by Maria Semple
“He’s a little weird,” Joe said and returned to the poem.
Timby dropped his fork. I dropped my jaw.
“Weird?” Timby cried.
Joe looked up. “Yeah. What?”
“Oh, Daddy! How can you say that?”
“He just sits there all day looking depressed,” Joe said. “When we come home, he doesn’t greet us at the door. When we are here, he just sleeps, waits for food to drop, or stares at the front door like he has a migraine.”
For Timby and me, there were simply no words.
“I know what he’s getting out of us,” Joe said. “I just don’t know what we’re getting out of him.”
Timby jumped out of his chair and lay across Yo-Yo, his version of a hug. “Oh, Yo-Yo! I love you.”
“Keep going.” Joe flicked the poem. “You’re doing great. ‘The season’s ill’…”
“‘The season’s ill,’” I said. “‘We’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue’—” To Timby: “You. Get ready.”
“Are we driving through or are you walking me in?”
“Driving. I have Alonzo at eight thirty.”
Our breakfast over, Yo-Yo got up from his pillow. Joe and I watched as he walked to the front door and stared at it.
“I didn’t realize I was being controversial,” Joe said. “‘The season’s ill.’”
It’s easy to tell who went to Catholic school by how they react when they drive up Queen Anne Hill and behold the Galer Street School. I didn’t, so to me it’s a stately brick building with a huge flat yard and improbably dynamite view of the Puget Sound. Joe did, so he goes white with flashbacks of nuns whacking his hands with rulers, priests threatening him with God’s wrath, and spectacle-snatching bullies roaming the halls unchecked.
By the time we pulled into drop-off, I’d recited the poem twice perfectly and was doing it a third time for charm. “‘One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull.’ Wait, is that right?”
Ominous silence from the backseat. “Hey,” I said. “Are you even following along?”
“I am, Mom. You’re doing perfect.”
“Perfectly. Adverbs end in l-y.” Timby wasn’t in the rearview mirror. I figure-eighted it to see him hunched over something. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Followed again by that high-pitched rattle of plastic.
“Hey! No makeup.”
“Then why did Santa put it in my stocking?”
I turned around but Timby’s door had opened and shut. By the time I swung back, he was bounding up the front steps. In the reflection of the school’s front door, I caught Timby’s eyelids smeared with rouge. I rolled down my window.
“You little sneak, get back here!”
The car behind me honked. Ah, well, he was the school’s problem now.
Me peeling out of Galer Street with seven child-free hours on the horizon? Cue the banjo getaway music.
“‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here—only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air—a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.’”
I’d nailed it, syllable for syllable.
Alonzo stuck out his hand. “Congratulations.”
You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?
Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.
Well, it rattled the hell out of me. I had a memoir to write. Yes, much of my memoir was going to be illustrations. No problem there. The words were the rub. With a book, I couldn’t just blather on in my accustomed way. Economy was everything. And economy wasn’t happening due to the abovementioned bad brain.
I got the big idea to sharpen my instrument by memorizing poems. My mother was an actress; she used to recite Shakespeare soliloquies before bed. It was amazing. (There! Amazing! If my brain weren’t so bad I might have said, It was proof she was disciplined and properly educated and may have had an inkling of her terrible fate.) So I did what anyone would do: I picked up the phone, called the University of Washington, and asked for their finest poetry teacher.
For the past year I’ve been meeting Alonzo Wrenn every Thursday morning at Lola for private lessons. He assigns me a poem. I recite it from memory, and the conversation gallops where it may. I pay him fifty bucks plus breakfast. Alonzo would buy me breakfast, so great is his love of poetry, but my will is stronger, so he accepts it and the crisp bill with a poet’s grace.
“What did you think?” Alonzo asked.
He was a big guy, younger than me, with a mop of mouse-colored hair atop his exceedingly kind face. He always wore a suit, linen in the summer, wool in the winter. Today’s was chocolate with a sheen; it must have been vintage, and under it a shirt the color of parchment. His tie was moiré, his pocket square starched white. (Joe’s mother made him wear a suit and tie to the dentist to show “respect for the profession.” Little Joe wearing a tie in the dentist’s chair = falling in love all over.)
“Can we start with what’s concretely happening in the poem?” I asked Alonzo. “What’s the term for that? The discrete incident?”
“The discriminated occasion.”
“The Discriminated Occasion!” I said. “You’d better make that the title of your autobiography.”
“I might prefer Discrete Incident.”
I unfolded my marked-up poem and launched in. “It starts with the hermit heiress who lives year-round on the summer island. I’m picturing Maine.”
Alonzo nodded, ceding it as a possibility.
“‘Her farmer,’” I said. “Is that her husband?”
“More like someone in her employ who farms her land.”
“Like you’re my poet,” I said.
“Like I’m your poet.”
“There’s lots of oranges,” I said. “But red too. Blue Hill is turning fox red. The red comes back later with the blood cells and the skunks’ eyes. God, doesn’t your heart break for the fairy decorator? Don’t you just want to go buy something in his shop? Don’t you want to just fix him up with the hermit heiress?”
“Now that you mention it,” Alonzo said with a laugh.
“Then the poet steps out of the shadows. He’s been saying ‘our’ up until now, but then it turns to ‘I.’ Is he called the poet or the narrator?”
“The narrator,” Alonzo said.
“The narrator appears. It’s a real shock when the poem alligator-tails around and says, ‘My mind’s not right.’”
“What do you know about Robert Lowell?” Alonzo asked.
“Only what you’re about to tell me.”
Our food arrived. Alonzo always ordered Tom’s Big Breakfast. It comes with octopus and bacon. I always ordered the daily egg-white scramble with fruit. God, I depressed myself.
“Can I have your bacon?” I said.
“Robert Lowell was born to Boston Brahmins,” Alonzo said, placing the thick
strips on a saucer. “He battled mental illness his whole life and was in and out of institutions.”
“Oh!” I suddenly had an idea. I waved over the waitress. “You know how you sell cookies and mints and that garlic spread? Can you make me a gift basket?”
For Sydney Madsen. Another bugbear was the way she always arrived with little presents for me. Today being different, I would bring her one too.
Alonzo continued. “The poet John Berryman suggests that ‘Skunk Hour’ depicts the moment when the ‘I’ of the poem—”
“The ‘I’ of the poem?” I had to laugh. “You’re among friends. Just say it: Robert Lowell.”
“When Robert Lowell recognizes a depression is coming on that will leave him hospitalized. ‘A catatonic vision of frozen terror,’ Berryman called this poem.”
“‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here. Only skunks,’” I said. Something occurred to me. “Only. Another one of our poems hinged on the word only.”
Alonzo frowned.
“‘Dover Beach’!” I practically shouted because how on earth did I remember that when I can’t remember what year it is? “‘Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray’… That’s when that poem turns on its axis too.”
Alonzo pointed to my printout. “May I?”
“Go ahead.”
He tore off a corner and wrote only.
“Look at me, making the page!” I said. “Will you use that in one of your poems?”
Alonzo cocked an eyebrow mysteriously and pulled out his wallet, bursting with similar scraps. Among the stacked credit cards, a blue stripe with white block letters—
“Hey,” I said before I could think it through. “Why do you have a Louisiana driver’s license?”
“It’s where I grew up.” Alonzo handed over a long-haired version of himself. “New Orleans.”
With those two words: the sucker punch.
“Are you okay?” Alonzo asked.
“I’ve never been to Louisiana” were the words that came out, a bizarre nonanswer and a lie. Now I needed to say something true. “I have no connection to New Orleans.”
Just hearing myself speak the name made me drop my fork into my breakfast.
The waitress bounced up with a gift basket the size of a car seat. “Someone’s gonna be happy today!” Seeing my face, she quickly added, “Or not. We good here?”
“I’m good,” Alonzo said.
“I’m good.” To prove my point, I lifted my fork out of my eggs and gave the handle a defiant lick.
The waitress pivoted on her heel and scrammed.
“A question,” I said, fumbling for the poem. I needed to get this morning back on track. “‘Spar spire.’ Would that be the steeple?”
“A spar is a ship’s mast,” Alonzo said. “So probably—”
My phone jumped to life. GALER STREET SCHOOL.
“There is no way,” I said.
“Is this Eleanor? It’s Lila from Galer Street. Everything’s fine. It’s just Timby seems to have a tummy ache.”
Three times in the past two weeks I’ve had to pick him up early! Three times there was nothing wrong.
“Does he have a fever?” I asked.
“No, but he’s looking awfully miserable lying here in the office.”
“Please tell him to cut it out and go back to class.”
“Ooh,” Lila said. “But if he is sick…”
“That’s what I’m telling you—” There was no arguing. “Okay, I’ll be right there.” I slid out of the booth. “That kid. I’ll show him fear in a handful of dust.”
I bade adieu to Alonzo, grabbed the gift basket, and split. As I opened the door, I glanced back. Alonzo, bless him, seemed more disconsolate than I that our poetry lesson had come to such an abrupt end.
I walked up the steps, between the thickset columns, and into the impressive foyer of the Galer Street School. It was underlit and cathedral cool. Framed photos told the story of the building’s transformation from a home for wayward girls to a single-family residence (!) to today’s ruinously expensive private school.
A little about the building’s restoration. On the floor, in wood inlay, BECAUSE STRAIT IS THE GATE AND NARROW IS THE PATH WHICH LEADETH UNTO LIFE AND FEW THERE BE THAT FIND IT, dated to 1906. One hundred and fifty rubber molds were created for the intricate plaster work. Colorado alabaster was cut paper-thin for the clerestory. The mosaic of Christ teaching children to pray required flying in a seventy-year-old craftsman from Ravenna, Italy. When the restoration began in 2012, the big mystery was what had happened to the brass Art Deco chandelier from the early photos. It was found by the guys blowtorching blackberry vines out of the basement. Large blindfolded pigs were lowered in on ropes to chew the chandelier free.
How could I possibly know this? As I entered, the chic architect in charge of the restoration happened to be leading a tour.
On my way to the administration offices: “Eleanor!”
I turned. For the past month, the conference room had become auction central, abuzz with parent volunteers.
“You’re just the person we need!” said the woman, a young mom.
Me? I mouthed, pointing, confused.
“Yes, you!” said another young mom as if I were a silly goose. “We have a question.”
When I graduated from college it never would have occurred to me not to work. That’s why women went to college, to get jobs. Get jobs we did and kicked some serious ass while we were at it, thank you very much, until we realized we’d lost track of time and madly scrambled to get pregnant. I pushed it dangerously close to the wire (no doubt because Catholic Joe, the oldest of seven, was in no hurry himself, having changed enough diapers for a lifetime). I gave birth to little Timby, thus joining the epidemic of haggard women in their forties trapped in playgrounds, slumped on boingy ladybugs, unconsciously pouring Tupperware containers of Cheerios down their own throats, donning maternity jeans two years after giving birth, and sporting skunk stripes down the center of their hair as they pushed swings. (Who needed to look good anymore? We got the kid!)
Was the sight of us so terrifying that the entire next generation of college-educated woman declared “Anything but that!” and forsook careers altogether to pop out children in their twenties? Looking at the Galer Street moms, the answer would be: Apparently.
I hope it works out for them.
I entered the conference room with its giant beveled windows overlooking the play yard and Elliott Bay. A massive table (cut from the center of a maple tree salvaged from the property or some such trendy nonsense, according to the architect) was piled with file boxes and cascading manila folders. I weaved my way through hip-height cardboard cartons with Galer Street T-shirts hanging out, red like tongues. The air crackled with efficiency and purpose.
“Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” the young mom muttered.
“Here?” I said.
“You need to find the item number and cross-reference it with her name,” said another young mom.
I went to Japan once and our guide claimed that to them, all Americans looked alike. At the time, I thought, Oh, you’re just saying that about us because that’s what we say about you. But beholding this array of young, glowing, physically fit moms, it occurred to me that Fumiko might not have been messing with me after all.
“Got ridiculous?” said the first young mom.
A young dad (because there’s always one dad) held up a folder. “Victory is mine!”
“You won a latte, you won a latte,” singsonged the first or the second or the third or the fourth mom.
Put these parents in a room with clerical work and zero supervision, and they start acting like the deranged winners in an Indian casino ad.
“You donated a hand-drawn portrait of the winning bidder in the style of Looper Wash,” said one, finally acknowledging my existence.
“That’s you?” asked another.
Like ostriches, they all stopped and cocked their h
eads at me.
“I heard you went here,” said one, taking me in.
“Timby’s mom,” said another, the expert.
Seattle is short on star power. A past-her-prime animator and a Seahawks doctor make me and Joe the Galer Street equivalent of Posh and Becks.
“I’m a Vivian,” said one.
“You’re totally a Fern,” corrected another.
“What are you doing now?” one flat-out asked me.
“I’m writing a memoir,” I said, heat weirdly building in my cheeks. “A graphic memoir.” It was none of their business, but I kept going. “I have an advance from a publisher and everything.”
The ostriches smiled inscrutably.
On the table, a ring of keys. Each key had one of those color-coded rubber jobs around the top. In my life I’d bought a hundred of the damned things but had always given up because who can put them on without bending a nail? Also on the ring, a neat fan of bar-code tags from Breathe Hot Yoga, Core de Ballet, Spin Cycle… And in a personal touch, this young, fit mom had attached a lanyard with her child’s name in baby blocks.
I turned my head sideways. What was the name?
D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E.
I froze.
“Yoo-hoo!” called a young mom.
“You forgot to put a dollar value as to what it’s worth,” said another.
“What what’s worth?” I said, snapping to.
“Your auction item,” put in another. “For tax purposes.”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“We need to put down something,” said the first young mom.
“It’s just a few hours of my time.” My breath had become stuck. Why did I have to see those goddamned keys?
“What’s your time worth?” This was the young dad, wresting control.
“Literally?” I said. “Per hour?”
Did he mean the hours I spent lying in bed vowing to change? The hours shopping for organizers that forever remained in the bags? The hours researching mindfulness classes, signing up for them, going so far as parking outside art-gallery-yoga-studios and watching the well-intentioned students file in, only to lose my nerve and peel out? The hours planning to eat dinner as a family, just to end up hunched in front of our screens, every man for himself? The hours steeped in shame that I had no excuse for any of it?