The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  “That does apply to an awful lot of people, historically speaking,” M agreed.

  “I just mean,” Natasha began, and then stopped and wasn’t able to start again.

  “I think you’re right,” Katia said in a soft, clear voice. “For myself, I’d like to be able to think about his life and his work instead of just his death. And for his sake—” She fumbled for a minute and then went on, “I’d hate it if I finally managed to get some writing done—some good writing—and published it and everything—and then every poem I ever wrote was basically wiped out because of how I died.”

  Her voice had risen, and so had Ms. Lurie, who appeared next to our table without looking as if she’d hurried.

  “Like Sylvia Plath,” Katia went on recklessly. “Nobody ever talks about anything she wrote. So many great poems, and nobody even cares! Everyone’s just, ‘Oh yeah—isn’t she the one who killed herself? Tell me all about how she did it.’ ”

  “Katia,” Ms. Lurie said softly.

  “It’s true!” Katia cried. “I hate that!”

  Ms. Young rushed over and knelt next to her. “Hey, hey, okay,” she said soothingly; and Katia, who’s always seemed to be the picture of tranquil togetherness, buried her face in her shoulder.

  I don’t know quite what I did then—it can’t have been anything too dramatic or Ms. Lurie would have said something. I do know I pushed my chair back a bit. I think I may have made some kind of sound. Fortunately, Katia was now sobbing, quietly but obviously, so everyone was focused on her.

  Almost everyone.

  “Emily?” M said very softly.

  If she had dared make a scene or dropped any kind of hint that I knew her from a hole in the wall, I would have smashed a plate over her head. I shook my head hard and clenched my hands into fists in my lap, and she took the hint and backed off. But I could tell she was still watching me. Worrying.

  Katia was quieting down. She sat up straight, wiping her eyes and nodding in reply to a murmured question from Ms. Young. Ms. Lurie looked at her and then around the room.

  “There’s no right way to feel about this,” Ms. Lurie said, to all of us. “I’ll be happy to organize a trip into town on the day of the exhibit. Anyone who wants to come is welcome. Anyone who’d like to spend the day shopping or visiting the library rather than looking at Stephen James’s work is welcome to do that, too. And of course staying here at Hawthorne is always an option.”

  She stressed “always” as if it applied to much more than just the day in question. Ordinarily I’d have felt reassured by that.

  Today I can’t find Hawthorne much of a refuge. Not if everyone won’t shut the hell up about corpses.

  When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.

  I’m trying to work, but I want to throw all my books out the window.

  Okay, not all of them. Not the ones with Dickinson’s actual words. Just the ones that talk about her life.

  These biographers are driving me crazy.

  I guess I shouldn’t blame them. I’m the one who wanted to know about the Emily I’m not really named after. They’re just trying to deliver the facts.

  Except they’re not—not all of them, at least. Plenty of them come across as creepy old gossips.

  Psst—did you hear that Emily Dickinson had an abortion? And lesbian love affairs? And lusted after married men? Did you hear she might have committed suicide? Did you hear she might have stayed in her room all the time because she had seasonal affective disorder? No, no—it was because she had uncontrollable diarrhea. Well, I think she wrote her poetry because her father sexually abused her! No way—it was because she had epilepsy!

  It’s starting to make me sick.

  It’s like someone held a contest: the biographer who comes up with the weirdest “What if—?” scenario gets a million dollars and a car.

  I just wanted to know a little about her life. If a little is all anyone can know for certain, that’s all right with me.

  Of course there are things to wonder about. Those strange, passionate love letters to someone she called “Master,” the letters she wrote but never sent—who was she thinking of when she wrote them? Or was she thinking of anyone? Was she playing on paper, spinning a fantasy for her own amusement?

  I don’t mind not knowing. I think I’d rather not know if she was ever in love, and with whom, and how much.

  I don’t want to read “Wild Nights” and think, Oh, right—she wrote that because she had the hots for so-and-so. I just want to go rowing in Eden, even if I don’t know exactly what that means.

  Sometimes I wish I’d never learned a thing about her.

  I started reading her poems because they were so shockingly strange and at the same time so familiar. Of course I knew she wasn’t really talking to me or about me, but still it felt as if I’d finally met someone who’d known me all my life.

  I want that feeling back. I want these poems to have fallen out of the sky. I want to not know everything I know.

  I finished writing that sentence and I looked up and M was in my room. Standing there, looking as pleased and expectant as if I’d mailed her an invitation. And then looking startled when I practically jumped out of my skin at the sight of her.

  “Do they even have knocking as a concept on your planet?” I demanded as soon as I could breathe again.

  She looked confused. “I did knock,” she said. “You said ‘Come in.’ ”

  “I did not—” I started to say, and then I stopped. M is as straightforward as a door slamming on your hand. She’s all kinds of annoying, but she isn’t a liar.

  Had I said it automatically?

  But since when am I in the habit of saying that?

  “You must have heard someone else talking,” I finished brilliantly.

  Now she looked amused. “I think I know what your voice sounds like,” she said. “And, anyway, nobody else is making a peep. It’s as silent as a tomb around here today.”

  She looked at my bed. There was barely room on it for me and what may have been every book ever written about Emily Dickinson, but that’s not the kind of thing that gets in M’s way. She stacked a few on top of one another, murmured, “Mind if I cut in?” and sat down in the space she’d made.

  At least she’d left a book between us as a sort of buffer zone.

  “Please, sit down,” I said.

  She smiled. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  There was a small silence that disturbed me because it wasn’t awkward at all.

  “So,” M said at last. “What are you working on?”

  “Oh, all kinds of things,” I said. “Just now I was trying to decide if I should set all these books on fire or pitch them into the nearest tree.”

  “Goodness, what’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t explain when it didn’t even make sense to me, but I tried anyway. M listened to me bumble on about how some biographers stop being explorers and start believing they own the country they’ve been wandering. They draw up borders and boundaries and laws and constitutions, all the while assuring themselves and everyone else that they’re just representing the wishes of the native inhabitants.

  I expected M to laugh at the idea of caring so much about a bunch of words written about someone who wrote a bunch of words. But she sat very quietly and looked thoughtful and waited for me to run out of words myself before she said anything.

  “Maybe,” she ventured, “there’s something more important than pinning down the factual, literal truth. Or maybe the greater truth about a person like Dickinson can’t be told by someone who insists there can only be one true story.”

  I felt comforted and a little sleepy, as if I’d walked a very long way and now I got to rest. Or, less poetically, as if talking so much more than usual had sapped my energy. “What do you mean?” I asked, only half caring about her answer. Mostly I just wanted someone else to be doing the talking.

  “I mean … well, it’s like tho
se saint stories of mine,” she said. “The best ones are the ones that never really happened. Like Lucy.”

  “You don’t think she was real?”

  “I think she was plenty real,” M corrected. “I’m just not sure she ever existed.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for clearing that up.”

  M laughed. “Maybe there was someone named Lucy,” she said. “And maybe she was a Christian back when that was a new, weird thing to be. But all the things they say happened to her? All that amazingness about her eyes and the brothel and the fire and everything? Some of those stories stomp all over each other. If one’s true, the others can’t be. But that’s okay.”

  “Okay,” I repeated.

  “They’re like Greek myths,” M said. “There can be a million different variations on a story, and each one has its own reality. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t really happen.”

  “It does if you’re Lucy,” I said.

  “If you’re Lucy, you know the truth already,” M corrected. “Those stories are for the rest of us. They give us something to think about. Something to aspire to.”

  She’d said something like that before. In her room, when I got to see her pictures. “You like Lucy because nobody tells her what to do,” I recalled.

  “Exactly.”

  “But you’re not religious.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if you were, you wouldn’t be saying it’s no big deal whether Lucy really existed or not.”

  “I might,” M said with her usual maddening calm. “I have an aunt who’s Catholic, and she says plenty of the stories are full of crap. Her words. She’s my one cool relative.”

  “It’s good you have one, anyway,” I said. “That must be nice.”

  M smiled at me, and I felt the same jolt of panic I had when I looked up to find her in my room with no memory of having let asked her in.

  She didn’t see anything amiss. I was alone with my terror. As always.

  “It’s very nice,” she said.

  The Soul that hath a

  Guest,

  Doth seldom go abroad—

  Diviner Crowd Within—

  Obliterate the need—

  “I should go wash up,” M said a few minutes before the dinner bell rang.

  I didn’t answer, and she slipped out as quietly as a cat.

  For such an intrusive person, M can be oddly tactful at times. She’s never questioned why it’s so important for me to be the enemy of the world. She’s not going to accept that without a fight, but she’s also not going to draw attention to it in front of our sister-students. And being seen leaving my room would raise questions—especially if I wasn’t right behind her, hurling insults and maybe a shoe. So she kept an eye on the time and left right before the halls were due to be full of people.

  I have to get a grip.

  What was I thinking, letting her stay so long? Letting her stay at all?

  She was in here for hours.

  It didn’t feel like that long. I have never in the history of ever understood the urge to use phrases like “the time flew by” until today.

  I can’t remember half of what M and I talked about. Dickinson, of course. And saints. She told me lots of stories about them, most of which involved virginity as an extreme sport.

  “This is getting a little repetitive,” I said at one point. “Don’t women saints ever do anything?”

  “Of course,” M said. “Ursula went on that pilgrimage.”

  “With eleven thousand virgins,” I reminded her. “As a virgin. Because virginity.”

  “Well, that was pretty much the only thing people cared about, so far as women were concerned.”

  “Great.”

  “Margaret of Antioch killed a dragon,” M said brightly.

  “To protect her virginity?”

  “Kind of,” she admitted. “But she won the fight after the dragon ate her. I think she should get extra credit for that.”

  Apparently M’s aunt—the cool one—used to tell her saint stories before bed when M stayed at her house for long summer visits. Which explains a lot about M, if you ask me.

  She also told me about how they figure out who’s a saint and who isn’t. It’s all very strange.

  She stayed and talked all afternoon and left after what felt, looking back on it, like no more than a few seconds.

  This isn’t okay.

  I can’t do this.

  She can’t do this, but she hasn’t once listened to me on that subject.

  It’s up to me.

  I can’t tell you—but you feel it—

  Nor can you tell me—

  Saints, with ravished slate and pencil

  Solve our April Day!

  What is wrong with me?

  I never loved the whole career-nastiness gig, but I thought at least I’d gotten good at it.

  At first I thought I should go all out at the dinner table, but then I realized how suspicious that would look. If I started insulting M out of what would seem like the blue, it would just come across as paying attention to her. Like the stories I read when I was little about boys teasing girls they secretly had a crush on. Over-compensating.

  I decided instead to just sit and do my usual imitation of a stale dinner roll—unwanted and a little pathetic, but no big deal as long as you ignore it.

  I tried to look hard enough to chip a tooth on.

  I thought about some of the saints M had told me about. One was thrown into a fire. Another threw herself into a fire. There were brandings and burnings and bone-breakings and tooth-pullings and worse, and the women endured them all—looking, in the paintings of them, calm to the point of stupidity.

  Surely I could keep a straight face through a single idiot dinner.

  Saint Emily, that’s who I’d be. Patron of bitchy teenaged girls. An inspirational figure for generations to come. Heavenly sister, help me in my hour of need. Damn it all, amen.

  What if there was already a saint by that name?

  With my luck, Saint Emily was the guardian of newborn kittens and other terrifyingly cute creatures.

  There could be more than one saint with the same name, though. Couldn’t there? I seemed to remember that from somewhere.

  “Is there a Saint Emily?” I asked without thinking.

  Every head at my table and several at the others turned toward me in astonishment.

  Apparently that’s the kind of response you get to a perfectly normal question after you spend several years making it clear that if you can’t say something nice, you’ll damned well say it anyway.

  Ms. Lurie smiled with puzzled pleasure.

  Wonderful.

  I imagined it hitting the local paper tomorrow: PREVIOUSLY NASTY HAWTHORNE STUDENT ASKS STRANGE BUT INNOCUOUS QUESTION—AUTHORITIES BAFFLED.

  All things considered, M held it together pretty well. For just a second she grinned broadly, but then she covered by picking up her glass and spilling some of the contents on the girl next to her, who screamed as if the water were lava straight from the source.

  “There are a few,” M said to me quietly through all the fuss over (who else but) Madison and her wet sleeve. “But they’re not too exciting.”

  She forced herself to tone down another gleeful smile. “We’ll have to work on improving that track record,” she added.

  “I don’t really feel like dying young and horribly,” I said, as long as no one was listening and I’d already made an idiot of myself.

  “Oh, neither do I,” M said. “Don’t worry. Not all saints are martyrs.”

  I don’t know if that was meant to be funny or reassuring. Maybe both.

  Either way, it didn’t work.

  Of Course—I prayed—

  And did God Care?

  He cared as much as

  on the Air

  A Bird—had stamped

  her foot—

  And cried “Give Me”—

  Dickinson believed in God, but she didn’t believe in church.


  In Dickinson’s world, even if you went to church and read the Bible and prayed all over the place, you weren’t considered a Christian until you “converted.”

  Dickinson’s mother was always a Christian, but the rest of her family held out. Eventually they all gave in—her sister and her brother and, last of all, her father.

  They all believed in a God you weren’t allowed to argue with. If he took away your loved ones, well, that was how he wanted things for some reason, and you just had to put up with it. No back talk.

  Dickinson couldn’t give up arguing with that God. Even when Lavinia urged her to convert, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t give up her own ideas for someone else’s.

  M seems to have that same kind of relaxed relationship with religion and God. I don’t think she believes or disbelieves. She picks the things she likes and doesn’t worry about the rest.

  I don’t know what I think.

  No one ever taught me anything about religion, but I found bits and pieces of it here and there. It’s all very confusing.

  There are so many different religions. It’s hard to figure them out on your own, and obviously I couldn’t go and have long meaningful chats with a priest or a minister or anyone like that. It would seem especially horrible to get someone killed who was just trying to help people and save souls.

  Do I have a soul? Is it worth saving?

  I tried praying once for whatever this curse is to be lifted. I didn’t know exactly what to say, but I did the best I could, and then I had no idea what to do. How could I know my prayers had worked? And wasn’t I praying to the same person who was doing this to me in the first place?

  I do know that I don’t believe in the God I hear the most about—the one who’s all-knowing and all-powerful and all-good. He just doesn’t make sense under my circumstances.

  If God were just two out of those three; or maybe if he were somewhat powerful—certainly stronger than human beings, but not as Ultimate as everyone wants to give him credit for being—that might make sense.

  Would such a god feel shy of all the attention he gets? Embarrassed—maybe even a little annoyed at people insisting he is what he isn’t?