Miriam's Well

by Lois Ruby

  “Close your lips tight,” she said, probing my wrist for a pulse.

  I could barely breathe, and I was terrified that the hateful glass stick would slide down my throat and choke me to death. Finally, mercifully, she slid it out of my mouth and went over by the window to read what it said. “It’s 101, Miriam. Have you had the sniffles?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Any strange symptoms—going to the bathroom a lot or an itchy rash, vomiting, diarrhea?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “When was your last period?” she asked.

  “Do I have to tell you? Does the school law say so?”

  “No, Miriam, it does not.”

  “Well, in my family, Mrs. Elgin, we don’t talk to strangers about personal things like that.”

  Then she asked me, “Are you pregnant, Miriam?”

  “No, I am not pregnant. I’m not even married.” Mrs. Elgin smiled. Did she think I didn’t know it happened to unmarried girls sometimes? But I wasn’t that kind of girl. Brother James always says that our bodies are temples, and we must sanctify them and not defile them. One thing I’ve secretly wondered is, why is it okay to defile your body after you’re married? Questions come into my head when I’m not concentrating hard enough. I swallow them all the time, praying that the questions won’t show on my face, and praying for answers.

  Mrs. Elgin sighed deeply. I didn’t mean to cause her such grief. “I must call your mother, Miriam, because we can’t keep you at school when you’re running a fever.”

  “Please don’t tell her about the fainting,” I pleaded. “And don’t tell her you took my temperature. And don’t give her any numbers, 101 or whatever it was.” Mama would have a fit if she knew I was even in Mrs. Elgin’s office. I looked around at the padlocked cabinet with its shelf full of white bottles. I had to get out of there before Mama came for me. “Can I wait for her outside?”

  “I’ll tell you what. You can wait on the bench in the hall. How long will it take your mother to get here?”

  “She has to walk from the church, which is about ten blocks away.”

  “She has no car?”

  “The men have the car,” I said. “My uncles, Benjamin and Vernon.” I couldn’t tell her Mama didn’t and wouldn’t drive.

  “Then let me do this. We’ll call your mother, and I’ll drive you by the church to pick her up.”

  “No! I mean, I don’t think that’s the best idea. Let me call my mother and tell her to walk home. If you want to take me home, I can be there waiting for her.” Mrs. Elgin agreed, thank God. Why did He grant me that much, when I’d lied? Another question.

  By the time Mama got home, I was sitting in front of the fire, wrapped in a granny-square afghan, and shivering. Mama took one look at me and lit the gas for a kettle of water. She put her lips to my forehead; that was how she could tell I had a fever. “What’s happened today, baby?”

  “I just haven’t been feeling very well.”

  “Something happened at school?”

  “No, Mama. Mr. Moran thought I looked peaked, so he sent me home.” Mama put her arm around me under the afghan until the teakettle began to whistle. I drifted off to sleep while she made the cinnamon tea; it was the hot vapors that woke me up as she settled back beside me.

  “Drink your tea, baby, and we’ll talk.” Mama’s cup tinkled daintily, while mine seemed to clunk onto the saucer. I didn’t feel like I had much control in my fingers. Pretty soon Mama took the cup and saucer out of my hands. “You lay down here on a pallet in front of the fire, baby,” she crooned, spreading a quilt on the floor for me. “I’ll give Brother James a call and see if we can’t get him over here before the men come home.” She pulled a soft cushion from the couch, and my head sank into it. Mama sat beside me, with her back up against the brick fireplace, reading the Book in Gold Leaf. Everyone else but us called it the Bible, Old Testament and New, but we found such beauty in the book that all our copies were in gold leaf, to mirror the treasure within the pages.

  I heard the pages gently slap together as Mama looked for certain passages. I dozed and dreamed. I whirled through space, no, through a huge wooden room, spinning like a dervish, my hair flying behind me. Whirling, twirling, spinning, my skirt whipping around my legs—I was dancing! I awoke with a start, ashamed. Imagine, dancing. But then I was doubly ashamed to realize that it wasn’t the wicked dream that woke me, but the telephone.

  Mama knelt beside me. “Baby, it’s some boy from your English class. Says he has to see you today.” Mama’s voice was dry and disapproving.

  I stumbled to the phone. “Hello?”

  “Are you okay?” asked Adam Bergen.

  “Oh, sure. I slept a while, and I’m feeling much better,” I said.

  “Well, Mrs. Loomis says we have to get together with our poetry partners before tomorrow, and I thought maybe we should, because you’re probably worried about your grade in there.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “In English? Are you kidding?”

  He didn’t know me well enough to know that I was never kidding. “What do you want to do?”

  “I could come over.” He said it, but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

  I considered the possibility for just a moment. “Hold on. Mama,” I whispered, “what time is Brother James coming over?”

  “I haven’t called him yet. You were sleeping so peacefully, I thought there’d be no need to bother him.”

  “Well, then, what time are the men due home?”

  “Six-thirty, same as usual,” she said, with that edge to her voice I’d begun to recognize when she talked about my uncles.

  I heard Adam Bergen shouting something to someone on his end. It all came so easily to him—laughing, playing, teasing. “Are you still on the phone?” I asked.

  “Still here.” I pictured him sinking into our couch with the zinnia upholstery and weak, squeaking springs. Our living room with its small-scale maple furniture, its chintz and flounces, its dark, plaid drapes, would never contain anyone with the breezy style Adam Bergen had. The men hated the room, called it a woman’s room, and refused to sit in there. The kitchen was where they sat to read the paper or the Book in Gold Leaf, when they weren’t out in the garage working with their wood and tools.

  But I couldn’t take Adam Bergen into the kitchen. The simple polished maple table didn’t join well at the seam where the table leaf would go when Brother James or one of the elders came to dinner. How would Adam Bergen feel reading Emily Dickinson at that table with the soulful eyes of Jesus watching him from the picture on the wall? And what would I offer him to drink? He’d laugh at me if I gave him cinnamon tea or tomato juice, or even caffeine-free Coke. To be honest, I’d never thought about our house this way before, because no one ever came over except church people whose houses looked and smelled much like ours. But Adam was different, freer. I’d been noticing him for weeks, as he hung his lean body over Diana’s locker or bounded up the steps two or three at a time or shoveled pizza into his mouth in the cafeteria.

  “Adam, I really don’t feel well enough for company,” I said. My head was pounding. “I’m sorry if it’s a problem for you with Mrs. Loomis.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” he said casually. That was the impression he always gave—a shoulder-shrugging “who cares?” Except when he was galloping after Diana like a lovesick pony. “Hey, but would you explain it to Mrs. Loomis, because she’d never believe me.”

  “I will. I have to hang up.”

  “Wait,” Adam said. “Do you think you’ll be at school tomorrow, before Mrs. Loomis skins me alive?”

  With the secret pain growing in my back, how would I be able to walk all the way to school? And stepping up onto a bus was almost as bad. But, as Brother James always says, each day brings the miracle of a new dawn, and I promised Adam, “Oh, yes, definitely I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “See you,” he said, so comfortably. It cost him nothing. I knew that his hands weren’t sweatin
g like mine when he put the receiver down, nor was his face hot. No doubt he’d already forgotten our conversation and had turned on the TV.

  I wiped my hands down the sides of my skirt and lay back down in front of the dying fire. I wondered about Mrs. Loomis’s motives. I’d listened closely while she announced her poetry pairs. I observed everything, because I was never distracted in class. It seemed to me she went out of her way to pair up the least likely teams—boy with girl, black with white, slow with smart, Cambodian with Mexican, Jew with Christian.

  Adam was the first Jewish boy I had ever known. Though he never took things seriously, his voice was gentle. He wasn’t at all like his friend Brent, who was such a loudmouthed show-off. Adam Bergen had nice eyes, kind eyes. I noticed his eyes sometimes at Rockwell Library, when he passed my table. Once I was scared to death that he’d take the seat beside me. That’s the kind of person Adam was; he’d sit next to somebody he didn’t like rather than sit alone. But he spotted his friends at another table and moved on by without even noticing me. I was relieved, then disappointed, then mad at myself for being disappointed, and I didn’t get a thing done on my physics problem set. Then, to make matters worse, Diana came into the library. People at the other table scrunched up closer and pulled up a chair for her.

  Diana was about the smartest and nicest girl in the school. She never passed me in the hall without saying hello, even if she passed me fifty times a day. If she did that to everybody, and I guess she did, she must have been hoarse by the end of every day. She and Adam looked just right together. Their skin tones were similar, sort of milky-olive, and she was half a head shorter than Adam. They were both slim and angular, in just the right proportion to each other. They could have posed for a magazine, one of the magazines I wasn’t supposed to read, like Seventeen.

  Diana and Adam should have been poetry partners, but somehow I got him. The idea made my stomach flip-flop.

  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Brother James always said, but just as you would drown in pride if you loved yourself too immodestly, you also must love your neighbor with moderation.

  This pairing, it wasn’t what Brother James taught. But neither was Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and certainly not Walt Whitman, who were all on our poetry worksheet. And neither was Adam Bergen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Told by Adam

  It’s unnatural to get through a whole day without a trip to the mall, so Brent came by and got me, and we tore down Armour to Towne East. Some civic-minded parent once had the brilliant idea of putting traffic bumps on the street, to slow down drivers like Brent and keep small kids from getting smashed like mosquitos against the hood of a Toyota. But what they didn’t take into consideration is that it’s a lot more fun to do sixty over those bumps and see how fast the little kids can scatter. On a lucky day, you can terrorize half a dozen kids and get a good enough bounce to send your head up through the top of the car. But that takes some practice and an open sunroof.

  Tuesday was just an ordinary day, rainy, no kids out, and a bump on the head barely worth mentioning. “What did you do about Ruiz?” I asked Brent.

  “Caught her between physics and government. I told her to say something about poetry and to make it quick and dirty. She is some poet. She said, ‘Okay, Jenkins, I’m talking alliteration here. Write this down.’ Right there in the hall she came up with a half a dozen first-class rhymes.” Brent stretched to get into his jeans pocket, pulled out a strip of paper ripped from a notebook, and read, “Pucker, plastered, pitch, pit, pock, and pass. Get it?”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “So, what’s the deal with you and the saint?”

  “She’s going to explain it to Loomis tomorrow. I’m off the hook for a while. Maybe I can study with you and Ruiz.”

  “No way!”

  We hung around Camelot Music for a while, memorizing lyrics off albums. We never actually bought tapes or CDs there, because just about any other music store was cheaper. But it had nice ambience. That was a Diana word. She pronounced it in a French sort of way. When I said it, it was closer to ambulance. But so what; it’s what Camelot Music had. We checked out a few other stores, read magazines in Waldenbooks, and played with the computers at Radio Shack. Then it was getting dark. Brent had to get home for Wheel of Fortune at 6:00, and it was close to dinner time at our house, so we left Towne East just as the parking lot lights were coming on.

  After dinner, I called Diana, but her mother said she was at the library with Kunal, her poetry partner, who was offered $86,000 to marry a girl in India after he finishes college. Mrs. Cameron sounded pretty apologetic. She liked me. She didn’t know my name was synonymous with wasted potential. “I’ll tell Diana to call you when she gets home,” Mrs. Cameron said, “if it’s before nine.”

  I thought about calling Miriam Pelham back, but let’s face it, I wasn’t that dedicated to poetry. After a couple of physics problems, I stretched out on my bed.

  “Adam, take off the bedspread,” my mother said as she passed my room. She was everywhere at all times, vigilant against sloth and corruption. I kicked the blue quilted bedspread to the floor, put my headphones on, and fell asleep listening to Pink Floyd, “The Wall.”

  True to her word, Miriam Pelham was at school on Wednesday, though she looked like she should have taken another day off. In French she sat in the first seat of the first row closest to the door, so when the bell rang I didn’t get to her soon enough to say anything about poetry. I don’t know what she had second period, but it wasn’t debate, which I took because it was an easy A and you got to leave school early on Fridays to go to tournaments in little Kansas towns like Kanopolis and Moundridge. I was late to third period English, and Miriam didn’t even look up when I walked into the room. Mrs. Loomis, of course, had a few choice words for me.

  “Adam, what a treat to have you drop by. Sit.” (As if I were a Doberman pinscher.) “And tell me, how is your poetry worksheet going?” She glared at me. I wondered how the belt around her middle could possibly hold up under the supreme stress, but I had a speech ready on the subject of poetry. Debate was definitely paying off.

  “You probably didn’t hear that Miriam, who’s my poetry partner, passed out in physics yesterday.”

  “I heard,” Mrs. Loomis said. Yes, she and my mother were both tuned into a universal ring of truth.

  “Well, I called her at home. Tell her, Miriam.”

  “He called me,” Miriam said, in her mousy little voice.

  “To what end?” asked Mrs. Loomis.

  “So we could start right in with our poetry studying,” I said, trying to fake as much sincerity as possible, “without loosing a single valuable day. But she was still sick. Tell her, Miriam.”

  “I was still sick.”

  “So you’ve both lost a single valuable day, together two valuable days. Hmmn. Perhaps you can both come here after school and make up for it. Would that be possible, Miriam?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Adam?”

  “After school?” That was my time, not the school’s time. After school was for shooting baskets up at the park, for hanging around Towne East, for watching reruns of Three’s Company (if my mother was still at work), and definitely not for doing poetry worksheets. It was strictly against my religion to tackle homework until after dinner.

  “Adam,” Mrs. Loomis said, peering at me above her glasses, “I’ve got a notice from Mr. Bennet that you need to be excused all day a week from Friday for a debate tournament in Dodge City. Well now, Adam, how can I sign the request until I feel certain that you have the poetry project well under way?”

  “After school today’s no problem,” I said.

  “Excellent decision.” The Big Bang bent over to pick up one of a stack of books on the floor. “While you’re working independently on poetry at home, people, we will be reading The Stranger in class,” she threatened. “I want one person from each row to get a stack of books for your row.” There was a mas
sive rumbling as we jockeyed for position. It was an honor to pass out books. It meant you could toss them into someone’s gut, smash fingers with them, flatten heads. No one wanted to miss out on the fun, but, thinking I had better maintain a low profile in the class for a day or two because of Dodge City, I let Patrick Davis beat me out this time.

  Diana leaned forward and whispered in my ear. Her whisper was warm and moist, like the hiss from the hot air vaporizer my mother used to put in my room when I got a cold. “Kunal is a dunderhead,” she said. “How did he ever make Honors English? I wish I’d gotten you as my poetry partner.” Oh! Her lip brushed my ear as she pulled back. Promises, promises.

  “Diana, you have something to say about The Stranger?” asked the Big Bang.

  “Only that he’s one of the most colorful characters in English literature,” said Diana. Quick recovery.

  Kunal said, “Hunh uh, it’s French.”

  “But we’re reading it in English translation,” Diana said quickly. “Of course, I’d be happy to read it in French.” There was a ripple of applause in the class. I couldn’t turn around and look at Diana; I knew I’d crack up. Then I noticed that Miriam was watching us both, and she looked paler and stringier than ever, but there was a blurry smile on her face. So, even Miriam Pelham appreciated Diana for the incredible creature she was. During the opening paragraphs of The Stranger, I calculated exactly how many hours it would be until I got back from Dodge City next Saturday and was in front of the TV in Diana’s dark library.

  After school, while Mrs. Loomis erased the chalkboard, shaking like a prevolcanic mountain, Miriam and I faced poetry. The worst was Emily Dickinson, who was what Brent called a chick’s poet. Miriam read:

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune without the words,

  And never stops at all.

  “How can Dickinson pass off ‘soul’ and ‘all’ as rhymes? She’s not such a great poet,” I said.