Black Ice (17 page)

The rest of the groupmaster’s report described my work at school as “excellent.” Mr. Hawley wrote about gymnastics, the house play, my term on Student Council, and my other courses. The failing calculus paragraph, however, was longer than the everything-else-is-great paragraph. I felt aggrieved that he had not even mentioned my first High Honors in English; he had not even mentioned my other four Honors.

“The man says he thinks you can pass,” my mother said in answer to my frustration.

“I don’t want to ‘pass.’ ” It was hard not to spit the words out onto the kitchen table. “I didn’t go up there to ‘pass.’ ”

I dared not say that I would almost prefer to fail outright than to scramble on my hands and knees for a P. The fact was, I wanted calculus to disappear. I wanted to drop it, reasoning that since I had taken one course more than was required, I had one to spare, so to speak.

The Vice-Rector disagreed. I would have to gather the strength to hurl myself at it once more. It was a two-term course. I could still pull it off. If only I could stand the pain of not understanding a little longer, the magic would happen. Understanding concepts was magic. It could come in drips or a glorious flood, but I couldn’t tell. I had to keep studying and hold on. That was the hard part. Not understanding made me want to explode after a time. I promised myself that it would come like a difficult reading suddenly came, and then I’d have it.

It would happen as my father described falling in judo: “It’s almost like religion,” he said. “It’s learning not to fight it. If you fight the fall, you lose. You always lose. But if you can just conquer the fear, you won’t get hurt. You just fall.”

We returned for mud season. The ponds were thawing. Water roared over the man-made fall by Simpson’s front door. It foamed over the rocks and swelled the grass meadow below the quad. The paths were gritty with layers of sand that the grounds crew had spread over the winter ice. Grit and sand and mud encrusted the soles of our shoes. Tiny cylinders of dried mud popped from the eyelets and onto the floor when I laced my shoes.

Mountains of snow by the sides of the roads did not melt. The sun warmed them; the nights froze them; and they grew
as hard and shiny as boils. Unexpected snows caught us by surprise at night, and freezing rains came suddenly, coating the trees and their tentative buds as if with shrink-wrap.

Despite setbacks, the buds on the tough little magnolia by the Schoolhouse fattened tenaciously inside their fuzzy pods, and the chickadees, their furry black-and-white feathers puffed against the wind, proceeded with their special springtime noise. It was a soft, surprisingly mammalian sound, delightful and disturbing. I, who was sometimes surprised myself these days by the sound of my own words (phrases and pronunciation I had worked to master now fell from my mouth spontaneously), I listened to these funny birds who did not sound like birds as if they could illuminate a mystery for me. They could not.

I continued to flail about in calculus. I cursed myself for ever having signed up for it. I cursed my teacher and made nasty jokes about him at table. I completed my homework assignments with grim determination, and emerged from each one as baffled as I had begun. I was just beginning to understand the ideas from the winter term, and it was already spring. I whipped myself into to a frenzy, hoping that pressure and panic would hasten learning, but with each new lesson, I fell further behind.

Grace’s older brother was assigned to tutor me, and then I was released from classes altogether. “I am not sure that this will work,” Mr. Shipman told me, “but at this point, I’m ready to try.”

Four times a week I met with my tutor or with Mr. Shipman alone. Having escaped from the daily humiliation of class, I confused relief with progress. I remained just as far behind, only I didn’t know it.

I chose crew for my spring sport. An old master named Mr. Church took us new girls out to the Lower School boat docks to learn the basics: how to get the boat off its shelf, down the dock, and into the water; how to step into the boat and strap
our feet into the stirrups; how to position our oars in the oarlocks and where to grip the smooth butt of the oar. He taught us port from starboard, how deep to dip our oars into the water and how high to carry them when we pulled them out. Mr. Church had been in the Lower School for years, and he was as gentle with us as with twelve-year-olds.

Once we learned how to get the boat into the water without ruining the shell or hurting ourselves, he led us into the calm water. We rowed clumsily, scooping deep into the water or glancing the surface. At the beginning of the term we rocked and rolled. Chunks of ice floated by silently.

Once we knew the basics, they took us away from Mr. Church. Now we ran out to Big Turkey Pond, a mile from the gym. I detoured through the forest behind Upper to find a shortcut. I negotiated fallen trees and mud and moss. I took my occasional falls as just punishment for chiseling, and I chiseled nonetheless.

Sometimes I stopped running because I was tired, and because the woods were too animated to pound through as I was pounding through adolescence. Each day the snow retreated a little from the coldest, shadiest places. The mud softened, and the path became more treacherous. I came to know the working chipmunk holes, sunny bird roosts, and squirrels’ nests, bulky as winter hats in the high branches of the hardwood trees.

My guilty afternoon pleasure made me greedy for more that spring, and so I left off studying now and then to read a short story or a poem that was not assigned or to skip the first half of Seated Meal so that I could steal away to the Lower School docks to watch the sunset melt into the tops of the pines.

I did not know that I was supposed to find in such solitary diversions moments of joy in learning so profound that I would cherish them into adulthood. I would have laughed just as my four-year-old daughter laughed when I told her that children grow while they sleep.

Ricky wrote to invite me for a weekend at his school. Over and over I asked where I’d be staying. I wanted a safe room, tucked far away, if possible, in an inaccessible den of some vigilant faculty member. That arranged, I came upon my inspiration for the term.

In biology lab someone mentioned a theory that the body needed as little as three hours to accomplish the daily physiological functions of sleep. About the same time I picked up another factoid, namely, that most people use only a small fraction—five or ten percent—of their brain capacity. It was like finding money in the road. I was so excited that I told everyone at the lunch table. They took the idea and worked it into a routine.

“You do the experiment, and then come back and tell us how it went,” said Kenny.

“I gotta see this.”

“Zombie time.”

“She’ll be sleeping standing up, like horses do.”

Somebody made snoring sounds.

“Nah, guys, it’s gonna be like this,” said Anthony. He, too, was from Philadelphia. He was a tall, bulky boy who liked to tell stories and joke. “She doesn’t half study anyhow, so what’s the difference? You’re gonna walk into class and do the same thing. No. Don’t try to deny it. Check it out. This is how it is in creative writing—” Anthony pitched his voice to a high falsetto. “ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Ball, but I think with regard to the reading, uh, Life is like a leaf.’

“And Mr. Ball says: ‘Now, let’s think about the possibilities. Did the rest of you hear that? Repeat that please.’ ”

“I never said that!”

“Get out of here,” Anthony said. “I was there. I know.”

After lunch it was time for practice, and since they’d warmed to teasing me, they teased me some more about crew. The boys had come up with an entire routine about crew, which opened
with their whistling an old sailing song that was featured on a TV commercial for men’s cologne. “Yeah, matey!” they said in unison. “Matey” was acceptable public shorthand for “faggot,” a term they used frequently. “Down brothers” did not row crew. Crew was effete. It did not translate perfectly in the case of a girl, but (or maybe therefore) they ragged me anyway. Then we went off to our separate sports: they to track and lacrosse, and I to skulk through the woods to the distant boat-houses.

I watched the back of the girl in front of me and moved my body with hers. The oars dipped, and I listened to the sound in order to hit the rhythm. Crouch and pull. Make the pull smooth, hard, long as you could. The trick was to hit a balance between thinking and not thinking. Once I’d gotten the oar into the water just right, I had to stop thinking about it and put my arms just there again, pull just so hard with my back, slide with just the same force from my thighs and calves. It took thinking about each part, and then letting go of the thought so that the parts could work together. Now and then I hit the balance. My body moved, and my mind was clear, focused on nothing but the rhythm and the sounds of the oars, the repetition, and Patty Glovsky’s voice shouting hoarsely:
Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!
Wood and metal and water made their own sounds, and we were silent.

I was always astonished at the end of practice at how little I had thought of my romance. Running back to the gym, on the road, if I was not able to slip into the woods unnoticed, or on the dappled trail, I did think of Ricky. I thought of his skin, his nostrils, and his mouth. Some days I could not put the features together and see his face in my mind.

When I visited his school, that forgetfulness amazed me. Ricky had prepared for my stay: He’d found a fancy bicycle for me. He explained its features and adjusted the seat. Together we rode on sloping roads that wound through the countryside
near his school. We scrambled over hills and sped down, our pedals flying through tenth gear. We sliced through shadows, and I tilted my head to keep my eyes from tearing in the wind.

We rode about fifteen miles before I braved the disappointment that I knew I’d see in Ricky’s eyes when I said I’d had enough. We rode back to his school underneath canopies of green trees, talking of bicycle design and our love.

“Well, what shall we do now?” Ricky asked me.

I wanted a bath, but that didn’t seem the right answer, so I smiled and asked what he would like to do. Ricky took me on a tour of the campus and introduced me to friends. Then we ended up in the gymnasium, where we shot baskets. It was high time I learned to play basketball, we decided, and he tried to find my natural shot. We tried lay-ups, jump shots, set shots, free throws.

We meandered in search of yet more athletic equipment. Finding rackets, we played a little tennis and then went to dinner at the cafeteria. Dinner was clattery, noisy, informal, and followed hard on by the school dance. The inevitable man-sized speakers blasted out the inevitable rock music. It was violent music, and the dancing took on the aspect of hand-to-hand combat. We danced as best we could, but the music was against us, and elbows were flying. We left early. After cycling, basketball, and tennis, my thighs had begun to cramp anyway.

When I arrived back at St. Paul’s the next day, I hobbled to the squash courts to smoke cigarettes with Jimmy.

“Are you sure this is the man for you?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t look like I’m woman enough for him, does it?”

I leaned against him and gave a moment’s thought, as I sometimes did, to why Jimmy and I remained friends instead of lovers. I wondered whether or not I would say years later, as my aunties joked, that they had never been able to get excited
over some of the nicest guys they’d known in school.
“Good
men. Good
husbands
. Loving husbands. Men you could talk to.
Good
fathers.” And they’d laugh together and shake their heads over these good men who were now married up to the evilest women in the universe—and were
good
to the heifers. I’d never understood why they had not grabbed these men, or why they weren’t sorrier to have lost them.

There was nothing of the comfort and easy, simple laughter of Jimmy’s friendship in my angry, athletic love, nothing of the honest acceptance or joyful, everyday discovery. I asked Jimmy about it.

“Well, darling, don’t ask
me,”
he said. “We see how
I’m
doing in the romance department. At least you
have
a boyfriend. Now whether he’s suitable is another question. Every girl I’m interested in wants me to be a brother. ‘I love you like a brother,’ ” he mimicked.

I looked inquiringly at him.

“Not you, love. What we have is different. What we have is special.”

I laid my head on his shoulder, disappointed and grateful.

It was at the end of that same week, I think, that I realized that the new calculus regime wasn’t doing the trick. I pushed back my despair until the weekend. On Saturday night I went to talk about it to Mr. Hawley. His front door was closed. Virginia Deane was on duty that night.

My last contact with Miss Deane had been embarrassing. It had been she who had had to roust me out of my bed when the screeching fire-alarm bells had failed to wake me. In fact I had not awakened at all until I found myself standing outside in the snow, my bathrobe hung over my shoulders. How Miss Deane got me out of bed and down the hall, I never knew, but if anyone was up to the task, she was.

Miss Deane was hard-core crisp. Her hair, a combination of stark straight strands of black and white, gave off the sheen of pewter. She carried her no-nonsense, long-waisted New England body on hard-muscled little legs that tapered to fine-boned ankles. She smoked constantly and had a voice as low and as husky as a man’s. When a girl in her group made varsity lacrosse or tried a new haircut, Miss Deane would smile widely and cry out with firm-bodied enthusiasm: “Oh, that’s neat! That’s just swell!”

At Miss Deane’s that night a crowd of the house’s most boring girls were assembled talking the most boring talk. I stayed for a quarter of an hour, and then excused myself to have another go at my math assignment.

I reworked the problem I had left and checked the answer in the back of the textbook. It was wrong again. Another wrong damn answer. I went back to the problem that my tutor and I had worked on earlier. I reworked that problem, checking my reasoning against his at each step. I could not understand it. I closed my notebook, and went to bed.