And We Stay
Page 13
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
“How are you feeling now, honey?” her mother asked.
“Oh, fine,” said Emily. “A little groggy but fine.”
“It doesn’t hurt?” Aunt Cindy said.
“Not yet,” Emily said.
“It won’t start hurting until all the anesthesia wears off,” Emily’s mother explained.
“Here’s some money,” said Aunt Cindy, holding out a bill. “Get your mom a cup of coffee, and get yourself something, too, okay? Whatever looks good to you.”
“Thanks,” said Emily. She walked past the counter and down the hall. At the door of the bathroom, she turned and looked back at the two women at the table, their heads leaning into one another’s. In one swift move, Emily sidestepped out the back door of the shop and into the falling snow. Across the street was a stop for the T. She hurried over. With the five dollars Aunt Cindy had given her, she bought a ticket and took the red-line train to Harvard because it was the only name on the map inside the station that she recognized.
Emily had no idea what to do once she got there, and she didn’t care. She was living in the moment—not in the past, not in the future. How or when she would get back to Aunt Cindy’s house didn’t matter because what mattered was now, right now, and right now, Emily wanted to be someone else.
When she emerged from underground, she walked through the Harvard campus in the falling snow, pretending to be a student, although there weren’t many of them around. Because the sanitary pad was bulky and her stomach was starting to cramp, Emily stopped into a deli near campus and sat down at a table by the window. When, after ten minutes, no one came to take her order, she realized she was supposed to tell the man at the counter what she wanted. She walked up and ordered a bagel with butter and a cup of coffee. “Pretty lady, numbah fifty-two,” the man said in his rich Boston accent. Even though her stomach hurt, she smiled. It felt exquisite, being anonymous. Fifty-two would be her lucky number forever. It was her first cup of coffee, and though she took only two bites of the bagel, it was the best meal she’d eaten in her life.
The coffee and bagel she has for breakfast this morning at ASG are good, too, but they can’t compete. Emily Beam is known here. She has a past, but she also has a future, dangling like a carrot on the end of a string. If she ever reaches it, if she ever gets to take a bite, then it will no longer be the future. In the moment of tasting, it becomes the present, and in the time that it takes to swallow, it is past. Time, both friend and enemy, confounds her.
As she rises to leave the dining room, Amber Atkins approaches.
“Hey, Emily. You want to study for the French test with me?”
“Maybe tonight after dinner.”
“Okay,” says Amber, “but I kind of need to tell you something now.”
“Then tell me.”
“I need to tell you in private.”
Emily looks around. No one is listening. No one is even watching. All over the dining room, girls are in the middle of living.
Amber whispers, “I took something.”
“Let me guess. A lipstick.”
“No, not lipstick. Something else. Something bigger.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Because you were there,” says Amber.
“Where?”
“At Emily Dickinson’s house.”
“Oh. So you were the one who put the crocus in my carrel.”
Amber winks.
“Look, Amber, I don’t think stealing a flower is a big deal. Plus, that was, like, a month ago.”
“I’m not talking about the crocus. Follow me.” Amber leads Emily out onto the quad and across to the lieberry, where Amber makes a beeline for the bathroom.
“Hello?” she calls. “Anyone here?” She checks under the stalls and opens one of the doors. “Get in,” she tells Emily.
“What?”
“No one can see this.”
“You’re freaking me out, Amber.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Amber swings the stall door closed and slides the lock into place before she unzips her backpack and pulls out a long white dress.
“Holy shit,” Emily says.
“I found it last night. Behind the house.”
“You stole it.”
“I swear I didn’t. I was just out walking, you know, like we do sometimes, and I found it in the garden.”
“Do you know whose dress that is?”
“I do now,” says Amber.
Emily reaches out to brush her hand over the pocket. “Can I touch it?”
“Sure.”
Amber passes her the dress, which Emily holds up in front of her. It’s thin, cotton, long-sleeved, with a neat collar and delicate mother-of-pearl buttons down the front all the way past the knee. At the right hip, there is an oversized, hand-stitched pocket.
“What are you going to do with the dress?”
“Take it back, of course!”
“How did it end up in the yard?”
“How the hell should I know? I was just walking by and—voila!—there it was.”
“It should be in the house,” says Emily.
“I know that,” says Amber.
“They keep it on display in her room.”
“I know!”
“So how are you going to get it back there?” Emily asks. “Because if you don’t, guess what?”
“It’ll look like I took it.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s why I came to you,” says Amber. “You’re the poet around here. Couldn’t you, like, sweet-talk your way in and put it back?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, probably. My mom thinks so.”
Emily pictures the sign by the front gate of the house: Open Saturdays & Sundays 12–5. “The house is going to open back up again in two days.”
“That’s why I need you to sweet-talk your way in there before then.”
“Not gonna happen,” says Emily. “The last thing I need right now is to get into more trouble.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?”
“Never mind.”
“It can’t be as much trouble as I’m in,” says Amber. “I’ve got, like, fifty Hashes. I, like, live in Detention Hall.”
“Well, I’m campused.”
“Till when?”
“Next Wednesday,” Emily says. “And I am not leaving campus till then.”
Gently, Emily reaches her hand inside the dress and lifts out a scrap of paper, brittle and yellow and torn.
“Did you put this in here?” she asks Amber.
“No.”
“Swear it,” says Emily.
“Don’t you believe anything?”
“Not anything you say.”
Amber sighs. “I swear on my mother’s fat ass—sorry, Mom, but it’s true—that I did not put that piece of paper in that pocket.” When she leans in to see what it says, Emily jerks her hand away.
“What does the piece of paper say?”
“Nope,” says Emily, “not until you promise to leave me alone about all this. I don’t want to get kicked out. I like it here.”
“But Madame Colche says you’re a genius. And geniuses can figure things out, like how to get missing dresses back inside locked houses.”
“You’re a genius, too.”
“Yeah,” Amber says, “but I’m on Strike Three Probation.”
“For what?”
“What do you think?”
Emily rolls her eyes.
“I didn’t steal the dress, Emily! It was just, like, lying there on the grass in the moonlight. I thought it was a dead person. It scared the crap out of me.”
“Then put it back in the yard where you found it. If you didn�
�t take it, then no big deal, right?”
Amber shakes her head.
“So what did you steal? At school, I mean.”
“Somebody’s Diet Coke out of the fridge and a couple of cookies from my roommate’s care package.” Amber shrugs. “I couldn’t help it. I missed dinner that night, and I was starving.”
Emily unlocks the stall door. “I’ve got to go to class.”
“Don’t tell anybody,” Amber says.
“I’m not stupid.”
“That’s right. You’re a genius. Please, Emily. Please? I’m terrified of naked mannequins, especially that one.”
“Aha! So you were in that room! How else would you know about the mannequin, huh, Amber? Not to mention the fact that the naked part was all your doing. Stop lying. Just stop.”
“All right, yeah, I was there.” Amber pointed at the scrap of paper. “Aren’t you going to give that back?”
“Nope.”
Emily walks to English pressing the scrap of paper flat to her palm. An unexpected Maid, it reads in faded black ink. All through English, while she is supposed to be revising an essay on “The Road Not Taken,” Emily scans the collection of Dickinson poems, looking for the line and the poem it belongs to.
All through Chemistry, while she is supposed to be solving problems of spontaneous reactions, Emily searches. She finds the line at the beginning of the book in a poem she missed the first time through. Emily makes it appear that she’s really into the endothermic and exothermic properties of chemical reactions, but she’s not—she’s contemplating Poem 17.
Baffled for just a day or two—
Embarrassed—not afraid—
Encounter in my garden
An unexpected Maid.
She beckons, and the woods start—
She nods, and all begin—
Surely, such a country
I was never in!
Who is the maid? A particularly beautiful flower? Springtime? But what is embarrassing about the spring? If the maid is a person, she is not a servant-maid. She is not a virgin overtaken by a man. No, this maid has the power.
At lunch, Emily goes back to her room, writes two poems, and sleeps until French, where she ignores Amber Atkins and pays attention to Madame Colche, wholly and devoutly, like she’s supposed to.
Anthology
What binds together the moments
of earthly grace? What gathers up
the last white daisy in an amber field;
a baby bird hatching from a speckled egg;
the look in a teacher’s kind eyes,
a look that says, You are gifted?
Gifted as in given by God,
like the words she penned on cold
winter mornings so that
someone way down the way,
someone far into history,
might know what it felt like to be
what she had become: a girl
whose life was an anthology
of sad.
Emily Beam, March 16, 1995
Hold Up
I can tell by your dimestore walk
you want it back:
your meadow-clear mind
your blank page
your hours and days unwasted
your childhood
your heart untorn
and just doing
its hearty job pumping
your blood
an organ
not risen up from the swamp
of evolution merely to be
twisted out of your body
by a manicured fist
and left to hang by a sinew
from your sleeve
The worst part is—
whatever she took
you let her have it
So, my brother, go
and let her have it
after you hold up
your palm and give me five
five dollars five quarters five minutes
five lifetimes five gallons of the blood
you are out for
Emily Beam, March 16, 1995
Sometimes, like now, as she’s running around the dirt track during Fitness for Fun, the sound of a thousand bells—doorbells, alarm bells, school bells, church bells, sleigh bells—rings in Emily’s ears. She can make them play symphonies; she can make them play hymns: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” She can make the bells peal out short little poems, the downbeats in sync with her footfalls:
Staying power is gradual.
We feel it through the soul,
The poetry that happens when
New Eyes see like Old!
On December 12, Paul walked down the hall to the library, believing deeply in life, in the power of youth, wanting for Emily to believe in those things, too. And she didn’t, not at the time, not with the fervency that he did. In the dust under her running feet, there is a message that she couldn’t hear then: life, life, life.
• • •
On Thursday night, as soon as dinner is over, Emily falls into a deep sleep while K.T. listens to classical music and plays the air-cello. Madame Colche drops by—Amber does, too—but even though she tries, Emily cannot wake up. The cups of coffee she drank in place of dessert can’t keep up with her need for sleep. In one dream, a white cloud floats toward her in a sunlit field and hovers, delivering paper snowflakes with lines from poems written on them. When she wakes Friday morning, she can still remember some of the phrases, but it’s 7:45, so she has only enough time to rush into the bathroom and chug down a cup of K.T.’s home brew before class begins.
When Emily told K.T. about that snowy day in Boston, she admitted that she stole the Harvard sweatshirt from the campus bookstore, walked straight out with it on under her coat. She got back to Aunt Cindy’s house in Belmont by taking the red-line T to the end of the line. Yes, her mother yelled at her and punished her with therapy and grounded her for the rest of their time in Boston, but where was she going to go? That kind of grounded was nothing compared to the kind of grounded she felt sitting in the recovery room with two other girls, waiting for the better part of the anesthesia to wear off. For K.T., Emily assessed it as a snapshot, a single image, like a parody of a brochure for a private girls’ school: one white girl, one black girl, and one Latino girl, all colors of the rainbow represented, slumped in chairs, the useless blood trickling out of them.
“Did you talk to each other?” K.T. asked.
“No,” Emily said. “We should have, though.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Emily thought for a moment. “Because the voices in our heads had already started up.”
Mosaics
In childhood, they had killed things:
ants, bees, a bird, a squirrel, a dog.
Accidents, mostly all
accidents. They could have
dealt with it inside the fog
of memory. If time were kind—
as time is known to be—they could
trick their hearts into telling
another tale, a believable one
about a boy and a girl
with magical days laid out
like mosaics.
The tiles of their past
rearranged, redefined.
Emily Beam, March 17, 1995
Friday night, before she falls asleep, Emily reads through the poems in her notebook. In the nine weeks that she’s been here, she’s completed twenty-seven, plus twice that many fragments and half-finished poems and, of course, there’s the hidden one under her mattress that she wrote eighteen days ago, which now feels like eighteen hundred days.
When Emily Dickinson died, her younger sister, Lavinia, burned all of her correspondence, as Emily had requested. But Vinnie, as Emily called h
er, was stunned to discover among her sister’s papers nearly two thousand poems bundled into booklets. All those years of living in the house together, and Emily had kept them to herself. Vinnie read the poems. She thought they deserved an audience, and so she took it upon herself to get her sister’s work published.
Emily Beam isn’t sure how to feel about Vinnie’s decision. On the one hand, she is grateful, because otherwise, she would never have heard of Emily Dickinson. On the other hand, here she is, with her own private stash of poems not meant for anyone’s eyes, though other eyes have seen them. She finds the folded-up flyer at the back of her notebook, the one announcing the poetry contest. With her black pen, Emily puts Xs through all of the blanks on the entry form. She marks through the contest deadline—Monday, March 20—and scratches all the way across the paper, like a six-year-old who’s just learned to spell his first bad word, POETRY SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After she balls up the paper and throws it in the trash can, she lies flat on her back and falls asleep, exclamation points rolling through her brain on little wheels.
On Saturday morning she wakes with numb lips. In a dream, she has been kissing Paul under a scratchy blanket in a cold, abandoned barn. K.T. is in the bathroom, where Emily will have to go in a minute. So far, she has avoided conversation with Annabelle and Waverley, though she has passed them in the hall and smiled a fake smile, which they return with their own fake smiles. In the dim light, when Emily reaches into the top drawer of her dresser for a clean pair of underwear, her fingertips meet an unexpected fabric. Emily pulls out the white cotton dress just as K.T. kicks open the door with her foot. Emily tucks the dress behind her.
“I wish we could go for a walk today,” K.T. says. “I’d like to see that eagle again.”
When K.T. isn’t looking, Emily stuffs the dress back in the drawer.
“Yeah, me too,” says Emily.
“If you get lonely this afternoon, come visit. I’ll be in the music room practicing. Vivaldi is kicking my ass.” K.T. wraps her wet blond hair up into a topknot. “Blond Buddha.”
Emily laughs. “Hey, I’m skipping breakfast this morning. You were right about the coffee in the dining room. It is full of dreams.”