by Terri Cheney
With his young, bearded, slightly sad face and brilliant blue eyes, he was the spitting image of the Jesus Christ in my Sunday psalm book. I instantly felt overawed and couldn’t think of a thing to say. The Black Beast felt no such qualms. The first words out of my mouth were, “I like your dirty painting. I’m surprised they let you hang it there.”
He blinked several times, like a startled owl. “Dirty? Really?” He looked more closely at me, then at the painting, then at me, then ran his fingers through his beard. “One of my students painted it. To be honest, I’m not sure what it means. What makes you think it’s dirty?”
“Well, the egg is so smooth and white and looks so pure, but then you crack it open and there are all these nasty little peas inside, like dirty thoughts that just can’t wait to get out.” I blushed furiously, in spite of my desperate desire to seem cool.
“What’s the title, anyway?” I asked.
“Egg with Peas,” he said.
“Oh.” Deflated, I dropped my eyes. They rested on Walden, and again I shuddered. Professor Tremaine raised an eyebrow.
“It’s just—that book,” I said.
“You’ve read it?”
“I tried. I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?”
“I don’t know.” I squirmed in my seat and pulled up one of my kneesocks. “It’s boring.”
“You think so? That’s a shame. To me, it’s pure poetry.”
I kicked the rung of my chair. I was embarrassed, and when I’m embarrassed, I pretend to be annoyed. “Poetry? Hah! It doesn’t even rhyme.”
An eager light flickered behind his eyes, like a hunter who’s spotted fresh meat. “Since when does poetry have to rhyme?”
“Since Shakespeare. And Dr. Seuss.” Both seemed like equally weighty precedent to me.
“Shakespeare doesn’t always rhyme, you know. At least, not in the way you’re thinking. Not like your poetry.” He picked up a volume from the windowsill. “Here, I’ll read you the soliloquy from Hamlet, and you tell me what you think.”
I understood very little of what he read, but still, I was moved. If only I had been able to write such beautiful words when I was seven, I probably never would have taken my mother’s pills. Why die, when you can write? Professor Tremaine finished reading, and I sighed.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Does it rhyme?”
“No.”
“Is it poetry?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s going to be our mission. To set you free from rhyme.”
I suddenly felt trapped. Lose my beloved rhymes? They were the only things in the world that brought some order and symmetry to my life. I never knew when my father was going to slam that front door for good, or which fight was going to be their last. I never knew when the Black Beast was going to take control. Would I be sunny and cheery and talk too much and spin a little too fast that day? Or would I feel crushed to the ground, too heavy to move, unable to summon the semblance of a smile? All I could really count on for sure was that Zach was going to be in his room.
Besides, my father loved rhyme.
Professor Tremaine continued: “. . . and on Friday, I’m going to have you come to the Visiting Scholars lecture. This week it’s Galway Kinnell, the poet. He’s very famous and very good.” He smiled. “And his poetry doesn’t rhyme.”
The egg in the painting looked down on me, the crack in its shell now resembling a malevolent grin.
The professor stood up. “I think that’s enough for today,” he said. “Except for one thing.” He reached over and, before I could pull back, plucked a leaf out of my hair and handed it to me. Then I think he winked, but I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t about to stay and find out. I practically ran out of his office.
I passed the oak without a second thought and headed back toward the college gate. A woman was leaning up against the ivy, obscuring the words “thoughtful and reverent.” She was kissing a man who had his hand down her shirt, which gave me a glimpse of her writhing bare breast.
More sex. Less rhyme. That seemed the direction my world was headed, and I can’t say I was pleased.
I tried writing a poem that afternoon when I got back from the college, but without the mesmerizing magic of rhyme, the words just seemed like random letters sprawled across the page. And what was there to say, anyhow? Probably everyone who’d ever written a decent poem had enjoyed some kind of sex, and that’s what they were writing about, either directly or in between the lines. It wasn’t fair. It was discrimination against good Catholic girls.
It was clearly time to climb a tree.
I chose my most reliable: the big old elm behind my bedroom window. It was the quickest and easiest conduit to the Feeling—usually. But that afternoon, I climbed and climbed until my thighs were too sore to grip the branches. The foulness of my temper increased with every unsuccessful, unsatisfying inch. By then, I’d climbed so high that I wasn’t sure how I would get back down. I settled into a nook between two big branches and pulled out my pencil and a scrap of paper from my back pocket.
I was dizzy, not just from my precarious perch but from the lack of rhyme to anchor me. I tried to picture Father Tim’s face, but what was the point? The Feeling was gone, Father Tim was as good as gone, and there was nothing left for me but the empty page, stripped of all its comfort.
I felt so lonely my ribs ached. But I struggled on and eventually wrote this:
Desolataire
What pain to live on when one dies
What shame to keep the whole thing going
Only because one doesn’t know—is
Scared of—what might be beyond.
What harm could be in going forward
What keeps one here so long a time
After the fire and fun and fancy
After the lights go down for good?
What dark dark days stretch out before me
What is there here to keep me still
If but I knew I would have stilled it
How long ago would have been gone.
Whatever—once again I sigh
Whatever—shrug and turn away
To yet more sorrow, desolation
Empty yawn of time. What life.
I’d just finished fiddling with the last line when I heard my mother’s voice from very far away: “Zach! Terri Lynn! Time for dinner!” Enough with feeding my soul; I was famished. But it was a long way back to earth. When I finally managed to scramble down, my legs were all aquiver, and my palms were studded with splinters.
I washed up as quickly as I could, yanking out the largest splinters, driving the smaller ones deeper in with my impatience. “Out, damn you!” I snarled, not even caring that swearing was a sin I’d someday have to confess. The pain didn’t bother me—in fact, it was a welcome distraction from the nastiness of my mood. Free verse obviously didn’t agree with me. I felt feral; I felt savage. The Black Beast was just itching to get out, hyperalert to any pretext for provocation.
While my mother was cleaning up after dinner, she explained to Zach and me that she was going to have to go out for an hour or so; some kind of meeting at the school. Zach’s grades, never good, had been slipping, and his teacher was worried. “Your father’s going to be late, so that means Zach will be in charge,” she told us. “I expect to come home and find the dishes washed, your homework done, and the two of you in your beds. Is that understood?”
I looked over at Zach, disgusted. His chest was puffed out like a blowfish. He’d been campaigning for this for months. “I’m thirteen and three-quarters,” he wheedled, over and over again. “I don’t need no stinkin’ babysitter.”
“No, what you need is to study your grammar,” my father replied.
“It’s a joke, Dad,” Zach said, rolling his eyes.
My father eventually relented, on one condition: “But you’ll have to promise to watch over your sister.”
Zach held up his Boy Scout ring and pro
mised.
After my mother left, Zach did boss me around a bit, making sure I washed and dried all the dishes and took out the evening’s trash (which was normally his chore). In spite of my disgruntled mood, I let him do it, a little impressed by his new superiority—but mostly because I assumed that afterward we’d get to do something fun. We didn’t spend much time together outside of school, what with all my studying and his—well, go-carts and whatever else it was he did in his room.
But after the kitchen was spic-and-span, Zach grabbed a stack of manuals that had come in the mail that afternoon, and disappeared. “Go do your homework,” he told me over his shoulder. I sat down to my geometry lesson and studied for exactly five seconds. No, it wasn’t possible. The Black Beast wanted to play.
I picked up the phone. Although I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls without permission, it felt soothing somehow to break a rule. The only problem was, I didn’t know who to call. It was weird. Technically, I was popular: a cheerleader, class officer, all of that. But I didn’t really have many close friends that I could just call up to chat. They all lived too far away: St. Madeleine’s was in another area code, and my mother watched our pennies. There was always my neighbor Katie, though. Despite the fact that she was a year younger than I was and went to (Heaven forbid) public school, she lived just down the street. I called her up.
“Hello?”
The minute I heard her voice, I launched into my tale of woe: my mother said this, my brother did that, the professor wouldn’t let me use rhyme—
Katie interrupted. “Terri, you’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Talking so fast I can’t understand you.”
“Okay.” I took a breath and tried to slow down. “Wanna go climb poles?”
“I can’t. The streetlights are on.”
“So?”
“I’m not allowed to go out after the streetlights go on. And neither are you,” she added.
“Mama’s girl.” I hung up without saying good-bye and ran down the hall to Zach’s room. I kicked on his door. “Zach! Wanna go climb poles?”
“I told you to go do your homework,” he said through the door.
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it.”
“No.”
“I’m in charge now.”
I kicked his door again, so hard it left a mark. “You’re supposed to be taking care of me,” I said, but so softly he couldn’t hear it.
“Please?” I shouted. I hated being nice to him, but my agitation was getting mixed in with loneliness now, and loneliness always made me polite.
When I got no response, I went back to the kitchen, looked at my lopsided diagram of a hexagon, and ripped it into pieces. If the Black Beast wanted to play, so be it. I wasn’t supposed to touch Zach’s bike—the brand new ten-speed he’d gotten for Christmas—but I went in the garage and unlocked it. (Unbeknownst to Zach, I knew his combination. It was always the same: 0-0-7. Zach had ambitions.) It was harder to ride than my own old-fashioned bike, which had big wheels and a beribboned basket. But once I managed to mount it and get a rhythm going, it went like the wind.
I headed straight for the park, a few blocks away—the one I was never allowed to go to by myself because “there might be strangers there.” Strangers were bad, of course. I didn’t quite know why, but then, I’d never met one.
It was a beautiful night, just chilly enough so that I appreciated my sweater. The moon was almost full, so there was plenty of light to steer by, although a coal-black cat nearly crossed my path, and I had a nasty swerve trying to avoid it. All around me, people were snug and safe in their neat little homes, in their neat little lives, watching TV and mindlessly munching. I alone knew what freedom tasted like: strong and sweet and just slightly bitter, like my father’s morning coffee. I felt immensely grownup, zooming down Benson Avenue, using my arms to signal left and right turns even though there were no cars to see me do it.
But once I really got going, I abandoned all pretense of caution. I indulged my craving for speed, more speed, pumping my knees so fast and hard they felt like automatic pistons. The wind kicked up then, burning my cheeks and making tears stream out of the corners of my eyes. They stung, but freedom has its cost, and I never felt so wide awake in my life.
I knew what I wanted: the swings. For whatever reason, vigorous swinging always made me feel terrific. My own ups and downs disappeared when I swooshed up and swooshed back, letting gravity be my master. We used to have a swing set in our own backyard when I was very little, but my mother thought I used it too recklessly—I always insisted on sailing too high.
The swings at the park were deserted. In fact, the whole park was deserted, except for a man standing by a tree near the rec center, with his back to me. A stranger. I shivered, but the Black Beast didn’t care. Plus I was going too fast to slow down. I glided up noiselessly behind him. He was doing something to his pants. I heard a zip, then he whipped out his penis and peed on the tree.
I screeched to a halt. He turned around and hastily fumbled to zip up his pants.
“Sorry about that,” he said. There was a black hole where his front tooth should have been.
I ought to have been terrified, but the Black Beast knew no fear. Still half drunk from the exhilaration of my ride, I waived my hand airily in the direction of his penis. “No big deal,” I said. “I’ve seen plenty of those.”
He moved a few steps closer. “My name’s Tom,” he said. “What are you doing out here, all by yourself?”
For some reason, maybe because he was a stranger and I knew I’d never see him again, the usual rule of secrecy didn’t apply. I felt compelled to tell him the truth. “The Black Beast wanted to play, and nobody would play with me.”
“Who’s the Black Beast?”
“Um, he’s—it’s—just somebody I know.” I decided to switch gears. “Wanna go climb poles?”
He put a hand on my front tire, then moved it up to caress the handlebar. “That’s a mighty nice bike you’ve got there,” he said. He was close enough now that I could smell him, and the smell was overpowering—not quite wine, not quite pee, but an overwhelming combination of the two. The Black Beast didn’t like funny smells.
“I just forgot. I’ve got to draw a hexagon.” I backed away. He followed me.
“Don’t go so soon. We were just getting acquainted.” He smiled, and the moon beamed into the gap in his teeth. I was suddenly frightened. I jerked the handlebar out of his grasp, jumped on the pedals, and didn’t look back.
“Tell the Black Beast I said hello!” Tom yelled after me, but as I sped away, I realized that the Black Beast was nowhere to be found. He and all his reckless bravado had deserted me too.
When I got home, my mother was frantic. She grabbed me and held me close to her chest. Then she shook me, hard, by the shoulders.
“Where have you been? We’ve been worried sick about you.” Zach stood behind her, white-faced. “I called all the neighbors. Katie said you’d gone somewhere to climb poles. Your father’s out looking for you now.”
I heard the key turn in the lock. My father came in. I rushed to him and started crying. I was genuinely upset and scared, but I also knew that tears usually headed off his anger. It was a desperate moment that called for desperate measures.
“Zach told me I could go out,” I lied.
“What the hell?” My father glared at Zach. “We trusted you.”
Zach exploded. “It’s a total lie! I never told her anything!”
“Then how did I get the combination to his bike?” In spite of my tears, I played my trump card smoothly.
“Well?” my father asked Zach.
“She’s lying. You know she’s lying. And you always take her side.” I couldn’t believe it. Zach was crying. Zach never cried. He’d get red in the face, like Daddy, but the tears would never come. Now they were pouring down his face, mingling with the snot from his nose.
My mother pulled a Kleenex out of he
r purse and gently wiped his face. I watched her tender gesture with a mixture of resentment and relief. I felt sorry for Zach, but not sorry enough to take back my lie.
“Jack,” my mother said, softly. “I think you and I should talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” my father said. “I told you we couldn’t trust him. He’s too irresponsible. Anything could have happened to her.”
I’ll never forget the look on Zach’s face. It was like stabbing him with the fork all over again, but worse.
He was grounded, of course. As was I. “You should have known better,” my father said.
The problem was, I did.
In spite of being grounded, I was allowed to attend the Galway Kinnell reading later that week. I was impressed by the turnout: it was late afternoon, but the auditorium was packed, not just with students but with faculty and other adults from the community. Professor Tremaine found me a seat right in front and showed me where he’d be sitting, a few rows behind.
My mood had greatly improved by then, so much so that I was tapping my toes and twisting all the way round in my seat to see who was coming in next. Although I’d been scared about going to the reading alone, now I was relieved. My mother would surely have admonished me to sit still, and no way, Jose! I just couldn’t. I was too excited, but it was more than that. Ever since that scary night in the park, my thoughts had been steadily picking up speed, to the point where they now raced around in my head like bumper cars run amok. Which made me think of go-carts, which made me think of Zach, which was not good. I was truly sorry for what I had done to him, but he still refused to speak to me.
To try to keep my mind from thoughts of Zach, I stared at the young man next to me: a student, no doubt, from his scruffy beard and lived-in jeans and—oh my God!—bare feet. How had he gotten in here without any shoes? I looked around in indignation, but there was no one to complain to, except perhaps Professor Tremaine. But something told me that a man who preferred his poetry stripped of rhyme wouldn’t care about naked feet. He’d probably like them better that way.
The word naked sent a chill down my spine, and try as I might, I couldn’t resist staring down at those feet. They were uncommonly large and ugly, with smidgens of dirt in between the toes. I longed to wipe them clean with my hair, like Mary Magdalene did to Jesus. (But Jesus at least had worn sandals.)
