Most sincerely,
Alexander Stromm
P.S. Please extend my sympathies to Trenton.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 8:48 P.M.
Green Fields
And Thomas was a good friend. The fact that he was an uncomplicated guy made him that way. You could argue with Thomas over the littlest stuff, and even if it snowballed into a fight, he wouldn’t hold it against you. Like a lot of people, he liked arguing for the sake of arguing. His father was a hotshot litigator, so he came by it honestly.
Like I wrote in the essay, Thomas and I really did go down to the river to fish sometimes, and although we talked about doing it, we never brought along anything illegal (i.e., pot) when it was just the two of us. We played by the rules, and that was nice because we didn’t have to worry about Dean Mansfield jumping out of the bushes during one of his “nature walks,” as he calls them, although we call them “patrol strolls.” Thomas would pack us a lunch (peanut butter crackers, Snickers bars, a couple of apples), and I would take care of the bait. We didn’t fly-fish—too many trees—so I dug up worms and grubs in the early morning after a rain. Although I never told Thomas this, I felt like we were Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer before Injun Joe entered the picture.
As far as Great American Novels go, put me down for Huckleberry Finn. It’s a hell of a lot better than Moby-Dick; I am having a hard time getting past the first chapter of that one. I read the library’s copy sometimes when I get writer’s block. Miss Dovecott says that schools don’t teach it anymore because there isn’t time enough during the academic year to cover all of the Greats. It makes her sad that such a fine novel collects dust on a shelf. It’s good for me, though, because a big book gives me something to hide behind.
Green Fields Gone
This afternoon in my room that I used to share with Clay, I copy the letter onto stationery with my name across the top, but what if it makes Mrs. Broughton cry? What if she and Mr. Broughton already hate me forever? I had not had the guts to offer them my condolences in person, and as soon as I drop the letter through the mail slot, I regret it.
The Artists
As I’m walking back from the post office, Miss Dovecott catches up with me. “Maybe you have a minute or two,” she says, pointing to a bench in the quadrangle. Another cold, hard bench. I feel sick to my stomach.
“I’ll get straight to the point,” she says. The point is that she finds my writing exciting. My most recent essay revealed to her that of all the students she teaches, I am the most observant. I have the sensitivity of a person twice my age. She believes that I feel things with my heart that I’m unable to put into words. She calls me a natural-born poet. As she says all of these things that no one has ever said to me before, she follows my eyes with hers, which are dark and deep like pockets.
“You are on my side,” she says.
“What side is that?” I ask.
“The winning side,” she says, and smiles. “The team of artists.”
“Who are we playing?”
“The barbarians,” she says. “We are always playing them.”
The Barbarians
Glenn is waiting for me—in my room—when I return from the quadrangle. He is sitting at my desk, and the middle drawer is open.
“You are brilliant,” he whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“The giant penis on Dovecott’s desk.”
“I didn’t put it there.”
“Like hell you didn’t,” Glenn says.
“I think you did. And I bet Miss Dovecott thinks so, too.”
“Why the hell would she think that?”
“Because you did,” I say.
“So maybe I did. It’s part of The Plan.”
“What plan?”
“The one to figure out how much she knows.”
“Glenn, we have to be careful. There doesn’t have to be a plan. It’s way too dangerous and completely unnecessary.”
“She knows, Stromm. She knows something, and she’s not telling us or Dean Mansfield or Mr. Armstrong. She’s keeping it all to herself, and you are the perfect one to find out what it is.”
“Why were you looking through my desk?” I ask.
“Pencil,” he says, raising one up in the air, and he writes out The Plan, with a line for signatures beneath it. Is Male signs it. Because he loves to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
The Plan
1. Mess with Miss Dovecott psychologically (as in the photo/drawing left on her desk).
2. Act innocent. Do all the homework; answer promptly and intelligently during class.
3. Make sure she is at the final pep rally.
4. Glenn: Tell Dean Mansfield she makes you uncomfortable when you go in for one-on-one help. Glenn: Go in for one-on-one help.
5. Alex: Use your writing to lure her. (This step is my contribution, though I do not tell Glenn what Miss Dovecott said to me in the quad.)
6. If she knows more than she’s telling, move in for the kill.
Glenn Albright Everson, III, Class of 1984
Achilles in the flesh. If you were a casting agent and were looking for someone to play the legendary Greek hero, Glenn would be your man. Two years ago, I wanted to be Glenn. I wanted his blond curly hair; I wanted his brain. I wanted his walk, his athleticism, his easy way with other guys. It wasn’t lust. I wanted his house on the golf course, his happy-looking family, his girlfriend with the thick brown hair. I wanted his whole entire history.
Our first year at Birch, he invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. He had overheard me say that I was supposed to spend it with my mom and didn’t want to. So I told my mom that she and Victor could go on to Aspen without me (which I knew they wanted to do anyway), and I rode down to Charlotte with Glenn on the bus. The room I stayed in had a fireplace. Glenn let his dog, Bailey, an old black lab, sleep with me because he knew I missed my own dog. At Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. Everson poured me a small glass of wine, and when I drank that, she poured me a second one, no questions asked. The Eversons ate by candlelight, even though it was only four o’clock. Afterward, everyone gathered in the living room, and we had to say one thing we were thankful for. I said I was thankful to have a friend like Glenn. Then they told family stories, and I listened and laughed. Glenn’s big sister, a junior in college, told me that I was an old soul. She said I had a great smile. That night, Glenn’s dad lit the logs in the fireplace in my room, and I slept like a baby, Bailey at my feet. In the morning, when I woke, I hugged Bailey to me as I watched the last orange ember burn itself out.
For the rest of the school year, Glenn and I played cards together on dorm and tossed the football around outside in the quad. Glenn showed me that I had interesting things to say because he encouraged me to say them; all the other guys I knew would rather hear themselves talk. One day Glenn asked me what I thought happened when we die, and I told him, “Nothing. We rot in the earth.” I told him that the idea of coming from dust and returning to dust was the one believable thing in the Bible, and he looked at me, wide-eyed, like I was some kind of prophet.
But he was the teacher, not me. When the weather grew warmer, he taught me the basics of lacrosse, a game I had barely even heard of before I came to Birch, but I wasn’t very coordinated and got cut from the first round of the freshman team tryouts. He was the only freshman who made the varsity squad, and I couldn’t help but wonder, out of all the guys in the class, why Glenn had chosen me.
And then, at the end of our sophomore year, Glenn didn’t ask me to be his roommate, and he turned into someone I didn’t know as well as I thought I did. I honestly believe that if Glenn hadn’t roomed with Thomas, Thomas would still be alive.
Is Male, No Middle Name, No Roman Numerals, Class of 1984
Once a blank slate; now an above-average student from a broken family. Lives with father, son of German immigrants, in a town you’ve never heard of (Black Mountain) in an A-frame house hidden from the road. Will attend a state-supported universi
ty (but probably not the one where his father teaches) and will be considered a man of mystery by the coeds because of his seldom-seen dimple. Will go down in the record books as agreeing to The Plan because friendship is more important than romance. Will go down in the record books as being responsible for his friend Thomas Broughton’s death. Is Male could have saved Thomas, maybe, if Is Male hadn’t been goofing around in the water. Is Male had worked as a lifeguard the summer before at a camp, where he’d earned extra money by cleaning the mess hall and the bathrooms. Is Male was a janitor.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 7:13 A.M.
Poetry Is All Metaphor
Thomas doesn’t come to me in dreams. He comes to me just before that, when I’m trying to sleep. I write poems when I can’t sleep. I write them in my head and memorize them for the morning, when I can record them in the light of day.
When I was in the third form, a starling got caught in some electrical wire hanging from the high ceiling of our dorm’s porch. Thomas stood there with me, watching it. Helpless together, we were near tears because the bird was going to tear its wing off trying to escape, and we decided the humane thing to do was to put it out of its misery. The whole incident has been burning inside me for almost two years, so I figure I might as well write a poem about it. Here it is.
On his way to class, the boy hears the wild beat of wings.
Others hear, too; they gather on the porch, heads jerked back.
Near the top of a column, in a web of electrical wire,
a sparrow, dull-eyed, hangs by its leg.
(Starlings are birds that push native birds out of their nests; in other words, they’re not the nicest birds in the world. So I changed it to a sparrow.)
The boys determine it’s been there a day.
David says it looks embarrassed; Sammy asks if he can shoot it.
Russell thinks it will chew its leg off and escape.
(Made-up names to protect the innocent)
Scooping a baseball from his backpack, the poet-boy cocks his arm.
Last week he wrote a poem about a bird he could not save,
a parakeet named Chuck that died in the cup of his hand
while he yelled to the sky, over and over, “Breathe!”
(In case you were wondering, I never owned a parakeet—more poetic license.)
Now the boy rips the air, cracking
plaster one inch from the sparrow’s head.
He tries again; the ball hits brick, drops to brown leaves.
The third time, he blows on it for luck,
but it loops into an overgrown hedge.
When Russell bails it out and hands it to him,
the poet-boy lingers, half in shadow, half in sun,
squinting like he’s saving words for later,
and he lets the ball roll to the ground
like the sound of nothing.
Writing is about making choices, Miss Dovecott says. One word or phrase or title over another. So many options that they’re almost overwhelming. Which is why it is sometimes so easy to grab the cliché, to reach out to what is familiar. But don’t. Because metaphor is all about the comparison of two unfamiliar, unlike things.
… one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 7:29 P.M.
I’m getting the distinct feeling that Moby-Dick is a symbol. If he were just a regular black whale, he wouldn’t be. So Melville made him white, like a ghost. White is innocent. A month ago, so was I. Miss Dovecott believes that “loss of innocence” is the “overarching theme of Western literature.” Maybe; I haven’t read enough of it to say. But her definition is deficient. Loss of innocence is not the small and/or giant steps that lead to the gray areas, the complexities, that are the substance of adulthood. Loss of innocence is the knowledge that your brain, no matter how much you cajole it, can never make your heart pure. My brain has been so unfaithful. It has tricked me into alliances I didn’t even know I’d formed.
Lovely in Her Bones
First thing Monday morning (yesterday), Miss Dovecott asks us to get out our syllabi; we are going to make a change because we need more in-depth work with the concept of metaphor.
Syllabi. All of our teachers must have taken Latin. I take Latin, too, but I’m not in the honors section. Does Miss Dovecott have ulterior motives for replacing the innocuous “The Author to Her Book,” by Anne Bradstreet—which, for the record, is rife with implied comparison—with “I Knew a Woman,” by Theodore Roethke? Glenn is certain that she does, and I have to admit, he might have a point. For homework, we are to track, through all four stanzas, the poem’s use of metaphor. It’s the dirtiest poem I’ve read in my entire life.
(X-Rated) Homework
“That woman in the poem must have been hot,” Ben Wilson says to me this morning as I sling my backpack onto my desk to retrieve my homework. I look at Miss Dovecott to see if she has heard. She is smiling, pulling at the tip of her ponytail. I would like to take a bath with her and undo that ponytail, see her hair fan out in the water like a mermaid’s.
“Teddy Row-Whoever was p-whipped,” says Jovan Davis.
“Yep,” says Ben.
Joe Bonnin says to Miss Dovecott as we’re settling in, “I can’t believe that poem was in our book. You finally assigned us something I didn’t mind reading.”
We are paying attention now, watching to see how she will wade through the sexy imagery in the poem, and I wonder whatever happened with the penis drawing, and though Glenn has refused to own up to it, I am pretty darn sure it was part of The Plan. “Well,” she says, “let’s first try to surmise what Roethke might ultimately be trying to say. If he is speaking to you, what is he telling you? Bailey?”
“Um, maybe he’s saying that a woman can change your life.”
“Good, good. Change it how?”
More hands go up. She lets Bailey Richards continue. “Maybe change the way you view time?”
“Right. Well done. So, Ben, how does the speaker view time differently?”
“Um, I’m not sure.”
“Look at the poem,” she says, “and see what you can find. Maybe in the last stanza.”
“ ‘I measure time by how a body sways,’ ” says Jovan.
“Right, Jovan. So what do you think that’s all about?”
“I guess it has something to do with, you know, boom-chicka-boom?”
Most guys are laughing. “Jovan,” Miss Dovecott says, “let’s try to look beyond that aspect of the poem for just a minute.”
“I don’t know if I can,” says Jovan. “I mean, I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but if it’s right there in front of you, you’re gonna look at it.”
The whole class is laughing now, and when Miss Dovecott raises her hand to calm us down, we quiet, but our eyes are all over one another’s, trying to measure who will pick up where Jovan left off.
“Glenn,” she says. “What do you think about the poem’s last line?”
“To be honest, I don’t think much of it. The poem would have been better without it. I think the line that comes before it is much stronger. Because isn’t the message of the poem that he learns from the woman? He lives to learn from her, he says. Time has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t care about time.”
“Yeah, the last line kind of diminishes the rest of the poem, especially with those parentheses,” I say, wondering if this is somehow part of The Plan or if Glenn really does believe this.
“Do you think men and women might read this poem differently?” she asks.
Joe Bonnin laughs. “I don’t know a single girl who would understand this poem.”
“I believe that,” says Jovan.
Glenn catches my eye before he speaks. “Miss Dovecott, I have to read it like a guy would. There’s no other way I can read it.”
She does not call on Glenn again even though he is clearly the best reader in the class. When she asks me what I’ve taken away from the poem, I read aloud from my homework, and I quote: “Roeth
ke is saying that making love to an older woman is as transformative as poetry itself.”
I am too embarrassed to look at her, but Glenn tells me later that he watched the blush rise from the triangle of skin beneath her throat.
Elegy for Jane
This afternoon before practice, I look up Roethke poems in the library. There is one I like, “Elegy for Jane.” Roethke knew Jane—she was his student—and he wrote a poem for her after she died by being thrown from a horse.
There is nothing sexual about this poem (unfortunately), but there is lots of metaphor: Jane is compared to a fish, a fern, and birds. Maybe she liked nature; maybe, to Roethke, she was nature, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. It is a sad and lonely poem, stuck here in this book, which will go back on this shelf when I’m through with it. No one will remember Jane unless they find her poem. Someday, no one will remember me.
Elegy for Poets
by Alex Stromm
We lie on our loamy backs—
quilt-less, quill-less,
no paper, no typewriter—
and forever compare earth with sky.
One might say we’ve an endless
supply of material: we have our
night, our grass, our shooting stars,
our dirt and worms, their appetites,
the clouds and all their ways of being
clouds, the roots of trees, the far-off
birds, the sound of air, which is not
the sound of breath.
What verse can prop us up again
on legs of bone and blood and skin?
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 7:04 A.M.
While I Was Writing My Elegy
This is where I start to doubt my good friend Golden Boy. This is where the ground between us begins to split. According to G.B., this is what supposedly happened.
At nine o’clock p.m., he walked into Miss Dovecott’s classroom, where she said she would be between eight and nine. He didn’t need help with his homework, a poem to be written in the form and rhyme scheme of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” but he pretended to need it.
Paper Covers Rock Page 6
