had seemed, for once, too far to walk, in part because the wind that day was so frigid and sharp I felt sure it could peel the bark off trees and the skin off my back. But also, I had woken up with an unfamiliar nesting instinct. Stay close, I thought. Stay here. Stay home. So I’d hunkered down in a study carrel, twisting myself into a tight ball of irregular verbs and borrowed pessimism. When the tap came on my shoulder I jerked around, knocking my book off the table and startling the girl I found standing behind me into taking a step back.

  Cindy Pink was a peripheral friend of Margaret’s who also happened to be in my math class. In general she spent a lot of time managing her cuticles, nibbling them until they bled or pushing them back with a small black emery board. You could judge her mood that way: if her nails were ragged, then class work was going poorly, or else she’d gotten into a fight with her mother, angry missives arriving by mail and the phone ringing off the hook in the dorms. There was a lot of gossip about it because sometimes those fights ended with Cindy receiving apologetic fruit baskets that she parceled out to her suitemates. That day, however, her hands were neat, with a thin layer of clear polish giving her naturally pink nail beds an extraterrestrial gleam. She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded to me.

  “Hey, you,” she said again. “Are you busy? What are you doing right now?”

  “Studying?” I looked at my book, splayed out on the floor. “Why?” No one really talked to me, as a rule, except in class or else to tell me that the loose buttons on the side of my skirt had come undone. And even then, sometimes girls just poked their fingers through the hole to my stockinged leg, looking up at me as if to ask, Well?

  Cindy pursed her lips and glanced down at one hand, inspecting the glossy manicure there. She seemed conflicted. “You’re kind of weird, right?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Sure you do.” Her hair was black and straight: she was a true winter, with pale blue eyes she narrowed at me, now. “You’re a spooky one. You know,” she gestured around her head, as if chasing off a cloud of gnats. “Woo-woo. So anyway, we need you to help us with a project.”

  At this point a touch of affront might’ve done me good, or at least a bit of skepticism. But I was dazzled by the idea that Cindy, or anyone, had thought about me as any kind of person at all. I didn’t know what woo-woo meant, but between her nervous stance and her hand-waving, I could guess. And in fact I wasn’t opposed to having a reputation for witchiness. It meant there were girls who had looked at me, girls who had whispered and seen something in me that I had no idea was there. Plus, it was a lot less pathetic than I expected.

  I leaned down and picked up my Schopenhauer, placing it facedown on the carrel desk so that the dour portrait on the front of the book, which always gave me the creeps, was out of view. Then I crossed my legs and lightly folded my hands on top of my knees.

  “What is this … project?”

  “Ok, I knew you’d be into it.” Paying no attention at all to what I’d hoped was a very sophisticated posture, Cindy grabbed my elbow and pulled me away into the library, weaving through the stacks and then looking back and forth behind us before slipping into a small stairway in the building’s rear. “Shh,” she said unnecessarily as we tiptoed down the stairs.

  We emerged into one of the library’s sub-basements, a supposed research area so poorly outfitted that half of the shelves were empty, and in some places graffiti had snuck onto the walls, eluding the watchful eyes of the facilities crew. Pencil scribbles mostly, though sometimes a haunting slash of lipstick: CHERYL WAS HERE and I’VE GOT YOU NOW followed by WHO? followed by WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW? Sometimes girls snuck down here to hide books they were using for class projects and wanted to keep from being recalled; at the end of every semester a librarian was dispatched to collect and re-catalogue them. Cindy and I made our way to the back of the room, where a few shelves had been pushed around to create a circle, like a clearing in the woods. Several girls were already there, sitting cross-legged on the worn grey carpet.

  “Oh good,” said a girl named Adeline, who lived on the floor below me. “You got her.”

  “Why am I here?” I asked. My elbow hurt where Cindy had been holding it, and I tried to rub away the pain while still looking cool, collected.

  “Right, right, we’ll get to that.” Adeline raised her eyebrows at Cindy and surveyed the room. She asked me: “You know everyone?” Besides us and Cindy, there were three other girls from our year—Bernice, Leslie, and Louise—plus a first-year named Marion who would later transfer out. A senior named Olivia.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Perfect. Well, listen, we’ve all heard about you”—again, I was flattered and confused to hear it—“and we think you can help us with something we need to do. How is, uh, how are your grades going?”

  “What?�
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  “You know,” Adeline said. “Are you doing ok in your classes?” She seemed uneasy, clocking my reactions, as if she was as scared as I was that I would say the wrong thing.

  “Sort of. It’s fine.” I didn’t want to get into it. Cindy smirked, and I threw her a look from the corner of my eye—math was one of my better subjects, actually. Dispassionate, and a universal language. “Why, is this a study group? I like working …” I paused, considered my phrasing, not wanting to lie. “I prefer working on my own,” I said, which I did, because it cut down on the stress of conversation.

  “Well, that’s really great for you and all, but not everyone feels that way.” Olivia, the senior girl, had her back pushed up against a bookcase, and she kept rocking into it, making it shudder. “Some of us aren’t doing so great, and some of us need to graduate on time.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t clear to me how I could help them. Olivia and Marion, in particular, weren’t even in my classes.

  “Anyway.” Adeline stared at Olivia until she sat still; until everyone was perfectly still. “Anyway. Studying is fine, but sometimes it’s not enough. We want to do everything we possibly can to make sure finals go well this year. It’s important. For all of us.”

  “Do something, like what?”

  “Hmm,” said Adeline. “Have you ever heard of the Gray Governess?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she’s the ghost of the library, and she’s going to help us pass. And you’re going to help us talk to her.”

  Excerpt from The Donne School: History and Legacy, by R. B. Stinson

  Though many consider the metaphysical poet and cleric John Donne (b. 1572, d. 1631) the institution’s primary spiritual forebear, the Donne School has long maintained a second connection to the mysterious and much-debated Lady Donne, also called the Gray Governess. A recluse and a scholar from the eighteenth century, the Governess lived in Devonshire, England, as heir to and proprietor of her ancestral castle The Goss, where she acted as ward to a group of orphaned young women from all over the county who called themselves the Gray Goslings. This group was viewed with some apprehension by the community; reported Gosling activity ranged from advanced hermetic scholarship to unsubstantiated, likely slanderous accounts of witchcraft and necromancy, though it is widely believed by serious historians that the girls spent most of their time cultivating the grounds around the castle in order to provide food to the local poor. After The Goss burned down in 1826, all firsthand records of the period were lost.

  Although her mark on history is fainter than that of her literary namesake, it can be seen in her limited remaining writing that Lady Donne shared many of the poet’s philosophical concerns, including the mercurial essence of nature, flux and momentariness in all existence, and the transmigration of the human spirit into the physical world. Lady Donne, however, also believed in the transmigration of God’s spirit into man, and was notable for her insistence that the exercise of human will is a vital method of communication with the divine. In simpler terms, she believed that what we do is what God is, and that this fact endows humanity with a number of grave obligations, particularly when guiding young people toward productive lives.

  At the Donne School, our primary responsibility is to the welfare and education of our students, and we believe Lady Donne provides them with a unique example of modern (if not quite contemporary) femininity. Robust in her challenge to the idea that young ladies must be seen and not heard, Lady Donne was heard, but not seen; she offered shelter and education to the unfortunate without seeking any personal visibility or reward, and was bold enough to insist on a causal link between base corporeal actions and the transcendence of the soul. Her work was, in a word, visionary, despite the limitations placed on her sex during her lifetime. Stonework rescued from the ruins of The Goss can be found throughout the Donne School campus, serving as a reminder of the Gray Governess’s commitment to education and as an extratemporal link between today’s Goslings and those of yesteryear. A chalice of earth from Devonshire, likewise, evokes the Governess’s spirit in the library.

  Editor’s note: This page, torn out of a Donne School reference book, was found tucked into the Andropov diary. A thorough comb-through of the Donne School library, including the sub-basements, located the exact tome from which the page originated, including the shredded remnants where the page was removed, and a smudged fingerprint in the nearby margins.

  Zoya

  11.

  “Here’s the basic idea,” Cindy told me, stepping in for Adeline. She seemed nervous again, allowing herself one small nibble at her pretty thumbnail. “There’s supposed to be this library ghost? And if you ask her things, she can help you with your schoolwork? Because she believed in education?”

  “Ok,” I said. “And?”

  “And we want her to help us? According to the legend, you’re supposed to find this dirt, see. That’s the first thing. And then you get a sensitive person to be the ghost’s, um, mouth. Voice. And, um, we thought, you seemed pretty sensitive.”

  I looked around the room, waiting for one of the girls to burst into laughter. But they were nodding, attentive. Leslie and Bernice held hands, and despite my fear of being made a fool of, I was intrigued. Back in Moscow I’d been raised by the state to believe in sensible ideas, focusing on practical knowledge and hard work instead of fairytales about life after death. God was forbidden in my childhood, and spook stories, too, those hair-raising articles of the capitalist imagination, designed to lull the overrun masses into a submissive stupor, while the revolution was designed, instead, to wake us up. But the pragmatism required by my Soviet education never quite took, with me. Maybe because my mother had been full of superstitions—sit on a cold stone and lose your childbearing abilities; go to sleep with wet hair and you’ll wake up with the walking flu; whistle below the full moon and you’re inviting something malign to tea—or maybe just because I didn’t feel that my physical senses were perfect enough to grasp everything the universe had to offer. And then, too, my parents died, which felt like something that might happen to somebody else, suggesting that I wasn’t living my own proper life. Anyway, beyond any ghostly concerns, I hadn’t been completely honest with Adeline when I said my grades were fine. They could’ve been better. They could always have been better.

  “So how do we get the dirt?” I asked.

  Cindy nudged Marion with her toe, and the younger girl reached into a knapsack, pulling out a paper bag. She shook it, and I heard the soft sprinkling of earth.

  “Open your hands,” Marion instructed, and I did so, making a little bowl. She shook a bit of the dirt onto my palms.

  “And you all just thought I could do this? Because I seem … open?”

  “Well, that,” Cindy agreed. “And, honestly, none of us wanted to. We figured if you said no, we’d tell Margaret you follow her around copying her every move.”

  “What?” I retracted my hands a bit, losing a light dusting of soil.

  “Careful!” Cindy said. “Look, it’s no big deal. We just thought, if we were Margaret, then we wouldn’t want our creepy roommate tailing us like a creepy shadow. Not that you’re necessarily creepy,” she assured me with a shrug. “And I mean, you said yes, so we don’t have to tell Margaret anything anyway.”

  My face burned. In a way, it had worked: my plan to get noticed and find my place among the other girls. But this was not the place I had wanted, or the notice I was hoping for. The ghostly dirt felt cool in my hands, and gave off the vaguest scent of grass and stone.

  “What do we do now?” I asked, not looking up.

  “Now we’re going to say a poem,” Marion told me. She was the calmest of them, and her voice was pleasant. Lulling. “You just listen to the poem, and each of us will light a candle. Then the Gray Governess is supposed to speak.”

  “Ok,” I said. It didn’t sound so bad. Around me, everyone nodded, and Adeline gently pushed me into the center of the circle. I sat down, and they arranged themselves at an eve
n distance, pulling out short tapers and passing a box of matches hand to hand. Louise stood up and turned off the lights. There was just the soft glow of the candles.

  Later I would realize the poem was in the Donne School charter, and I would wonder how they came to select it for this particular task. But at the time I barely caught the words—all I took in was the sense they were talking of honesty, clarity, a peculiar girl. I supposed she must be me. I closed my eyes, and the poem rumbled across me like waves. I thought of the whale, which I’d seen from the ship that brought me to America. I thought of my mother, singing gentle lullabies. And my father, frowning at me, beginning to change from the lighthearted man I knew in my early childhood into someone suspicious, hollow-cheeked, and stern.

  He had been a true believer in the revolution that killed the centuries-old Tsarist regime with the aim of redistributing all the aristocracy’s land and wealth. He was, too, a passionate advocate of the idea that the workers of the world would unite, that we shared a spirit which would help us ascend to a place of equanimity and humble goodness. I loved his faith, as it was all that I knew, and loved it more when he began to rise in the Party, bringing home meat from the most recalcitrant butcher and offering us little presents: a comb or a ribbon, a locket with his picture inside. The modest lift in our household status seemed to confirm that his faith was justified, that the Party was right in all it said.

  But as the years went by in Moscow, something changed for him, and then, slowly, it changed for me. Though I was still obedient, my political observance stopped pleasing him, somehow—even simple expressions of enthusiasm for the Party or our brave new world made him look at me with suspicion. When he told me we wouldn’t be going back to Lipetsk because the Party thought his skills were needed elsewhere, I was overjoyed at the idea of staying in the city and danced around the room, singing a little song I made up on the spot. (Kto yez-dit? Ni-k-to. Kto sidit zdes’? Ya, horosho! Who’s going? No one. Who’s staying? Me!) But he was ashen. “Don’t you see?” he asked me. “It isn’t right. If I’m not there to help with the harvest, who will do my work for me? Someone will have to do it for me.” I didn’t understand why this upset him. But he wouldn’t stop talking about it, or about the other items on his growing list of qualms. Opulent meetings. Peculiar methods. Privileges withheld from the many for the benefit of the few.