The News from Spain Read online

  He was German, or Scandinavian: pragmatic, blue-eyed. He had a crisp energetic encouraging way about him. You liked him but felt guilty around him; he seemed to think better of you than he should have.

  In class, he—Mr. Sturm—wrote big columns of numbers on the blackboard, underlining the answers and the equal signs so hard that the chalk squeaked. Then “There!” he would say, turning away from the board toward the class. “Everybody get it?”

  Nobody did, but no one said anything.

  “Any questions?”

  There weren’t.

  HIS WIFE

  She wore her black hair piled on top of her head, a lofty, delicate structure composed of many soft, elaborate little puffs. A croquembouche, you realized years later, coming upon a picture of one in a magazine and instantly thinking of her. All of her was like that—something confected in a bakery. She smelled sweet, her white skin was powdered, her nails were tapered and polished pale pink; when she raised her finger in the classroom, you could see the sun shining pinkly through her fingertip.

  You were nervous around her at first, because you started in the school at mid-year and you had never studied a foreign language before. In class the first day she said something to you in Spanish, which you didn’t understand. Then she asked you in English to conjugate the verb “decir.” You sat there while she smiled encouragingly, and finally you said that you didn’t know what “decir” meant, and you didn’t know what “conjugate” meant. The boys laughed. She swiftly told them, “You may not realize it, but you are being cruel and ignorant.” You were grateful for, but embarrassed by, this; it felt like too fervent a defense, too much championing over too little a thing.

  She started meeting with you in the afternoons to give you a crash course. Once you got the hang of it, you loved Spanish, memorizing lists of verbs, showing off to her what you’d learned since the last time. “… viviremos, viviréis, vivirán,” you would finish triumphantly, and she would say, “Muy bien, Marisol!” “Marisol” had nothing to do with your real name—a dull, one-syllable thud of a name, you thought—but you had chosen it from the list of Spanish girls’ names she’d showed you on your first afternoon with her. “Don’t I have to pick one that’s sort of the Spanish version of my name?” you had asked.

  “Why? Pick a name you wish your parents had given you,” she said—and so became something else you’d always wished for, a kind of godmother. A woman who was not your mother, or an aunt, or one of your mother’s vaguely impatient friends. A woman who paid attention to you as a girl. Your mother cared about different things: books, politics. “You can be anything,” your mother told you fiercely; and you believed her—with an amendment, also fierce but too humiliating to be said aloud: You could be anything, except pretty. You didn’t know how. Hair, skin, nails, clothes—yours were terrible, or at least inept. In those afternoons at Mrs. Sturm’s house, you saw things—ruffles, rose-colored lipstick, a fur collar, a charm bracelet shifting and twinkling on a delicate wrist bone—that you didn’t see at home, and certainly were not going to see anywhere else at the boys’ school. You learned that prettiness was a possible thing to care about, even if you didn’t have any idea how to achieve it.

  Still, even as you yearned for it, you worried that it was, in fact, trivial—that she might be trivial. In class, she would write on the blackboard, in her big, airy script, “Las noticias de España.” You knew, from headlines on the front page of The New York Times, which was always lying around in your house, that there was actually news from Spain that year: Franco’s death, elections, uncertainty about the new king’s allegiances. Mrs. Sturm’s news was news of nothing, news of fluff. “Esta semana es Las Fallas,” she would write, and you would dutifully copy it down, imitating the curly tips of her capital E and the way she had of writing a’s like the a‘s in printed books, fat little structures with curving roofs. She explained, glowing with gentle excitement, that the festival of Las Fallas involved the building and burning of large puppets! It was very festive! Perhaps someday you would all go to Valencia and see this for yourselves! Her news was full of festivals—this one was a mass-participation drum festival, that one was a reenactment of a battle between Moors and Christians, fought over a papier-mâché castle. Constant bullfights, lots of flamenco—but sometimes there were special bullfights and special dances—La Feria de Sevilla!

  “Olé!” she said, standing at the blackboard, stamping her little heels, lifting her hands still holding the chalk in a graceful dancer’s pose. The boys snickered, more than they would have dared to with a teacher who intimidated them but not as much as they would have with a teacher they disliked.

  You didn’t snicker, but you were embarrassed for her—the nakedness of her fantasy of herself as a fiery señorita. You wanted to protect her. Look at me! she seemed to be crowing, innocently, like a naked child darting into the living room during a dinner party. You wanted to wrap her in a blanket and gently lead her out of the room.

  After a couple of months you didn’t need extra help with Spanish anymore. You’d caught up with the boys, and you were doing well in class. But you kept going to Mrs. Sturm’s house: she started having you and Lily Joyce over on Monday afternoons. “We women have to stick together,” she said.

  She gave you tea in translucent flowered cups, along with cookies that, like everything of Mrs. Sturm’s, were small elusive feminine mysteries. What did they taste of? Lemon? Vanilla? Something pale and delicate. Something far removed from the hunky chocolate things you and Lily Joyce tore into together standing in Big Lily’s crammed dark pantry.

  THE BOYS

  There were so many of them. All those heavy shoes clomping down the stairs and along the corridors between classes, all those tweed sport coats. During morning chapel, sitting there with your head bowed as the school chaplain said prayerful things in a stagey voice, you thought: There are two hundred and twenty-seven penises in this room.

  TRYING TO DESCRIBE IT

  You couldn’t. One weekend you were invited to a slumber party in the town you had moved away from earlier that year, where you’d gone to a regular public school. That night, when you were all sitting around in your pajamas, the girls—your old friends—asked you what it was like to go to school with all those boys.

  “It’s fine,” you said.

  “You must be so popular!”

  “I guess,” you said.

  “Do you just kind of … have your pick?”

  “Well,” you said. “It doesn’t really work that way.” You tried to explain that being one of only two girls made you conspicuous. It made boys not want to be seen talking to you. They were afraid of being teased. They didn’t want to stand out, to be different. In a way this was true. But in another way you knew, even as you were saying it, that it was wise-sounding bullshit. Nobody minded being seen talking to Lily Joyce. The boys kidded her, exchanged loud insults with her in the halls, grabbed her green book bag and tossed it to one another over her head as she ran back and forth with her arms waving, trying ineffectually to retrieve it; they imitated her shrieks—“Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Waaah. I’ll tell! I’ll tell!”—and she laughed at the imitations while continuing to shriek that she would tell.

  Lily Joyce was a small, cute, flirty girl. You were tall, heavy, serious—somehow not a girl at all. You were conspicuous but invisible. The boys who spoke to you asked how you had done on the math test, or if you understood this whole diagramming-sentences thing.

  You couldn’t tell this to your old friends. What’s wrong with me? you thought, and tried not to think, all the time. You worried that there was some fundamental thing that might be missing, some difference between you and other girls that was just now starting to show itself but that would become more and more apparent as you grew up, like the progressive divergence of two nearly parallel, but not parallel, lines.

  VON BRUYLING

  Once, though, a boy did say something to you.

  “Any time you want it, I can give it to you.”
/>
  He was older, a ninth-grader (the school went up only through ninth grade), someone whose voice had changed, who shaved. He said it to you in a low voice, coming up behind you on the stairs and smoothly passing you before you were sure you’d actually heard him.

  But you did hear him. His name was von Bruyling. You hadn’t liked him, even before he muttered to you on the stairs—he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t smart. You got that what he’d said had been a joke. A mean joke. You, he was implying, were the last person who would ever want it, and the last person he’d ever want to give it to.

  Still, sometimes after that when you were home lying on your bed, with the door shut and your hand between your legs, you thought of von Bruyling’s stupid face, and his low voice growling those words over and over.

  THE STRING BASS

  Another embarrassment: to play an instrument that looked like you. They’d assigned it to you, or you to it, in your old public school, because you were tall and strong and could physically handle it. Now you were stuck with it. String bass players were rare, so you’d won a scholarship to take lessons at a conservatory. Your mother, almost maniacally proud of what she had decided must be prodigious musical talent, drove you there every Saturday. The string bass lay across the backseat, its neck and scroll sticking out through the open car window; you wished for a tree growing a little too close to the road, or the sudden press of a tunnel wall. The bass decapitated; you and your mother safe; but your mother somehow knocked sensible, agreeing to let you quit.

  Your bass teacher loathed you for loathing the instrument. Every lesson was the same: you would plunk out a few notes, and he would stop you. “Did you practice?”

  “Some,” you would say.

  “You have to practice.”

  “I know.”

  Practicing was the most boring thing you had ever done. Plunk plunk plunk (rest). Plunk plunk plunk (rest). That was pretty much how the string-bass part went in every piece of music your teacher assigned you. He was right, you never practiced.

  Then one afternoon at school, a boy came up to you and said, “I hear you play the bass.”

  “Yeah,” you said, wary. You weren’t expecting another von Bruyling incident—this kid was younger, and he seemed nice—but you had found that in this school humiliation lurked everywhere and jumped out when you forgot to look for it.

  “Because I’m putting together a rock band,” the boy, whose name was Henderson, went on.

  So then you were the bass player in a rock band.

  During the whole time you were in it, the band played only one number, over and over, a song called “Groovin’ with Mr. Bloe”—which, in turn, at least the way your band played it, had only one phrase of music, repeated over and over. The bass part went: plunk plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk plunk; and so could not claim to be much more interesting than the bass parts your conservatory teacher assigned you. But playing in a rock band felt strange and glamorous, out of character for you. Upstairs in your room you practiced “Groovin’ with Mr. Bloe” with a diligence and fastidious musicality that would have made your conservatory teacher cry if he had ever had the chance to see it.

  After a few weeks you made up your own words to “Mr. Bloe”—an incantation for Henderson to fall in love with you—and sang them softly in your room while you practiced, and silently whenever you played with the band.

  TELLING

  Eventually you told Lily Joyce. “Huh,” she said. “Henderson?” She’d been waiting a long time for you to start liking a boy. In the time you’d known her she’d liked Stewart, Cook, Childs, McDonald, Chesborough, Hilts, and Sperber. They were all boarders at the school; they would get off-campus permissions to go to her house on Saturdays, mostly one at a time, but Chesborough and Hilts she invited together, because she liked them both.

  “What do you do when they come over?” you had asked her once.

  Lily Joyce shrugged. “Swim. Listen to records. Sometimes we make out.” With Chesborough she had played something called Seven Minutes in Heaven. You didn’t know what it was, and you didn’t ask Lily Joyce to explain. But Chesborough was another one of those manlike, shaving ninth-graders; and Lily Joyce’s exact words were “I let him play Seven Minutes in Heaven,” so you sort of knew.

  “Why Henderson?” she asked you.

  You weren’t going to give Lily Joyce a list of reasons. He’s so clean. I like how his eyes are blue and his eyelashes are dark. I even like how his glasses are held together on one side with tape. He’s a very serious, not very good guitarist. You didn’t like him because of those things; it was more that you liked those things because you liked him. “He’s cute,” you told Lily Joyce.

  This was a term she recognized and honored: it was valid currency with her. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Do?”

  “I know. You need to get Mrs. Sturm to put you with him at the dance.”

  There are children who are too old to be children. It stops being a problem when they get older—they grow into themselves—but before that happens it’s perpetually awkward. For you it was a mix of judgment and wistfulness. You thought all this stuff was stupid, but you also had no idea how to get it, and you wanted it.

  “Oh, goody. Let’s,” you said to Lily Joyce. She laughed; she liked it when you were sarcastic. Egged on, you grabbed her hand and started skipping toward the Sturms’ house. The two of you skipped along the colonnade, laughing, just as the boys were trailing out of their dorms to go down to the gym for sports. You felt wildly happy, bounding forward with the wind blowing against your face and hair, with all those boys watching. (Later, though, you’d use the memory to humiliate yourself: it had felt like two pretty girls skipping along a colonnade, but it must have looked like big you galumphing along beside little Lily Joyce.)

  Mrs. Sturm made tea and put out the mysterious pale cookies on a flowered plate. You sat in her living room, where she always had a fire going on these winter afternoons. “Well, ladies,” she said.

  “Ask her,” said Lily Joyce to you.

  “No, that’s okay,” you said. You knew that Mrs. Sturm was in charge of organizing the upcoming dance, and that each boy from your school would be “put with” a girl bused in from some girls’ school. But asking her to put you with Henderson seemed crass to you, dishonorable. She liked you; didn’t you owe it to her not to take advantage of that fondness by asking for a special favor? Maybe you would end up with Henderson anyway, either accidentally or because Mrs. Sturm, with her almost magical delicacy, would somehow know without being told to put the two of you together.

  Besides, you were afraid to tell her you liked a boy. You didn’t want to bore her, or make yourself look silly.

  But Lily Joyce was pointing at you. “Mrs. Sturm, she wants to be put with Henderson for the dance, and I want to be with Sperber.”

  Mrs. Sturm went over to her writing desk—a small, many-compartmented thing that she had told you was an old campaign chest from the time of the Napoleonic wars—and came back with a pad and a tiny pencil. “Lily Joyce, Jeff Sperber,” she said, writing. She smiled at Lily Joyce, and then at you. “And Mark Henderson?”

  You nodded, emboldened by her matter-of-fact feminine complicity: all right, you would throw yourself onto the conveyor belt and let it carry you toward the dance.

  “Mark Henderson,” she said in her light, silvery voice as she wrote. “Very sweet boy.” She smiled at you again. “Muy bien, Marisol.”

  AT THE DANCE

  Your band played. You were up on a platform, grooving with Mr. Bloe. Then suddenly Henderson lifted his head and yelled out, “Drum solo!” and the kid on drums went crazy for a few minutes, banging out what sounded like a big collision of pots and pans and sandpaper all happening in a bowling alley. “Keyboard!” yelled Henderson, and you started to realize that you were going to be next. Shit. “Bass!” shouted Henderson, and the other instruments quieted down and there you were—the lighting didn’t change b
ut you felt like it had and that you were suddenly standing in a cone of merciless brightness—and you didn’t know what to do, but you settled for plunking out your usual sequence of notes with what you hoped was special emphasis, as loudly as possible, twice; and then you nodded at Henderson and he went into his own loud, squeally guitar solo which, you saw then, had been the whole reason why he’d accorded solos to the rest of you.

  Seeing this—how badly he had wanted to play this energetic, incoherent solo, how transparently he’d tried to hide his desire to do it, how the tape on his glasses gleamed beneath the lights—made you tender toward him, and maybe a little less shy when Mr. Bloe finally came to an end and you laid down your instruments and joined the dance. Still, you were pretty shy.

  “Mrs. Sturm put us together,” Henderson said, leading you over to the punch table.

  You shrugged. Mrs. Sturm winked at you from her seat by the refreshment tray.

  You and Henderson fast-danced. Then you slow-danced. He held one of your hands and put his other arm around your waist, leaving six inches between you: mannerly, respectful, correct, a relief, disappointing. Everyone else was hugging, barely moving. All these strange girls had arrived on a bus, pretty, in pretty dresses, and had gone in straight for the kill. Their faces were buried in the shoulders of the boys from your school. They were letting themselves be touched, and kissed, forgetting or not caring about the teachers who were chaperoning. Sperber’s hands were moving lower on Lily Joyce’s back; her dress was hiked up and you could see the striped cotton of her underpants. Mr. Sturm came over and said something to them, and they moved apart a little. The Sturms danced: majestically. They looked like ice skaters. It would have been funny, if they had done it with any less grace or dignity.