The Finishing School Read online

  “After you settle in,” her mother chirps, her Estonian accent even more grating than usual, “we’ll walk down to Place St. François for a hot chocolate and a ramequin. You haven’t had hot chocolate until you’ve had one here.”

  Kersti continues to stare out the window, remembering bits and pieces from the dozens of Lausanne brochures her mother gave her before they left. The city is built on the southern slope of the Swiss plateau, she recalls, rising up from the lakeshore at Ouchy. As the taxi climbs the steep cobblestone streets, a dramatic panorama of the Alps comes into view and the city begins to look distinctly more European than it did down by the train station.

  Her new school is in a suburban section of Lausanne, set back from the street, enclosed by a black wrought-iron gate and hidden behind a fortress of leafy trees. Kersti notices the black bars on the windows and can’t help comparing the school to an eighteenth-century women’s prison. She can’t believe this is where she will be for the next four years.

  There are half a dozen buildings that make up the campus, the two largest connected by an enclosed footbridge. All the buildings are white with carved green dormer windows and red-tile roofs. A sign at the entrance announces lycée internationale suisse. bienvenue.

  Kersti hauls her suitcase inside Huber House, which her mother tells her is the main building that houses both the dining room on the first floor and the dorms on the second, third, and fourth. The other houses are Frei, Chateau, and Lashwood.

  Inside Huber House, it’s dark and drafty, shabby. It reminds Kersti of the Estonian House back home. Everywhere is dark wood—the long dining tables, the chairs, the floors and ceilings, the crown moldings, the stairwell and banister. The drapes are dark green velvet, puddled on the floor. A carved plaque in the foyer proclaims the school’s founding mission statement: Preparing Young Women to Become Citizens of the World since 1915. The corridor smells of beef stew and cigarette smoke.

  “Ah, the smoking,” her mother says, with a nostalgic sigh. “I miss Europe.” Her big complaint about Canada is that no one smokes anymore.

  A small, dark-haired woman wearing a red blazer with dwarfing shoulder pads, a matching red pencil skirt, and bright white Reeboks greets them in the foyer. She looks somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, but it’s hard to tell. She isn’t very attractive—her hair is cut in a blunt, mannish style, very unflattering, as though she did it herself with kitchen scissors—but there’s something warm about her brown eyes. Or maybe it’s the way she smiles, like she’s absolutely thrilled to see you.

  “I’m Madame Hamidou,” she says, giving Kersti a hard handshake. “Welcome to the Lycée and to Huber House. I’m your housemother.”

  She has a wiry, athletic body that she propels up the stairs, taking two at a time in her pristine running shoes. “You’ll be in good shape by the end of the year,” she calls down to them. Kersti can’t figure out her accent. She speaks perfect English with only the faintest trace of something European—possibly French or German. “Here’s your room,” she announces, throwing open the door. “Your roommate is Cressida. She’s a returning student so she can show you the ropes.”

  “When did she start?” Kersti’s mother wants to know. “I was here from fourth grade until I graduated.”

  “Cressida’s been here since second grade.”

  Second grade? Kersti looks at her mother in a new light of gratitude for not having shipped her overseas at the age of seven.

  “The welcome luncheon is at twelve fifteen,” Hamidou says. “Students only.”

  Kersti steps into the room and looks around. It’s weird and old-fashioned; nothing matches. There are two single beds side by side, with tall brass headboards and matching comforters in a 1960s gold paisley design. The furniture is of a heavy oak—a bedside table between the beds, two twin desks, a bookcase, two behemoth dressers. There’s a garish carpet with a design of brown, mustard, and rust medallions, faded floral wallpaper in pinks and greens, dingy eyelet curtains in the windows, and a porcelain pedestal sink in the corner that may have been here since the school was built in 1916.

  “Is this what forty thousand dollars buys?” Kersti asks, going over to the bed and touching the disgusting comforter. She knows what a year at the Lycée costs because she overheard her father complaining about it. He didn’t want to send Kersti here even on a scholarship, but her mother can be extremely forceful.

  “Wait till you sleep under it,” her mother says, unzipping Kersti’s suitcase. “It’s filled with goose down.”

  Kersti would be happy with her old polyester quilt from home. She wanted to go to a regular high school in Toronto and have her own room with her own things. She doesn’t need to ski the Alps and sleep under goose down or learn French to make her well-rounded. She opens the large bay windows overlooking the back of the school grounds and here at last is the postcard she’s envisioned—clusters of red-tiled roofs and church spires descending into shimmering, opalescent Lake Geneva, which stretches out toward France and the majestic Alps.

  “That’s Evian over there,” her mother says. “Isn’t it breathtaking? I remember the day I arrived. . . .”

  Kersti tunes her mother out. The view is nice. It smells good, too. Like clean laundry. But it’s not home.

  At lunch they serve thick brown stew and strange noodles that look like fried white worms. Nice warm rolls, hot chocolate, and kiwi. Kersti eats in silence, seated beside a giant German girl with a crude bowl haircut, clothes from the seventies, and a strong body odor that wafts across the table. According to the sticker on her chest, her name is Angela Zumpt. The smell is so pungent Kersti can’t turn her head in that general direction without feeling queasy.

  The teacher at the head of Kersti’s table is Mrs. Fithern. She has curly brown hair and slightly buck, overlapping front teeth. She tells them she’s from England and asks them where they’re from, what grade they’re going into, and how they like Switzerland. Kersti is grateful to be halfway down the table so she doesn’t have to answer. She isn’t like the rest of these girls. She’s only here because she got some obscure scholarship.

  Her roommate doesn’t turn up for the welcome lunch, nor is she there when Kersti’s mother drops her off after dinner. Curfew is ten. Ten! Kersti hasn’t gone to bed at ten since third grade. She sits by herself in her new room, staring out at the Alps, feeling completely alone. She already misses her mother. How does a mother just drop her child off in another country and leave, she wonders? How did all the mothers of all these orphans do it?

  Kersti imagines the kind of mother she’ll be to her own children. Loving, nurturing, fun, present. She will never ship them overseas. She’ll be hands-on, devoted; she’ll want to be with them. And she’ll have them before she’s thirty, too, so she can be full of energy and enthusiasm. Eila will be her first daughter, Elise her second. She doesn’t like anything for a boy yet, but she probably won’t have boys anyway.

  Close to ten, Mme. Hamidou sticks her head into the room and interrupts Kersti’s fantasizing. “Cressida will be here tomorrow,” she says. “It gets better, love.”

  Hamidou turns out the lights and closes the door behind her. Kersti can hear her running downstairs to the lounge, one floor below. She can smell the smoke from Mme. Hamidou’s cigarettes. She closes her eyes and lies down, succumbing to the jet lag. She sleeps like a baby under the fluffy down duvet with the fresh Swiss air blowing in from the open dormer window.

  The next morning, Kersti comes back from the shower to find her roommate, Cressida Strauss, unpacking a box of books. Kersti’s breath catches; she’s never seen anyone like her.

  “Hi,” she says, shoving a handful of books in the bookcase.

  Kersti is wrapped in a towel, naked except for her flip-flops and a streak of blood on her shin from where she cut herself shaving. Cressida is wearing a chambray Polo button-down tucked into faded Levi’s, with riding boots, completely casual. But on her . . . She looks like she’s just ridden in on her horse, fresh-che
eked and windblown, posing for a Ralph Lauren ad. Her suitcases and a number of boxes are piled on the floor at her feet.

  “I’m Cressida,” she says, as ordinary as can be. But she’s far from ordinary. She has a beautiful, unruly mane of hair, spiraling out in all directions. Her head is just slightly too big for her slender body, but she’s dazzling, with pale green eyes, exquisitely long lashes, and a prominent, arched brow. Kersti is literally awestruck by her perfect pink complexion, no doubt from all that good clean Swiss air. Her posture, her height, her long legs—all of it together a masterpiece of teenage magnificence.

  Staring at her, practically with her mouth agape, Kersti hates, worships, and wants to be her in one sweeping, exhilarating moment. She feels suddenly dwarfed in her presence, diffused. Cressida is on a whole other level of beauty. She’s in another realm.

  “Where are you from?” Cressida asks, shoving books onto the shelf.

  “Canada.”

  “With a name like Kersti Kuusk?”

  “My parents are Estonian but I grew up in Toronto.”

  “Great. No language barrier. My last roommate was from Japan. Didn’t speak a word of English.”

  Kersti can’t help noticing the books she’s lining up in their communal bookcase: Ulysses, The Wings of the Dove, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, Tender Is the Night.

  “Do you want to go get a chope?” Cressida asks, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in her hand.

  “What’s a chope?”

  Cressida smiles. Gorgeous teeth, gleaming white, straight.

  They go up the street to the Café le Petit Pont Bessières, a fluorescent-lit saloon full of old Swiss men drinking beer for breakfast. Cressida orders two chopes, which are barrel-shaped steins of Cardinal beer. “Welcome to Switzerland,” she says, clanking her mug against Kersti’s. “What do you think so far?”

  “The students seem kind of strange,” Kersti says. “Everyone smokes and speaks a bunch of languages and wears shoulder pads in their sweatshirts.”

  From what she gathered at yesterday’s luncheon, most of the kids at the Lycée have grown up in European boarding schools. Their parents are princes, princesses, famous designers, actors, oil barons in the Middle East. “I like the name Cressida,” Kersti says. “I’ve never heard it before.”

  “My mother is a Shakespeare buff,” Cressida explains. “Of course she had to name me after one of the most obscure and misunderstood of all his plays.”

  She waits a beat and, realizing Kersti has no idea what she’s talking about, says, “Cressida was a traitor, the archetype of female duplicity. She betrayed her supposed true love Troilus, a Trojan, and aligned with the Greeks. And then she was basically forgotten.”

  “My name means ‘follower of Christ,’ which is ironic since my parents are both atheist.”

  Cressida laughs and Kersti feels a sudden crushing desire to impress her new roommate, to hear that laugh again and again.

  “So what’s your story?” Cressida asks her.

  “I don’t think I have one.”

  “If you’re here, you’ve got one.”

  Kersti thinks about it for a moment. She feels unsure of herself, more than the usual low hum of insecurity. The beer is making her queasy. Everything is whirling—her mind, the room, her sense of balance.

  Cressida hands her a cigarette from her pack of Marlboro Lights.

  “I don’t—”

  “Right.” Cressida lights one for herself. “Give it some time,” she says confidently. “Smoking is like breathing here. I started at twelve.”

  “My parents are European. They both smoke.”

  Cressida exhales perfect smoke donuts above Kersti’s head. “You met Claudine?”

  “Who?”

  “Madame Hamidou. Our mother-away-from-home.”

  “Yes. She seems nice.”

  “What does your dad do?” Cressida asks her, jumping from one question to the next.

  “He owns a travel agency.”

  Cressida raises an eyebrow.

  “I’m here on scholarship,” Kersti says.

  Cressida tips her head and fixes her aquamarine eyes on Kersti, as clear and brilliant as two perfectly round gemstones.

  “My mother is an Old Girl,” Kersti explains. “Her parents had money, but they cut her off when she moved to Canada with my dad.”

  “That’s romantic.”

  Nothing about her parents’ marriage strikes Kersti as romantic. It’s true Anni Lepp came from a fairly affluent family—by Estonian standards—and gave it all up to be with Kersti’s father, Paavo, but having grown up in their home, under the dark cloud of their mismatched union, Kersti can only describe her mother’s decision as impractical and misguided. Romantic, never.

  Anni was from the Old Town of Tallinn, the daughter of a successful architect. She claims to have had a good childhood. They lived in a modern house facing a vast pine forest and her fondest memory is of putting on her cross-country skis inside the house every morning, and then skiing down the stairs right into the woods. When she was nine, her father sent her to school in Switzerland. It was 1944 and he wanted her to be safe and also to have better opportunities than she would have had in a poor country like Estonia. She ended up staying there almost a decade. Her father also sent his money to Switzerland, stashing it there for safekeeping during the war, which is how he managed to hang on to it when most people lost everything. When she graduated from the Lycée, her parents sent her to Canada to live with second cousins, always hoping she would have a better life than Estonia could offer.

  Paavo was a poor working-class guy from Kalamaja in Northern Tallinn. He was not educated and had no obvious skills or ambition. He worked on the assembly line at the cross-country ski factory. In 1948, when he was eighteen, he went to Canada on the SS Walnut—a boat full of Baltic refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. Paavo had nothing of real substance to offer a girl like Anni Lepp, but he was extremely handsome and charismatic, and she fell in love with him at an Estonian Youth Club dance. He’d already been in Canada five years but was still doing odd jobs in factories. He hadn’t managed to build anything.

  Her parents were furious. All their hard work and sacrifice to ensure a good life for their daughter had led Anni to a blue-collar Estonian barely eking out a living. When she married him, they cut her off.

  Four decades later, Kersti’s parents have the kind of terrible marriage that is marred not by vicious fighting, but by frequent, long, punishing silences.

  “Does she ever regret it?” Cressida asks Kersti.

  “Marrying my dad?”

  “Sacrificing the family money.”

  “We don’t talk about that stuff.”

  “Parents rarely do,” Cressida says. “They’re too afraid to let us know they make mistakes. God forbid we would ever find out they’re human.”

  “What are your parents like?” Kersti asks her. “How come they sent you here when you were so young?”

  “It was the best thing for me,” Cressida says, as though she’s said it a million times before and believes it. It’s a canned response, even Kersti can tell. “My mother’s a stage actress and my father is a producer. She’s British and he’s back and forth between L.A. and New York all the time. They’re never in the same city for very long. They felt boarding school would give me the most stability.”

  “Did it?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Kersti can’t tell if she’s being serious.

  “What difference does it make if I’m here on my own, or if they’re fucking me up in closer proximity?” she says rhetorically. “It all evens out in the end.”

  She finishes her chope and flags the waiter, who doesn’t seem to care how old they are.

  “Do you do this every Sunday morning?” Kersti asks her.

  “And Saturdays after lunch.”

  “Is there anything else to do?”

  “Besides skiing? Sometimes we go to Ouchy, down by the lake.”

  The waiter
brings over the chope and Cressida speaks to him in perfect, melodic French. They laugh and he pats her shoulder affectionately.

  “What else can you tell me about Kersti Kuusk?”

  Kersti wants to tell her something dramatic and shocking that will impress her, but she doesn’t have much in her arsenal. Her father drinks too much. Whose doesn’t? She’s a virgin. It’s the usual adolescent alienation and sense of impending doom. “I’m pretty ordinary.”

  “You must have some little juicy secret.”

  “My family’s nickname for me is Ônnetus,” Kersti offers.

  “Which means?”

  “Accident,” Kersti replies. “My mom got pregnant with me after her tubes were tied, seven years after what was supposed to be her last kid. I don’t really get along with any of them.”

  “Didn’t they adore you and smother you? Isn’t it always like that when the baby of the family comes along late?”

  “Not in my family. They were pretty indifferent to me. It’s kind of like I’m not a real Kuusk because I wasn’t supposed to be. I think that’s the real reason they sent me here. They don’t have the energy to parent me.”

  “I knew you had a story,” Cressida says triumphantly.

  “I don’t think about it much.”

  “That’s a lie. I bet you think about it a lot.”

  Cressida is right. Kersti does think about it a lot. Cressida already understands that about her, which is really quite thrilling. No one has ever gotten her before, or for that matter, really seen her and accepted her anyway. Cressida doesn’t seem to give a shit about Kersti’s lack of credentials, or who she has to pretend to be for the world, or what she looks like, or her silly bravado. She’s dug her hands right inside Kersti and she’s feeling around in there, looking for something she can get hold of, something dirty and real she can grasp. That’s what she’s really interested in—the gory truth—which is utterly freeing.

  “What about you?” Kersti says. “What’s your story?”

  “It’s only our first date,” Cressida answers, smiling. “Too soon for my dark secret.”