Do You Remember School?

I have been thinking about memory these days, because I have been gathering contributions for Class Notes from my classmates at the Brearley School. Seven contributions have come in, either instantly or, after many weeks, reluctantly. They are long or short, emotional or matter-of-fact, describing adventures abroad or hard work at home, and now my job will be to cut and select, paraphrase and quote, and count words from each contributor—our entire collection will have to add up to no more than six hundred and fifty words. The hard part is trying to give more or less equal space to each of these life accounts, since some of us tend to recount incidents in great detail while others are tight-lipped. If nine of us altogether, including me and my co-agent, contribute notes, then each note is allowed a little over seventy words. If another contribution comes in at the last minute, we all go down to about sixty-five. Do I cut out the trip to Costa Rica, or the visit to the nephew in New Jersey? The recent grandchild, broken hip, or Scrabble competition?

Why did I decide I would not mind being a class-notes agent? For the same two reasons, I suppose, that I pursue any piece of writing—since this, too, would be a kind of writing. First, I like the challenge of trying a new form. In this case, my task is to assemble and adjust, as much as necessary, the writings of a range of personalities to create one fairly coherent whole. The second reason is always emotional. I am drawn to a subject because I am moved by it—its humor or pathos, surprise, perversity, beauty, mystery, perhaps the oddity of a piece of overheard language. Here, one source of my emotion was the years-long experience of the school itself. I was also touched that my classmates suggested me for the job, their sensible reason being: “You’re a writer.” It is a role that places me well inside our small community, whereas I had always felt marginal when I was in school. I was a shy newcomer in fifth grade to an already well-established group. I eventually acquired friends, and a best friend, but I was certainly never “popular.” Later, at reunions over the years, I discovered that many others in the class had also felt marginal, even lonely and isolated, so that it became difficult for us to decide who had actually been, comfortably, in the “center.”

But my co-agent did have a larger circle of friends, and she has a nice, easy way of reaching out and prodding or kidding our classmates into sending us their reports. She is the one to start soliciting and then I gather the material and get busy cutting and pasting. Together we remember deadlines, nudge each other, and double-check our submission. It is a division of labor that has worked quite well in the four years we have been doing it. I like feeling connected in this way to the thirty or forty former girls whose names are so permanently engraved on my mind, whose faces, gestures, and mannerisms I so endlessly used to study in moments of distraction in the classroom, or while waiting my turn in gym.

Once we agents are in touch with the class as a whole, sometimes a question will be asked and a group conversation will spring into being, with a flurry of responses. In the latest case, I was the one who asked: Did anyone else remember a large piece of art in one of our classrooms, probably a homeroom? It was a reproduction of a section of a classical frieze—from the Parthenon, I know now. It was a curious choice for a classroom of prepubescent or pubescent girls: a file of barely clad, muscular men, surely warriors, riding small, strong horses. Prominent was one horse rearing, the rider keeping tight in his seat. The frieze fascinated me, a place to rest my eyes when I was bored or stuck in my work. One or two of my classmates remembered it, but, strangely, many of them not at all.

After we had dealt with that frieze and where it might have hung, maybe in the assembly hall or the classroom of a certain French teacher, the conversation went off on a tangent about this teacher. I did not know her. The conversation then drifted to other French teachers. Were we sure which one had the poodle? Which one led the class in a march around the room singing the “Marseillaise”?

And further afield. Memories were contradictory. Was it Miss Ely who taught the language-arts class in seventh grade that so bored some of us, or Mme. Kostka? No, Mme. Kostka was the Latin teacher. I seem to remember that it was in Miss Ely’s class that I learned about etymologies, cognates, and sentence diagramming, all of which interest me now, whether they did then or not. There was consensus as to which teacher was severe, and which one was amusing and much imitated, and which one was inspiring. Many of my classmates, I discover, including me, were intimidated by the school, and by some of the teachers, more than I realized at the time. We do seem to agree that we had had a good education. And of course that was the point—we were there to be educated, not just to be brave or silly, have crushes and fits of jealousy, form secret clubs, or learn how to recover from a quarrel.

I think of our class as, in some way, a superorganism—many individuals with a common history. But, in fact, this superorganism is also quite various. Some girls entered the school in kindergarten and stayed through twelfth grade, whereas others, like me, entered later and left earlier. I went off to boarding school after ninth grade.

The fact that most of the others don’t remember that remarkable frieze makes me realize how inconsistent our group memory is. Do others remember so distinctly entering the art room and seeing the always fresh and surprising still life that has been set up for us to draw? As I reimagine that arrangement and our warm little bodies in our blue uniforms, tall and short, plump and thin, pushing into the room, I see that I relished the pattern of our days, or at least I relish it now in retrospect—how, over and over, we would enter a classroom for a new period, how the teacher was always poised there with a plan. I found the constant recurrence reassuring: we enter, she is there (it is usually a “she”), a formula or a math problem is already written neatly on the blackboard, or—to our happy surprise one day—the geology teacher has for each of us a boxed set of twelve beautiful minerals, and the lesson begins. (The feldspar, strangely, feels as though it were covered with soft fibre.) The lesson ends, we leave.

I try to figure out why certain memories have remained—why the rest of my experience at the school, no matter how lively or emotional, is buried and beyond reach. One memory, involving the Lower School Library, has surely remained because of a sense of loss. It was a small room, as I remember it—and now I have asked my classmates, and they have corrected what my memory had wrong—with just a few simple furnishings: bookshelves against every wall, a carpet thick enough to lie on, two armchairs, a desk for the librarian, and window seats with “tired cushions” (a classmate says) below the two or three tall windows that opened from the top with a long wooden pole and looked out on the East River. All we were expected to do in that room, during our library period, was to pick out a book and read it, and check it out at the end of the period, if we wanted to. Of the books I read there, I remember only Mazo de la Roche’s rather steamy “Jalna” series—another rather surprising choice for girls of that age—but most vividly I recall the pleasure of reading quietly with so many others in that dark, close room, where the concentrated focus all around me intensified my own.

But then, at the beginning of one school year, I don’t remember which, I was told by the librarian that now that I was in eighth (or ninth) grade I would no longer be allowed to use this library, but would use the one on the sixth floor. The library upstairs, once I found it, was all bright lights, hard surfaces, hard tables and chairs, shelves of heavy reference books. It was for research and study, no longer the darkly padded realm of the imagination. I had been shut out of my refuge. I was not only sad but hurt: how the librarian had frowned at my mistake, redirected me, and sent me away! But now I hear, from more than one classmate, that she was a gentle person. She was simply explaining the rules.

Hearing about the experiences of my classmates twice each year, I become more sharply aware of how different the young schoolchild’s days are from what will come later, as we make the multitudes of decisions that determine the course of our lives. In school, we are herded and directed as a group, identify with it, move with it. Although we are distinct individuals, at home and to our classmates, we also are expected to function as part of a larger unit. We are each given our schedule and we advance through the day from math and English to gym and geography, settle into our chairs in each classroom, and leave again after forty minutes. From my vantage point now, as I must plan, each morning, what I will do during the day, I find comforting the memory of the group schedule and the unavoidable authority of the grownups. The day was decided by someone else, responsibility was off my shoulders, I had only to follow directions—or to fail or resist, with unpleasant consequences. Where are the grownups now?

In fact, I am in touch from time to time with one of my former teachers. I find it a strange thing for me, an elderly woman, to be communicating with a still more elderly woman who was once in charge of me as a child. We were her students in her first year of teaching, and she tells me we remained special to her because of that—she can recall most of our names. I have kept some of the English assignments I wrote in her class (“quote and analyze ten metaphors in Julius Caesar”), with her neatly inscribed comments. It was in part because of her meticulous care and seriousness in correcting my writing that I, too, later took such care with it.

I live with fixed memories of my classmates as children, memories that do not have access to what they were “really” like, inside themselves, within their families, with their closest friends. For me, they are still full of youthful energy, passion, or disgust, riotous laughter or tearful hurt, inspired by ideas quickly conceived and as quickly abandoned, in the setting of a large, warm, late-afternoon homeroom, probably as we were all milling about before going home. “Blessings to all of you for your deep sharing and our knowing each other for almost all of our lives,” one of my classmates recently wrote in an e-mail to us all. And it is true that we have “known” one another for most of our seventy-six or seventy-seven years. Some girls I admired because they were pretty, or generous, some I admired for how well they drew, some I disliked for their coolness, or sarcasm, or superiority. They are so present as they were, in my memory, that I struggle to remember they are no longer rambunctious children but calmer, slower elderly women like me, with our various disabilities, tragedies or joys, difficulties, and gifts. I can become used to my own gradual aging but have a harder time imagining theirs. (And some are gone, having reached the ends of their lives either abruptly or after a gradual decline.)

When, from time to time, we have met in person, at a gathering in someone’s living room for a dinner together, I can usually discern the face of the child in the face of the woman. But, again, I am seeing only the surface. How familiar they all are, and yet I really know so very little about them.

A few years ago, I translated a story by the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel in which he gives an account of a small incident that occurred when he was a young child. He was with his mother on a street corner, waiting impatiently while she talked at length to a friend, in his frustration tearing leaves from a boxwood hedge and wrapping them over his fingertips. After describing the moment, Bichsel remarks that the story is boring, is nothing, but it was the first story of his life, the first he remembered, it was then that he awoke to his life. And he emphasizes that his fingers then were not just the little fingers of a child but the same fingers that he has now, and his anger now is the same as his anger then.

Are my classmates and I the same people we were then? I think we are, in our most essential aspects. We have been inflected by the course of our lives, but only a few of us, possibly, radically changed. My report cards used to comment that I had the potential to be a leader in the class. This surprised me. I was never a leader—I would not have dreamed of it. Nowadays, though I am still sometimes shy, I am also sometimes a leader. Have we all gained confidence, either socially or in what we believe we can do? Maybe. Or maybe we just don’t care anymore what people think—that also comes with age.

About some of our classmates we know nothing at all, since they choose not to send any news. That is interesting to me since, if invited, I am always happy to talk about myself. But I can tell, from those who contribute with reluctance, or who apologize for not contributing, that some think their lives are not interesting enough to report. I regret this. I think we like hearing not only about travels, publications, stellar children, and professional activities, but also about the more ordinary—sitting around a bonfire with friends during a COVID winter, or taking a morning walk to the post office, or helping out at a homeless shelter. Whatever they told would paint that singular picture of their day-to-day life. One contributor wrote, last year, in her note, “I am still very interested in what former classmates are up to, what they care about, how they serve, how they relax and how they use their skills.” I’m not sure I’m naturally gifted at condensing all these colorful details into a concise and entertaining account. But I try not to be too biased in my choice of material. I try to quote their own words as often as I can. And I try to vary the openings of the notes, as I’m sure one, or all, of our English teachers would have taught us. ♦