All Souls

January

CHF

What could she write to Astra in the moment that would not be wrong?

Dear A,

Maybe you feel like it has been a waste to have spent your life practicing for what turns out to be nothing. But you are lucky in some ways because you will know what it is like to die, and the rest of us will spend our lives wondering. I know that this isn't comforting at all, but I'm sure you'll be getting enough of that from others, and soon it will stop meaning anything. So I want to talk to you about your dying. I know you have envisioned your own funeral before. People missing you. People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent.

Car had faltered over other letters, but this one she sent.

Siddons

Mr. O'Brien was wearing his Irish pants, the thick Donegal tweed number that Suki and Alex always said must have made him sweat in manly places. In the overheated classrooms, Mr. O'Brien was wearing these pants, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up.

"Oh," Suki whispered, "he is so hirsute."

"You know the ugliest words, Suki."

Mr. O'Brien was reading aloud again, "'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / and Mourners to and fro…'" He was leaning over his desk in his scratchy-looking pants and plaid shirt and talking about the speaker's point of view, asking his students if they had contrived an afterlife or heaven for themselves. "What does Emily Dickinson seem to be proposing here? The floating then, the narrative word, at the end, by itself, in the poem with lead boots and space, what does that lonely term suggest?" And he repeated the lines, " And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down— / And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing — then—'" and he said again, "'then.'" Mr. O'Brien was asking the seniors in English, section Z, what was Emily Dickinson saying about the prospect of heaven? Kitty Johnson was taking notes, sensing her own funereal headache was on the way, not quite looking at Mr. O'Brien, but listening to Ufia hold forth on how scary the poem was because there was no satisfaction for the dead. No eulogy overheard, only scraping chairs and shoes.

Alex whispered to Suki, "I got up at seven to make this class only to be informed there is no fucking heaven." Alex was circling a circle in the center of her notebook, a vacancy, a black hole that grew larger as she spoke. "I mean, this is swell. Nothing to look forward to. I should have guessed."

Nothingness again, that odorless gas again; Marlene, in the back row, felt sick. She wasn't reading this poem with Astra. This poem would be an assignment Astra could do with someone else. Let someone else, let Car explain it, for Astra would insist — did insist, asked for whatever was said and done in class — because she planned to graduate with her class. "My minister visits. He keeps my spirits up," so Astra had said to Marlene, and who was she to suggest a darker outcome?

CHF

Dear Astra,

Maybe I am being morbid, but I'm not going to lie. So you won't go to college or have a family, but wouldn't you get tired of that? There are songs about people like you, making you heroic just because you're young but near the end. You can't stop this.

All you can do is pretend to be sad that you are leaving and smoke your medicine and hide your skill as if you are ashamed, but I know that you are happy this way. The only thing you have to excel at now is leaving, because you only get to once.

Another letter Car suspected she should keep in her drawer, but she didn't.

"Carlotta, are you going to eat that or not?"

"I'm cutting it, aren't I?"

"Have you talked to your father about spring vacation?"

"I don't know why you ask me these things when you already know the answer, Mother."

"Why would I know the answer?"

Mrs. Forestal crossed her arms and caressed herself and was soothed by how thin she was. St. John Knits were made for thin women; their close-fitting jackets showed off long arms. Car had the same long arms, although her mouth suggested she could be a larger woman. Was it any wonder then her daughter would cut and cut and cut her meat until not much of it seemed left?

"Don't bother," she said as if speaking to herself.

"'Don't bother' what, Mother? What are you talking about?"

"I'm going to St. Bart's, and you're welcome to join me."

"Thanks."

"We can eat mangoes and sit in the sun and read and swim." All the time she was talking, Mrs. Forestal felt of her arms, put her face against her arms and smelled — Norell was still a wonderful fragrance, wasn't it? — and she felt slightly comforted. She liked her wrists, too, and the prominence of the bone and the color of her skin.

"When are you going out tonight?" Car asked.

"It's an eight o'clock curtain," Mrs. Forestal said.

"And you're seeing?"

"I don't know. Your grandmother bought the tickets.

"Do you like this color?" Mrs. Forestal asked. She meant her St. John Knit. "Is it too much like one of Nana's colors?"

Suki and Alex

A tooth just simply fell out. Cracked, fell out. One of the big grown-up teeth, a fat one in the back, gone — like that.

"Oh my god," said Suki, who did and did not like to hear terrible news, but this kind of next-to-death terrible news about Astra was really, really, really horrible.

"I think she is…," said Alex.

"If she does…"

Alex and Suki, pre-exams. Stressed, really stressed now, but at least it was snowing, and they were walking past Will Bliss's apartment, the Bliss they seemed destined never to see, Will Bliss who had surely not missed any holiday, who was spending this one in Alta. Alta?

"One of those places."

"Why don't I ever know these things?" Alex asked.

CHF

Car Forestal called Astra from her father's apartment on the kitchen phone. She had been making a mess in the kitchen for a couple of days. A shallow sushi container, Starbucks cups, Starbucks napkins, biscotti. "I'm having a meltdown," she said. "I'm eating cookies. I'm ordering anything Annie's or Patrick's has to deliver. No one knows I'm living here. The staff's got off. Mom and Nana are in Bermuda. Mom thinks I'm at home with Arlette, and Daddy thinks I'm with whomever, and you know Arlette. She loves me; she would never tell Mother on me — besides, she thinks I'm visiting you most of the time. That's what I tell her, and I would come, Astra. I'd come to the hospital except you're still off-limits, aren't you?"

"Why are you talking so fast?"

"Starbucks, I don't know."

"I haven't been off-limits since Christmas. Marlene comes a lot."

"You can tell I don't see anybody," Car said. "I have Folio and that's it. Since when did you and Marlene become friends?"

"I was never not her friend."

"You never socialized with her."

"She keeps me up-to-date and reads goofy animal stories. Nothing sad. Not like your letters, thanks."

"Astra."

"It's good. You keep a person on her toes, Car."

"I can't bullshit you, A."

"No, keep the letters coming. Marlene likes them."

"Marlene."

"She means well. My little friend Teddy from across the hall sometimes comes over to hear Marlene read to me. She brings me my homework. I help her with math."

"Could you help me with mine?"

The sad part for Astra was that she didn't always know Marlene was in the room. The nurses had to tell her it happened. "I'm so often asleep. Watch. Later I'll forget we even had this talk."

Car said, "Oh, why do you have to be sick?" She mushed wasabi into soy sauce with her finger. "I know it's trivial in comparison, but I really, really, really need to get permanently away from my mother."

"That's what happened?"

"Of course, that's what happened."

"What this time?"

Car told a mother-daughter story she had told before. This time sweaters, purses, pushers, spoons, but as before, there wasn't much drama in it. The setting was entirely indoors. "My christening spoon — Jesus — what do you make of that?"

The clock on the wall chimed four while Car's watch read something else.

Time for Astra's visitors. She got them almost every afternoon and who would you expect? "You'll never guess," Astra said. "No. It's not. It's Mr. Weeks. Miss Mazur is here, too."

Unattached

Tim Weeks thought what was happening to Astra Dell was private. What business did he have in her hospital room? He didn't talk very much; instead he looked out the window at the river. He remarked on the view, then the current's roil, and the oily-colored scarring on her arms reminded him of what he had heard about rods and radioactivity, but he did not ask Astra what had happened. Tim Weeks asked nothing but looked around the room and out the window again at the river and the bridges and the islands beyond the bridges.

Astra was saying that when she saw the little children who were sick, then she really felt sad. Hearing this, Tim Weeks had to look at her again, and what he saw made him sad, for what was Astra Dell but a child, a child who had learned no other way to behave than gallantly, a child whose benevolent spirit seemed to swell even as she steadily grew smaller. To look at the sharp knobs of her shoulder bones, her wrist bones, her flimsy bones was to look at mortality, the grotesquely insubstantial self. The netting of blue under her throat and along and up her jaw was visible and seemed to pulse when Astra spoke, and she didn't speak a lot but she got thirsty. She drifted off.

"Sorry," she said.

"Why should you be sorry?"

"I'm making friends here. Next time I'll introduce you."

"We've overstayed."

"Oh, no. I'm so glad you came. I miss school. I miss my teachers."

"We'll come again."

Mr. Weeks smiled, but once outside he said, "I think I shouldn't see her this way."

But when Tim Weeks spoke about Astra, his voice didn't sound woeful but romantic; moreover, Anna Mazur could see why the woman walking toward them on long legs would distract him, but to shove into life so soon after visiting a sick girl on a blasphemous ward was unattractive even in this most attractive man.

The perverse part was that in that moment Anna loved him.

They shared a taxi home from the hospital, although Anna insisted she get off at Eighty-second and Third so that Tim Weeks could cross at Eighty-sixth. She didn't need a door-to-door escort.

"Do you get the picture?" Anna, on the phone to her mother, was relating the afternoon visit to Astra Dell with Tim Weeks.

"He is vain, but who wouldn't be with a face like his?" Anna had already told her mother that she liked him, that she liked Tim Weeks a lot, but what had started in October was the same in its intensity in January. Then Anna told her mother about the moment on the street when the pretty girl had passed them. How all of his attention was taken up by this approaching woman and his ambition to win her heart. What did this say about Tim Weeks?

Her mother asked, "Do you do anything else besides visit the sick girl?"

CHF

Off the phone, Car sock-slid around the kitchen island and out the door into the hallway, past the dining room, the living room, the library, veering to the carpeted hall that leafed into walk-in closets and the central bloom of Daddy's bedroom.

Car did not look into the bedroom but turned around and kicked up the carpet and slid on the hallway floor back to the kitchen, around the island, over the icy marble, out. She repeated this tour of the apartment until the kitchen clock chimed six, although her watch read six thirty. She was out of breath, but she took up the phone again, and when Astra answered, Car said, "I'm too fucked up to visit. I hope you know that."

Siddons

The learning specialist was there to help girls in the upper school, especially ninth-grade girls, organize themselves for exams, although even she admitted many of the girls already had good habits. Many had a plan. Double sessions with tutors, stockpiled Post-its, organized notebooks. Some rented the movie for the first time (or again); some bought the book on tape. CliffsNotes were shared, although they had been pronounced as nutritious as bread someone else has chewed and spit out. In fact, CliffsNotes really weren't read much. Most girls arduously reread. Their books glowed in the dark with pink and yellow marked passages. Some books seemed entirely painted. Fat with use and notes and flagged with Post-its, the books were as homely as gummed toys.

"I'm contemplating dropping out," overheard in a Folio meeting, Car Forestal presiding.

"Don't worry. A B here translates into an A anywhere else. The colleges know this."

"Phew," Suki said to this news. "Like I'm really relieved."

CHF

"Nobody wakes up in the morning trying to burn. Believe me, Dad, that's not my ambition."

A Daughter

Lisa had never been to Queens before, but she asked directions and found the street and proceeded through the door, up the elevator, and down the hall toward an escalating smell of onion. She knocked at the door and opened herself to Miss Wilkes's embrace, to the fuzzy, unwashed, brown disarray of Miss Wilkes in her oniony apartment. Miss Wilkes — Janet — cleared a space and then she hovered. "I haven't had company since Marie," she said. "Just Taffy," and Janet pointed to a large caramel-colored mound of fur making little m's of sound, whiskers twitching.

"I'm allergic."

Janet moved between Lisa and the cat. "Oh dear, this whole place is cat!"

"It's only if I get close."

"Oh god," Janet said, and she brushed at her own clothes, but the caramel flecks of Taffy adhered. They could go somewhere else, but they had come to want privacy and for the first time had it. Lisa took Janet's hand and let herself be led into a back bedroom where one of the windows fronted brick. The buildings were close; the view was scary. The lumpish bed was covered in something coarse and maroon colored that Janet threw aside. "Scootch under," Janet said. Under the blanket then, under the cold sheet, against the warm, white shape, which did not smell like the usual Janet but a powdery, unexpected softness.

The truth was everything that happened did not feel good, although Lisa said she was only cold. It was cold outside. It was January. "But go on," Lisa said, and she let herself be held. She held still and said to the woman holding her, "Go on," even though some of what they were doing Lisa was shy of. "I think I may only be experimenting, Miss Wilkes," Lisa said, and the sound of the teacher title, Miss Wilkes, had the intended effect, turned the bedroom inside out, and they were both in school again, Lisa as the student.

"Yes," Janet said. "I understand," and after a while, "This is probably not something we should continue."

"Do you mean that?"

"I do."

This, this, no one else was doing this, this what Lisa was doing, which was experimenting, living, getting ready for college, ugly as it was in the ways it involved another's body.

"I don't think I've ever loved anyone," Lisa said. "Isn't that shocking?"

CHF

Miss Hodd said "Bedtime Story" was one of Car's best poems, and Car sent it to Astra because Astra would know what it was about.

A Daughter

Lisa Van de Ven e-mailed Josh that she had done it and discovered this kind of love was not what she was after. Josh was the only one of her friends to know what she was up to because, as she had told him, "to tell this tale would serve as an opportunity for some people I know to belittle and ridicule me, and I am the one who does this to others."

Mothers

Mrs. Van de Ven volunteered without anyone's asking. She had found the most reputable wig shop and taken Mr. Dell there, saying that one good feature was the range of styles they offered. Colors, yes, too, although nothing to match Astra Dell's red hair; her hair was not to be found in a shop. Carroty colors, moon yellows, silvers, whites in a schoolgirl style — long, straight, and banged — were available, and Mrs. Van de Ven held up the most orange model and asked Mr. Dell what he thought.

"Are you kidding?"

He thought he should buy his daughter earrings. Why try to hide the badge of her illness? The startled blue of her lashless eyes, the shadows of eyebrows — bald, bony, easily crushed — why bother with disguise or risk the horror of seeing her in a shifting wig, except that Mrs. Van de Ven seemed to think Astra might feel better about herself and her appearance in the "Cindy" wig. She held out the dummy head for him to touch the hair.

"See how lifelike?"

Mrs. Van de Ven didn't think he should pay for the more expensive human hair; the synthetic felt real, and, besides, the wig was temporary. "If you touched her scalp, I'm sure you'd feel stubble already."

Not stubble. He would feel the plates of bone. "I can't do this right now, Lettie."

"David."

"I've seen the wigs. I have to think about it. I have to speak to Astra."

"Then I'll buy it for her, David."

"Lettie, please."

Mrs. Van de Ven moved toward the counter with the "Cindy" wig, explaining to the saleswoman that this was the wig she wanted. At the same time, Mr. Dell held out his credit card. He said to the saleswoman, "I'm paying for this, please."

"David."

"I can't let you."

"And why ever not?"

He addressed the saleswoman, saying, "I'm paying," and the saleswoman looked at him and then at Mrs. Van de Ven, and when Mr. Dell held out his card, the saleswoman accepted it despite Mrs. Van de Ven's saying, "No, no, no. This is my treat. I'm the one who's insisting you get it. Give Astra a choice." She repeated this protest while the mechanics of the transaction went on between Mr. Dell and the saleswoman.

"Just sign here, please."

Mr. Dell also signed for the lunch that followed with Mrs. Van de Ven.

CHF

She told Astra the latest. "Now that Dad has a serious boyfriend, he doesn't need me to pimp for him, which is why, I'm sure, he's discouraging me from coming to Paris. He says I shouldn't. He says he's heard about my health. I bet he's heard. Didn't send him rushing home for Christmas, though, did it? I don't think I am going to go to Paris. I don't want to go."

Astra said, "Sometimes you do sound like the girl who uses her pusher too much, know what I mean?"

"Look, I know I'm being a brat, but I'm a seventeen-year-old American girl, Astra. I'm allowed."

Marlene

Was it as late as it looked outside?

Astra opened her eyes and said, "Time in here," but she didn't finish before she shut her eyes again. "I want a warm bath," Astra said. "The medicine makes me cold."

"I'm sorry," Marlene said. She was hurrying now, forcing folders into her book bag. Astra's otherworld voice scared her. She put on her coat and was almost at the door when Astra opened her eyes.

"It's too exhausting," Astra said, and she seemed to see dimly. "I can't be personal all the time."

Siddons

Dr. Meltzer repeated the question just asked him, "Can I give you the format to the exam? Do you really think knowing the format helps?"

How many times did Miss Mazur have to say it, "Yes, you should know the part of speech. Okay, okay. If you can use the word correctly in a sentence, I'll give you half credit."

"Extra credit? I never give extra credit."

"Will there be multiple choice?" The girls asked, "Maybe?"

"Can we not have an essay question?"

"I hate essays."

"I can't write essays."

"I never do well on exams."

"Even if I study for hours, I fail."

"I always fail."

"What if you can't read my handwriting?"

"Canweplease,pleasewriteinpencil?"

Alex and Suki

They were looking for Will Bliss again. They put on their lightweight coats despite the weather. They gave up on matching gloves but found good hats. They were taking long steps up Park Avenue, midnight by the clock, Alex and Suki, walking into the wind with their tiny coats wide open. Tube skirts, boots, candy striped, goofy hats with pom-poms. The snow, another snow, another storm predicted, had begun to fall. The big flakes seemed to be swinging in their descent, seemed to splash they were so large, and the ticklish pelt of them made the girls laugh, and it was hard to see for all the snow caught and melting on their eyelashes, watery drops on their cheeks, tears. They had given up on chemistry and Dr. Meltzer. Blue books, pencils, boxes of Kleenex.

CHF

A—

I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll

understand it now. Please do. Not everything can be

funny.

I'm not even bothering to study.

kisses,

C

Mothers

Mrs. Forestal told the school nurse that she was doing everything she could to get Carlotta help. Carlotta had a nutritionist and a psychiatrist. "We have a cook. I sit at the table with her as often as I can, but I can't watch her every meal."

"Yes," the nurse said. "That's the hard part."

"Yes," Mrs. Forestal said. Why should she understand what the nurse was saying when she couldn't make sense of her daughter? The most recent poem she had been given to read didn't make any sense to her. So her daughter didn't like her body? Fine. Who did?

She reread her daughter's poem: "…and covering my eyes with tea bags, listened to the menagerie of bears, pigs, puff-white lambs, and crumpled tissues swarming the sheets." What was this all about? And why would anyone in her right mind admit to a "zoo-ish fragrance"? It made her think of apes. Was Carlotta trashing her father's place again? Now at least it looks as if somebody lives here: Carlotta's defense. Mrs. Forestal felt helpless and a little bored with Carlotta's bullish enthusiasms and clumsy lows. Maybe after exams.

Siddons

The snow that had fallen on Sunday was added to again on Wednesday, but by then Marlene Kovack had taken the math exam.

Miss F defended Marlene's grade, saying, "Marlene must have studied. She sees Astra Dell, and Astra could have helped her with discrete math."

Poor Astra Dell was the general feeling. The girl would have been in AP calculus if she weren't sick. "I mean, she's in it," said Dr. D. "She just won't take the exam, I guess."

Exams were over in a sentence and returned just as fast.