The Summer Without Men

suitably absurd. The look of surprise and confusion on their faces made me laugh. They did not laugh with me, but at least they had been rattled out of their fatigue. It was time for my speech, and I made it. The gist of it was that a single story with seven characters can also be seven stories, depending on the identity of the narrator. Every character will regard the same events in her own way and will have somewhat different motives for her actions. Our task was to make sense of a true story. I had given it a title: “The Coven.” This was met with a round of wordless murmurs. We would meet every day this week to make up for the lost classes. Today each girl would read her text and we would talk about it, but in the following four days, we would trade places and write the story from the point of view of someone else. Jessie would become Emma, for example, and Joan, Alice, and Jessie, Ashley, and I, Nikki, and so on. Eyes widened, worried looks exchanged across the table. By the end of the week, we would have a story authored by the entire class. The trick was, we would have to agree, more or less, on the content.
    To be honest, I had no idea whether this would work. It was not without its risks. Note: The now famous psychology experiment at Stanford in 1971. A group of young men, all college students, took on the roles of either prisoners or guards. Within hours the guards began tormenting their prisoners and the experiment was stopped. The theater of cruelty made real? Performance becomes the person? How malleable were the seven?
    I began with a short summary of my experience: my suspicions during class, my bafflement about the Kleenex, and my dim awareness that some plot was cooking. I also mentioned my involvement in a similar story as a girl. I did not say which role I had played. You, friend out there, will mostly be spared the tedium of early adolescent prose; it is worse than the poetry. (Not one child chose to describe the hex scandal in verse.) Suffice it to say that the clumsy and often ungrammatical narrations were not harmonious. After every reading, the refrains “I never said that!” “It was your idea, not mine!” “That’s not how it was at all!” rang out loudly. Some of the tiffs were of no importance, when and where and who. “You put the dead cricket in the formula, not me!” “Ask my mom. She saw you coming out of the bathroom with blood running down your arm, remember?” Nevertheless, there were recurring justifications for the plot: They had all liked Alice at first, but then, as time went on, she had distinguished herself in ways they didn’t like. She had been Mr. Abbot’s “pet” in history class and was always raising her hand with the answer. She bought her clothes in Minneapolis in a department store, not at the Bonden mall. She read all the time, which was “boring.” Ashley’s synopsis included the fact that Alice had been given a starring role in the school play, and after this “lucky break,” she had metamorphosed into “a big snob.” What had begun as a “little fun” among the conspiratorial witches to “get back at Alice” had somehow, mysteriously, run wild, of its own accord. There were no agents in this version of the story, just currents of feeling, very much like spells, that had pulled the girls hither and yon. Bea and I used to have a phrase when we were growing up that described such actions well: “accidentally on purpose.” When I mentioned this, there were sheepish smiles all around, except of course from Alice, who was hard at work scrutinizing the table’s surface.
    She read last. Despite the ugliness of the tale she had to tell, the girl had cast herself as its heroine in the mode of Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, those wronged orphans I had loved so much when I was her age, and she had worked hard on the story. Heavily adjectival and hyperbolic though it was, and not free of diction errors (“torturous” for “tortured”), it articulated both her intense need to be inside the group and the agony of being an outcast. Listening to her, I guessed that although her dramatis persona would not endear her to all the members of the Coven, finding it had been a boon for her. The victim came out well in her version of events, if only because Alice had dressed up her alter ego in gothic conventions that had been conveniently aided by the memorable storm that had cracked the heavens as I lay in bed that night in June. Apparently, while