The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  A few girls snickered. “We can trade parents if you want,” Natasha said. “Mine want to hear all about my writing. They’re not just checking in—they want a full report. It’s getting to the point where I can’t get any writing done because I’m so busy telling them about it. I can’t tell if they’re just making an excuse to talk to me five times a day, or if they want to know what I’m working on to make sure I’m not, you know. Traumatized.”

  Brianna nodded ruefully. “With my mom, it’s that terrified tone of voice that’s getting to me. It feels like she’s not asking how I am—she’s asking if I am. ‘Are you dead yet? No? Okay—I’ll talk to you in the morning. Unless you’re dead, of course.’ ”

  M laughed. The other girls at our table looked shocked. A few at the next one over looked curiously in our direction.

  “You’re not the one who was scolding me the other day for ‘tactless’ language in the wake of a tragedy, are you?” M asked. “And if I may say so, your gorgeous mahogany skin is made even more lovely when you blush.”

  “I choose you may not say so, since you give me the option,” Brianna said. “And what about your folks? Still nagging you to come home? Or just happy to have all the windows in one piece?”

  “Oh, they’ve left me alone about that,” M said. “I’d just get in their way now. I think they’re planning a trip to Greece. My mother is, anyway.”

  “Now? And just her? Not even your dad, too?”

  “She likes going off without him. It makes her feel powerful. I guess something has to—he’s the one with all the money.”

  The girls at the table glanced at one another uneasily. “But—she wanted you to come home,” Brianna said. “And now she’s going off island-hopping like nothing even happened?”

  “Oh, she never wanted me to come home,” M said, without a hint of complaint in her voice. “She doesn’t like to have me around. She just knows she ought to. Looks good to the neighbors and all that. She’s very good at going through the motions.”

  She glanced up from her whole-grain pasta. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she added. “My mother has never liked me. I can’t say I blame her. I mean, to be fair, I started it.”

  “I think I’ll stop complaining about my parents now,” Brianna said.

  “Me first,” Natasha said.

  I caught M looking at me with inquisitive concern as I stopped even trying to eat and stared down at my plate as if I’d lost something there.

  I have to admit, I envy M.

  I mean, yes, I’d like to have Brianna’s mother fearing for me, or Natasha’s parents demanding a verbal book report every day; but what I’d really like is to have the option of thinking of my mother as anything but a saint.

  She’s my mother. She was murdered. She died when I was very young.

  What else can she be but perfect?

  If my mother had lived, maybe probably she wouldn’t be anything special. At least not to the rest of the world. She inherited wealth and then married more of it.

  I’ll never know what kind of mother she really was, or would be. She’s just this vague, angelic, golden-haired memory.

  There’s no room in my life for the sort of casual irritation Brianna and Natasha and girls in novels feel toward their mothers. I certainly can’t go in for M’s brand of barbed contempt.

  Would I have hated my mother, if I’d had the chance?

  Won’t you tell “the public” that at present I wear a brown dress

  I was safe in my room working on a piece I’m trying to write about Dickinson’s white dress. It’s the one thing people know about her other than the poetry, but they know it wrong.

  They like to think of Dickinson as a romantic woman-in-white floating around the attic like a literary ghost.

  Certainly there’s something glamorous about wearing long white gowns now, or M wouldn’t go in for it so much.

  But Dickinson’s gown was actually much less fancy than M’s nighties.

  M loves wearing things that are frivolous and impractical. She thinks about how she looks all the time.

  Dickinson is more like me. She wore her flowing white dress for the same reasons I wear blue jeans.

  If something gets on my jeans, it won’t show much and it’s easy to wash out.

  A plain white dress could be boiled and bleached until it was completely clean.

  Dickinson’s dress wasn’t quite as ready-to-throw-on-and-go as my jeans, but it was simple and loose. She could bake or write or even work in the garden, if she put a blanket down first. (She did work in the garden for most of her life. She left the house; she just didn’t leave the yard.)

  Best of all, her dress was considered as casual as a pair of blue jeans is now. She probably didn’t even wear a corset under it, which must have been a relief. Her insistence on wearing a very plain dress was a defiant statement to the world: I am not at home to visitors.

  I want to write something about all of that—about how Dickinson is the opposite of people like M, who dresses herself up like a new painting every day.

  I can’t think where she gets the energy, either to do it or to deal with people looking at her. M isn’t exactly beautiful, but she’s striking, especially when she goes all out. Which she generally does.

  I was trying to write something about all this. Maybe I can start a blog.

  I’d like to have something to think about other than the obvious.

  I was scribbling random thoughts when there was a knock on my door. I knew it was M even before she spoke.

  “Emily?”

  I sat absolutely still.

  “Can I come in?”

  Nothing.

  “I’d like to talk, if that’s okay.” A pause. “Or you can do all the talking. You can tell me something weird about Dickinson. I’d like that.”

  I looked down at my notes and had a sudden urge to throw them all in a fire.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t answer when you asked the other day; but in case you’re still interested, I do know how to shut up.”

  Don’t say anything.

  As if to demonstrate her claim, M said nothing for a full minute. I could tell she was still there. There’s a certain sound that comes along with standing silently.

  And then she sighed and walked quietly away.

  I wish she’d stomped or stormed or made some catty remark over her shoulder. It would have made things easier.

  Now I can’t concentrate. Instead of working, I just sit here writing about what I was planning to write about. What I would have been writing about, if only someone would let me.

  Is M getting any work done, or is she sulking because I don’t happen to be in the habit of letting people barge into my room all the time just because they feel like it?

  The Bee is not Afraid of Me—

  I know the Butterfly—

  The pretty people in the Woods

  Receive Me Cordially—

  I was tired of sitting in my room. I couldn’t settle down to work—not while I had to wonder if M was going to come tapping at my chamber door.

  I put on my boots—thick ones with hard heavy soles, in case of thorns and snakes—and went to take the kind of ramble Dickinson used to enjoy.

  One thing I love about Hawthorne is the way that, if I’m facing away from the school, I can feel as if I’m the last person in the world. The only road that leads away from the property is a long, curving driveway, sloping down so it seems like we’re in our own private valley. It’s hard to tell you’re basically playing on the side of a mountain, at least if you keep to the paths I prefer.

  I’m glad Ms. Lurie and her husband bought plenty of land back when it was cheap and they had the chance. I’d hate to have close neighbors. As it is, it’s easy to avoid the boundaries.

  I love wandering around outside partly because it’s beautiful and wild and partly because, next to holing myself up in my room, it’s the best way to avoid everyone. It’s too easy to be in accidental proximity in the library or
the lounge. The grounds here are open enough that it’s easy to spot other people and avoid them. And of course it’s easy for them to avoid me. If anyone wants a walk of her own, there are plenty of non-Emily-intensive locations to choose from.

  I was wandering no path in particular and paused to look at some poppies and think about something Dickinson said in a letter to her favorite cousins. “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness,” she insisted.

  In other words, their lives are just like ours, only quieter.

  I think it would be pretty horrible if flowers had emotional lives. Mother Nature is even meaner to them than She is to people. Mass executions! Beheadings without benefit of trial!

  Dickinson seemed to understand this. One of her poems is from the point of view of a guy picking a flower for the girl he loves—but it sounds as if he’s kidnapping and possibly planning to rape the flower in question, so the poem is creepy rather than sweet or romantic.

  Back before she decided her room was the best place in the world, Dickinson used to love wandering around outside. A friend of Emily’s wrote about going with her on a five-mile walk to a mountain, where they gathered specimens for Dickinson’s herbarium—a book of dried flowers she put together, complete with labels and proper Latin names.

  She mentions flowers in a lot of her poems, but she was pretty scientific when it came to collecting and studying them. And growing them herself. She had quite the green thumb.

  I have a black thumb, as I learned when I tried to grow some herbs on my windowsill. Either the light was wrong or the rules that govern my life can even boss around photosynthesis.

  I keep planning to learn the proper names of the plants on Hawthorne’s grounds.

  So far I know poppies, and that’s about it. Which isn’t even Latin.

  Dickinson would not approve.

  All this was going through my mind and giving me ideas for the blog I might start and the book I might write, and I was regretting not bringing my notebook to jot down ideas (I always regret it when I don’t have it with me on hikes, and then when I have it I never use it), and then I glanced up and there was M, striding right toward me in a blouse the color of the poppies and—wonder to behold—practical, nature-oriented shoes.

  This was a million times worse than being cornered in the library. At least inside of Hawthorne there are walls and a roof and thick cozy curtains. Out here I felt pinned and frozen and completely exposed, like one of Dickinson’s dried blossoms.

  I wanted to run and yet I was afraid to. You don’t flee something unimportant, after all.

  “I do have to ask what those flowers did to piss you off,” M said, so casually that you’d think we were friends who’d just happened to run into one another.

  “Excuse me?” We were in a patch of openness surrounded by clumps of dense greenery. Usually that makes me feel gratefully alone.

  “You’re glaring like they just insulted your grandmother,” M explained.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, so I added, “I guess I don’t see the point of flowers.”

  M looked profoundly amused. She’d brought a notebook with her, in a bag with a strap that went across her front as if she were a guerrilla warrior. She pulled out a regular pencil and scribbled a few quick lines, then found a blue colored pencil and did a little shading. “Here you are,” she said, tearing the page out and offering it to me.

  I looked at it without taking it. It was a drawing of a blue ribbon, the kind an aunt who isn’t Aunt Paulette might win at a county fair for Best Cherry Pie.

  “Congratulations,” M added. “You’re the first woman ever to say she doesn’t like flowers.”

  I looked around at everything but her. There was something dangerously interesting about being referred to as a woman. Obviously I know I’m female, and ever since I was officially emancipated “woman” is my legal status, but it’s not a word I’m used to applying to myself. Ms. Lurie calls us all her girls, and no one else calls me anything I’d care to repeat.

  “I mean, sure,” M went on, tucking her notebook back in her bag, “others may have said it, but none of them have backed it up with evidence. And here you are out in broad daylight trying to murder one with your laser beam eyes.”

  I felt my lips twitching against a smile, and made them stop it. “I’m not a killer robot. That’s just how I look when I’m thinking.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And, anyway, I don’t hate flowers,” I said. “It’s just—I know they’re the kind of thing I’m supposed to like. Everybody says so. The flowers say so. They’re so blatant, you know? ‘Hey, look at me! I’m pretty!’ ”

  “So you don’t like flowers because you think they’re slutty,” M said agreeably.

  “I didn’t say—”

  “Sure you did, goth girl.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Of course you are. You’ve got at least six different black blouses that I’ve counted, and I’ll bet the real number is higher than that. It’s like your closet has a sign on it saying ‘Death Before Pastels.’ ”

  My face felt painfully hot, and I realized to my horror I must be blushing.

  She’d been looking at me. Watching me closely enough to notice the difference between Monday’s black T-shirt and Tuesday’s.

  Sure, I’ve noticed what she wears, but that’s different. M’s clothes are worth looking at, for the same reason her paintings are.

  “Anyway, you’re right,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “About flowers. They’re nature’s little sex maniacs. I’ve never been too big on science, but that’s what they are, right—a plant’s way of hitting on birds and bees?”

  “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Well, then.” M picked a pale purple thistle and stared at it somberly for a minute. “You tramp,” she whispered.

  “And they’re only pretty for a little while,” I went on. “Then they rot and die.”

  M dropped the prickly blossom and shook her head, smiling a bit. “So you don’t like beautiful slutty flowers because they’re not immortal,” she said. “No offense, but that sounds like something out of a really emo vampire novel.”

  “They don’t have to live forever,” I said, blushing again. I couldn’t help wondering how hard she’d laugh if she could see some of the stupider books on my shelves. “It would just be nice if they lasted more than twenty minutes.”

  “They do, actually,” M said. “Change their water often enough and they can stay fresh for days.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work for some soggy petals.”

  “Well, then, enjoy them while they’re in the ground.”

  M looked around, and I did, too. Undoubtedly for different reasons.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. She walked down the path a bit, then squatted in front of some drooping flowers.

  She was wearing a short skirt. I’d never noticed how tan her legs are. Or maybe her skin is naturally golden. But her face is so fair.

  I stared resolutely at the flowers. “Well?”

  She smiled up at me. “Chocolate lilies,” she said. “Even you have to like a flower with a name like that.”

  They were kind of nice, actually. Their slim necks were a strange shade of purple, and the way they bowed their bell-like heads made them look as if they were embarrassed to be stared at. Don’t mind me. I’m just here to see a friend.

  “They’re okay,” I admitted, and M grinned.

  “I’ll have to take this back, then,” she said, looking down at the drawing she still held in one hand. “You’re giving up your shot at a major award.”

  “I kind of wasn’t planning on accepting it.”

  “What? After all my hard work?”

  “You drew that in ten seconds.”

  “It’s the thought that counts.” M stood up and stretched, arms raised to the sky. Her skirt shortened accordingly, and I frowned hard at the purply-
brown lilies.

  If M weren’t there I might have picked one and taken it home to press it. I certainly have enough heavy books to get the job done.

  That might be illegal, though. I guess I don’t know the rules about wildflowers. But you certainly can’t take wild animals home, and why should plants be any different?

  Better to follow too many rules than too few.

  “You know,” M said, and I almost jumped. She’s soft on her feet even outside, and was standing much closer than I’d noticed her getting.

  “Thanks to you,” she went on, “every time I walk through a flowery meadow, I’m going to feel like I’m on a porn set.”

  Dear Friend,—We must be less than Death to be lessened by it, for nothing is irrevocable but ourselves.

  Dickinson’s letters are incredible works of art. They’re always outshone by her poetry, which is strange to me when so many of her letters are like little poems themselves.

  Then again, some of her poems are “letters,” so maybe she just couldn’t stand to be told what to do and wrote whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to.

  Her letters have a lot of death in them just like her poems do, because death was such a frequent visitor. She was always seeking and offering comfort after the loss of friends or family or the family of her friends.

  But maybe the strangest loss she suffered was one where she could never be sure if death was the culprit or not. Her uncle went out to go to church one night and was never seen or heard of again.

  It bothers me unreasonably that we’ll never know what happened to him. It seems as if we ought to be able to do better than that from this end of history.

  But detectives can’t even solve the things that are in front of them, so I suppose it isn’t fair to ask them to take care of the past while they’re at it.

  At first, Dickinson thought it was awful not to know what had happened to her poor old Uncle Joseph. The first poem she wrote about it was angry and indignant. She calls the silence surrounding his disappearance a thief even crueler than death. She sent that poem to her aunt, the uncle’s wife, who could probably be counted on to feel the same way.