For coffee-stained girls in libraries
Thirteen thousand feet above sea level, you can drown in air like water.
I read that drowning is a good way to go. By all accounts the pain fades and euphoria blooms in its place like hothouse flowers, red orchid roots tethered to the stones in your pocket.
Falling would be worse.
Falling is barbed-wire terror ripping down your spine, a sharp drop and a sudden stop, scrabbling for a rope that isn’t there.
My cheek is pressed against the snow. I don’t feel cold anymore. I am part of the mountain, its frigid stone heart beating alongside mine. The storm batters against my back, tries to peel me off this rock like lichen. But I am not lichen. I am limestone and schist, veined with quartz. I am immovable.
And up this high, pinned against the eastern face with thin air crystallizing in my lungs, I am the only thing left alive.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The legacy of Dalloway School is not its alumnae, although those include a variety of luminaries such as award-winning playwrights and future senators. The legacy of Dalloway is the bones it was built on.
—Gertrude Milliner, “The Feminization of Witchcraft in Post-Revolutionary America,” Journal of Cultural History
Dalloway School rises from the Catskill foothills like a crown upon an auburn head. Accessible only by gravel road and flanked by a mirror-glass lake to the east, its brick-faced buildings stand with their backs turned to the gate and their windows shuttered. My mother is silent in the front seat; we haven’t spoken since New Paltz, when she remarked on how flat the land could be so close to the mountains.
That was an hour ago. I should be glad, I suppose, that she came at all. But, to be honest, I prefer the mutual indifference that endured between me and the hired driver who met me at the airport every year before this one. The driver had her own problems, ones that didn’t involve me.
The same cannot be said for my mother.
We park in front of Sybil Hall and hand the keys to a valet, who will take care of the luggage. This is the downside to arriving at school four days early: we have to meet the dean of students in her office and then tramp across campus together, my mother and the dean chatting six steps ahead and me trailing behind. The lake glitters like a silver coin, visible in the gap between hills. I keep my gaze fixed on the dean’s wrist, on the bronze key that dangles from a string around that wrist: the key to Godwin House.
Godwin House is isolated from the rest of campus by a copse of balsam firs, up a sharply pitched road and perched atop a small ridge—unevenly, as the house was built three hundred years ago on the remains of an ancient avalanche. And as the ground settled, the house did too: crookedly. Inside, the floors slope noticeably along an east-west axis, cracks gaping beneath doors and the kitchen table wobbling under weight. Since I arrived at Dalloway five years ago, there have been two attempts to have the building condemned, or at the very least renovated down to the bones—but we, the inhabitants, protested vociferously enough that the school abandoned its plans both times. And why shouldn’t we protest? Godwin House belongs to us, to the literary effete of Dalloway, self-presumed natural heirs to Emily Dickinson—who had stayed here once while visiting a friend in Woodstock—and we like our house as is. Including its gnarled skeleton.
“You can take your meals at the faculty dining hall for now,” Dean Marriott informs me once she has deposited me in my room. It’s the same room I always stayed in, before. The same water stain on the ceiling, the same yellowing curtains drifting in the breeze from the open window.
I wonder if they kept it empty for me, or if my mother browbeat the school into kicking some other girl out when I rematriculated.
“Miss MacDonald should be back by now,” the dean goes on. “She’s the housemistress for Godwin again this year. You can go by her office sometime this afternoon, let her know you’ve arrived.”
The dean gives me her personal number, too. A liability thing, most likely: After all, what if I have a breakdown on campus? What if, beneath the tailored skirt and tennis sweater, I’m one lonely night away from stripping off my clothes and hurtling naked through the woods like some delirious maenad?
Better to play it safe.
I take the number and slip it into my skirt pocket. I clench it in my fist until the paper’s an inky nugget against my palm.
Once the dean is gone, my mother turns to look at the room properly, her cool gaze taking in the shabby rug and the mahogany dresser with its chipped corners. I imagine she wonders what becomes of the sixty thousand she pays in tuition each year.
“Perhaps,” she says after a long moment, “I should stay the night in town, let you settle in….”
It’s not a real offer, and when I shake my head she looks relieved. She can fly back to Aspen this afternoon and be drinking cabernet in her study by nightfall.
“All right, then. All right. Well.” She considers me, her shell-pink fingernails pressing in against opposite arms. “You have the dean’s number.”
“Yes.”
“Right. Yes. Hopefully you won’t need it.”
She embraces me, my face buried against the crook of her neck, where everything smells like Acqua di Parma and airplane sweat.
I watch her retreat down the path until she vanishes around the curve, past the balsams—just to make sure she’s really gone. Then I drag my suitcases up onto the bed and start unpacking.
I hang my dresses in the closet, arranged by color and fabric—gauzy white cotton, cool-water cream silk—and pretend not to remember the spot where I’d pried the baseboard loose from the wall last year and concealed my version of contraband: tarot cards, long taper candles, herbs hidden in empty mint tins. I used to arrange them atop my dresser in a neat row the way another girl might arrange her makeup.
This time I stack my dresser with jewelry instead. When I look up I catch my own gaze in the mirror: blond hair tied back with a ribbon, politely neutral lipstick smudging my lips.
I scrub it off against my wrist. After all, there’s no one around to impress.
Even with nothing to distract me from the task, unpacking still takes the better part of three hours. And when I’ve kicked the empty suitcases under my bed and turned to survey the final product, I realize I hadn’t thought past this point. It’s still early afternoon, the distant lake now glittering golden outside my window, and I don’t know what to do next.
By the middle of my first attempt at a senior year, I’d accrued such a collection of books in my Godwin room that they were spilling off my shelves, the overflow stacked up on my floor and the corner of my dresser, littering the foot of my bed to get shoved out of the way in my sleep. They all had to be moved out when I didn’t come back for spring semester last year. The few books I was able to fit in my suitcases this year are a poor replacement: a single shelf not even completely filled, the last two books tipped forlornly against the wood siding.