In the Kingdom of the Girls
“I would do anything for the girls,” said Marjorie.
Anyone spending an hour’s time with Marjorie would know that she would say that, would in fact be waiting for her to say that. She was senior instructor for sports at the Claddis Day School, an expensive girls school on a century-old campus an hour outside of Washington. She was short, brown, and wiry, with a whistle around her neck, and spoke exclusively in an “outdoors” voice.
Yet when she actually said “I would do anything for the girls” at Monday Staff, Mr. Bennett was surprised to hear it. One did not expect to meet the perfection of the cliché in real life. There was no doubt that she meant it. She loved the girls as a horse trainer might love horses, yelling at them, ordering them about, flying into rages that passed in an instant, obsessing over trivia, and seemingly indifferent to them as individuals. She longed to hammer them all into the perfect mold of the perfect Claddis girl, a mold that, of course, no longer existed. The girls did not dress alike, speak alike, or act alike. Marjorie had not attended Claddis herself, and was not so old that she could remember “the Old School,” and “the Old Girls,” who still looked down from a few dusty photographs. Yet somewhere in her brain was a shimmering ideal, a prototype of perfection, of what “the girls” (she did not speak of them, or even think of them, as “her girls”—that was for the head mistress) should be.
Mr. Bennett wondered, not unkindly, what that ideal was. Marjorie was a lesbian, of course, if by lesbian you meant a woman who was at once mannish in behavior and dismissive of men. Yet Mr. Bennett did not think there was anything corrupt or vulgar in Marjorie’s attitude toward the girls. Her lust, he felt, was entirely sublimated, to the service of her ideal, the perfect Claddis girl. What did the perfect Claddis girl actually do? he wondered. Did she marry, or not? Have a glorious career, a quiet one, or even none at all? He did not know. In the few weeks he had known her, Mr. Bennett had never heard Marjorie remark on the career of a graduate. The perfect Claddis girl, he decided, existed in moments, moments that might never be encountered in real life, yet could be easily imagined: the girls returning from the hockey field at sunset, tall and erect, bathed in the rich light, faces flushed, hair tousled yet perfectly kempt, and flecked with bits of clean, green grass; the girls in winter, clambering up the hill to class, laughing as they crunched through the snow, breaths coming in puffs; or a single girl sitting on the grass in May, absorbed in a book; or, perhaps most of all, at graduation, the girls for once dressed alike, streaming past the Old Plum, the gnarled tree that had endured at the front gate since the founding of Claddis, streaming out into the world with absolute confidence, streaming out into a world that offered endless adventure but no defeats, no sorrows, and no heartbreaks. Like figures on a Grecian vase, the Claddis girls would be forever tall and erect, with perfect skin and tousled hair, forever young.