The Eliot Girls (27 page)

“It's a little sinister.”

“Ruth, I think we've gone far beyond diminutives such as ‘a little.' When Ms. Loveland delivered this to me yesterday evening, I knew that we had crossed into new territory. What exactly are we dealing with?” Now that she was speaking at greater length, Larissa's voice grew smoother, more lubricated, had lost its unnervingly geriatric crackle and regained its usual braying heft. “I apologize. Here you are to discuss this inspiring project, and I'm utterly preoccupied. I had every intention of reviewing your progress.”

“Larissa, it's fine.” Ruth reached a sympathetic hand across the table, as if to take Larissa's in her own, but unable to follow through, let it rest on the papers between them, an unexpressed thought.

Ruth had come to George Eliot after two years of teaching at a public school in an area of downtown Toronto where gentrification was much discussed but scarcely in evidence. As it turned out, she had glorified not only her ability to change things, but also the extent of her own idealism. Every morning as she rode the streetcar along Queen Street, she had a queasiness in her gut that barely abated as her day got underway. The rooms were bathed in inhospitable fluorescent light, the long bulbs dotted with black spots, the shrivelling carcasses of the dead flies inside. The linoleum was always gritty underfoot, the hallways littered with empty pop cans and Wagon Wheel wrappers. Her third graders knew what oral sex was and used it alternately as a promise and a threat. Even among the girls, bullying was blatantly physical. The teachers were of the opinion that you did what you could to ignore it.

There were bright moments too, inklings of promise, but every instance of hope was undercut by the shadow of its implied inverse. After a parent-teacher interview where a mother on welfare told Ruth that she had taken a parenting course, with the result that she now read to her son every night for an hour so that his life would be better than hers, Ruth had sat in a bathroom cubicle with her head in her hands, tears dripping onto her grey skirt, until someone had knocked to see if she was okay. She couldn't accept the paltriness of a little hope, a little light. And then there were just the plain old low moments. Eight-year-olds unable to identify basic vegetables. She wasn't cut out for that kind of reform.

But Larissa's reform—that she could get behind. Here was a school where parents requested summer reading lists before the doors had even opened for the first time. Here was a school where students fought over a hardcover edition of
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
with coloured illustrations and gold-edged pages. Even Larissa's office, the first time she saw it, had inspired her and restored her belief in her own passion. With its nine-foot ceilings and grand mouldings, the immovable mahogany furniture, the green banker's lamp on the desk, the crimson fabrics, the office seemed an emblem of intellectual prosperity, the consummate merging of tradition with Larissa's robust idealism. Indeed she did believe that new paradigms could be formed here. Ruth felt stirringly diminutive, both insignificant and powerful, as she sat in the shadow of the towering bookcases. How could she feel anything but reassured by the poised permanence of them, as if they were part of the stabilizing architecture of the school, the very syntax of its doctrine? How could she fail to marvel at her own luck in ending up there?

She loved this office as much as she feared it, for the same reasons she feared it: because its ability to terrify her was inextricable from its ability to exhilarate her. The things that filled her with dread and performance anxiety, the things that made her feel like a wayward child, were the same things that made her believe in the power of George Eliot. Sitting in this unyielding chair, she was never able to defy the room's grave, silent command that she be better.

“We can't let this go on,” Ruth said.

The light fell in a diagonal block across Larissa's desk, across the offending note, blanching the glossy image of Carrie at the prom. “I've wracked my brain. I've prayed for insight. I simply can't see our way out of this, short of catching the perpetrator. And how do we accomplish that?”

“Eventually, it has to happen. She, or they, is bound to make a mistake.”

“My primary concern thus far has been protecting the majority of students. Obviously, I've had to engage the senior classes, separately, in discreet discussions about this matter. But I've balked at the thought of making a more serious, potentially frightening, announcement. We've created within these walls a world of great privilege. Why make our girls feel unsafe? Moreover, why give the act the fame its architects were undoubtedly seeking? But now I'm wondering if I'm going to be forced to go more public. To get the whole school in on the hunt, as it were. The prospect is anathema to me.” A burst of laughter from outdoors pierced the seal of the closed windows and Larissa lifted her chin slightly, as though heartened by it. “I've seen the best and worst of our girls in these past months. The delicacy and dignity with which they've handled moral danger have given me renewed faith in the inevitable triumph of the Eliot spirit. I suppose I must cling to that.”

“There must be something we're not seeing,” Ruth said. “I can't believe that we're harbouring a girl with some evil streak in her. Surely it's just teenage stupidity gone too far.”

“Much too far.” Larissa stood and again walked to her bookcases. She stood before them, her face upturned, supplicating. Ruth waited patiently. She knew that while Larissa's distress was sincere, her affection for a theatrical silence was incorrigible. “Who could want to harm us?” she said at last.

Ruth picked up the note and studied it again. She was wary of sounding dismissive but sincerely wanted to help Larissa navigate this difficulty, to help her decipher this complex new topography of adolescent venom—not new at all, of course, but new, somehow, to Larissa, who was an innocent, really, blinded by her impractical idealism. “I doubt the girl is thinking of it this way. It's bullying. It's terrible, but I truly believe it just comes back to that.”

“This is more than that. This is far beyond the norm.”

“Agreed. Not normal. Have you thought about asking Seeta not to play? At least to take a break, let things settle?”

“I did think about that,” Larissa replied. “But she—we—cannot capitulate in that way. Not here, of all places. We have a duty, Ruth, not to permit the triumph of bullying. Of mediocrity. I have parents to explain myself to, parents who sent their children here on the best faith in our ability to make their lives better.” She paused and pushed her heavy glasses up her nose, then strode to the window and planted herself there with a defiant sobriety, looking out, arms crossed. “Personally, I dislike Seeta's routine,” she added. “I would rather start my day with an earnestly attempted, if imperfect, performance of Mozart or Debussy. Give me a mistake-studded ‘Clair de lune' over ‘Good Vibrations' any day. But to encourage creativity is the most important thing.”

The sounds of lively life outside were intensifying. The rush hour of arrivals: the unbroken stream of cars on the salt-strewn icy driveway, doors slammed, greetings shouted. Ruth knew the school so well that she could flesh out the entire scene, theorize whole conversations, from the most muted bursts of sound.

“I don't know how to say this,” Larissa said. “I'm not sure if I
can
say it.”

Ruth frowned.

“I've heard the tittering over Mr. Prasad's turban.”

“Yes, but that's just foolishness. It's harmless ignorance.”

“Is ignorance ever harmless?” Larissa asked. “We prize nothing here more than the love of learning. How could such poison reside in our midst?”

Ruth considered this. Had they really prized nothing more than the love of learning? The tests,
IQ
and otherwise, on which Larissa affixed so much meaning—what did they prove? She thought of Audrey staring out the kitchen window as her homework lay piled beside her, and she couldn't help feeling that there was something they were getting wrong.

“Besides,” Larissa continued, “whatever has caused it…does it even matter in the end? There will be gossip. And then all the work we've done here is for naught.”

“Oh, Larissa. That's—”

“The whispers are out, Ruth. And now that the spectre has been raised, does it even matter whether the allegation has substance? The speculation is just as damaging. Can't you see that?” She turned heatedly from the window. “I've worked tirelessly, for all my career, at exploding all those damn hierarchies of old. At instituting a new value system. But it seems there's no fruition, just the constant labour.”

Ruth was startled by Larissa's strident despair and knew it was her responsibility to pull Larissa back, but she couldn't see how. She was so weak, Larissa so strong. She had no ideas of her own. “There
is
fruition. We've guided girls through the most formative time in their lives. Many have gone on to great things after their educations here.”

Larissa picked up the note, appraised it, and let it fall from her hand. “All these years, hadn't we thought we were getting somewhere?”

There came now a knock on Larissa's door, and instantly Larissa snapped out of her troubled contemplation, performed an invisible, acrobatic leap from the reaches of self-recrimination. Though subtle, the change in her was unmistakable, her gaze refocused, her spine lengthened, her lips already forming her stiffly smiling greeting as she called out, “Come in.” There were some hierarchies Larissa supported unequivocally, and the divide between principal and secretary was one of them.

As Erica Moss entered with a cup of coffee, Larissa turned to Ruth to indicate that the meeting was over, smiling like a tolerant host tactfully dismissing a guest who has overstayed her welcome. Ruth, having run out of things to say, was glad to go.

She was passing the massive window on the second floor landing when she noticed a silver Honda turning into the round driveway. Right away, she recognized the head in the passenger seat, and before she could be stabilized by rationality, she rushed down the stairs and out the front door. Arabella was just emerging from the back seat.

“Hey, Ms. Brindle,” she said with a little wave.

Henry, in the passenger seat, leaned across the car to give Clayton a kiss. As he opened the door, he was laughing. A chill descended over his face when he spotted Ruth.

Clayton emerged from the driver's side and leaned with her arms crossed against the roof of the car. “Hey there,” she said, without a trace of the animosity for which Ruth had rather hoped.

“Morning!” replied Ruth cheerfully, as though their recent meeting had been the start of an incomparable affinity.

“Enjoying the cold?”

“Just getting a breath of air.”

“Big day ahead?”

“Isn't it always…”

They smiled at each other blandly, bolstered by their platitudes.

“Car trouble?” Ruth asked, turning to Henry.

“Trouble is the understatement of all time,” said Clayton. “It's like watching those people who just refuse to put their ailing pet to sleep.”

“Is that what it's like?” Ruth said.

“I keep telling him he needs a new car,” Clayton went on. “You tell him. Maybe he'll listen to someone impartial.”

Ruth glanced at Henry. “I doubt very much he'll listen to me.”

“I'll get to it,” he said.

“Henry's leaving tomorrow for a long weekend in Montreal,” Clayton said. “He's planning to take the train anyway. His thesis adviser, who now lives in Russia, has flown in for a conference at McGill. They haven't seen each other in a decade.”

Ruth had never heard a word about a beloved thesis adviser. “Oh?”

“Train aside, why fix your own car when you can be chauffeured every day by your loving wife?” She winked at him.

Ruth smiled tightly.

“I best be getting in, my love,” Henry said, reaching his hand across the roof of the car to clasp her fingers.

“Yes, yes. Go. Drink coffee.” She blew him a kiss and then waved to Ruth grandly, as though she were standing on the deck of an ocean liner pulling out of port.

As Henry watched the car retreat, Ruth slipped into the vestibule. She was waiting in the shadows when Henry swung open the door, admitting a narrow shaft of light.

“So I just had the craziest meeting with Larissa,” she said. “It's like she's on the brink of a breakdown or something! I think for the first time in all the years I've known her, I actually felt sorry for her.” She felt cheap for offering this information so flippantly, with such gossipy gusto, but was eager to get back in his good graces.

“That's unfortunate.”

“Things are bad with Seeta. Worse than I ever imagined. Larissa is at her wit's end.”

“Am I supposed to pity her?”

“What are you saying?”

“Larissa is the principal. Is it her job to handle the situation or to worry about her reputation?”

“That's not fair. These things are complicated. Larissa is handling things. Isn't she?”

Henry sighed. “Ruth, I don't really give a fuck. I won't even be here next year.”

Ruth's breath seemed to fall out the bottom of her stomach. “Where are you going?”

“York. Part-time position. I'm going to work on my book, at last.”

“Your book?”

“Look,” he said, glancing at his watch, beginning to move away. “I don't really want to discuss this right now. I've got photocopying. I need coffee. Later.”

“Why are you acting—” she halted. Because Henry was turned away from her, she was leaning forward, pursuant, reaching out her hand as if to grab him, and her words formed an unfortunate hiss.