by Sara Cassidy
If I forget my words, I don’t think I’ll find my way again. It took me three days to write my poem or whatever it is. The next three days, I recited it over and over, fixing little mistakes here and there, cutting a word or choosing a better one. I was mostly laying the track though, burning it into my brain so it wouldn’t fall apart while I slept. I wanted to get to a point where the words were all mine, forgettable as my own fingers, forgettable as my tongue, so I could then perform them—bend them, whisper or shout them without getting muddled.
I didn’t imagine that I’d be feeling this fevered with nerves. I’ll have to take my cheat sheet up to the stage with me after all. I wish Clem would hurry back. I need him to hide me a little. Twig Girl approaches the mic. The café goes quiet.
“Good evening,” Twig says. “A full house. New names on the sign-up list too. We’re trending, I guess. Going viral. Contagion of the spoken word. And there ain’t no vaccination. No shot, no potion, no pill, no serum. No cure. You’ll be stained, you’ll be spoiled. You’ll also be cleansed, mended, glorified, even blessed. Yes! You will be freed.”
Twig smiles mischievously. She dips her head, and the crowd applauds. The first performer is an older guy in his twenties with a goatee. I don’t hate a lot of things, but goatees look like pubic hair. Pubic hair on a person’s face is not a good thing.
“Remember these?”
Clem’s finally back. He’s carrying two little cups of hot chocolate.
“Kid size. A dollar each. You don’t have to be a kid to order them.”
Clem doesn’t seem embarrassed at all. But then he raises an eyebrow at me, quick and light, and his smile turns sad. I know what he’s saying. He’s asking me, Is this going to end? How long can we live on kid-size hot chocolate?
I force a smile. Force it into my eyes. We’ll be fine.
Goatee Man’s performance piece is more a story than a poem. It’s about a rat that chews through the walls of the White House and becomes Barack Obama’s pet. At night, when everyone in the White House is asleep, the rat climbs up to Obama’s pillow and gives him pro-rat advice like “Make farmers plant more corn” and “Rats aren’t to blame for the bubonic plague—change the history books” and “Make rat catchers pay higher taxes.” It’s pretty funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but people chuckle and Goatee Man gets a good round of applause.
The next reader is old, with a white beard and glasses. He hasn’t memorized his piece and fidgets with his pages, losing his place a bunch of times. It’s about how family is important and how you’ve got to hold them close. But he just blurts it out. Even though it’s an important idea, the way he tells it is boring. It’s like a lecture, a big message that everyone got ages ago. As the old guy reads, Clem slides down in his chair. That’s my cue. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out the chocolate bar I bought this morning with some of the money Dad left. Snickers, Clem’s favorite. Clem sits up.
He’s truly hungry. He eats the thing in three bites, in under a minute, barely chewing. Then he turns the wrapper inside out and licks it clean. I bite my lip. I feel more sad than embarrassed. When Clem finishes his hot chocolate, he reaches in with his pinky and wipes every last bit from the sides of the cup. He sucks all the chocolate from his finger. When I finish my drink, he does the same with my cup.
After the old man, who gets light applause, is a guy about twenty. He has blond dreadlocks and is wearing shorts—in early April—and a hemp necklace strung with shells. His story is called “Tofino,” and it’s about getting hit on the head by his surfboard. In the story, he passes out, and while he’s “under”—under the surface of the water, or unconscious—he has a love affair with a mermaid. They get married and everything. One night he wakes from a terrible weight on his chest. His mermaid wife is sitting on him, urgently trying to wake him because he has to go to the surface or he’ll die.
The surfer is devastated to leave “that place of perfect happiness, a place where you never cry, because you are already living in a giant tear.” Eventually, he breaks through the surface of the water, back into the air.
The pain in my lungs is horrible. I’m sobbing.
My surfing partner grabs me. “Man, was I worried,” he says. “You were down there for, like, a whole minute.”
I stare at him. I want to tell him what happened, where I’ve been. I touch my face, but there are no tears. Only ocean water.
People clap like crazy when the guy’s finished.
Next up is the girl who wrote about “where mercy grows.” Her new piece is about the loose shingles on her apartment building that flap in storms. In her poem, she’s lying in her bed, waiting for the entire roof to fly off. She says, “Exposure’s around the corner. It will fly in on the next ragged wind.” She even sings at one point.
When she’s finished, I look over at Clem to see if he realizes how good Mercy Girl’s poem was. He’s reaching for a plate of food from the next table.
“Are you sure they’re not coming back?” I ask.
“Positive. They took their coats and left as soon as Poor Exposed Me started telling her story.”
Clem plunks two plates onto our table—one has half a bagel and cream cheese, the other has three-quarters of a raspberry square. Clem digs in. He doesn’t offer me any, but I don’t mind. I’m too nervous to eat. Then I notice Surfer Boy across the room, staring at me and Clem. Is he going to tell the café owners about Clem taking the food? Is it that big a deal? The food was just going to be thrown away.
Twig has refreshed her red lipstick. “Looks like we have a first-timer tonight,” she says. My heart clunks to the bottom of my rib cage. I breathe deep, trying to pull it back up. “Please welcome Angie.”
As I take ten wobbly steps to the mic, I pat my back pocket, making sure the script is there. The café is totally silent. I can hear my blood pumping. It’s like listening to a conch shell. Twig adjusts the mic to the right height, then nods and smiles. Her smile puts air into my sails.
“I was thinking about the poem last week that, um, the last reader performed,” I start. My voice sounds far away. It’s clear, water-clear, but trembling. “About that field ‘where mercy grows.’ I tried to figure out what mercy is, what it looks like and feels like. But all I came up with is what it isn’t.”
In my mind’s eye, the words of my poem scroll past, black letters painted on a white wall. This was how I imagined them when I memorized them. I watch the words flow past, but I can’t speak. I swallow. It’s like I have to lower my tongue into my neck to find my voice, to get it to spark. I look at Clem. He nods. He smiles. And there’s my voice, dragged up against the side of my throat.
I don’t know what mercy is, but I have met pity. Pity is a wilted flower. A rusting blade. It would cut you if it wasn’t so pathetic. Pity doesn’t smell good. If mercy is oasis, pity is penitentiary. Pity is bitter, a bite of something rotten. Even while pity’s eyes well up, brim with do-goodness, pity sneers. Pity is so small it has no heart. Pity is all the rich have to offer—they hold it toward you, a dead, mangled bird in their hands, a little bundle of sorriness. Oh, how good pity feels, its sticky warmth, its sickly charm. But pity sits in the gut, souring, like guilt. Pity puts you in your place. It can’t call you home. Poor, poor, poor, poor pity.
As I speak, my voice rises. It stretches thin and wavers. My face feels like it’s being stung by wasps. I run out of breath. My words crack. My heart, well, it’s a wrecking ball. It tries to break through my ribs, make a run for it. I stick it out though. I don’t vomit and I don’t forget a word. I don’t pull out my cheat sheet. And when I’m done, the audience doesn’t look at me with pity. They clap! Somehow, my rubber legs carry me back to our table, where Clem sits, freaked out.
“Did I embarrass you?” I ask.
“No,” Clem answers. “I’m just—when did you learn to do that?”
I shrug. “This week?”
“It was good, Angie,” he says quietly. “You said things I felt when the cops used to bring
us stuff, or when that old friend of Mom’s pats us on the head but never invites us in. You made me feel all that again.”
“Sorry.”
“No. I thought I was the only one who felt that way.”
Two others perform after me, but I can barely pay attention. My mind keeps racing back to those terrifying moments onstage. I remember every word I stumbled on and, better, the sweet feeling of the words I nailed. But I shake my head to clear it—I want to hear the others. I listen double, once for the story, once for how they built it.
Finally, Twig introduces the week’s judges, the owners of the hair salon next door. While they deliberate, Clem stops the surfer as he passes our table and asks if his mermaid story was true. The surfer shrugs. “What is truth anyway, man?” he asks. Then he stares at me as if he’s angry. It takes the wind out of my sails—punches a hole right through them, actually, and my confidence flies out through that hole.
“It was a cool story,” Clem says.
The guy with the ragged sweater, Aaron, the reigning champion, taps my elbow.
His eyes are light blue, almost chalky.
“Hey,” he says. “Cool.”
“Thanks.”
“Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness,” the guy says. “That’s the poet Amy Lowell.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say. Amy Lowell. I will google her at the library. “You didn’t perform tonight.”
“I couldn’t come up with anything. Fallow week.” The guy points to his head. “Germinating. I’ve been reading. Priming the pump. You can’t write if you don’t read. Reading a lot is the difference between those who win and those who don’t.”
Mercy Girl passes by.
“Hey,” I say. “Your thing was really good.”
“My thing?”
“Your, uh, slam piece.”
“Right. Yours too.”
“The idea of the roof flying off. I like that.”
“Yeah,” Mercy Girl says. “You going to write about that too, next week? Or about a floor that’s falling or something?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Then I get it. She doesn’t like that I riffed off her poem. “I just thought your poem last week was so good. It inspired me. I was answering it.”
“Echoing it.”
“I wasn’t copying it.”
Clem looks back and forth from me to Mercy Girl, like he’s watching a tennis game or the Skylark’s windshield wipers.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Mercy Girl. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Hmm.” Mercy Girls grunts and walks away.
Clem shakes his head. “Boo hoo! You copied my moves! I hear that all the time at the BMX park. Just ignore it. Where do they think they got their moves?”
“Keep your eye on the prize, hey,” I say.
We burst out laughing. It’s something Dad used to say to tease Mom if she walked in on him in the middle of getting dressed. It’s kind of disgusting but mostly hilarious.
The café hushes. Twig steps up to the microphone.
“Another interesting night at the Spiral Café,” Twig says. “Third place this week goes to Violet. Great singing!”
The audience claps as Mercy Girl collects her prize, which is an old-style, secondhand game of Scrabble.
“Second place goes to—a first-timer. A slam virgin! Angie, for her piece ‘Mercy.’ I mean, ‘Pity.’ Pity’s so small it doesn’t have a heart—I like that line.”
I’m totally shocked. Clem has to shove me out of my seat. Twig hands me a book called Keep That Candle Burning Bright & Other Poems by a woman named Bronwen Wallace, and a dozen eggs donated by someone in the audience. The brown eggs are so big, the carton has to be held shut with a rubber band.
“And our winner this evening, Jeremy Loren, for ‘Mermaid.’ A great story, Jeremy. The ocean is a giant tear. Love it.”
Surfer wins a paint-by-number picture of a matador, on velvet, and a haircut at the salon next door. The audience laughs at this, since it doesn’t look like Surfer’s going to part with his dreadlocks anytime soon. But Surfer doesn’t laugh. He actually looks put out. As he walks back to his table, he pushes past me, nearly knocking my eggs out of my hand. I look up, thinking he’ll apologize, but he just sneers. When I look for Mercy Girl to congratulate her, she’s already heading out the door.
I don’t think I should have gotten second place. Mercy Girl’s piece was better than mine. Maybe the judges felt sorry for me. Maybe they gave me their pity vote.
Home
“Let’s boil those eggs when we get home,” Clem says.
“Home?” I ask.
“You know what I mean.”
Clem suddenly stops. We’re in front of an apartment window at sidewalk level. It’s a blazing rectangle of yellow in the dark night. “Look.”
Inside the apartment, a large man in sweatpants reclines in an easy chair in front of a TV. A large yellow dog sleeps at his feet. Near them is a bookcase filled with books, and two paintings hang on the wall, one of a river banked by forest, the other of a snow-filled meadow. It strikes me that the last thing I would want in our car would be pictures of cold, damp forest or snow. I’d want a picture of—well, of someone in an easy chair, watching TV. Of the inside.
“I don’t miss TV,” Clem says. “I don’t mind watching a show now and then at Aunt Evie’s, but it feels weird now, like I’m sticking my head in a box. I hate living in a car. I hate it. But when we get back to living inside, I’m going to do stuff. I’m going to start a business designing gear especially for cyclists, like a helmet that whistles when you hit a certain speed, or a handlebar attachment that records your laps.”
“I’m going to write all over my bedroom walls,” I say.
“Cool.”
Mom, Clem and I have four favorite parking places. We spend two nights at each before moving on. Tonight, it’s Blackberry Estates, a quiet lane beside a park where Clem and I, with Mom—and Dad—have picked blackberries since we were little. There’s no public washroom nearby, which is a drag, but it’s the quietest of the places we stay.
We’ve learned to make a little noise as we approach the car, so the person “at home” has some warning. In the early days, we gave each other a few heart attacks by appearing suddenly at the car window. When you’re living in a car, some part of your brain is always on high alert. You can get cozy in the Skylark, but don’t mistake that coziness for privacy. You’re never out of view. Sorry, Mercy Girl, but the shingles flew off my house long ago.
Mom’s surprised but proud that I competed in the slam. She likes the eggs too. We set up the Coleman stove beside the car and boil up eight—three each for me and Clem, two for Mom. We eat them with crackers that Mom got at the Single Parent Resource Center and cups of mint tea that we make with the same water we boiled the eggs in. A few bits of egg white float to the top of my cup. I would never have put up with that in the old days, but we’re experts now at conserving water.
Mom’s spirits pick up as we eat. “What’s that book you won?” she asks.
I click my flashlight and start to read from Keep That Candle Burning Bright. The book says they’re poems, but they feel like letters. The writer just starts speaking right into your ear, telling you exactly what’s on her mind. I can tell that Mom and Clem start thinking about other stuff, but it doesn’t really matter whether they’re listening. I just reel the words out into the night, lay them down like a carpet for us, let them build against the air like wallpaper.
Getting Clean
Our favorite library branches are the Bruce Hutchison and the Juan de Fuca. They’re both next to swimming pools. It takes a little more gas to get to them since they’re farther away, but Mom says it’s worth the drive. We swim first, flying down the slides and leaping off the towers, but mostly we spend our time in the change rooms. In the hot showers, actually. Ahh! I shave my legs and scrub every square centimeter of my body. I leave the conditioner in my hair for minutes, not just one. I soap betwe
en my toes and twist the corner of my washcloth to deep-clean my ears, and I come out of there glowing. Clem too. We’re so clean, it’s like we’ve got fresh batteries. Mom walks out looking like two million bucks.
With our hair still wet and our eyes buggy from the chlorine, we head to the library. If we’re at Bruce Hutchison, we don’t even have to leave the building. At Juan de Fuca, we have to run thirty steps through the evening air and then we’re inside again. I love approaching the yellow light of the library. It’s like entering a warm cave. It’s so kind in there. There’s nothing you have to do or prove or pay for.
Mom tries not to hurry to the computer, but she’s eager to check Gmail. She hears from Dad a few times a week. She is in a whole other world, a happier one, when she reads his letters. It’s like she forgets where she is. That evening, as we’re settling in to sleep, she’ll announce, “Dad says his new apartment is over an ice-cream shop. The freezers hum all night,” or, “He’s putting a check in the mail for clothes for you two.”
Dad and Mom always seemed to start in the middle of a conversation. Mom could say out of the blue, “No, I don’t think we should do it,” and Dad would answer, “Remember that guy in Austin? He’d say that we should go for it,” and she’d say, “Yeah, but look how long that guy’s beard was.” And then the two of them would burst out laughing. From start to finish, Clem and I would have no idea what they were talking about. They had their storehouse of experiences and could talk in shorthand. Sure, sometimes they argued, mostly over how they parented us—Mom thought Dad was too soft, and Dad thought Mom worried too much.