The Eliot Girls Read online

  Audrey stood out as one of the few solitary girls. The sight made Ruth realize—she couldn’t believe that she had never thought of it before—that she had rarely seen Audrey in one of those happily squealing girl groups. On the occasions that she had fetched Audrey from her former school, she would sometimes find her on the less crowded side of the school, in conference with one other girl. Ruth had interpreted the seeming smallness of Audrey’s social world as her response to the chaos of the overpopulated public school. Ruth herself disliked large groups. If there were other signs of mild melancholy in her daughter, she chose to read them as the typical disaffection of adolescence. But where, then, she wondered, was the equally typical ebullience, the giddiness that descended abruptly, brilliantly, leaving girls inarticulate with outrageous joy?

  At Audrey’s age, Ruth had been brimming with the kind of reckless confidence that was the hallmark of happy youth. Her mother, who had made it her personal mission to extinguish the power associated with good looks, had never told Ruth that she was pretty. Ruth still remembered the moment when she was fourteen: she had glanced in the bathroom mirror and seen her face as if for the first time. The recognition was petty, yet transformative. She saw herself, then, rushing headlong into life with a spirited resolve that no one would be able to destroy. Of course she had met obstacles to her self-esteem, but that was part of the point. In her was a secret, almost furtive, fund of strength.

  Ruth had never been inclined to look for herself in her daughter. When Audrey was a child, Ruth had watched her little girl picking her way around the garden singing to herself like a benevolent drunk and understood that this was why people became parents. Surely there lay the magic of creating a life. To observe the distinctness of your child was to discover the power of sorcery in yourself. She didn’t understand those parents who boasted total genetic ownership of their children’s every frown and blink, assigning the son’s laboured pedalling of his bicycle to the long line of maternal incoordination, the daughter’s refusal to take baths to that bullish pinprick midway down the winding Y strand, until eventually their children’s entire repertoire of mannerisms were conveniently done away with, checked off like items on a grocery list. Ruth had adored Audrey with the kind of fascination borne of bewilderment. Even as her fear for Audrey’s vulnerability grew, Ruth couldn’t fail to be stirred by the beauty her daughter so weakly, so skeptically grasped. Although her meeting awaited, she had continued to stand by the tree, her stomach in knots, after Audrey was lost within the spirited mob.

  The staff room was a large rectangular room at the front of the school with two tall bay windows that overlooked the long driveway leading up to the school’s entrance. Larissa McAllister had wanted the room to feel like a luxurious library, so she had furnished it with several deep red leather wingback chairs and two matching couches, as well as two heavy rectangular oak tables, at which teachers could eat their lunches or mark papers. The walls were mahogany panelled and unadorned—not for Larissa the jovial inanity of educational posters of students partaking in school activities like soccer, reading, and cooperation, colourful photographs of spirited staff events, a bulletin board bursting with outdated messages. She deplored overly personal spaces, so she had allotted one cupboard, beneath the microwave, to teacher’s mugs from home and other personal kitchen effects. The refrigerator, which she reluctantly conceded as necessary, though it undermined the library effect, was tucked away in a corner where it would least interfere with the desired atmosphere.

  Most of the teachers had already arrived and were criss-crossing the grid of the staff room, brightly conducting loud-voiced, far-reaching conversations about their summers. Ruth headed straight for the coffee pot. It was not yet eight o’clock, an hour she hadn’t witnessed in over two months. She reached for her mug and found that the handle had broken off and a large crack zigzagged down the side. She crouched at the cupboard, at a loss for how to proceed. Years ago, Larissa had complained about the teachers bringing their own mugs from home and then showing unabashed possessiveness of them: how could her colleagues, people she admired, not understand that such attachments were infantile? Ruth had voted against Larissa’s suggestion that they stock the staff room with sensible brown mugs like her own, and now she regretted it. She scanned the shelves of mugs and settled on the plainest one, poured herself a cup of coffee, then shielded the mug with her hand as she moved to the sitting area.

  Ruth sat in an armchair, slightly removed, feeling herself come back to life at the taste of coffee. Sunlight streamed through the freshly washed windows. The chatter around her was lively enough to be pleasantly indistinct. Several teachers nodded to her affably but no one seemed to expect anything of her. Ruth had known most of these colleagues for years, and their familiarity, though sometimes irksome, was a comfort on mornings like this. The feeling of being alone in company was a pleasure as timeless and unexceptional as a warm breeze across the face.

  She was nearing the end of her coffee and contemplating another cup when Michael Curtis, who taught biology, stepped grandly into the seating circle, sipping water from a glass bottle. “It’s so good to be back!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms out. “I had a beastly holiday!” She sank dramatically into one of the couches and began regaling her audience with stories of a horrific August cottage rental.

  Michael was the most striking woman on staff, tall and regal, with long, poker-straight, enviably Asiatic hair and unfortunately low-slung breasts. She dressed in layers of black and silky jewel-toned scarves wound in voluptuous piles around her neck. Ruth had never quite recovered from the idiocy of her first words to Michael. “Oh, I always wished to have a man’s name! How fashionable!” Ruth had exclaimed, a patently false and bizarrely flirtatious comment, made worse when Michael icily informed her that she had been named after a would-be older brother who had died shortly after his birth. In the intervening decade, Ruth had done her best to make Michael like her—it was a compulsion, really, nothing to do with her feelings about Michael’s own likeability—and had never gotten past her disappointment in the failure of her early endeavours.

  Michael was the mother of six children, three of whom were adopted, and when people asked her which (yes, rudely), she liked to say that she couldn’t remember. In spite of Michael’s endless stories about family horseplay and cheerful chaos, Ruth had difficulty seeing Michael as the archetypal mother. She was too bony and ungainly, too stiffly magnificent. Her main mode of social interaction was to discredit how glamorous she looked as a paradoxical way of underscoring that glamour. “Oh, our kids think we’re the biggest dorks on the planet,” she was always saying. “We spend our days in the mud digging for worms and looking for treasure.” When she was in the room, Ruth’s eyes were drawn to her, sometimes much against her will.

  “Flies everywhere!” Michael was saying now. “I’m as much a friend to the winged creatures as anyone, but it was bloody ridiculous.”

  Michael’s fondness for British vernacular when she had lived all her life in Canada had once been lambasted in a staff meeting by Larissa, who declared that she hadn’t moved to Canada and dedicated her life to pedagogical scholarship to be surrounded by the vulgar slang of the Cockney proletariat.

  “Did you have a good summer, Ruth?” asked Sheila Smith, the grade three teacher. She was sitting to Ruth’s left, flipping through an old Chatelaine from the collection of ancient magazines piled in a wicker basket by the coffee table. Larissa also disapproved of the trivial content of such magazines, not to mention the grade-eight-level writing, but, in an environmentally conscious nod to the principle of reusing, she permitted their presence.

  “Yes, thanks, Sheila,” Ruth said. “You?”

  Sheila nodded vigorously. “But I’m happy to be back.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got to read this article, Ruth,” Sheila said emphatically. “It may save your life.” She signalled to what she had been reading, a piece
about breast cancer. Sheila always went straight for the disease articles and, when she was finished, left them in Ruth’s mailbox.

  Grey was the word Ruth would have used to describe Sheila (grey hair, grey skin, even grey lips), who in a meeting during the early days of Eliot had used the word phantasmagoric to describe herself, prompting one of Larissa’s forays into the twenty-pound dictionary installed like a hallowed, gleaming monument on a pedestal by the windows. (“Yes, our aim is to encourage lateral thinking,” Larissa had said before reading aloud the definition of phantasmagoric, “but let us honour, too, the strictest accuracy. Imagination, of course, but never at the expense of meticulousness.”)

  It was partly because of the Sheilas of the world that Ruth had a tendency to let her hair grow too long, why she swept it up crudely into a rumpled chignon, even though she knew that such a look wasn’t necessarily appropriate for work. During meetings that went long, Ruth often fell into a daze, looking around at the other teachers, and daydreamed that she had gone to the salon, fallen for the hairdresser’s long-winded ramblings about a new mature look, and emerged an hour later with an overgrown bowl cut that was a page straight out of Sheila’s style book. Awakening from these reveries with a jolt, she was ashamed, not by her wandering attention during work hours, but by the absurd superficiality of her imaginings. Didn’t she have anything more substantial to daydream about?

  As Sheila thrust the Chatelaine at her chest, Ruth nodded vaguely and began to rise for another cup of coffee. Then the door swung creakily open and Larissa McAllister entered the room.

  “Oh!” cried Sheila. “We’re on!”

  Larissa shut the door firmly behind her. She felt that a teachers’ staff room should be kept hidden from prying student eyes, much as a men’s washroom should remain a zone of mystery to women. (She had never seen a urinal until the construction of the school had required her last-minute, on-site approval of a bathroom tile.) She offered a monarchic wave and stalked to one side of the room, her sensible, clunky pumps tapping out a marching beat that was distinctly hers. A white board draped in a black cloth was set up on the centre of the wall, and she stood next to it in her speech-giving stance. The air around her was charged with her severe ardour for Eliot generally and for meetings specifically, and with the stamina of her unchanging beliefs about the education of girls. Her presence was magnetized, it seemed, and Ruth found her own gaze locked on Larissa, paralyzed almost, as though she’d been hypnotized without her consent.

  Had Larissa been a different kind of woman, Ruth would have said that she was atwitter. But unlike most people, her agitation manifested itself in a robotically rigid bearing of body and head. Ruth’s own hands flitted and flapped uncontrollably when she was nervous or energized, flew upwards to her hair to fix straying strands or to her forehead and cheeks to brush away imaginary irritants. Her entire body loosened, threatening to trip her, and she dropped pens, paper, even coffee mugs, for no reason. Larissa, on the other hand, became superlatively controlled, as if all her physical expressions had to be stilled, sublimated to the elaborate, leaping demands of her mind. It might have been a performance, Ruth thought, Larissa’s way of capturing notice, like turning off the lights to get rowdy students’ attention or lowering your voice by barely perceptible decibels until it was nearly a whisper as a response to shouting, tactics they had all been taught in teachers’ college.

  Larissa was dressed in an adapted version of the school uniform. This outfit was an annual first-day tradition, and Ruth couldn’t help noticing that not just the idea but the clothes themselves had been carried through the decade. Larissa wore the uniform only on special occasions—the first day of school, the closing ceremonies, the rousing final performance at the Independent Schools’ Music Festival—and Ruth didn’t doubt that she kept it safely ensconced in plastic for the rest of the year, but still the clothes showed their age. Certainly, she had done a better job of pushing the clothes past their expiry date than Ruth could have managed: the pleats on the narrow navy kilt were expertly pressed, and the long silver kilt pin shone as if she had sat at her kitchen table the night before with an emptying bottle of silver polish at her right hand. Unfortunately, the kilt also had a sheen to it, of cheap material too long loved. The tailored grey blazer fit her as neatly as it ever had, but the school crest on a pocket over her heart needed to be re-sewn at the bottom, and the hems of the sleeves were thinning, ever so slightly, much like the great leader’s hairline.

  In Larissa McAllister’s view, her wearing of the uniform did not diminish her authority, but heighten it. She was proud to be associated with this company of brilliant girls, not simply as their devoted leader, but as their creator. She felt that she and her pupils, attired identically, made a beautiful spectacle of democracy—leader (she sometimes wondered whether icon was too strong a word) and followers as one. But she felt that she was more than their creator, God-like and distant. She had brought these girls, the hundreds of them, into the world—they were here because of her vision, because she’d seen, as a child attending a grubby grammar school on the Isle of Wight, that there could be more, should be more—through her craving for something too exceptional to articulate, through an almost maternal swell of desire—although what she felt was at once grimmer and more passionate than animalistic procreative instincts could ever be. (And maternal longings were something she counted herself blessed never to have experienced.)

  Larissa was nearing sixty, yet she had not aged noticeably since Ruth first met her over ten years before, probably in part because back then she had looked much older than her years, as though she had always aspired to be an ageless, sexless grande dame and had only to get past the obstruction of youth to realize her truest incarnation. The name Larissa did not suit her, was far too flowery for the shrewd, hawkish face, with its jutting chin, the slender, pointed nose, and the tight lips over which she applied a daily slash of cranberry lipstick. Ruth tended to think of Larissa in terms of her full name, but when she considered the first name alone, she felt a fleeting tenderness for the woman—the name was proof that Larissa McAllister had once belonged to someone else, that a mother had aspired to beauty on her behalf. Even as she squirmed under that critical gaze, Ruth couldn’t help acknowledging that Larissa was magnificent, in her way.

  “More,” Larissa declared, breaking the waiting silence of the room.

  “More what?” Sheila piped up.

  “That is the question, Sheila,” replied Larissa, pointing at Sheila with approval. “More what?”

  The high voltage in the room was making Ruth sleepy, and she yawned loudly, attracting Larissa’s glare.

  “‘More’ is to be our motto for this year, colleagues. More. More from the girls. More from ourselves. As exceptional as George Eliot Academy already is, excellence lies in constant evolution, constant pushing against predetermined boundaries. Today, I’d like us all to put our heads together to come up with innovative ideas for the coming year. You’ll see in just a moment that on one half of the white board, I’ve compiled a list of last year’s most exciting events. On the other half, I’ve anticipated two suggestions minimum from each staff member, and jointly we’ll—”

  There was a stirring then by the door, and even though she was about to whip away the black cloth, Larissa lost the attention of the room. Unaccustomed to such lapses, she looked startled and immediately stopped speaking. A man came in, shoulders hunched, dipping his head low, as though he thought he could shrink himself and enter unnoticed. An unlikely prospect, considering that he was, including the groundskeeper, one of only four male staff members. Ruth had never seen him before, not at the June cocktail party introducing the new hires, or at the widely resented, day-long summer meeting at the end of July (which Larissa referred to as “the summit”). She had heard, however, through Moira Loughlin, the art teacher, that there was talk of a late hire, a man who’d taught at the University of Toronto. But every now and then such rumo
urs sprang up—the result of too many women in one place at one time.

  And there he was, the rumour wished into reality. His attempts to minimize his presence were useless. His long lean body did not fold easily in on itself and his gangly weaving around the outstretched legs of the women on the armchairs and couches by the door only made him more conspicuous. Although he made little noise himself, a bright nebula of sound followed him as he manoeuvred: the women roused from their torpor, moving their legs to grant him a pathway, shifting nervously in their seats, whispering questions to each other or murmuring low hellos to him.

  Ruth waited for the stern rebuff from Larissa, the short lecture on tardiness and example setting. She had been on the receiving end of Larissa’s castigating arrows more than once and had found herself blushing like a teenager, a burning blotchy red from forehead to collarbone. Surely Larissa would be especially irritated by his timing, his interruption of the zenith of her presentation, the moment of high drama when she would unveil the white board. Better for him to halt the brainstorming, which was harder to control anyway, than the flourish of her revelation. But Larissa brightened visibly, letting her hand drop from the black cloth as she stepped away from the board.

  “Henry!” she said. “You’re with us at last. I hoped you would make it, but we all know how trying first days can be.”

  She was smiling warmly. (Could Larissa McAllister smile warmly? Ruth had seen her smile politely, had seen her smile proudly, contentedly, conceitedly, reluctantly, tightly, angrily, but never, not once, warmly.) The cranberry lipstick had faded in the middle of her dry lips, leaving only an outline around them. She advanced on Henry, shook his hand heartily, and led him to the front of the room, where he tried to shrink even more.