An Uncommon Education (23 page)

We entered a copse in the woods. A.J. directed the beam of her flashlight onto someone I didn’t know, a physically intimidating woman with blond cornrows and broad, freckled cheekbones, drop a pile of wood into a wide, shallow pit in the middle of the clearing. She began ordering people around, as did a few other seniors, including Phyllis, who grinned at me when she saw me standing there in my flannel pajamas and robe. “Nice slippers, Naomi,” she added to her nod of approval before turning around to collect another stack of papers from another senior. I walked over to the fire pit, and Mara, the woman building the fire, introduced herself in a disinterested way.

“This pile of soot’s as old as the college,” she said ruminatively, “maybe older.” She heaved logs and sandwiched them in on each other; an art of effort. “So,” she said. “Want to know what’s going on?” I nodded noncommittally, affecting a casual attitude I couldn’t actually adopt. Mara wasn’t looking at me. She reached forward and shoved a heavy log deeper into the pile. “Forensic burning is one of the college’s oldest traditions. Officially, it’s also a dead one.” Her voice was low and resonant, and as the fire grew I had to strain to hear her. “I guess some of the Shakes alums from the twenties thought the burning should continue. They used to burn textbooks to symbolize the forensic, back in the day when the college was in on it. It was a game for the juniors and sophomores: the juniors hid their books, and the sophomores had to find them. The idea was to not let knowledge just sit around, you know?” She was looking intensely right at me. “Kill it before it suffers from old age.” She laughed at my face, which must have reflected my shock. “The good stuff always gets resurrected, hon. Don’t take it too seriously. The phoenix always becomes stronger with new feathers.” She grinned, her teeth white in the light of the burgeoning fire. “Don’t believe what anyone tells you about college traditions,” she ordered me. “The best have been ruined or squirreled away by a few brave souls. Hoop rolling, for instance, is a load of shit.”

“Not to everyone,” Julie corrected. She’d been standing with her arms folded, looking into the first flames as Mara lectured me. “I imagine fires became less popular when most of the college burned down,” she added matter-of-factly. Mara didn’t react to Julie’s statement. She seemed wholly absorbed in attending to the fire.

I thought of those images I’d seen, in a back corner of the library, of the 1906 fire brigade: the women in their uniformly heavy dresses, standing in an assembly line of water, battling the fire in the dark with buckets, the smoke rising overhead like a mocking, amorphous spirit. The college’s main hall, a five-story collection of library, dormitory, and classroom, had burnt to the ground. I remembered the before-and-after pictures: the marble columns, the wet students at dawn, staring at the still smoking foundation.

“The power of fire is not something people grasp as quickly as they should.” Mara finally spoke. “And it always develops ten times faster than you would expect.” Hers was now burning lustfully, transfixing all three of us. Julie had squatted down and was sitting before the fire with her eyes closed. A casual observer might think she was sleeping or praying. The three of us stood together around it for a while longer, not speaking.

Once Phyllis’s arms were full of the stacks of papers she’d been collecting, she came over and tapped Julie on the shoulder. Julie stood up, yawned, and cricked her neck. Then she began ordering everyone to sit in rows, to form a crowd facing Phyllis, who stood directly in front of the fire, her back to it. She cleared her throat as a few stragglers settled down.

I could see how Phyllis must have drawn audiences. She took to a stage well. Her voice managed to be both authoritative and self-mocking as she began the ritual; she was clearly playing a role.

“Who is in the woods?” she called out.

“None,” a voice answered.

“What is in the lake?” she called again.

“None,” another voice replied.

“And the hills and houses?” she concluded.

“None,” a chorus of voices answered, followed by giggling, either because protocol hadn’t been followed or more than a few people were nervous and rattled. I shivered, pulling my robe closer. Someone had thrown several heavy blankets down as protection from the cold ground, but they didn’t do much to cut the cold that seemed packed into the hard soil underneath.

“Sentinels,” Julie announced, stepping forward. Eight women stood up and went to the edge of the copse, standing at intervals around the perimeter with their backs to us. “Forensic burning,” she continued. She wasn’t as commanding as Phyllis, but no one looked away from her stern stoicism. “A tradition from the earlier days of Wellesley, thought to be lost, kept safe by the women of this society.” She spoke as if she were delivering a lecture to a class, easily, confidently. “Knowledge needs to be purged. Live knowledge can grow static or too strong; it can be mistaken as more powerful than the human minds who seek it. Dominance is key.” She paused dramatically, turning back to Phyllis, who was smirking at her.

“Director, which play is it you wish to redeem?” Julie’s voice deepened a bit as she addressed Phyllis, whose poise and command of her audience was striking.

“
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
,” Phyllis answered.

“And what do you offer in return?” Julie asked this as Phyllis squatted down, drawing the stacks of paper back up to her chest. “
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
,” she said, her voice unexpectedly soft.

“Let the burning begin,” Julie ordered her. Phyllis walked through the seated crowd, handing out the stacks as she did. When mine was in my hands I could see that it was a copy of the
Cymbeline
script, that each one of us was given the same play, some of them dog-eared and full of notes, others seemingly new and untouched.

“ ‘How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily!’ ” Phyllis exclaimed, tossing hers on the fire. The smoke thickened, rising into the glittering sky and beginning to cloud it. To my left, A.J. stirred nervously, and the tension spread through some of the crowd, a few people looking up, most still focused on Phyllis. Ruth was at the fire, tall and well lit, her voice strong: “ ‘Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle.’ ” The fire sputtered and smoked more when it received her script, causing a few surprised exclamations from those nearest it.

“Damn it, Mara,” Ruth scowled, “you know the wood isn’t supposed to be wet.” Mara, her shadow huge in the firelight, glowered back. “Dry as a bone, Wiefern. Check it yourself.” “I think she’ll want to take your word on that,” someone teased. Mara grinned and Ruth blushed. Phyllis and a few others laughed out loud. My face felt hot from the heat, but the rest of me was cold.

“You,” Phyllis said, extending her arm toward an already intimidated Ellie, “next.” Ellie muttered something that sounded like a collapsed question. “Just find a line, toss the script. It’ll do the burning on its own.” Her smile was either warm or taunting, I couldn’t tell.

Ellie stood up shakily. I glanced at Jun, who was frowning sternly at Phyllis. “Do I have to?” Ellie asked once on her feet.

“Of course not,” Phyllis said with false generosity. “You can pass, if you want.”

Ellie nodded and swallowed, receiving Phyllis’s cutting response as penance. “Um,” she began, riffling through the script awkwardly. The pages bent and stuck to her hands, the collection of them in her care an impossibly awkward thing, “Here’s one. Um, act three, scene three,” she looked up, trying a smile, “ ‘How, in this our pinching cave, shall we discourse the freezing hours away?’ ” A.J., directly in front of her, nodded her approval and encouragement. I saw Jun smile, egging her on as well.

“Toss it,” Phyllis said, returning Ellie to the moment.

“Oh, sure, okay,” Ellie said, walking toward the fire.

“Your skirt!” Mara yelled. “Watch it!” someone else called out. Ellie fell a little before she caught herself, the script landing just at the edge of the fire. One corner of it lit, then burned out as Ellie scrambled back to her feet, getting tangled in A.J.’s waiting arms. Tears were running down her face as she took her seat again.

“What’s the point of this?” I asked Ruth as she sat down beside me after her own toss.

Ruth laughed out loud, her face too close to mine to be seen well in the dark, “There doesn’t have to be a point to everything. Well, that’s at least part of the point.”

“No,” A.J. disagreed, “that’s the whole point.”

“The point is,” a voice on my left said steadily, “that there are some Wellesley traditions—student traditions, mainly—that the college wanted gone but never died. Forensic burning goes back to the teens. The powers that be thought it was too dangerous. They were probably right.” A thin hand extended in the dim light. “Calbe Tharpe,” its owner said by way of introduction, then continued: “You’re Naomi.” I nodded. “Feinstein,” she added. She turned around as A.J. tapped her on the shoulder.

“Flask,” A.J. whispered. “If you want it.”

Calbe took a dutiful sip. “Swill,” she announced.

A.J. took it back from her and took a long, experimental swallow. “God, Ruth,” she exhaled, “where the hell did you get this?”

Ruth stood up, smiling, and walked over to the group that had begun dancing to thin music projected by an aging boombox, ignoring A.J.’s question. A.J. leaned back on her elbows, watching the flames reach up and out as the fire absorbed the last of the scripts.

“God, I hope they don’t streak,” Calbe said, her posture an unwavering vertical line from the back of her head to her tailbone.

A.J. grinned at me. “Toss it,” Mara said a few feet away. A.J. obeyed. She looked at me apologetically. “Not for initiates,” she said sorrowfully. “Though if you’d like to start the streaking . . .”

“Don’t joke,” Calbe chastised us. “A couple of winters ago two of our members got frostbite from doing just that.”

“Frostbite
where
?” A.J. blurted out.

“Shhh,” Calbe insisted, pointing to my face. “You’re scaring her.”

A.J. threw her head back and laughed. “Naomi doesn’t get scared!” she exclaimed incongruously. I smiled at her, unclasping my knees and wondering if she was drunk, grateful to her for denying the very real fear I had at any mention of frostbite. I forced myself to relax into what was becoming a blur of noise and movement; in the midst of it all, despite the winter cold, the prospect of people stripping naked and running through the woods seemed quite possible. A sound several feet away caught our attention, something like a scuffle. Ellie was trying to worm Ruth’s flask, now in Mara’s hand, into her own. I wondered if she were already drunk. Mara stood as still as stone, Ellie’s efforts comical beside her. A flare rose from the fire. Ellie’s coat sleeve, like a wing, was suddenly a sheet of flames.

Ellie was screaming and flapping her arms. I reached her in a few long seconds, dropping the heavy wool blanket that had been under me around her arm, other hands joining mine to suffocate the flames, which after an unbearable few moments, quieted beneath it. Mara stood by the now dark pile of smoldering wood, a fire extinguisher in her hands as she watched the smoke rising from her feet in plumes even blacker than the night. It was suddenly dark everywhere, commotion and fear muttering their way through.

“Water,” I managed, clearing my throat and then shouting it just as Phyllis and another bucket of freezing lake water appeared at our feet. I plunged Ellie’s arm to the elbow in the murky wet, her scream an intimate, painful hollow in my ear, the steam off her skin and the smell of it hushing us as the company around us suddenly, nearly as one, became quiet.

“Don’t take her to the infirmary,” Julie said, breaking the silence. “Jun, your car. Take her to Newton-Wellesley.”

“My car’s across campus,” Jun said in a low voice, “it’s over a mile away.”

Julie turned and faced her, “Go get it.”

Jun nodded after a blink of hesitation.

“The lake,” I said to A.J., at my side. “Can you walk?” I asked Ellie. She stared at me blankly, throwing me back to another night in the freezing cold years ago. I shivered. “You’re cold,” she observed, and began to cry.

“You’ve gotten into quite the habit of saving people,” Ruth proclaimed merrily at my side as we trouped back into the woods toward the lake. Instead of feeling proud, I felt strangely exposed. In front of us Ellie wept as A.J. walked with her, one long arm around her waist, the other across her shoulders: a fully mobile embrace. Ruth chucked me on the arm, sending me stumbling. “She’ll be okay!” she announced.

“She’ll be fine,” Phyllis said quietly at my shoulder, wrapping an arm around my own waist, a half-embrace; it felt, by comparison, like an acknowledgment that I was able to stand on my own.

The blanket fell off Ellie’s arm at the lake, which was blessedly unfrozen at the spot where we approached it. We laid her on her belly and extended her burnt arm into the water. Her eyes were open and wide. The skin and the sleeve merged, a dark color those of us close to her were grateful we couldn’t see any better.

Somehow Jun found her way onto a side road with her car and we loaded Ellie into it. Julie slammed the door behind her. “What’s wrong with the infirmary?” I asked her.

She kept her back to me for a moment, watching Jun drive away. “Newton-Wellesley has an emergency room.”

“And no connection with the college,” Ruth added. Julie shot her a look. Ruth shrugged. “Her parents will find out anyway.”

Julie nodded, looking at me. I was thinking of burned skin, its distinct red ripples, Ellie’s arm to the elbow. Julie was watching me closely. “She’ll get better care at the hospital,” she stated. A series of hollers interrupted us.

A group of four had undressed and made their way into the lake; three were running back, a fourth was wading bravely in up to her knees. “They’re drunk,” Julie announced. “Get them out of the water!” Phyllis called from somewhere. “Party’s over,” Ruth said, her face a mix of regret and deep amusement. “Glad you joined Shakes?” I didn’t answer, thinking of Ellie’s arm and the time between trauma and care—maybe not a golden hour, but close enough—when, an instant later, Ellie was suddenly running, fully naked, past us, toward the lake.