S
eptember means pressed white shirts. New socks. School shoes. Rigidly pleated skirts. “Those pleats. That’s what morality looks like,” one of the history teachers said once in class. He was young and exciting, and he was talking about the Inquisition, which seemed to give him a particular thrill. “That pleat right there,” he said with an arch smile, pointing to one of the girls’ freshly pressed skirts. “That’s morality for you.” No one knew exactly what he meant. But all of the girls laughed and shifted a little sideways in their seats.

They had brothers and uncles and fathers of friends.

They knew the feeling of watering, avuncular eyes getting under your clothes.
Squidgy
might be a word for it.

But for the girls of the Carmine-Casey School, September, when it comes, feels like waking up to an overcast morning—that diluted and deceptive quality of light that seems to die on the windowsill. Not night nor morning nor even dawn, but rather the approximation of daylight—the best effort in bad circumstances. The weather has gotten sick. It languishes there in the corner by your unread books, circled by a cloud of dust motes. Clammy ambiguity. That’s what September is like.

On the first day of school, everything feels old and new at the same time. The exchange of summer stories. The smell of laundered uniforms. The comparison of anklets bought either by out-of-town uncles (which is good) or by out-of-town boyfriends (which risks unbelievability). The walk to school with its familiar byways, the doormen in their tasseled coats, the wide-
staired stoops of buildings where you can sit and watch the other girls go by. That girl has goose pimples on her arms—the wind this morning is chilly, but she isn’t sure if she really likes her new sweater, which is currently bunched up in the bottom of her bag.

Still, as familiar as these things are, they also seem to imply possibility and promise. Each girl thinks, in terms large or small, Perhaps this will finally be the year that I have been waiting for. Maybe this is the year for me.

So when September comes, the girls of Carmine-Casey—CC girls, as they are sometimes known among the community of Manhattan prep schools—are already flush with minor-key dramas of hope and apprehension.

The building itself—whose side windows overlook Fifth Avenue and Central Park—houses a venerable institution dating back to 1895, since which time its marble staircases have been worn into arcs so subtle and soft that new adhesive traction strips have to be added at the beginning of each year. In fact, the girls are no longer allowed to wear open-backed shoes ever since, two years ago, a freshman girl tripped on the stairs and sprained her knee. It could have been worse, said the administration, evoking images of skulls cracking against the yellowing marble. It could have been much worse.

The facade of the building is stark white, and the only thing that identifies it as a school is a small brass plaque, the size of a sheet of notebook paper, mounted to the left of the main entrance. There are four stories above the ground and two below, and the building is shaped like a U, with the bottom of the U facing the street and the center containing a private courtyard where the girls can take their lunch trays when the weather permits. There is also an old sugar maple, which at this time of year still has bright green leaves, and from a branch of which, it is rumored, a girl once hanged herself to death after a particularly difficult calculus final.

It is near the base of this same tree that two girls can now be seen malingering in poses of boredom or irritation on one of the
picnic tables set up around the yard. They are seniors, and they take it as an obligation to be constantly gazing with disinterest in directions that nobody else is gazing.

One of them, Dixie Doyle, a pretty girl with ironic pigtails, takes a lollipop from her mouth and says, “So I think my formative years are over.”

“Really?” says the other. This is Andie. She is tall and never quite knows what to do with her shoulders.

“Over the summer I marked on the calendar every day that something formative happened. I looked back at it yesterday—four formatives and seventy-two blank squares.”

“Well, maybe something formative will happen today.”

“It seems unlikely,” Dixie sighs. “It’s September. Formative things happen in June and July mostly. August at the latest.”

Andie nods at the irrefutability of Dixie’s logic. Andie is the daughter of Mrs. Abramson, one of the English teachers at Carmine-Casey, and everyone suspects her of having an intellect that towers over that of her friends.

Dixie takes the lollipop out of her mouth and looks at it with one eye squeezed closed—as if measuring it against something in the distance. “Did I tell you,” she says, “that I slept in the hall for two weeks?”

“The hall?” Andie says. “What hall?”

“In the hall, while my folks were gone. They went to Rome for two weeks.”

“What for?”

“They wanted to see a pita.”

“The round bread?”

“No,” Dixie says. “Not the bread, don’t be silly.”

“Pisa? You mean Pisa, Dix? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

“No,” Dixie says again, shaking her head. “A pita. It’s a sculpture. It’s a marble sculpture of Mary Magdalene or something.”

“Oh. The Pietà,” Andie says. “Michelangelo.”

“Right.”

Of Dixie Doyle it is said that she could convince grown men
of anything. While she is only a mediocre student and a wholly untalented tennis player, she possesses a quality of performed girlishness that turns sex into a ragged paradox for men beyond the age of thirty. She speaks with the hint of a babyish lisp, the pink end of her tongue frequently peeking out from between her teeth, but her eyes are implacable fields of gray that at any moment could conceal everything you imagine—or nothing at all. She might be an X-ray registering the skeleton of your soul, or, like Oscar Wilde’s women, she might be a sphinx without a secret.

But when her friends look at her, especially Andie, who now rubs her eyes open as though her mother were waking her up from bed, what they see is a violence of feminine spirit—their own desire for which they can only begin to articulate.

“So anyway,” Dixie continues, “after they left I realized I couldn’t stand my room anymore. You know—I was just
done
with everything in it. I wanted a new perspective. I wanted a non-bedroom perspective. And I saw this thing on TV where in old mansions in England some of the servants used to sleep in the hall. So I got Brady to come upstairs one day, and he moved my bed into the hall. All I know is that hallways in England must be bigger, because it just barely fit.”

“Brady moved your bed?” Andie asks with a half smile. Brady is a boy from the Bardolph Boys’ Academy. He lives in Dixie’s building on Park Avenue.

“He just
moved
it. And it’s just Brady. Anyway, when the folks came home, they made me put it back. My mom kept asking why I was sleeping in the hall. ‘How come you weren’t sleeping in your room? Why do you want to scratch up the wainscoting?’ She just about went crazy over it. I think she wants to send me back to the therapist now.”

“God,” Andie says.

“Oh, Donald’s okay. That’s the therapist. He knows a lot about TV. For a therapist.”

“Hmm.” Andie looks up at the sky again, and then at her watch. “I guess we better get inside. Everybody’s going to want to be on time today.”

Dixie and Andie rise from the picnic table and straighten the skirts of their blue and gray uniforms. Then the two girls march side by side toward the rear doors of the building.

“I once slept in the garage, in the back seat of our car,” Andie says, almost wistful. The Abramsons live in an upscale New Jersey suburb. “But I never slept in the hall.”

Through the windows, Dixie spots a figure she recognizes—a tall shadow of movement whose pale face and racing eyes are visible only briefly behind the panes of glass. Feeling suddenly agitated, she takes the lollipop and looks for a trash can to toss it into, then reconsiders and puts it back in her mouth, wondering with deep concern if it has made her lips purple. She removes the lollipop again and runs her pinky fingernail along the corners of her mouth; she hates it when she sees girls who have sticky stuff in the corners of their mouths.

She thinks about her father—how he didn’t say anything when he took her bed apart and moved it back into her room. There was a gaunt stoicism in his movements, as though it were the prerogative of every daughter to move her bed into the hall and the obligation of every father to move it back.

“Was that Binhammer who just went by?” Andie asks. She must have seen the same figure.

Dixie doesn’t say anything.

“I think that was Binhammer,” Andie says again. “Did you see him?” No answer. “At least I have Binhammer again this year for English. That’s something. You got Binhammer again too, didn’t you, Dix?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Thank god. I don’t know what I would have done…. At least there’s Binhammer.”

Yes, Dixie thinks, at least there’s Binhammer.

BOOK: Hummingbirds

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