“What’s the matter with you, Burls? Thinking about the boys again?”
Fuzzie did not reply but only blushed redder, so that her freckles disappeared, and her head sank further onto her chest. Everyone was staring at her, laughing, except for Meg, who looked as though she were about to weep. Fuzzie was watching her hand trace the sinister, blue flower pattern of Miss G’s carpet.
“What, no reply from Burls? Perhaps it’s about the girls that she’s thinking?”
We laughed even louder at that, and Pamela made little kissing noises, and we put our arms around ourselves and rubbed our backs.
“No, I’m not thinking about either one,” Fuzzie said, blinking her close-set eyes. We were all watching with secret delight, glad someone else was the target of Miss G’s ire, as Fuzzie sank miserably into the blue flower pattern, her face flushed with shame.
“Why are you left wallowing around in the water when Fiamma passes you by? She must be exhausted after the way she swam today. Did she remain in the dormitory, or has she gone off somewhere on her own again? She’s not ill, is she?” Miss G’s voice rose to a panic pitch. She got up and walked back and forth across her room, her boots creaking. She scratched at the bristles at the back of her neck.
No one said anything.
“Don’t any of you know? Don’t you care? Lindt, what about you? You’re supposed to be her friend, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” Ann said, looking as though she were thinking about mathematics. “But I make it a rule not to talk about anyone behind her back.”
“Very wise, Lindt, very wise,” Miss G said, sitting down again and turning back to Fuzzie. She scratched her leg, saying, “Burls-the-Bear, now why isn’t it Fuzzie-the-Fish? It could be Fuzzie-the-Fish, couldn’t it? Actually, you do look a bit green, positively green around the gills tonight. Been eating chocolates on the sly, hey? You ought to watch your weight, don’t you think?”
Fuzzie blinked, lowered her head, and said, “Yes, Miss G.” No one laughed now.
She went on scratching. “I am only saying this for your own good, you know. No one else will tell you girls the truth. Your parents are too far away, and only I care about you. Obviously no one else does. I could tell you lies as everyone else does. I could tell Burls that she swam well, but what good would that do her? You have got to look into your heart and find the truth, and the truth is you are putting on weight. You look bloated, puffy. Can’t you see it when you look in the mirror? Are you blind, after all? If you cannot see it, there must be somethingwrong with you. You will never be able to swim will, if you put on any more weight. Did you ever see a fat swimmer? Besides, doesn’t all that fat disgust you? Look at your arms, even they are getting fat. Now no more chocolates, hey? Promise me, will you?”
“Yes, I promise,” Fuzzie muttered to the carpet.
“You’d better, if you want the boys to love you, and if you want to swim as well as Fiamma. Don’t you want the boys to love you? Why do you eat so much? You ought to think about that; there must be a reason. You’ve got to find it out. Can’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know why, Miss G,” Fuzzie said with a great sob. The tears were pouring down her fat cheeks, and Meg was weeping, too, in sympathy.
Miss G lit a cigarette and exhaled fast, scratching at her leg.
“What’s the matter with you, Burls? Get up and go and find your friend,” she concluded. “Go and see if she’s all right, Burls, do you hear?” Fuzzie staggered out of the room, saying she had pins and needles in her peg legs.
The teams’s losses
Miss G was increasingly distracted as the long summer term wore on. She did not listen when we talked but gazed across the gray grass and the flowers strangled in the soil. She did not respond to us. She no longer talked about the truth or the wonderful things we could accomplish.
When she did speak, she fell silent suddenly and gazed toward the pool in the fading evening light. She had lost the direction of her thought. We waited for her to continue, but she scratched the back of her head and said, “What’s the point? Go on, go and swim, girls, go along.”
As we swam slowly up and down the pool, or even lay on our backs and stared at the red sky, she stood beside the pool in her swimming costume, her whistle hanging silently between her dry, chapped lips. She did not run up and down beside the pool as she used to do when we swam in the evening; she did not call our names. Sometimes she even forgot our names, calling Lindt, Fadfield, and Kohler, Donovan. She never again called us to swim with her at midnight, despite the increasing December heat.
We all stared up at her in the long shadows of the evening light. We hardly recognized her. She had lost weight; deep, dark circles formed under her eyes; her breath smelled sour. She looked older, though we noticed she made and attempt to cover it up. She had taken to wearing makeup. She applied mascara to her eyelashes but would forget it was there and rub her eyes, causingit to run down her cheeks. She even colored her wide lips with a ghastly, dark rouge that gave her a hard air. She had dry patches on her skin and sores around her mouth. She scratched constantly. Her old skin ailment was acting up in the dry heat. We were afraid she would fall ill, or, worse, leave us. Sometimes she even spoke of giving up teaching. “For the amount of money they pay us to do this, it isn’t worth it,” she said; no one appreciated her efforts. No one was grateful. No one cared. What was the point?
We no longer won any prizes. Di no longer flashed her shiny, pink gums and her strong, white teeth in the sun, her arms full of trophies. Instead, her arms hung limply by her sides, her empty hands clutching at the air. Our team came last or next to last. Kingsmead beat us. St. Andrews beat us. Even the convent schools beat us. We slunk bac to the bus in the shadow, ashamed. We sat silently and gazed out the windows. We sang no triumphant songs. We scowled at Fiamma, who sat in silence beside Ann on the bus or walked past us with head tilted and her distant air.
Staring up at Miss G as she stood vacantly by the side of the pool in the evening light, we could not believe that she had fallen for a girl who made no attempt to be charming, who had no desire to charm her, or anyone, who slipped by us like the moon through cloud. To us Fiamma seemed entirely unfeeling. We found her could, through and through. She never seemed angry or sad or even amused. When we told one another jokes and laughed raucously, rolling about, holding our stomachs on the floor, she only fidgeted and left the room.
None of us could understand how Miss G could get excited about a girl like her. Italians were supposed to be so passionate and temperamental. They were supposed to fall into rages, to express themselves in song. “Besides,” Mary whispered, “Italians aren’t blond.”
When we complimented her, she shrugged her shoulders, indifferent, as though all she wanted was to pass unnoticed. She never took pains to impress, and yet we found her domineering and mysteriously willful. Ann helped her with her Afrikaans homework; Mary, with her science; Meg baked an extra batch of scones for her at domestic science, because she was not eating much; Sheila lent her silver pens, and she lost them in the grass. Her carelessness created havoc in our hearts.
When we spoke of love or attraction, she said nothing. She was always scrupulously polite, but she was always trying to escape us, slipping by coolly and boldly, as thought she wished to make herself invisible.
We could not believe that Miss G, who had told us once she felt at a distance, felt far, far out at sea and alone, could be brought back in and made a fool of by this pale, careless girl.
What to do about Fiamma?
Meg wanted to be Brigitte Bardot,
Sheila, to be Scarlett.
All Ann wanted was to read Diderot,
But we all wanted to be Miss G’s pet.
The doves cooed in the eucalyptus trees.
The wind stirred the dust across the dry veld, which had been set ablaze by one carelessly discarded cigarette stub, causing untold damage, reducing a thousand acres to a black stubble. The thatched roofs of the round changing huts had caught fire, saved only when the night watchman, John Mazaboko, had come running with his hose.
The earth had cracked, and the roots of the flowers were strangled in the soil. Only the red-hot pokers and the aloes with their prickly pears still stood stiffly upright. The fan-shaped sprinklers no longer waved back and forth in the evenings on the lawns, cooling the air. When we went for walks in the afternoons, the dust was on our shoes and in our mouths. We were not allowed to bathe at all now except in the basins that ran along the center of the dormitories like a string of coffins. We all splashed 4711 behind our ears and poured it between our new bosoms. Di had put it in the wrong place and screamed when it stung.
We were supposed to lie on our beds for two hours after lunch because of the polio scare. There had been an outbreak of it. The only newspaper available to us was the Manchester Guardian, which gave us no local news anyway, but the teachers told us terrible stories of children paralyzed from the waist down, their limbs withered, pushed around in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.
Because of fear of contagion we were not allowed to go to the few public places usually allowed us: the outing to the Pablo Casals concert, the tour of the art museum. Even our Friday visits to town for doctors’ and dentists’ appointments were canceled. We no longer went to lie under the sunlamp, burning off our pimples. We no longer left the grounds at all. The iron gate was kept closed except for the on Sunday a month when the girls who had families in the area went home, and the rest of us tried desperately to ingratiate ourselves with someone who would take us along. Some of the parents, like Sandra’s, had sent for their children. Those who remained were to wear little cotton bags with camphor around their necks. The teachers, too, lay on their beds for two hours after lunch.
We stood before the mirrors behind the basins in the long, narrow dormitory with its iron cots and whispered about Fiamma and Miss G. Meg pursed her heavy lips like Brigitte Bardot and lisped, “If Fiamma were kinder to Miss G, she would be kinder to us. Why doesn’t she care for her?”
Bobby Joe glanced along the dormitory to Fiamma’s bed at the end by the wall, where she lay, apparently sleeping, on her side, one arm above her head, and said, “She doesn’t care for anyone.” She seemed capable of sleeping for long hours, hardly moving on her bed.
Ann, on the bed next to Fiamma, said in her low, nasal voice, “It won’t last; nothing lasts long with Miss G,” and glowered in the background, looking glum, propped up on pillows, reading about revolutions. She read about the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution. She read about the eighteen-century French philosophers in her history book: Rousseau and Diderot and Montesquieu, and about the Rights of Man.
Di said, “Perhaps, but in the meantime, I am getting impatient.”
Di was half naked before the mirrors, using her school tie as a veil, dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils, pretending to be Salome, getting Herod to give her John the Baptist’s head. Mary was dissecting a tadpole she had fished out of the pond to study for science.
Sheila lay on the bed beside Pamela, their feet in the air, comparing their beauty. Sheila was finding her own superior. She said there was nothing we could do about the situation anyway and added that she was trying to decide whether to be bold and rapacious like Scarlett O’Hara or good and meek like Melanie, but was leaning toward Scarlett. Di said she much preferred to be Becky Sharp than Amelia.
Fuzzie, who was singing “La donna e mobile,” trying to be Mimi Coertse, said she wanted to be Jane Eyre as a fierce wild child shut up in the red room, not as a meek and mild grown-up who wore gray and fell in love with Mr. Rochester.
Ann blew her thin nose and scolded us. She told us we were all vain, strutting about before the mirrors, and should stop thinking about ourselves and think instead of our fellow man, not trifle our lives away. Instead of hovering before the mirror, contemplating our images, we should be thinking about helping others. What about the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the natives?
When she rose and came over to us, approaching the mirror, she turned away from her reflection, her high, shiny forehead bulging like an egg, her little pig eyes glowing, and went on scolding us. We should all be thinking about the injustice of the natives’ position in our country. Wasn’t it time someone did something about that?
Mary said she had helped with the African Feeding Scheme in her holidays. She had fed starving little black children peanut-butter sandwiches.
But we went on dreaming of Miss G or Heathcliff, putting our hands between our legs. When Miss Lacey had asked how many girls would like to marry him, all the hands shot up.
Our favorite film stars were Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. She was so beautiful and familiar, shining with her own light, and he, though dark and handsome and smooth, was all mysteriously wrapped up in a suit. Which one to choose? We wanted them both. Only Miss G was both familiar and mysterious, beautiful and dark at the same time; only she was capable of arousing all our desires.
But why did she desire Fiamma?
Pamela said she thought Fiamma was keeping some deep, dark secret from us. “Perhaps she had a lover in Italy?” she suggested and turned her foot to a more advantageous position in the light. “Can’t you see mine is much prettier than yours?” she told Sheila.
“Perhaps she had lots!” Fuzzie exclaimed loudly, but Fiamma did not stir.
“Do you think she is really asleep?” Lizzie asked Ann, who went back to her bed and peered down at Fiamma, who, as though she felt our gaze on her, or had been listening all along, stirred, rose languidly from her bed, went over to the basins, and began scrubbing her cheeks with soap and a toothbrush. She always did that to preserve her creamy complexion.
We pretended to read but spied on her. Di went back to being Salome and Fuzzie, to singing “La donna e mobile.” Mary said she was going to flush the tadpole down the toilet.
We were always spying on her. Sheila, who enjoyed it, looked on, as Fiamma scrubbed absentmindedly. She whispered, “Her Royal must be preparing for Miss G.”
“Now Her Royal must be thirsty,” Meg observed, when Fiamma added an Alka-Seltzer capsule to a glass of water to make it fizz, because she never drank flat water. Meg was never given even the pocket money to buy her sanitary towels and was obliged to borrow them from Di.
Di whispered that Fiamma washed her hair with fresh lemon to heighten its blond lights, and took baths in milk to make her skin white. Fuzzie said it was champagne.
The twins rose from their beds. One put her panama hat on her head and walked over to the door. She pretended to come in the door, imitating the way Fiamma curtsied when she shook hands with adults, making a brief bob. They bobbed at one another, giggling. One said, “Your Royal Highness, how delightful, how lovely of you to come to tea.”
