As time passes, Tiffany comes to think of the Night as the Situation because she knows they fucked in one sense or another even before they did it with their bodies. Now, when the Situation reappears in her mind, the facts are tangled and rearranged, some missing, some deformed, like a puppy got to them first, and many seem to have been swallowed whole, looping and knotting questions inside her gut. What did they choose? What was chosen for them? Who undressed whom? Had it been pinot noir? He entered her, he exited her, but what happened in between? Did he give her tea or coffee the next morning? Was it Stella or Wayne who picked her up from her ACT prep class? Was there anything salvageable about this? Was there anything interesting about this? Did James and his wife get divorced? She wanted, and he wanted, but what exactly did they want?
Tiffany reads The Waste Land over and over, which makes more and more sense to her on every read, although she has no idea what it’s about. Here is Belladonna, writes Eliot, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations. Tiffany is not a lady of situations—everyone assumes she is, but she’s not. This is her only Situation.
In the aftermath, Tiffany picks up more shifts at Ampersand. She legally changes her name to Blandine, after a teenaged martyr who stoically endured public torture at the hands of the Romans. Blandine persuades her foster parents that she needs some time off. She finds a book on female mystics in the library and reads it in one night while drinking Wayne’s Yukon Jack. She rents two more books and requests a third from their partner branch. The mystics were sick and wonky geniuses, often hilarious, always alone.
Hildegard is Blandine’s favorite mystic because she is about a hundred people in one body. Hildegard of Bingen: prophet, composer, botanist, abbess, theologian, doctor, preacher, philosopher, writer, saint. Doctor of the Church. A veritable polymath. She didn’t ask anyone’s permission to be these things, to be everything; she just did it. She was always writing letters to male members of the clergy, telling them to get their act together. They weren’t blowing the trumpet of God’s justice, was the problem. She wrote recipes. The tenth of ten children, she was born to a noble German family who donated her to the Church as a tithe, an alarmingly common practice of the time. Hildegard was born sickly, as the mystics always were, and experienced visions since she was a child but didn’t tell anyone about them until she was in her forties. In her writings, she adopts an annoyingly gendered humility, painting herself as some idiot savant, some silly little woman. This initially annoyed Blandine, but upon reflection, she realized that it was a brilliant choice: it was the only way her exclusively male superiors would let her assume as much spiritual authority as she did, lecturing priests and publishing her books. Kings consulted her.
Blandine was born sickly, too. She made her social worker explain it to her once: she was born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. On the Finnegan scale, she scored a ten. Her biological mother was high at the time of the birth, and as soon as Blandine arrived in the world, she began to experience withdrawal. “You were treated for three months,” explained the social worker. “Your symptoms became subacute over time. Your foster family took great care of you, though. Do you remember them? The Millers? They really loved you.”
Later, Blandine looked it up: babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome required pharmacological treatment. A controlled dosage of morphine. They have tremors and a fever. You have to minimize light and sound, hold the baby a lot—almost all the time.
Now, studying a book of Hildegard’s chaotic and luminous writing, Blandine tries to remember if she ever had visions as a child. Slowly, images return to her: worlds of cotton candy and light, mothers and geometry, lilac triangles and little jumping goats. Voices telling her that she would be free, one day. That she would be held.
She did have visions. Didn’t everyone?
Three weeks pass this way. Wayne and Stella accommodate Blandine because social services warned them that Tiffany had experienced repeated trauma and that she coped far worse than she appeared to. Social services also warned Stella and Wayne that Tiffany was unpredictable and possibly dangerous. Blandine enrolls in an “Independence Workshop” that will expedite her transition out of the foster system and into independence, which Wayne and Stella encourage. Neither of them attended college, and they find her resistance to it sensible. They tell St. Philomena that Tiffany—Who now goes by Blandine, by the way—is taking a leave of absence.
“For her health,” Stella says on the phone. “Your school has worked this girl to death.”
The Independence Workshop is hosted at Vacca Vale High and taught by an irrationally chipper man named Micah, someone with a background in youth ministry. You could see the God all over him. He loves his wife, his kids, his dogs, his grill, his aboveground pool. He’s the lead singer of a Christian rock band. As far as Blandine can tell, the worst thing that had ever happened to him was the alcoholism of his grandfather, who got sober well before Micah was born. Whenever students answer questions correctly, Micah distributes Smarties. “Smarties for a smarty!” He grins, and the whole class scowls. Despite herself, Blandine feels affection for this man. Maybe it’s pity. His optimism is embarrassing, yes, but she finds herself helplessly rooting for him. The course involves watching a lot of videos from the nineties about how to balance checkbooks and triumph by bending the truth in job interviews. During breaks, girls deal weed in the bathroom. For the hell of it, one shows off the knives she keeps in her jacket. In class, under the guise of note-taking, Blandine writes unhinged spiritual advice in the voice of Hildegard von Bingen. Through the psychological fog of that summer, she sees that she is only partially real, partially alive. Unfit for human contact. She sees that this has always been true.
At the workshop, she sits behind a boy named Todd who draws exquisite comics with a left hand and a fine-tipped marker. She loves to watch him conjure whole worlds from nothing but ink, paper, and thought. When a handsome guy named Malik stops Blandine after class and asks if she wants to live with him and two other boys in a four-bedroom apartment near the river, Blandine says sure. Later, she’ll wonder what made her accept his offer so swiftly: an investment in her life, or an indifference to it? She’s got to live somewhere, she reasons, and boys don’t scare her. Men don’t scare her. Nobody scares her. Nobody can break into you if you break out of your body first. In 177 AD, not a single hungry beast touched Blandine of Lyon in that arena. “Cool.” Malik smiles. He looks like an actor. Not a specific one—all of them. “If we get it, we’d move in on August first. I think they’ll like our application more now that there’s a girl.”
The rent he found is cheap.
Blandine forbids self-pity, but she permits rage. When she takes inventory, she grants that many aspects of her Situation were enraging: in the end, she was insignificant to the person who was most significant to her; she freely entered a power dynamic that was prematurely fucked; she allowed herself to participate in the fracturing of a family, even if they remained together; her behavior was surely anti-feminist, although she hasn’t worked out the particulars of this, yet; she invited one person in the world to see her, and as soon as he did, he fled; she never returned to school, although the college counselor pushed competitive courses and applications on her, and learning was her drug of choice. Almost every teacher from St. Philomena contacts her, plying her with descriptions of her worth, urging her to return. James does not contact her at all. If you don’t come back, you will not only break my heart—you will break your future, writes her English teacher, whom she loves. Blandine deletes it. She hates melodrama.
She prefers the anger of the principal, apparent in his email: