Polyphony

I am eighteen years old. My half-assed attempt at defying dress code—an ugly unhemmed gray dress safety pinned at the neck, worn over black tights with nickel sized holes at the knee—is hidden beneath a blue polyester choir robe. I process into the largely chapel behind a fifth former carrying a cross, singing in Latin. Vere Languores Nostros. Pete stammers on a syllable. I touch a finger to his forearm and make sure he’s okay. He’s apt to stumble, unlike his older brother. His face is flushed, but maybe it’s just the evening light through the blue violet stained glass diamonds in the leaded windows. I finish the phrase, note held over two measures and turn to Clara behind me, her high heels clicking like tap shoes against the stones of the chapel floor, and narrow my eyes to give her the old how weird is it that we do this when none of us believe in god? She smirks, mouths religion is the opiate of the masses, and manages to affect an saintly gaze before picking up the third note of the soprano line at the start of the next measure. Ipse Tulit. I wonder why I’m not really friends with Clara. I think it has something to do with her habit of chewing her hair, or maybe that Ellie thinks she’s sort of a poseur. I think I’m sort of a poseur. Et Dolores Nostros. Right now, I’m posing as Catholic, a longtime favorite activity made somewhat more appropriate on this slapdash Maundy Thursday service, thrown together by the school chaplain (technically a Protestant) and my music teacher (an agnostic, ex-Southern Baptist) because they thought it would be cool. We, the sixteen members of the chamber choir (all coincidentally actors, recently off a shadowbox run of Shakespeare), agreed. The cool, wet April evening, the flames flickering out of the ends of martial black iron candelabras, the muddy footprints across the nave tracked in from the greening chapel lawn, the earthy smell of wet wool, the high faux-Gothic vault of the roof above the chancel—it all feels right. We are time travelers, we think. Players pretending to be penitents. Ipse Portavit. Apostate heralds summoning angels with archaic Latin for the benefit of the few actual believers huddled in the front rows of the chapel for this rare, non-compulsory service. I try not to look at them as we pass, though I’m certainly curious who they are. These believers. Christians, whispers Clara and rolls her eyes for the benefit of David, beside her. David is Jewish. Clara, to my knowledge is not, although she is from New Jersey, which she says is enough to make her understand the plight of the oppressed. The chaplain coughs.

Above us the chandelier swings, slightly when a breeze funnels through the open chapel doors and turns up the corner of the altar cloth. Cujus livore. There’s a silver communion cup by the cross and a matching plate. No one’s asking any of you to take communion, said the Reverend, earlier that day. I haven’t taken communion in four years, which puts me in good company with the rest of chamber choir, at least half of whom have never taken communion. Of those that have, only about half have done so at churches where they use chalices and not plastic cups, wine and not Welch’s grape juice. Sanati Sumus. This is the first and only time of my years at the school, in which the Eucharist has made an appearance in the chapel. This had been a hotly debated point all day. At least one choir member had threatened to protest, calling school-sanctioned communion a clear administrative endorsement of mainline Christianity and an insidious plot to coerce conversion among students. Another shot back with the obvious we are required to attend Chapel at least twice a week and the headmaster still says grace before meals. It’s not exactly a secret where we fall on religion in this joint. I catch sight of the Reverend smiling toward the back corner pew, where his wife, our largely unflappable dean of students, whispers something to the new admissions director. Dulce Lignum. The Dean is apparently unmoved by our polyphony and this haunting atmosphere. The Dean is, to my mind, largely unmoved by anything her husband does, and I’m not exactly sure why they’re married. Dulce Clavos. The other day Ellie and I were summoned to the Dean’s office after convocation. We feared the worst. You never know the infraction that will get you expelled until you find yourself on the wrong side of the table during Conduct council facing five glowering administrators and the only two prefects you’re not friends with, the two prefects who in fact hate you, and the headmaster’s hand goes down like a gavel and the next thing you know you find yourself unceremoniously dumped back into the public high school you would have (and almost did) run away to San Francisco to avoid a couple years back. Dulcia Ferens. But the Dean only wanted to compliment us on our shoes (black, clunky, military surplus) and ask us to join her posse. Posse? The dean smiled. I’m not asking you to rat out your friends—I like your friends—I’d just like you to know that if you ever feel the need to say something about somebody else, I’m the person you should talk to first. We reminded her that we weren’t prefects. I know that, she said, but I don’t trust all the prefects. They’re not like you two. They’re not part of my posse. Later, Ellie and I debriefed in her dorm room, trying to figure out what made us different from the prefects, outside of the fact that we weren’t, you know, prefects. Maybe it’s that we are both on financial aid. Maybe it’s that we both like Russian novels. Maybe it’s that we’re both underachievers. Maybe it’s that we both came from public schools? More particularly, public schools with sizable minority populations and faculty lounges populated by more than just white faces. Pondera. The Dean is the only black woman on the staff, save the ladies in the dining hall. The Dean is the only African-American on the faculty. In the history of the school. Maybe it’s just that we don’t think it’s strange that she works here, said Ellie. But I do think it’s strange that she works here, just not for the reasons Ellie implies.

Quae Sola. Ellie is not in chamber choir, though she has a lovely voice. It might be because chamber choir has no revolutionary cachet. Or it might be that committed punk rockers are fundamentally opposed to motets. This could complicate things for me down the line. Fuisti Digna. The Reverend steps up to the plate, after giving Cary a forbidding eye, meant to reflect his enduring displeasure at Cary’s tendency to ring the heavy bronze chapel bell for kicks, thereby stopping us all in our tracks, silencing classes, suggesting for a moment in its reverberating wake that we might be faced with a campus emergency, a barbarian invasion, a red coated infantry queuing up just outside the campus perimeter, a red shirted league of Russians. Funny, that. Some say we’re still too close to the conclusion of the Cold War to make jokes about the USSR. Nuclear warfare. I’m pretty sure the entire choir has devised a plan for what to do when the sirens sound and the missiles approach. Mine, as always, involves losing my virginity, ideally to the most attractive man in range. In this case, that would be Jonathan, who so enticed me with his "O What A Rogue and Peasant Slave Am I," delivered just last month for Shakespeare recitation contest. He’d stalked the stage, nearly trembling with rage and the sort of soulful vulnerability that caused a fair number of sixth form girls to dream of playing his Ophelia. The type of girls who eschew the golden boy athlete in favor of the haunted and newly directionless shell of the same, after injury strips him of his shot at Olympic trials and leaves him depressed and sullen. Sustinere. I would be of that type, as would Ellie. We wrote dirty poems about Hamlet anonymously and attached them to various doors and bulletin boards around the school. We suspect our English teacher knows we were responsible. The bell rings. War with the redcoats or the Russians. Most of us wouldn’t mind the Russians, I think. There’s a certain romance to Marxism. Rich white kids go in for that sort of thing. All rebellion is a rebellion against class, says Ellie. And that’s why we shop for classroom dress at thrift stores and smoke cigarettes at the redneck pool hall across the street. It’s why we play like we have nothing to lose and use our summertime stints at posh ice cream parlors as an excuse to identify positively with the proletariat. Regem.

I nearly trip over Jonathan’s choir robe on the way up the stairs and use the opportunity to look for the trapdoor in the altar floor. I’ve never been down there and I’ve never climbed the water tower in the center of campus. Coelorum. Past that, I think I’ve been everywhere else I need to go, down white-washed windowless maintenance hallways, through the library to the statue of a naked angel feeding a bare-chested man—a shrine, we think, to what we’ve been told is an expulsion offense, into the steamy corners of the dining hall kitchen, out the perimeter trails to the old boathouse beside the drained lake, under Anderson Hall to the robing room, where you can usually find both the polyester cassocks we wear tonight and sometimes a couple of freshman rounding third base. I have seen the pink tiled bathroom just beyond the library where Ellie smokes illicit cigarettes while proctoring. And its masculine twin across the hall, fitted with a barber chair. I have visited the rough wooden throne in the woods past the stables, set for some convocation of naiads who apparently leave condoms as tribute for the absent Pan. Et Dominum. I have received a letter informing me of my acceptance at the college of my choice (though I have yet to receive any promise of financial aid). And none of these have produced in me the otherworldly chill of watching my fellow choristers go solemn on the last sustained note as if we really believed what we were singing.

Et Dominum.It’s a short sermon, slight on imagery, and I’m able to tune out the sound of The Reverend’s peculiar mid-Atlantic vowels by studying the blue panes of leaded glass over the sanctuary. When it comes time for communion, I find myself kneeling for the cup as if it is the most natural thing in the world, forgetting the hairy-knuckled boorishness of The Reverend and my own incipient atheism and how this weak-kneed acquiescence to religion undermines almost everything I’ve ever said and everything I’ve ever failed to believe. In that fraction of a second, as the wine touches my tongue, I want to believe in God so badly that it seems inconceivable to me that I’ve never wanted to before. And I swallow. It’s gone, save the sweet wine aftertaste a couple crumbs of the host still clinging to my tongue. There’s barely time to contemplate this turn of events before I see Clara kneel as well, and Pete, and Jonathan. Our ambivalence briefly overpowered by ambiance by the fleeting promise of the sublime, blowing in under the chapel doors in a breath of cold, rainy April.

I am eighteen years old. In a few moments, I will recess into a drab twilight and drag my gown back into the basement of the boy’s dorm, where it will reside until next Sunday’s chapel and I will drive away listening to noisy guitars and smoke at least three cigarettes before arriving home to confront the a kitchen table still littered with Xeroxes of FAFSA forms and my mother’s endless what-ifs. I will be disappointed, though I don’t know it yet. But now, I sit transfixed by flames of the altar candles lulled by pipe organ, as Clara receives the host with a solemn nod and her fingers crossed behind her back.

Amen.

Censorship

One of the most surprising discoveries I made after transferring from public school to private school was that, for all its antiquated restrictions, The Boarding School was comparatively lax when it came to freedom of speech. No parent commission bickered over the texts on the syllabus, no student needed a guardian’s signature to take sex ed, the biology teacher taught Richard Dawkins with impunity and it was not unusual for the AP English Lit Class to get sidetracked by discussions of female masturbation during the “Paradise Lost” unit. The library stocked Henry Miller and no one seemed too worried about rampant use of four letter words, unless they were used to explicitly insult the faculty. And even then, the punishment for off-the-cuff verbal disrespect was less than or equal to that of a standard dress code violation.

As such, we always figured the headmaster’s insistence on editing the scripts we used for theatrical productions to be a sort of traditional nod to a simpler, less coed day, when The School likely treated its students to canings, gruel and cold showers. After all, the plays chosen were the typical, far-from-controversial fare favored by community theaters and high school drama departments. “Our Town,” “Blythe Sprit,” “Spoon River Anthology,” “You Can’t Take It With You.” The sort of inoffensive productions favored by the WASPy gray-hairs on the board of trustees and dreaded by the rest of the student body (who were required to see them).

Naturally, the actors all had their own reasons for doing theater at The School (unbridled egocentrism, desire to avoid playing football, possibility of sleeping with the leading lady) and our own opinions about what sort of plays we should be doing. At least half of my fellow cast members spent their summers in voice and tap lessons praying that the faculty would come to its senses and let us do “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The other half of us tended to namedrop Brecht as if we had the foggiest idea what we were talking about. Both of these two groups were equally insufferable and I can’t help thinking the head of the drama department didn’t take a certain pleasure in disappointing all of our expectations.

A steely-eyed woman of indeterminate age, the head of drama at our school defied every conceivable stereotype about high school drama teachers. Unlike the jolly eccentrics much beloved and well remembered by self-conscious theater kids across the known world, Mrs. L seemed to have arrived at The School direct from a previous engagement as matron of a 19th century workhouse with only minor adjustment to fashion. She treated the theater as some asylum closed ward for the criminally insane and directed her plays as if rehabilitating the actors for post-confinement positions as factory workers. Of the myriad theories that attempted to explain her abiding scorn for her actors, my personal favorite was that she was trying to discourage any of us from pursuing a career in the arts and that her violent outbursts, glowering intimidation, dislike of all of us and peculiar casting choices were deliberately calibrated to make us run screaming toward a future in banking or law or telemarketing. Anything other than theater.

As such, she wasn’t too deeply invested in preserving the integrity of our dialogue. She delivered our scripts to the headmaster with no complaint, usually several weeks before our opening performance and brought them back to us with all of the best lines inked through.

My first term at The School, the words censored from an A.R. Gurney script caused such general upset among its cast that some enterprising participant took it upon himself to print every censored phrase across the back of t-shirts. Within forty-eight hours, the shirts were outlawed, which did nothing but make them more coveted among the student population. This occurred shortly after fate (and a sympathetic faculty advisor) allowed me to ditch the end of field hockey season to join the crew as a prop girl. I remember standing in the wings on opening night watching the actors recite the excised text under the breath as they stood waiting in the wings. It was all a bit Orwellian, but then again, it was boarding school.

In retrospect, the headmaster’s insistence on censoring scripts indicated a kind of tragic obliviousness on his part. Clearly the only person at The School who still believed in the transformative power of live theater—as catalyst of rebellion and contaminator of bright young minds—was the headmaster himself. The idea of a white haired old boy sequestered away in his wood paneled office frantically marking through genteel sixty year old euphemisms for bodily functions while “Straight Outta Compton” thumped out dorm room windows about fifty feet away is almost sad when you think about it. For all its attachment to outdated values and traditional practices, The School in the early 90’s was as much a product as its time as any other place inhabited by teenagers. You can’t erase the effects of a childhood spent glued to Mtv with a coat and tie and a stroke of a red pen.

The old headmaster retired at the end of my sophomore year. When I returned the following fall, the newer, younger head of school had eased up on some of the more stringent policies. Boys were no longer marched off to the barber when their hair grew below the collar. Girls moved into the bottom floor of a traditionally male dormitory. A new director joined the theater staff and reenlivened the entire program.

For our spring play, that year, we presented a Shakespearian revue, of sorts. The end of its first act was a scene from “Measure for Measure,” in which Isabella, a nun, pleads for the life of her brother to Angelo, a corrupt bureaucrat. The negotiation, between two figures of uncompromising values, was staged as equal parts seduction and assault. The two of my friends cast in the roles did an impressive, especially given their age and relative difficulty of what they were trying to convey. I remember watching them in rehearsal, and from the wings on opening night, and thinking it was one of the more shocking and riveting pieces of theater I’d ever seen, and at its end, I felt unsettled and complicit and a little speechless. And that is, in my opinion, a hallmark of a job well done.

“We never would have gotten away with this if the old headmaster had still been around,” I told one of my fellow cast members after opening night. “To be honest with you, I’m kind of amazed we got away with it now.”

“He wouldn’t have censored Shakespeare. What words could he have edited out? “

I shrugged.

She wiped an eye clear of stage make-up. “Besides,” she said. “The old bastard never said a thing about blocking.”

Adolescent Hangover

There was a period of my life, round about my ninth grade year, in which I was so dedicated to living up to my full potential as family black sheep that I would spend evenings regaling my mother with lurid tales of deviant behavior—surreal sexual exploits, drug-fueled four ams and acts of supreme, thrill-seeking stupidity. To authenticate my claims, I’d crib hallucinatory language and evocative details from some combination of Beat novelists and Vanity Fair exposes. I’d invent fictional fellow students to serve as my partners in crime. I’d be sure to assume a weary tone, equal parts regretful and blasé, and finish with a long sigh and a slight eye roll I believed made me appear sort of French. To her endless credit, my mother would sit patiently through my performances and send me off to bed with a nod and a “Well, that sounds like fun. Did you by chance find time to do your Algebra homework?”

I was always disappointed by her response. A different mother would be shocked, I’d tell myself as I huffed off to my bedroom. A different mother would be deeply concerned. A different mother might have stuck me in rehab and grounded me for the rest of my natural life. But that never really entered my mind, just as it never occurred to me that no intrepid explorer of the sexual netherworld and/or hardened user of narcotics would likely tell her mother about it over the dinner table. And even the most sheltered mother would have a hard time believing her daughter swilled absinthe in the girl’s bathroom at the local Junior High before seventh period and cut Latin class to visit an opium den downtown, as I may have once claimed. But it certainly made for more interesting material that my actual experience at age fourteen.

To wit:

1.) I’d smoked a cigarette once at summer camp, in a thicket of scrub pines behind my cabin, in order to prove to the older girls that I hadn’t been responsible for ratting out a wan, blonde girl from Atlanta, who’d hitch-hiked to a nearby flea market to smoke a joint with a junior counselor. The smoke was unsatisfactory, burning my throat and turning my stomach and mostly I remember them laughing at me as a coughed and sputtered and watched a great dark beast of a summer storm blow in over the barrier islands, somersaulting catamarans into the shallow edge of the Sound. Afterward, we hunkered down inside, listening to REM sing about the end of the world while great bony limbs crashed against the window screens and I received patronizing smiles for my poor attempt at appearing a bad ass.

2.) Six months later, I drank my first full glass of wine at my dad’s best friend’s sculpture studio, where I spent my first paternal custody dinner surrounded by martial-looking tools and massive marble forms in medias metamorphosis. Tipsy after half a glass, I wandered the dusty perimeter and felt like the enormous abstracted eye emerging from a rough block of pink stone was following my movement. That this dinner fell a mere two weeks after my father moved out of the house was almost as unsettling as the juice glass full of inexpensive Chianti on a thirteen year old stomach.

3.) I spent one evening with my friend J, hiding out under the great, yawning stone arches of her parent’s house puffing on notebook paper stuffed with opium-flavored incense we’d ground to dust with a mortal and pestle. For a while, we tricked ourselves into believing it worked and cavorted across her front lawn in the moonlight on top of the mountain for about ten minutes before realizing we’d done nothing more than stain our fingers with scented oils and litter the driveway terrace with ash.

This paucity of experience wasn’t for lack of effort. My closest friends and I had a near-academic dedication to getting high. We believed doing drugs would lead to transformative experience, artistic greatness and epic sexual encounters, ideally with rock stars. It would be easy to believe these notions were born out of popular culture. They did, in part[1]. But some credit must also be given to the Nancy Reagan-sanctioned drug education & prevention programs, in which we heard about mythic trips and complete submersion into eternal twilight and apotheosis by way of uppers. The more grotesque the cautionary tale, the more appealing the drug seemed. Everywhere you looked in the late eighties, you saw a story about drug-addled, sex-obsessed, devil-worshipping teenagers (or at the very least, a tabloid shot of Drew Barrymore, who was exactly our age!). It’s no surprise that we felt like we were missing out on the zeitgeist.

We spent hours lamenting the lack of cool friends, street smarts and sex appeal that would put us within reach of second base or a single joint. We lacked the money to buy drugs and the slightest clue as to where we’d buy them even if we did. We couldn’t beg, borrow or steal our way into the sort of party where a joint might get passed. In our desperate, timid naiveté, it never occurred to any of us to, say, investigate the contents of parental medicine cabinets, let alone consider that some of our parents were themselves under the influence and not at all nervous about keeping marijuana in the house.

It’s hard to say, exactly, when all of this changed. I can’t take it back to a moment or even a collection of moments. Most of us found what we were looking for, and almost all of us found our first forays into illegal substances very much like our first forays into sex. Anti-climactic, at best.

I don’t think it’s purely coincidental that most of us hit on sex and drugs at about exactly the same time that we surrendered belief in some magical alternate reality. At some point, you enter the wardrobe headed for Narnia and veer off on a different path when you pass the vintage negligee and the ancient bottle of brandy. The sordid glamour of adulthood with all of its sexual and sensual overtones is one of the very last fantasies of childhood. And we hate to lose it. Which is why we spend so much of our young adulthood making ourselves miserable trying to have a good time.

The worldly pleasures are just that. The easy nightcap. The long lazy afternoon. The full stomach after a truly outstanding meal. The times in your life when planets align and a smile and a touch can make you feel beautiful, if only for a second or two. They’re ephemeral, but so is most everything else, including life itself. I spend too much time in the past to be a true carpe diem enthusiast, but I’m certainly more likely to gather rosebuds than contemplate my lack of a 401(K). Day-to-day life rarely lives up to its advertising. You’ve got to get your jollies where you can. I view the headaches, the indigestion, the social awkwardness, the messy kitchen, and the messier bank account as souvenirs of a time well spent, as opposed to blemishes on my permanent record.

And thus I celebrate the fatigue that follows pleasure. The weighted-eye drowsiness that allows you to sleep soundly at the beach, despite having done absolutely nothing all day save nap and sun and let the waves wash over you after trying half-heartedly to explain the trial of Oscar Wilde to your Bloody Mary sipping grandmother at the cabana pool. The dreamy eyed satisfaction of dozing off after the consummation of some infatuation knowing you’ll be perfectly content even if you never see him again. Or it’s the persistent wooziness of a second day hangover that you treat by sitting outside in the sun on a warm September afternoon, trying to remember all those reasons you so desperately wanted to grow-up.

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[1] I recall that the dark, drug-induced Carmina Burana-soundtracked sex scene in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” figured heavily into our collective fantasy life.