All Souls

Dance

Fathers

She should have died that night, but David Dell shook harder than even his daughter — in confusion and rage and fear. He shook, he stood, he sat, he knelt near enough to his daughter's bedside and prayed, and the girl went on living. His own hair, he was sure of it, had grayed, whereas Astra's was just showing itself; she wore a bandanna.

She was up; she was out of bed; she was home. An outpatient! After great suffering and burning of the body, a quiet descended, remission, a word to be whispered, perhaps not yet used; besides, someday, years from now, sudden and cruel, it always came back, didn't it? Cancer, blunt, done in a matter of weeks, months — never more than a year; the second time around it came fast. David Dell had heard the histories at the funerals before. In ironic, doomsday voices, the closest friends were glad to recount when the big C struck finally. He was planning their vacation when his arm began to hurt… That was six weeks ago; now he is dead. How it happened: this healthy man or that strong woman, and who would have guessed? Who could have known? That time we went fishing was our last… or… Not so long ago we were at her daughter's wedding.

And how did Astra Dell look? She was very thin; she wore dark clothes; she often whispered when she talked. She said, "I still get tired very easily."

Her father said he had known all along she would get well. He said what he thought Grace would have said, that he had always been sure of Astra's recovery, convinced of it from the beginning, as who could imagine such a girl as this to be extinguished so young? No, he insisted he had always believed she would get well. In truth, he had mostly expected her death to arrive as her mother's had, mercilessly. Nothing he could do, nothing he could do, and he would offer up his life for Astra's; he was ready to take on her disease, whatever it was. He had never fully understood Dr. Byron. To stand in almost any corridor of the hospital was to stand in a cleaned-out closet with a lot of unused metal hangers jangling. That's what it had felt like to him, and all of the flowers and imported decorations, posters, teddy bears and photographs, the schoolbooks and books for pleasure, a deck of cards, a game of Scrabble, a computer — nothing could change the room where his daughter had slept for half a year. Penitential furniture, hose down, easy to clean. Mr. Dell had rarely sat in Astra's room but stood leaning against the window even when he read to her. Reading to Astra had been a pleasure he was sure to miss, but he would not miss Dr. Byron's dull blows—"She is young; her vitality works against her; the cells thrive." Dr. Byron's dour view of his daughter's future: no guarantees, no guarantees. For now Mr. Dell was saying, "My daughter is at home." Whose business was it, besides, to know more? "My daughter is at home, thank you," Mr. Dell said to all the well-wishers, and there were many.

Marlene

The changes in Marlene Kovack had happened slowly over several months, so that her mother didn't notice until after Christmas that Marlene was in perfect uniform. (All those detentions of tenth grade over the Goth look Marlene had perfected.) Now the white shirt was white and very girlish, round collared, soft. Now Marlene wore dark tights, and her shoes were simple and thin heeled, no longer threatening. Alone of all the seniors, Marlene was taking notes in near-perfect uniform, eschewing a second-semester senior's freedom to come to school every day out of uniform. Why? "It's easier," she said whenever asked. Marlene had reviewed for exams with Astra and had done well. Marlene was not dumb after all; she had only been lazy, as some of her teachers had always suspected.

(She hadn't thought of herself as lazy, only bored and alone.)

Was she as smart as Astra? This was a question Marlene asked herself, and though her answer was no, she was not as smart, Marlene nevertheless felt she was like Astra, growing ever more like Astra. Astra had faith; miracles were possible. On her near death, the crazy fever that might have caused brain damage, Astra said, "All I know is that the cancer cells were either cooked or my immune system finally recognized what it had to do. The scans before the fever showed new growth and after showed nothing.

"I don't want to fall behind." Astra said, "I've had to give up on AP calculus."

She sat up straighter and shook her head. After the hivey heat and hurt of chemo, she believed she was getting better. Clean of cancer, she believed. Faith and love and her mother's watching over her. "She was there."

Astra said, "I had a community of faith," and by this she meant Walden and the wider Unitarian Universalist communities and its congregants who prayed for her and with her father. She wrote in her college essay, "The leaps of faith that we take as a community or as individuals do not necessarily lead us away from suffering or strife, and they often lead us toward hard work, but they are the risks that enable us to grow, to heal, and to struggle for something better." Was she quoting some one when she wrote, "Just as long as I have breath, I must answer, 'Yes,' to life"? Saintly girl.

The tooth? That happened. Chemotherapy patients often lost or broke teeth. She smiled at Marlene and said, "See? All fixed." Then she said, "You're completely weird, Marlene. Now that you don't have to be in uniform, you're in uniform."

Marlene came forward and bent to the ball of her forehead and kissed Astra and touched the top of her head, Astra in her Joan of Arc hair. Would she let her hair grow as long as before?

"I don't know," Astra said. "Short's awfully easy."

"I am really, really glad you are home and feeling better."

"Best ever," Astra said, and she frowned a little. "Only I get tired," and she shut her eyes, and by the time Marlene reached the door, Astra had fallen back against the pillows of her plump and quilted girlish bed. Marlene could tell by the way Astra was breathing just how deep a sleep it was, and when she turned back to look into the room again, Astra opened her eyes and said… What did she say? "Lucky I was sick." Was she talking in her sleep? Did she say, "Don't take my mail, Marlene"?

Marlene walked uncertainly out of Astra's lobby and bumped into others and must have seemed a tourist or a stroller or a stupid, fucked teenager. Sick, sicko, fucked teenager. She was fucked; she felt fucked. She wanted to walk into oncoming traffic.

Siddons

Kitty Johnson said she was glad not to be in Mr. O'Brien's elective but that Mrs. Godwin's Families in Distress class was grimmer than she had expected. King Lear was not in the course description. "It's a bummer to start the day with somebody scooping somebody else's eyes out with a spoon or however the guy did it. And the quizzes. I hate to think how many of mine are on the wall of shame in the senior lounge. Besides, we're seniors. Isn't this supposed to be the slack-off, fun part of high school?"

Ufia said, "Some of us want intellectual engagement."

"Wait until you get to Harvard, Ufia. You'll see a lot of engagement then."

"What a dirty mind you have, Alex," Krystle said.

"Rub my back." Suki sat herself between Alex and Krystle, and bumped against Alex, saying, "Would you please rub my back? I'm so sore." And Alex stopped looking at Krystle and pounded Suki's back until the girl said, "Not so hard."

Jade, the dance coach, said, "It's too late now to think of cutting." Instead Jade's finale included each girl giving herself a window.

"What does that mean?"

"If you'd come to rehearsals," Krystle said.

"Bite me."

"Nothing should happen on the extension," Jade was saying to Lisa. "And if you have trouble with the lean and lunging, well… Terry will clean up on Monday." Jade looked at the seniors. "If you feel uncomfortable, see me, but I'm not spending hours on any one dance. Those days are gone." Then she circled the room in address. "Every choreographer," Jade said, "you're now a dancer. Hand your dance to your people. Amen. I love you guys."

Kitty said, "Will everyone remember etiquette backstage? Nothing back there belongs to us. Not one bobby pin. It's the drama department's. You've got to organize yourself. Put your gear in a little corner, so you know where your stuff is, all of it."

" The show is less than an hour and a half," Jade was saying to Lisa.

Ufia said, "Seventy-eight minutes."

Krystle walked around the gym with a garbage bag picking up the afternoon rehearsal's refuse, the empty water bottles and candy boxes left mostly by the middle schoolers, she guessed. The coffee refuse was theirs, surely, the juniors and seniors. Upper school's indulgence: expensive coffees from the seafaring shop on the corner, the one with perfect cupcakes and, outdoors, pretty foliage in all the seasons.

"I'm sick of you guys," Jade said to some girls lingering in the folds of the curtain. "Go home," Jade said, but she was not so emphatic, seeming drugged by the hallucinatory nonsense of their nonstop talk now that rehearsal was over.

"Did you know a sneeze travels a hundred miles an hour?"

"A lot of moose or a moose so no fishes."

"But what's the plural of rhinoceros?"

"Oh, Kitty, why so sad?"

Kitty spoke quietly and out of Jade's hearing. "Seniors, don't forget your money for the flowers."

"I'm serious. Chapters nine through eleven in To the Lighthouse."

"Oh great! More chapters where nothing happens."

"Don't fret!" Suki jostled against Alex. "We'll stalk Will Bliss," she said, and the two, bumped up against each other, shouldering past the younger girls, lugging stuffed feed bags on their backs.

"I need a suitcase," Alex said. "This is ridiculous. I'm carrying my life."

Fathers

All of the dances had meaning, however difficult it was at times to discern given the distraction of the music, but Ufia choreographed a dance set to a smoky voice in a song about skin color. Ufia and three black dancers — Mr. Dell knew only the seniors — in yellow dresses onstage. The dance involved something made up to look like a brownstone stoop. The girls changed places on the stoop, but their attitudes were by turns sultry, submissive, dismissive, and independent. The song played these same changes. The next dance involved girls in pajamas — Mr. Dell recognized no one, but his daughter, seated next to him, explained that Gillian Warring, the leggy girl in the blue babydolls, was only in eighth grade, which he took to mean the girl was good, but none of the girls had his daughter's grace. He sat through Alex Decrow's shrill, head-banging solo—"Is she mad?" he asked — and endured "Unbelievable" by EMF and was attentive to even the clumsiest dances, but nothing put him into a gaze, and he was taken aback by Lisa Van de Ven's aggressive movement and wondered at how thin Suki Morton was and why hadn't the dance teacher taken out a few of the weaker dances? His daughter, seated next to him, fully enjoyed herself. After spring break she hoped to come back to school every day — a half a day. "Now and again" was a phrase Grace Dell would have used, but what would she have said to Astra's friend? Car, seated next to her, was too thin by half. The other girl, Marlene Kovack, he knew from the hospital. And in the rest of the auditorium, Mr. Dell saw others from the class. Let-tie Van de Ven, of course, was there in the third or fourth row with flowers. She waved at him during intermission but seemed disappointed to see Astra. (Later he wondered if it wasn't the damn wig the woman had been hoping to see.) Teachers came up to Astra during intermission. Mr. Dell recognized Dr. D and Dr. Meltzer and Miss Hodd and Mr. Weeks. The woman from the English Speaking Union contest, that woman, wasn't there; Mr. Dell could not remember her name, but he had seen her at the hospital. Miss Brigham came forward and talked to him: The froth of school goodwill, but Mr. Dell was grateful to the school. His daughter had always been happy in it, and the school returned his daughter's affection. The teachers who visited — and so many had come to the hospital, he couldn't get over it, by which he meant… he meant he couldn't get over everything that had happened. He had the sensation that he was standing in the middle of a desolate summer road and that the heat waves, the watery kind a person sees from a distance, were really waves of love, and that he was standing in this water, braced by waves of love from his community — at work, the hospital, Siddons, his wife's church; from all sides came this heat. He hoped never to forget how he had learned to love God, which was what his wife had wanted for him all along. His daughter's near extinction had left him no choice but to have faith.

Mothers

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Mr. Van de Ven said to his wife when she thrust the flowers for their daughter into his arms at the end of the program so as to catch up with Mrs. Quirk, the college counselor. The woman was already moving down the aisle, and Mrs. Van de Ven only wanted to say hello, to say wasn't the Dance Concert splendid and how hard the girls worked. Lisa was president of dance; of course, Mrs. Quirk must know that.

"You didn't?"

Mrs. Quirk smiled. "Of course, I know."

Mrs. Van de Ven told Mrs. Quirk how glad she was that the last applications had been mailed off; the temperature in the house was cooler.

"I should hope so," said Mrs. Quirk, who was quick — she often put these words together — quick Quirk was quick at turning away.

Poor woman was all Mrs. Van de Ven could think, but who poor?

A Daughter

The first person Lisa Van de Ven wanted to see after the concert was Josh, who said he would come, but the first person she actually saw was Astra, who waved at her and Jade. All the seniors in Dance Club received the ritual rose that marked the end of their dancing careers at Siddons, and most of them were crying. Lisa, as Dance Club president, received a bouquet as well, and for this Astra and Car were shouting, "Way to go, Vandy!" Which was so generous of them considering, considering Astra had been Dance Club president until she took sick. But somebody had to replace her, so Lisa had put herself forward. No one else wanted the job. "Josh!" Lisa shouted out to him, and he bobbed or nodded or whatever boys did. "They're so queer," she said to no one in particular. Damn. Her mother was in the dressing room. "Mom!"

"I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful." Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it…

"Mother, please, we're all getting changed here."

"All right, all right, all right, all right," and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers.

Lisa said, "Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it."

Marlene

After the Dance Concert, Marlene walked with Car and Astra and Mr. Dell to the corner. Astra was saying she was tired but happy to be out-of-doors in an unaccountably springlike spell — a spring snap — and she feeling springy, though she leaned against her father. Marlene could not look at him; once before she had been a stranger and now? At the corner the old cut opened: She was not going their way but east, as far east as the river, though she couldn't see it from where she lived. Marlene would have liked to have explained why she stole Astra's mail, but she was afraid. Part of the reason she stole the letters was to ward off being afraid, also curiosity, jealousy. What did Car do for Astra? And the hair clip? The hair clip was to be brought nearer to Astra. It was a comfort for Marlene to hold the barrette in her pocket, the way she might a bit of bone, to caress it and so find strength enough to talk.

A Daughter

"If it's not great sex, and it's not true love, then it's definitely worth my time because how else are you rife with passion and singing with hate all at once?"

Josh said, "Has anyone ever told you, you are a really scary girl?"

"All the time," Lisa said. "So are you interested?"

Siddons

Valentine's Day and Kitty's romantic life amounted to zilch, nada. "All I am doing is counting the days until AP physics is over, and Families in Distress — ha. Oedipus and his brood: our dysfunctional family of the week. I thought second-semester senior year was supposed to be fun." Sometimes Kitty wondered about the Ramsays. Miss Hodd had read the novel with them in junior year; it was one of the books in her elective on heroines. The Ramsays: Were they a family in distress or just a family?

Red sweaters, red tights, bows, bracelets, stick-on hearts, the red streaks of the middle school down the sixth-floor hall were as hectic as the drugstore's cheap displays. The sixth-grade girls had been on countdown since the first of the month, and now here it was Valentine's Day, and Anna Mazur, in pink, was putting an animal valentine on Tim Weeks's desk, this one a picture of a panting terrier with the message: Be my valentine, doggone it! His desk was already loaded with big cards from students, homemade some of them, stickers, doilies, pasted-on red hearts: I'm stuck on you! A rose, already blackened despite the plastic cap of water on its stem. Some Red Hots, some chocolate hearts, a bag of Twizzlers. Tim Weeks, ever the favorite. She had seen less and less of him since Astra Dell had come home from the hospital, but why did that surprise her when beyond visiting the sick girl, they had never had a date? A few weeks before, she had helped chaperone a sixth-grade outing through the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan. She had kept her coat on, though it was damp from the walk in the light snow that fell through the elm awning along Fifth. "Bear squares" the girls called the paving stones and skipped, and Anna Mazur had walked behind with Tim Weeks — Mrs. Nicholson was at the head — and Anna admitted, "I've lived here three years now and have not once gone to the Whitney. Isn't that terrible?" He said it was and they had laughed when she admitted the same was true of the Egyptian wing. "I've never been. Don't tell the girls." She stood with him in front of the Fragmentary Head of a Queen in yellow jasper. "How sensuous she is." The wonder of it was the way the face was there in full even as they looked at just the mouth.

Her own mouth was a string of pins. He'd never kiss it.

However did Edie Cohen manage to stick a valentine into every classmate's mailbox when she had been sick most of the week? That was the wonder in the senior lounge, as Edie's classmates discovered their "perfect" individualized, homemade, secretly delivered card with her fat script and XXXXXXXX's.

" This might be my last valentine from Edie ever," Krystle said, and she made a tearful face.

Lisa Van de Ven bought herself a pair of silk embroidered boxers with rhinestones, but she told her classmates the gift was from Josh. In truth, though they had talked and e-mailed, she had not seen him since that night after the Dance Concert when, still in her leotard and gauze skirt, she slid past him into his apartment—"I can't go home. You saw it. My mother's a drunk." She invited him to take a shower with her, but he was smoking up in his bedroom — she could smell it — and didn't answer, so she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hand outstretched for a toke, and she said, "I've never had sex with a man, but that doesn't make me a virgin." She said, "Do you have something I could borrow?"

He gestured to the closet behind him. "Help yourself."

She sat with him on the floor; she wore nothing underneath his jeans and soft dress shirt. They smoked. They smoked, and Josh got up to put on something she thought he called narcotics, wobbly music that made her sway, but her boobs were bags of sand and her face was doing something ugly. "Oh my god," she cried, and she cried and laughed and cried. "It's all over, I can't believe it, that's the last time I will ever dance on that stage, the last time with any of those stupid people, stupid, stupid Alex Decrow — could you see how we had to cover for her? — oh my god, my boobs weigh a ton," Lisa said, and she went into the bathroom and flung herself into a defeated halter with gymnastic support, and who cared if it was stinky and damp — that stupid stoner Josh was asleep, so where was his hairbrush, didn't he have a hairbrush, where was his hairbrush? "Ach! I look so ugly!" — and she took up a scrub brush he used on his back and banged it against her head. Everyone has an outstanding feature; yours is your hair. Her mother said all she needed was a good colorist; all she needed was Elie at Ishi. She brushed her hair and wondered at her face; she knew who she looked like, and it was not her mother. She's got my hair, at least. Not her mother's color, never her mother's fake, man-made, fake. "I hate my mother!" How much does Suki Morton weigh, do you think?… How tall is that Ufia Abiola?… What does her father research?… All those minorities, you know… Is she Jewish, is she rich, is she smart, is she Jewish, she must be Jewish, she must be Jewish or Asian. My manicurist's daughter is an anesthesiologist. What are you?

"'How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?…the hives, which were people….' That's such a beautiful passage," Car said when she had finished reading it in the yearbook proof of Astra's ad to Car. The picture of them, girls, arm in arm, in bathing suits. Astra and Car had both wanted sisters, had wanted to be sisters, had pretended to be sisters. In the photograph both girls are missing front teeth, but their smiles make out that the world is hilarious, especially to those with secrets.

What were they keeping from Mr. Dell, who took the picture, and from Mrs. Dell, who stood behind the porch screen at the lake house? How prescient that picture now seemed with Mrs. Dell scratched behind the screen. The picture was years and years ago, if Car were being dramatic, and lately she had been very dramatic. "I called my father to tell him I wasn't coming."

"And?"

"I don't want to talk about it, Astra."

The fantasy of a father, an impeccable appraiser, a cocktail-cool and lethal man with a shapely hand at the small of her back, guiding her through a clamor that seems to lean toward them, toward this man, this pretty father, whose concern is for her — and she? Car is not so demurely dressed as to be expected; the back of her dress is low, and her back, her shoulders, the stem of her neck, the upswept hair, and ears, visible and smally inviting, invite touch, touch, touch, touch, touch. Car, on her knees, put her head in Astra's lap and let the sick girl pet her weeping friend; Astra finger-combed Car's hair out of her face and around the small ear, and thus they sat in Astra's room in a month reduced to dusks. March, nearing spring now and spring vacation, and the enormous old window in Astra's room waggled in the high wind, and the easterly dark was not so complete as to obscure the bombast of the air-conditioning system on the rooftop play yard of the neighboring boys' school. "God," Car said, lifting her head to see how the school's addition had obscured Astra's distant view of the river. "When did they do that?"

"That," Astra said, "was finished just before school started last fall."

"When do the little boys come out to play?"

Mothers

The fat envelope that arrived just before spring break was from Siddons and not, as Theta Kovack had hoped, from the University of Wisconsin. The fat envelope was an invitation to the School Spring Auction and included a list of live and silent auction items and raffle tickets. Top of the live auction list was this: "A fabulous stay for five nights in a beautiful four-bedroom/five-bath private retreat on the island of Kauai, Princeville, Hawaii. The property includes a swimming pool, a staff of seven, and a cook." Next came a walk-on role in a Woody Allen movie, a sleepover for twelve at the American Museum of Natural History, a VIP table at the Hampton Classic Horse Show, a weekend getaway by private jet to Palm Beach and the Breakers, and a day of sailing on a forty-foot Dufour sailing yacht with captain. How tempting to sail away, and there were families that could do just that and did just that, and, to be fair, these same cheerful rich or many of the same also spent their Saturdays at the Family Service Morning, where students and parents could jostle in a good-cause direction: roll pocket change; bead a bracelet for a sick child; decorate and fill a toiletry kit for Women in Need. Time was Theta thought of herself as a woman in need, but Dr. Bickman had hired college consultants for her. (Theta, how many years have we been together? I know Kal. His kids are going to need braces soon) And Kal had come to the apartment and explained the forms: All Theta had to do was… and Kal would ink in the final forms, and college was affordable wherever Marlene went. Once or twice, Theta had considered calling Bob… but why? Why bother was always where she settled late at night when she could almost see the green that was the wider world of college. To think Marlene was about to embark on what she, Theta, had not quite finished. Dentist's receptionist was a good job but not what she dreamed of for Marlene, for Marlene… oh something. What we hope for our students is that each will find her passion. But friends, one can be passionate about friends; some have a passionate need of them. Not so long ago, whenever it was Astra Dell left the hospital, Marlene had said, "I can't visit Astra at her home. I never went there when she was well; why would I go there now?"

"Those in need can give others purpose" was what Theta had said at the time.

Marlene looked at her as if she had farted, and the girl's expression scared Theta a little for being familiar, and for a few days Theta stayed later at work, didn't want to come home at all. Then Astra called to ask Marlene why hadn't she visited?

Siddons

"'Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.'" Kitty did a little dance in the lounge. "Tennessee Williams at last! Families in Distress!" She twirled and fell back onto the sofa. "Now blindness will only be a metaphor."

Astra showed Marlene the mock-up of her senior page and the picture of Marlene that she had found to use — Washington trip, eighth grade, braces. Marlene said, "This makes me want to cry."

"Oh, Kovack!" Astra said.

Marlene said, "I've wanted this," by which she meant her place on Astra's page, there with Miss Hodd and Dr. D, Kitty and Edie, Suki and Alex and Car. Car, Car, Car, the two Elizabeths, Ufia, Ny and Sarah, Mr. Weeks and Miss Mazur. The minister from All Souls, summer cousins in Virginia, her favorite nurse at Sloan-Kettering, Teddy — the little boy with leukemia she loved — Dr. Byron, her horse Lady, Pitiful the cat, and Rye, her mother's dachshund. Grace Dell again and again, Mr. Dell and Mr. Dell. The dog was just a nose.

Astra's quotation was from Emily Dickinson: "'Hope' is the thing with feathers."