I stared at the food as if it might evaporate. I hadn’t bought those things. Jess was here. I flicked my eyes to her bedroom door. It looked locked, but of course it would: it was the kind of deadbolt where you needed a key both to lock and unlock it. She might be inside. She might have only stopped by. I had been in the shower. I had been asleep. She could have snuck in. She might still be here.
I would be late if I didn’t leave now to meet my professor. I walked to the TV and snapped it off.
“Jess?” I said.
No scuffled sound of someone trying to keep quiet, no answer, sigh, or breath. I couldn’t see her keeping quiet for long, without running to the bathroom to pee or to check herself in the mirror with the good lighting, to study her new eye shadow or look at her hair another way, or to ask me how to spell “discombobulate” (she was the world’s worst speller, and until she met me she assumed commas were random), or to get water because she believed in eight glasses a day, or, really, just because she wanted to say hi to me. Just to say hi to me. That she wouldn’t do that is what I couldn’t imagine, even after everything.
With the TV off, the silence was piercing. I tiptoed to her door, pressed my ear against it. “Jess?” I whispered. “Are you in there?”
The furnace whooshed on, the refrigerator hummed. I heard a gurgle in an upstairs pipe, the leaky toilet tank burring to life, a car horn honking, the deep-chested bark of a dog on the sidewalk, the endless beat of my own heart, the imaginary sound of the ocean ringing through both ears as if I were holding a seashell. I could have looked for her car, but that was easy. I was afraid it was there, afraid it wasn’t.
“Where are you?” I spoke in my normal voice, suddenly a thousand times too loud, startling me, and I refused to feel afraid so I shouted, “Where the fuck are you, Jess?” and I hammered both fists against her door, until the bones in the sides of my hands felt pulpy, and I rattled the locked door, raging at it, twisting the knob, wanting it to snap off in my hand. Finally I howled, clawing the wood, gouging streaks and scary grooves across the varnish, splintering fingernails and trashing my polish.
Her car wasn’t anywhere.
I was ten minutes late to meet my professor, but he barely cared, waving one hand in a slow semicircle as I tapped the half-open door and slid inside. “Good to see you,” he said, before starting one of those long pauses I guessed someone taught him to do, where the other person breaks and speaks first, absolutely frayed by the pressure of his silence. He pulled that in class all the time. I could wait him out most times, but right now I brimmed with nerves.
“I think I maybe want to be a writer,” I said. “Would you take me in the writing program?” I was breathless, from walk-running all the way down Sheridan Road to University Hall on south campus. It was one of the oldest buildings on campus, always hot and crowded, students roaming and circling with thick down jackets draped over their arms, backpacks mashed and tangled. I was in such a rush that I hadn’t taken off my coat, simply flinging myself into one of the wooden chairs, the one not teetering with double stacks of skinny-spined poetry books.
“There’s paperwork,” he said. “Everyone has to apply.” He reached for a coffee cup but didn’t sip, just held on to it as if his fingers were cold, which had to be impossible since it was about a thousand degrees in this fourth-floor office (one dinky elevator for the whole building; I’d stormed the stairs two at a time). He looked so, what, “poetic” sitting there in his V-neck like all the English department people wore, with his spidery, dark fingers curled around that pretentious mug, a picture of Shakespeare on the side or some other guy in a neck ruff, and I just knew the saying his fingers covered up was something like “What fools these mortals be!” or “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” and that it was a gift from a now ex-girlfriend who’d bought it at some Shakespeare festival. What was sherry anyway? He probably drank cheap beer like everyone else. He was pretty young for a teacher, maybe thirty. But already he had a book of poems that won a prize, all about his dead brother, all sad. I read them last spring in the library, months ago, but one line I couldn’t forget: “But grief is like a dream, interesting only as our own.” I mean, really, that I had tried hard to forget it, but I couldn’t. It was too sad to forget. So even though his coffee mug was stupid, there was that unforgettable line, those poems, along with his dark skin and a rebellious tangle of braids spilling down his back. The creative writing major had fewer requirements than the English major, so mostly there was that. I could grab the paperwork and go without a meeting.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll apply and everything. But I want—no, I need to know if I even could. If I even could be a writer, I mean a real one.” That wasn’t at all what I had planned to say, not even close. I didn’t know I was thinking this. I sounded weak and needy. I sounded sad like the line from the poem. I sounded all alone. I sounded lost. This would be how the fake confessors would talk, I realized, like lost, needy people who were all alone. “Do you keep copies of those really bad poems from class and make fun of them?” I added. “You and the other teachers? Like at a faculty meeting, do you all compare the bad ones? The ones about the dead alewives symbolizing the circle of life and stuff?” As I spoke, I struggled out of my coat, which was hard to do while sitting, and I got trapped by the sleeves, thrashing around like a flipped-over bug, like Gregor fucking Samsa.
Still circling the Shakespeare mug with both hands, he leaned back in his chair, which squeaked melodically, watching until I finally freed myself of my stupid coat. I almost knocked over the stacks of poetry books. Dozens of baby bookmarks jabbed out the top of each book, the markers made from ripping tiny slivers off a normal sheet of paper. His chair squeaked again as he resettled in it. There was one small window to my left, and a slant of sunlight angled in, so sharp it was like it had weight. This silence was going to kill me.
I said, “Did you put any of my poems in that folder?”
I said, “Like, I wasn’t very happy with that one about the staircase and the footsteps, you know, from when we were talking about personification. Did you put that one in that folder of really bad, dumb poems? Did you let anyone else read it?”
I said, “Did you laugh at any of my poems?”
I said, “That really happened, what I wrote about. That was real. Those footsteps. Those.”
I said, “That was my life.”
I said, “That was me.”
It sounded like these things I said were each separate and that it took a hundred years to spit them out. But probably it wasn’t even a minute, and the whole time, he was watching my face. The whole time, he was listening to me, and finally he brought the mug to his lips and took a sip. Then he said, “Yes. I do think you could be a writer. I do. And yes, a real one.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that answer, or any answer. I jumped up and grabbed my coat, hugging it to my chest. “Okay, thanks.”
He laughed, though nothing seemed funny to me. Sweat dribbled down my back. My face felt puffy and hot and pink. “Fill out these forms,” and with one hand, he peeled a couple of pages off a giant stack. “The deadline is next week. And please type,” he added. “I remember your deplorable handwriting.”
Deplorable. I made a mental note to use that word more often. I took the papers, debating whether to hold them pristine in my sweaty hand or stuff them into a crinkle in my book bag. I held. “Have you seen Yeats’s grave?” I asked. Finally I was able to grasp at one of my prepared questions, getting back on track for the sophisticated meeting I had planned.
He seemed startled but said, “I have. Have you?”
Have I? Me? He didn’t know that I had never been on an airplane, let alone gone to Europe; that before coming to this school, I hadn’t even understood Ireland was split up, or known who Yeats was or why we said Yeats one way and Keats another though the words looked like rhymes; that I’d never had a black teacher, let alone a black teacher who wrote poetry and who had seen Yeats’s grave. I shook my h
ead no but felt oddly buoyant.
When he spoke, I could tell it was a piece of poetry by that reverent lilt he got when quoting the real poets in class (he certainly did not read our piddly work with this voice):
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by.
He said, “The epitaph on the stone.” Another silence, but different, the kind of silence where everyone is thinking, and surprisingly he spoke first: “Noting that things carry on after we’re gone. That life and death are...” He peered closely at me. “Well, you’re smart. What do you think?”
I said, “That’s nice,” though of course the quote was much more than nice, and nice was about the stupidest stupid word I could have said about those lines, which were more words I couldn’t forget even if I tried. To distract myself, I concentrated on the skinny line of sweat tickling my spine and how unbearably hot I was. Pop the window and get some air, I wanted to shriek. No wonder he was always hacking coughs in class with this petri dish of an office. It was the worst one in the building, hopefully because he was so young and hopefully not discrimination against the only black English professor.
“I’ll fill this out as soon as possible,” I said, rattling the papers in my hand to add authority. Then I crammed them awkwardly into my book bag.
“Very good,” he said. “Welcome to the sweet torture of the writing life.”
My smile felt embarrassed and confused, but maybe he saw beyond it, because he went on: “‘A terrible beauty is born.’”
Later, I learned that line was also Yeats, from “Easter, 1916,” the famous poem about the Irish rebellion, a breakthrough for Yeats and his political evolution. Later, I saw Yeats’s grave in Ireland for myself, and a scruffy grad student took my picture beside the tombstone, my fingertips deep into the famous words etched into the stone. This professor and I crossed paths again, the first time at a poetry reading in an incandescent city I’d always considered more dream than destination. And crossed paths, and crossed and crisscrossed, until our lives were entwined. He gave me Baldwin and Portugal; I rescued his pages from the trash; we whispered by candlelight and murmured on balconies and argued long-distance, and when it was over, we stayed in love for a long time after.
Later again, I couldn’t say when, I realized that what the professor said to me this day was what he would say to any hopeful cluttering his office. He was merely doing his job as director of the creative writing major, reeling in students to keep his department funded and placate the dean. I had not been tagged as a special person of genius. I was not some extraordinary talent waiting to be properly honed. He neither said nor implied that, not any of that, which is so clear in retrospect. But such is random luck—that we don’t recognize it’s luck as it happens, or that it’s random—and those casual, tossed-off, empty sentences of his became an open door beckoning to me, a haven to step inside.
I plunged out of University Hall into the crisp blue of October, thinking about Yeats, half expecting to see a horseman. I felt slightly important, like this feeling might last forever. But there was Sydney Moore, posed in front of the Rock, staring as if it were some sort of oracle at Delphi instead of what it was, a semi-embarrassing school mascot—I guess, if an inanimate object could be a mascot—centered in the plaza, perpetually painted and repainted with a mélange of Greek letters. That was the thing to do with the Rock late at night, splash it with paint and your Very Important Message (PHI PSIS RULE!) and stand guard until morning to make sure it wasn’t painted over by a competing group’s Very Important Message (PHI DELTS RULE!). Rumor was the Rock was actually an old drinking fountain that had been coated with years of paint layers, turning it into a misshapen lump the size of a VW bug. Not that anyone believed this story, but it was more interesting than the truth of it just being a rock.
I stood still as purposeful students zigzagged busily, their brains buzzing about important meetings with professors and reserve reading in the library and band rehearsal, like a scene in a movie where everything else speeds up until it was only me and Sydney both motionless, linked in some significant way. So when Sydney turned and started walk-running, it felt right to leap into her wake, following. She sped along the asphalt path that wound behind University Hall, continuing over by Annie May Swift Hall and the library, the path eventually leading on to the student center and, beyond that, if she kept going, to the lake. She wore sweatpants with her sorority letters slapped across her butt and red high-tops, which I coveted immediately. On top, a purple sweatshirt baggy enough to look swiped from a boyfriend or an ex, perhaps Tommy.
There was no reason to follow her, just that everyone else was moving with such purpose. I had purpose, I reminded myself as I slid into my coat on the run, I had a goal, the most immediate being to type up my application for the creative writing major and, more immediate than that, to get myself to my Victorian Novels seminar that met in ten minutes, where my clear purpose was to make pertinent remarks about The Portrait of a Lady so I would get a good grade, the purpose of which was to get a high enough GPA to land me into business school or law school and to get good grades there and meet fancy friends who would help me get high-salary jobs in interesting cities, who would invite me to the kind of parties and weddings where I would be a bridesmaid and meet the man I would marry, who would also have a high-salary job in the same interesting city. There was a whole path of purpose ahead of me, ahead of all of us, but instead of putting my head down and following it, today I trailed Sydney Moore through campus.
Her dusty-blond hair was in a tight ponytail, bobbing in a perfect, hypnotic arc, never too far one way or the other. Maybe the ponytail was her choice, but in my experience ponytails meant unwashed hair. Also in my experience: unwashed hair meant unshaven legs and possibly unbrushed teeth—but this was impossible to imagine of Sydney, so must be she was late for something, and she simply tumbled out of bed in a crazed rush. One shoe was untied, but she didn’t stop to fix it or notice when the lace dragged through a puddle. People hurrying in the opposite direction lifted hands and waved, mumbled “hey,” but she kept her head low, rarely even a nod. She knew about everyone, or everyone knew her anyway—even when there wasn’t a hello, there was a sign of startled recognition on the faces blurring by. She kicked through leaves, veering to knock through the biggest heaps, and even found a loose rock that she kept going for a while, knocking it fiercely forward.
I was getting farther from where my class met, but I matched her pace even as the sweat built up again. I realized I had never spoken to her, maybe never heard her voice. Tommy had loved her, presumably—though I couldn’t imagine him murmuring “I love you” without chortling immediately after.
Something about the liquid blue of this particular sky sharpened everything I saw, making me expect meaning from these ordinary things: the crunch of leaves, the glinting windows of the three library towers, Sydney’s vivid red shoes, William Butler Yeats. My mind filled with anticipation, unsure of what I was anticipating. Almost like when I was a kid, walking home after school, the house key loose in my coat pocket, my fingers running over its grooves and ridges, and a voice stuck in my head: She’s on Eastwood Drive now, and at the corner, she turns right. Here’s where the tied-up black dog lunges and barks. Time to cross the street again, so she looks both ways. She’s cutting across the yard. She’s at the porch. She’s at the door. She’s opening the door. The door’s open. She’s inside. My heart banging, my breath rattling, though no one was home, only me.
Sydney dashed onto a dogleg that led around the side of Baxter, the student center, and to a little-used back door, which she pushed through. Baxter was boxy and glassy and aggressively modern, seemingly built from spackle and cement, all open space, all cold floors and sharp angles and echoes, utterly lacking in nooks and the colors and shapes most people would identify as homey; you couldn’t even think a word like “chintz” without feeling mortified. It was like, Here’s a new student center for you people, but don’t ge
t comfortable. There was a grill—grease a specialty—and the Cone Zone for ice cream (both places I visited too often); a game room with pool (dominated by frat boys) and Ping-Pong (dominated by Chinese grad students); meeting rooms for clubs; the student newspaper headquarters; the place to cash checks with a student ID; various administrative bureaucrats scattered in offices; a “quiet room” filled with reasonably soft chairs, racks of magazines, and dozing students; a pushpin map for people hoping to hitch rides to various cities; and the campus bookstore, where we loaded up on textbooks and rah-rah, like the purple sweatshirt Sydney wore. This is where she ended up, swooshing through the glass doors, so me too, several steps behind and slowing my pace, curious to see what she was buying—spiral notebook? Tampax? Did Sydney Moore use Tampax? I was sliding my book bag into one of the lockers at the front of the store, ready to stalk Sydney through the aisles, but she was already at the open cash register. Not like she was much noticing the existence of other people, but I scooped up a copy of the student newspaper and flipped to the angsty personals in the classifieds, pretending I might be the “Kant-carrying brunette in the libes at 9:00 break.” I could stare at the paper while spying on Sydney in line, sighing and shifting her weight; she was even less patient than Jess. I couldn’t make out what she was buying; something small and purple was crumpled under one arm. Pom-pom hat for next week’s football game? Puffy mittens for winter? Freshman year, right when I got here, I splurged on a purple football jersey with a number printed on the back that I thought was arbitrary but that I later found out was supposed to be your graduation year. I was off by one, so wearing the shirt made me feel like a fraud, like trying to pass myself off as older. Worse, I felt like an idiot, the girl too stupid to buy a school T-shirt. I barely wore it except in Iowa, where no one knew my screwup.
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