Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

to climb up to the top floor of the main tower of the Great Lodge—above the dining hall, the two floors of the Middle School classrooms, and the floor where a few lucky senior boarders had suites. There was no reason for us to do this except that the highest floor was off limits to students: Gretchen and I, good revolutionaries, had the ambition to break every rule in the school at least once. Moving fast to avoid Miss Netherlander, the Argus-eyed old woman who patrolled the halls, we climbed the stairs through the floors of classrooms and the pleasant level full of stuffed animals, ruffled curtains, and Beatles posters that the boarders referred to as Cellblock Ten. One flight above this, we found ourselves in a bare-board corridor where air and light seemed to have been excluded as needless luxuries; there was something mean and meager in the look of the unlit electric bulbs over our heads. We moved cautiously along, peering at narrow doors with numbers on them, until we came to a door that opened onto a room the size of a closet. The room had stained green walls, a small, barred window that seemed grudgingly to allow a view of the back courtyard, a tiny radio on the windowsill, and a black woman seated on the bed.

I was stung by three separate shocks: the deadly bleakness of the room; the fact that people lived on this floor; the fact that contiguous to the bright, prosperous outer life of the school was another existence, a dark mirror image, which, like the other world in a Grimm’s tale, was only a few steps off the path of daily routine. I recognized the woman as one of the maids who cleaned the rooms of the boarding students; in a second, she looked up and saw us, the strands of her straightened hair standing out a little wildly around her head, an indecipherable expression in her eyes. Another door opened and another black face looked out. Gretchen and I took to our heels, plunging down the stairs as if we’d just seen a crime.

Gretchen was indignant about the conditions on the top floor of the Lodge, but I tried to forget what we’d seen. Thinking about the black people who worked at the school made me uncomfortable; I didn’t know what to feel about them. I put the incident out of my mind, but after that the school reminded me of a print my brother had hanging in his room: it showed a flock of white geese flying on a strong diagonal against a dark sky—except if you looked at it another way it was a flock of dark geese heading in the opposite direction. You couldn’t look at the poster and see both without a spinning feeling in your head.

The following September, in eighth-grade English, we dissected Macbeth, and Gretchen and I were stagestruck. We bombarded each other with soliloquies each morning when we met on the train to school, and studied from afar the gestures of Miss Wold, the drama teacher, who, with her fluttering Pre-Raphaelite hair and clothes made of murky, nubby fabrics, was the closest thing to a bohemian Prescott could boast. Gretchen and I determined to try out for the Middle School play, which that fall was the Kaufman-Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You. Gretchen, who had lost weight over the summer, had set her heart on being Grandpa Vanderhof, and she convinced me that I, with my spidery legs, ballet training, and hysterical laugh, would be perfect for the pixieish dancing daughter, Essie. It is curious that I never questioned the idea. I read for the part on the dusty stage of Carroll Theater and felt something like electricity racing through my body and voice; I drew huge, controlled breaths of excitement, and afterward there was quite a lot of applause from the other girls waiting to audition. Mimsy Davis, a tall, drawling girl whom I admired desperately because she was head of the Middle School Players, came up to me and said, “You know, you were really good!”

I went home that afternoon with a pounding heart and the wild surmise that the gates of paradise were suddenly going to open for me. When the cast list went up the next week, Gretchen, who had auditioned splendidly, did not have a part, but I did: I was to be Rheba. Who was Rheba? Somehow, neither Gretchen nor I could recall her. I leafed through the play and read aloud, “(From the kitchen comes a colored maid named Rheba—a very black girl somewhere in her thirties. She carries a white tablecloth and presently starts to spread it over the table.)”

Gretchen snatched the play from me, looked at it, and then threw it on the floor, startling a group of Lower School girls, who stared pertly at us as they trotted by on their way to the playground.

“Pigs!” said Gretchen in a trembling voice as I retrieved the book. She had an operatic way of wringing her plump hands when she was excited or upset. “You’re not going to play that part, are you?”

“Of course I’m not,” I said. I had to dig my knuckles into my mouth to control a fit of giggling that had seized me; it was laughter that burned my insides like vinegar, and it felt different from any way I had ever laughed before.

That afternoon, throughout Mme. Drouot’s eighth-period French class, I was seized by involuntary recurrences of those giggles, so that Madame was cross, and my classmates looked at me strangely—but they had always looked at me strangely.

After that, life at Prescott was easier for me. It was simply, as Matthew remarked when I told him about the play, a matter of knowing where you stood. (I declined the part of Rheba without mentioning the matter to my parents, reasoning, quite rightly, that they would make a fuss.) I had settled into being twelve, and the new way