Skin Game: A Memoir (4 page)

The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.

6

I was twelve, and I lived in a boys’ boarding school.

I’ve gotten almost to expect the raised eyebrow, the intimating smirk, when I tell people where I grew up.

When I was twelve, the odds seemed deliriously in my favor, a fact I attempted to play for some cachet among my own friends from school during the bleary late-night junk-food stupors of slumber parties. We’d be flopped on our patchwork-pattern sleeping bags, and I’d be holding court at center stage, trying to sketch a general image of myself as a woman of worldly expertise, without being pressed too closely on any of the many points about which I was actually still quite vague.

“Of
course
I’ve kissed a boy like that,” I’d say with the world-weariness of a jaded courtesan.

“EEEWW! With tongues?” they’d shriek.

I’d fix them a withering glance, neither confirming nor denying.

*   *   *

When we moved to this boys’ boarding school, however, I had only just turned three, and for the next eight years, if I thought of the boys at all, it was only to consider them rather goofy, all arms and legs in a puppyish excess of earnestness and energy. One or two boys in particular might feature as favored baby-sitters, who would come over and entertain my sister and me with ridiculous stories and scrambling, giggling games, and let us write notes in the margins of the letters they were composing to faraway girlfriends. The rest of them—well, they were just the Boys, mere cosmic background noise.

*   *   *

My father was hired in 1965 to come teach English and serve double-duty as chaplain. Or rather, the school needed a chaplain, and in my father they found one who conveniently came with an A.B. in English from Harvard, which is the kind of credential you like to wave in front of parents if you’re a boarding school looking to convince them to deliver their sons and unship their checking accounts into your hands.

“This is
it?
” said my mother, aghast, as my father drove us from National Airport outside Washington, along ever-narrower roads, past listing frame houses and decrepit barns and broken-down Chevies propped up on cinder blocks, over rolling hills dotted with scrubby cows, legs and bellies stained orange-red from the Virginia clay. Only my father had scouted our new home before we moved there; we had left the crisply manicured, elm-lined streets of suburban Chicago for a rural Virginia county of defeated trailer homes and endemic, hardscrabble poverty at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“It’s fairly remote,” my father had warned my mother, but her idea of “remote” was the farmlands of Vermont, the cabined woods of New England where she’d spent her camp summers.

I think she passed the first few years in Virginia stunned, as though she’d been the butt of an ingeniously complex practical joke and she was still waiting for the punch line, the moment when Allen Funt would emerge from behind the stage set to clap her on the back and commend her for being such a good sport.

Eventually, she became a teacher as well, but she never quite lost that aura of bemusement. “Thirty days hath September…” she used to mutter over a scribbled stack of midwinter exam blue books, finishing the old mnemonic with “… except in boarding school, where February lasts forever.”

In Virginia, we were thirty miles from the nearest town, Charlottesville, a sleepy university burg where people drifted languorously as though the heat of the summers had penetrated to their bones. The miles that separated us from this minor bastion of civilization were paved with narrow, unmarked strips of tar that melted out black, oily bubbles in the summer heat, and always threatened to unveil just around the next bend some thirty-year-old pickup truck barreling down the middle of the road at you and swerving violently only when it seemed it must certainly be too late.

Our mailing address was the one-building town of Dyke, a general store with a post office tacked on the side, perched at the intersection of two roads to nowhere. The store smelled of chewing tobacco and the smoked hams dangling from the rafters, and everything remained perpetually enshrouded in a fine coating of dust, churned up by the trucks that congregated in the parking lot like so many ants about a crumb. Vegetables lay mummified beneath a thick layer of plastic wrap. Hamburger of dubious provenance lurked in the refrigerator case. The proprietor/postmaster slid stamps and small change across the marble countertop with the stumps of fingers severed at the joint slaughtering hogs.

There were always a few locals—as we called them, implicitly suggesting that no matter how long we lived there, we would never be local—hanging around, swapping gossip in a nearly unintelligible dialect and snacking on exotic Southern food like Moon Pies and pork rinds and Yoo-Hoo chocolate sodas. They were sunburned and T-shirted; in youth they were sinewy like rawhide; by their late twenties their wiry frames started to soften and spread, pooling and then cascading over the cinch of their belts.

In the heart of all this, of course, a boys’ boarding school—why not? When the board assembled itself with the idea of creating a prep school for boys who, in the words of the school literature,
have had difficulty finding success in the traditional academic setting,
someone knew someone who knew how they might come about acquiring the moldering remains of a now-defunct missionary school. Thus the campus had risen Lazarus-like from its dead self, though when we moved there it was still considerably more dead than risen. The buildings crumbled around us, holes gaped in the ceilings, plaster sifted down in little flurries, floorboards gave way. What I remember most, however, about those earliest years was that the walls of whatever residence we occupied fairly seethed with the fluttering and buzzing and scurrying of legions of birds, bees, flies, bats. Our Siamese cat used to sit in my bedroom window in one house, crunching dead flies like popcorn.

We were housed in first one, then another of these decrepit buildings, the headmaster shuffling the faculty about like an endless game of three-card monte, but gradually the school’s finances gained ground and the worst of the old structures toppled at the nudge of a wrecking ball. When I was nine we were granted occupancy of a gloriously spanking-new four-bedroom brick house, complete with the decadent luxuries of thunderous water pressure and level, unsplintered floors, and doors that slipped neatly into plumb frames.

The campus itself was impossibly beautiful, nestled in an elbow of the Blue Ridge, with the mountains rising behind our backs and the Piedmont rolling away in front of us. The thousand acres of the campus were a sheltered enclave, the shack-and-trailer ambiance of the surrounding county invisible to us there.

I thought surely God must be an academic—didn’t time slip perfectly into the alternating rhythms of school and vacation? Could there be any more perfect life than to live on this campus, with a pool and a gymnasium and two lakes, canoes in summer and ice skating in winter, trees made for climbing and streams for wading, and always the mountains unveiling something new every season?

Mine was the best of all possible lives, and though I knew it was nothing like the lives led by my own classmates, its uniqueness served only to underline my good fortune. I felt grievous pity for those classmates from school, in distant Charlottesville, hemmed in by sidewalks and backyard fences and streets they couldn’t cross alone.

In the winter, the wind poured down off the mountains in a roaring rush often thousand bare trees scratching at the sky, a sound that made my own warm bed, with its gathered retinue of stuffed animals and sleeping cats, the very essence of luxurious abundance.

In spring, green would explode in a lush profusion of mountain laurel and honeysuckle and dense tangles of Virginia creeper that misted their way slowly up the slopes of the mountains. My father would gather up my sister and me and a handful of boys and the tents smelling of mildew from a winter shelved in the basement, and we’d all go camping in the Shenandoah National Forest, scooping up greasy Hamburger Helper by the light of a Coleman lantern.

Then spring would decline into summer with the languor of a screen ingenue swooning into a chaise longue. In June and August my family decamped to the Eastern Shore of Virginia for the long school vacation. In July summer school was in session, and my sister and I passed the blanketing heat of those summer days submerged in the school’s pool like crocodiles in a chlorinated pond, surfacing only to sun on the cement deck until our mother rounded us up for meals. In the thick stillness of summer evenings, the steady thrum of the bullfrogs in the lake mixed in strange harmony with the whir of cicadas and the soprano chirrup of tree peepers, until the air was textured with the sound.

In the fall, the boys would come back. The Mercedeses and the Volvos and the Lincolns emerged one after the other in regal procession through the stone gates that marked the campus entrance. Trunks were unloaded, blazers brought forth from the dry cleaner’s wrap in which they’d spent the summer entombed, radios started blaring out newly reopened dormitory windows, the smell of succotash and Tater Tots drifted from the school kitchen’s exhaust fans. The rhythm of our lives began over again.

We lived by the boys’ schedule, our waking hours punctuated by the chattering metallic ring of the alarm bells that divided the days into minutely scheduled interludes. From 6:00
A.M.
Wake-up to 10:10
P.M.
Lights Out (an indulgent 11:10 on Saturday nights), the bells signaled the day’s transitions, from bed to breakfast to chapel to classes to athletics to supper to study hall to bed.

This painstaking structuring of the boys’ lives was part of the school’s strategy to rescue its charges from histories of academic failure. The boys were not disciplinary cases, but rather the dyslexic, the too easily distracted, and only occasionally the simply dumb. Here at the foot of the Blue Ridge they were removed from girls, parties, cars, movies, and all the other little teenage hazards by means of which a boy with only half a mind to his studies might trip and founder. For entertainment, they were offered a weekly trip into somnolent Charlottesville, and a Saturday night movie screened in the school auditorium—B-grade monster flicks and cheesy Westerns or whatever could be rented cheap from the distributor.

We ate all our meals with the boys in the echoing barn of the school dining room, with a student’s painting of the school’s emblem—St. George slaying the dragon—mounted over the baronial stone fireplace at one end and gradually, over the years, bespattered with malicious shots of ketchup, butter pats, and even, I remember, one desiccated olive still flying its forlorn pimiento flag. The faculty congregated at maybe half a dozen tables, and the boys commandeered the rest. Like any school cafeteria, ours was loud with cutlery and scraping chairs and conversation at volumes sufficient to reach the length of the long wooden tables, all those masculine voices blending to a rumbling bass note.

Inevitably, at every meal, some boy would come up to stand diffidently behind my father’s chair.

“Sir, is it too late to sign up for the caving trip?”

“Sir, can we talk about my grade on the test?”

“Sir, my mom wants me to ask you to call her about my college applications.”

At every entreaty, my father would turn, still with fork in hand, perhaps chewing the last bit of toast or lettuce, to offer his full attention.

*   *   *

As faculty, we had the dubious privilege of cutting ahead of the boys in the cafeteria line, where we shuffled along, meekly accepting the plates like some country-fried Communion thrust toward us by the kitchen help. We dined off fiberglass trays, using industrial-grade stainless-steel utensils; sometimes an unappetizing bit of crusted egg or spinach clung still to a fork or knife.

Those meals were all resolutely rural Southern: eggs and sausages and fried apples and pancakes and grits all composed upon a foundation of bacon grease; vegetables boiled into submission and dotted with gelatinous globs of ham fat; meatish things congealed in a pool of gravy; canned fruit salad snowed under by sweetened coconut; bread pudding, collard greens, squat cubes of cake cut from yard-long baking trays and smeared with a thin film of frosting in pink or white or yellow. In the unlikely event you might want seconds, you couldn’t have them anyway.

At the end of each meal our trays were drawn away into the steaming bowels of the kitchen by means of a stained and yellowed rubber conveyor belt, like so many boats making their funeral procession across a River Styx smelling always ever so vaguely of sour milk.

Because we so rarely ate at home, our own kitchen was the least-used room in our house, its cupboards mostly bare but for some instant coffee and a few packets of mix ’n’ serve oatmeal, the refrigerator home to little more than an ancient tub of margarine and a bottle of martini olives. On vacations our expeditions to the Safeway in Charlottesville were fantastical adventures; I roamed the aisles in wonderment at the exotic possibilities of Tuna Helper, SpaghettiOs, Swanson’s frozen dinners.

“Kraft Mac-a-Chee!” my sister and I clamored. “Spaghetti!” These were the ultimate symbols of our brief paroles from institutional dining, and to this day they conjure up for me the taste of liberation.

On vacations my mother used to try to approximate something like normal family life, but the rest of my family were like the congenitally blind suddenly given sight and unable to make sense of the shapes, patterns, and colors of ordinary domestic life before us. My mother would struggle to get us all to sit down together at the dinner table. She’d explain to my sister and me the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork, and the fine art of the butter knife, for the day when we might be confronted with a meal that wasn’t served up on a tray with a paper napkin. Then my father would induce anarchy by alleging that you could tell crystal from glass by wetting your finger and drawing it around the rim of a wine goblet until it begins to hum. The next thing you knew, we’d all be dipping our fingers and setting our glass rims humming.