both at the same time.
We pick blue and white weed flowers and some of the nightshade berries, and arrange them on burdock leaves by the side of the path, a horse chestnut on each. They are pretend meals, but it isn’t clear who they’re for. When we’re finished we walk up the hill, leaving these arrangements behind us, half wreath, half lunch. Cordelia says we have to wash our hands really well because of the deadly nightshade berries; we have to wash off the poisonous juice. She says one drop could turn you into a zombie. The next day when we come home from school these flower meals of ours are gone. Probably boys have destroyed them, it’s the sort of thing boys destroy; or else the lurking men. But Cordelia makes her eyes wide, lowers her voice, looks over her shoulder.
“It’s the dead people,” she says. “Who else could it be?”
Chapter 15
W hen the handbell rings we line up in front of GIRLS, two by two, holding hands: Carol and me, then Grace and Cordelia back behind us because they’re a grade ahead. My brother is over there in front of BOYS. During recess he disappears into the cinder playground, where last week he had his lip kicked open during a soccer game and had to have stitches. I’ve seen the stitches, up close, black thread surrounded by swollen purple. I admire them. I know about the status conferred by wounds. Now that I’ve changed back from pants to skirts, I have to remember the moves. You can’t sit with your legs spread apart, or jump too high or hang upside-down, without ridicule. I’ve had to relearn the importance of underwear, which has a liturgy of its own:
I see England, I see France,
I can see your underpants.
Or else:
Me no know, me no care,
Me no wear no underwear.
This is said by boys, while making faces like monkeys.
There’s a lot of speculation about underwear, especially the underwear of the teachers; but only that of the female teachers. Male underwear is of no importance. There aren’t very many male teachers anyway, and the few that do exist are elderly; there are no young men, because the war has eaten them. The teachers are mostly women over a certain age, women who aren’t married. Married women don’t have jobs; we know this from our own mothers. There’s something strange and laughable about older, unmarried women.
At recess, Cordelia doles out underwear: lavender frills for Miss Pigeon, who’s fat and saccharine; plaid for Miss Stuart, lace-edged to go with her hankies; red satin long johns for Miss Hatchett, who’s over sixty and wears garnet brooches. We don’t believe any of this underwear actually exists, but thinking about it is a nasty joy.
My own teacher is Miss Lumley. It’s said that every morning before the bell rings, even in late spring when it’s warm, she goes to the back of the classroom and takes off her bloomers, which are rumored to be of heavy navy-blue wool and to smell of mothballs and of other, less definable things. This isn’t repeated as speculation or as part of the underwear invention, but as fact. Several girls claim they’ve seen Miss Lumley putting her bloomers on again when they’ve had to stay in after school, and several others say they’ve seen them hanging in the cloakroom. The aura of Miss Lumley’s dark, mysterious, repulsive bloomers clings around her and colors the air in which she moves. It makes her more terrifying; but she is terrifying in any case.
My teacher of the year before was kindly but so unmemorable that Cordelia doesn’t even mention her in the underwear game. She had a face like a dinner roll and blancmange-colored skin, and ruled by wheedling. Miss Lumley rules by fear. She’s short, and oblong in shape, so that her iron-gray cardigan falls straight from shoulder to hip with no pause in between for a waist. She always wears this cardigan, and a succession of dark skirts, which can’t possibly be the same one. She has steel-rimmed glasses, behind which her eyes are hard to see,
We pick blue and white weed flowers and some of the nightshade berries, and arrange them on burdock leaves by the side of the path, a horse chestnut on each. They are pretend meals, but it isn’t clear who they’re for. When we’re finished we walk up the hill, leaving these arrangements behind us, half wreath, half lunch. Cordelia says we have to wash our hands really well because of the deadly nightshade berries; we have to wash off the poisonous juice. She says one drop could turn you into a zombie. The next day when we come home from school these flower meals of ours are gone. Probably boys have destroyed them, it’s the sort of thing boys destroy; or else the lurking men. But Cordelia makes her eyes wide, lowers her voice, looks over her shoulder.
“It’s the dead people,” she says. “Who else could it be?”
Chapter 15
W hen the handbell rings we line up in front of GIRLS, two by two, holding hands: Carol and me, then Grace and Cordelia back behind us because they’re a grade ahead. My brother is over there in front of BOYS. During recess he disappears into the cinder playground, where last week he had his lip kicked open during a soccer game and had to have stitches. I’ve seen the stitches, up close, black thread surrounded by swollen purple. I admire them. I know about the status conferred by wounds. Now that I’ve changed back from pants to skirts, I have to remember the moves. You can’t sit with your legs spread apart, or jump too high or hang upside-down, without ridicule. I’ve had to relearn the importance of underwear, which has a liturgy of its own:
I see England, I see France,
I can see your underpants.
Or else:
Me no know, me no care,
Me no wear no underwear.
This is said by boys, while making faces like monkeys.
There’s a lot of speculation about underwear, especially the underwear of the teachers; but only that of the female teachers. Male underwear is of no importance. There aren’t very many male teachers anyway, and the few that do exist are elderly; there are no young men, because the war has eaten them. The teachers are mostly women over a certain age, women who aren’t married. Married women don’t have jobs; we know this from our own mothers. There’s something strange and laughable about older, unmarried women.
At recess, Cordelia doles out underwear: lavender frills for Miss Pigeon, who’s fat and saccharine; plaid for Miss Stuart, lace-edged to go with her hankies; red satin long johns for Miss Hatchett, who’s over sixty and wears garnet brooches. We don’t believe any of this underwear actually exists, but thinking about it is a nasty joy.
My own teacher is Miss Lumley. It’s said that every morning before the bell rings, even in late spring when it’s warm, she goes to the back of the classroom and takes off her bloomers, which are rumored to be of heavy navy-blue wool and to smell of mothballs and of other, less definable things. This isn’t repeated as speculation or as part of the underwear invention, but as fact. Several girls claim they’ve seen Miss Lumley putting her bloomers on again when they’ve had to stay in after school, and several others say they’ve seen them hanging in the cloakroom. The aura of Miss Lumley’s dark, mysterious, repulsive bloomers clings around her and colors the air in which she moves. It makes her more terrifying; but she is terrifying in any case.
My teacher of the year before was kindly but so unmemorable that Cordelia doesn’t even mention her in the underwear game. She had a face like a dinner roll and blancmange-colored skin, and ruled by wheedling. Miss Lumley rules by fear. She’s short, and oblong in shape, so that her iron-gray cardigan falls straight from shoulder to hip with no pause in between for a waist. She always wears this cardigan, and a succession of dark skirts, which can’t possibly be the same one. She has steel-rimmed glasses, behind which her eyes are hard to see,
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