Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Once, he’d gone up looking for Elizabeth Bishop. “The Fish” was one of those poems he’d remembered reading, around Ella’s age, that had just turned his blood cold. While his gills were breathing in / the terrible oxygen. Who knew you could rhyme things like that? Slice went that page, and he watched it flutter down to the floor. Then he’d spotted Blake just after it. (Oliver’s books were alphabetized within an inch of their lives.) He guessed that Ella had probably read “The Tyger” in high school, in some tissue-paper-paged Norton Anthology, but had she ever read “London”? Probably not. Had she ever been to London? he wondered. Jacob had done Europe in high school on a class trip: the Jewish quarters of Rome, Paris, London, Madrid—with bonus stops in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. He’d always meant to go back without chaperones, but what poet could afford the jet fuel these days to cross the ocean? Ooh! Wordsworth. “Daffodils” was good stuff, but was it the right thing? It was tricky.

  On the day Ella finally came up to Ward III, Jacob was all set. Barely acknowledging her presence in the group sessions or the art room, each morning he would find his way over to the closet library and slip one poem into the middle of whichever book he’d seen her reading the day before. Then in the afternoon, when she went over to reclaim her book, he’d watch from the windowsill as she found the poem tucked inside. Anne Sexton one day, Keats the next. He tried to avoid any chronology. “Is there a W theme?” she wrote on the inside cover of one book after the first few days, when she’d gotten William Carlos Williams, Wislawa Szymborska, and Wallace Stevens. The next day she got Wang Wei and a note that said, “Theme = Poems That Do Not Suck.”

  At first he’d been wary of writing on the poems, because anyone who found one lying around her room was bound to get the wrong idea. But then he realized it wasn’t like anyone would recognize his handwriting, except maybe Oliver, and what was he going to do about it? Anyone else would just assume it was a by-product of some interpatient romance (which were just about always going on). Teenagers were teenagers, especially crazy ones.

  After one week, Ella wrote a poem back. He found it folded up under the edge of the chessboard during Dr. Feingold’s group. While the patients went around discussing their relationships with their parents in advance of that afternoon’s visitation, Jacob quietly unfolded the neatly hand-printed page. “The Whole Ball of Wax” described a ten-year-old girl who eats every crayon in a box of sixty-four, vividly imagining the flavors of Brick Red (“too salty by a mile”) and Caribbean Green (“like pea soup turned up the dial”) and “Outer Space” which “vanishes between my teeth / refusing to exist in me.” After the final crayon, a Yellow Orange, sets her “intestines roiling” (not bad, for a rhyme with orange), the girl eases her own belly button open with two fingers and extracts the titular ball of wax—“a lump / indigestible and indefensible. / A Crayola cortex / slick with slime / my parents shriek / and jam it down the disposal / with two ounces of vegetable oil. // They hit the switch. / Colors fly into the air / settling like snowflakes / in their shirt collars / and hair.”

  He could feel her eyes on him, searching for approval. Without supplying any visual cues, he took his pen and began circling weaker words, underlining a few tremendously good ones. There needed to be another syllable here, one removed there. Rhymes weren’t really in vogue anymore, but they were tolerable until you turned into Dr. Seuss. He noted this in the margin and slipped the poem back beside the chessboard and listened to the group’s discussion again.

  “My parents are both so in love with themselves, it’s disgusting,” Anne Marie was saying. “When they look at me, they’re just seeing themselves, and if I’m not doing a good job with their half, they get pissed.”

  “Mine are divorced,” John agreed. “So they each just see the shit they can’t stand about the other.”

  Dr. Feingold nodded. “There is a mirror effect there, yes, but it goes two ways. Parents see their own faults in us. We see our own fears in them.”

  Jacob didn’t think this was particularly true, as a rule, at least not in his case.

  A prim girl, Karen, announced, “My parents think the president was born in Kenya.”

  Dr. Feingold was trying hard not to smile as she continued.

  “Last Christmas my dad bought everyone in the family guns. Mine and my brother’s they’re going to keep in the attic until we’re older, but he said he can’t wait until because by then the government will have outlawed the Second Commandment.”

  Jacob listened as the group described mothers who lived at Bed Bath & Beyond, racking up credit card bills with purchases of window treatments, pod coffeemakers, and slow cookers that were never even unboxed. Fathers who drank a six-pack a night while watching Three Stooges reruns. Some loved too much, others not enough. They had stuck them in here, though no one gave any sign they were happy to be away from these alleged monsters, who embarrassed them in public, didn’t understand, had no idea what it was like to be a kid these days. They were overbearing, underbearing, and bared too much skin at summer swim parties. They slept with teachers, secretaries, neighbors, or the parents of friends, or else they desperately needed to get laid. They had gotten divorced too fast or had stayed together too long. They had married too young or too late. They had irresponsible numbers of children, or they had focused all their energy and attention on just one. They were untrusting, unsupportive, manic, drunk, cheap, anal, bullying, balding, varicose veined, miserable, fucked-up, saggy-armed, Botoxed. The list was endless.

  Jacob waited to hear what Ella would say, if anything. What had happened to make her this way? Why did she need to be kept safe here, like him? Had her parents raised her in some kind of protective bubble? Was she, like some zoo-born animal, incapable of reentering the jungle? He heard the other kids talking about their big plans. All eager to get out and join some startup. Or marketing their own lines of purses or building an Etsy empire. But Ella never seemed interested.

  “Ella. You’ve been very quiet,” Dr. Feingold pressed.

  “My parents are—” She took her glasses off as if to clean them, then set them back. Jacob realized he had both feet wrapped around the legs of his chair.

  “My parents are such . . . stupid—” Ella began.

  Dr. Feingold gestured for her to continue.

  “Such stupidly happy people.”

  Jacob spotted them later at the family visitation, held biweekly in the sanctuary of the former chapel. The stained-glass windows here were the last real building features that remained from the convent days, deemed too beautiful to be torn out, even if they did depict horn-tooting angels and sword-wielding saints. Jacob couldn’t actually get close enough to hear how the visit was going, but he watched: mother just like Ella but with hair up in a twist, chin doubled, and cheeks red with capillaries; father pudgy with a street-sweeper mustache, spiffy spectacles, and a Livestrong bracelet. Still? Jacob wondered if his own parents looked this way to other people. Like better-padded versions of their offspring. They were both beaming vacuously. Not that they appeared unintelligent, just that their enthusiasm didn’t seem to be merited by the circumstances.

  Other parents had the decency to seem uncomfortable, worried, or even put out by their journeys. Lots of them spent the majority of the hour looking around, trying to get Oliver’s attention so they could discuss his sense of their child’s progress, rather than actually visiting said child. Mr. Yorke was looking around all right, but not for a consult—seemingly, he was admiring the stained glass, squinting up at a depiction of the Lamb of God on a purple hillside. Jacob thought at first, maybe he was a religious nut of some kind, but then Mr. Yorke scrunched his face up in an imitation of the lamb’s and made a little baaaaaaaaaah noise to get Ella to laugh. She didn’t, but Jacob did.

  He watched them say their goodbyes and wrap her in bear hugs before they left.

  “What’s so funny?” Paul asked.

  “Your mom’s so funny
,” Jacob replied. “Hey, I gotta take a leak.”

  Paul was always happy to uphold the sacred brotherhood of pee breaks. “I’ll cover you.”

  So while Oliver was busy with Karen’s parents (who indeed wore matching PALADINO FOR GOVERNOR buttons on their shirts), Jacob ducked out the main doors a little ahead of Ella, then pretended to be just coming back from the restroom when she came through.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “Back to the common.”

  “Let’s go the long way.” Without really thinking about it, he held the doors open to the outside.

  Ella looked warily at him and then, just as he was about to apologize and explain he’d only wanted to get some air, she walked boldly past him and out into the world. They walked quickly, neither saying anything about the fact that they were hurrying to avoid being seen, and they didn’t slow down until they were back by the relocated Christ statue.

  “Your folks left early?”

  “They got us all tickets to a movie, but I told them I couldn’t—”

  She glanced at him sideways, knowing that he knew she’d been cleared for an afternoon outing. That he’d know that it wasn’t what she’d meant by couldn’t.

  Jacob thought about it a moment. “What movie?”

  “That new one with Stone Culligan.”

  She noticed his scowling. Jacob wished he could explain why the star annoyed him, and the argument he’d forever be reminded of by him, but bringing up Irene at all felt wildly inappropriate. It might even send Ella into a tailspin. He couldn’t reconcile it all himself. How could he explain what had happened to a girl who found telethons depressing?

  “Check the DSM, but I think not wanting to see a Stone Culligan movie is proof of sanity.”

  She sighed. “They were so disappointed! They never show it, but I know they were.”

  “Why didn’t you want to go?”

  “It looks sad.”

  Jacob had seen a few commercials for it over Oliver’s shoulder, and there had been a review in the latest New Yorker. Fresh from rehab and now dating a different Israeli supermodel, Culligan was taking on substantial material for the first time. Playing one of four brothers uniting for their mother’s funeral, Culligan arrives sexily disfigured from a recent ATV accident, which in a fit of art-imitating-life turns out to be not an accident at all, oh my god!

  “I take it you’re not a fan.”

  “He’s not my type.” It was hard to tell if his implication had landed. Ella did get very quiet and remained so as they stepped around a half-dozen headstones.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do people pay fifteen bucks to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers so they can watch actors pretend to be miserable for two hours when they can see it for free if they just open their eyes? And anyway, how do they get up afterward and just go across the mall and buy sensible shoes at Ann Taylor Loft?”

  “Why do you like poetry then? At least in movies sometimes things explode.”

  “Poetry makes things look more beautiful. That’s okay.”

  Jacob checked his watch but made no effort to turn back. It would take them a few more minutes to realize Ella wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

  “Shitty movies can make things more beautiful too. If Stone Culligan felt how you feel once and turned that into something, then that’s one less thing to keep to yourself all the time.”

  Ella looked at him through fogged glasses, then removed them as if to wipe them clean but instead just waved them around. “I wasn’t going to jump. Off the cruise ship. I don’t know what you heard, but I wasn’t.”

  Jacob shook his head. “I hadn’t heard anything. Who thought you were going to jump?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and walked ahead.

  “My parents. The stupid deckhand guy who saw me on the railing. The asshole ship doctor—who becomes a doctor on a goddamn cruise ship? That’s what I want to know. That’s not a reputable career, you know? That’s not, like, a sign of excellence in doctoring, to spend your life bandaging kids’ skinned knees and—and—”

  “Worrying a lot about Legionnaires’ disease, I imagine.”

  “Exactly. Who would choose to do that? Who would work on one of those floating prisons all year long? Someone like that shouldn’t be taken seriously, is all I mean.”

  Jacob didn’t say anything, though he was thinking that at least if he’d signed up for a year on a cruise ship, he could practice his backstroke once in a while.

  Ella was stepping widely to avoid the ground in front of the nun’s headstones. “‘Here Lies Sister Mary Sullivan.’ ‘Here Lies Sister Alice McNally,’” she read as she leaped over the graves.

  Jacob decided to try one too. “‘Here Lies Sister, Sister, American TV sitcom.’”

  She laughed, and he wondered if she even got the joke. But then she said, “TGIF,” as she crossed herself and went along to the next.

  “‘Here Lies Twisted Sister, who really aren’t going to take it anymore.’”

  “You’re too young to know about them.”

  “My dad still has all his old records.”

  “And terrible taste, apparently.”

  “Hey, speaking of taste, what’d you really think about my poem?”

  Jacob had been wondering if she’d have the nerve to ask him face to face. He felt another small swell of pride that she had. “Just what I wrote.”

  “But what do you really think? Like, do you think I’ve got what it takes? To be a poet?”

  Jacob examined her closely. “You’re going to need a thing. Like white-person dreadlocks. Or a ponytail that goes down to your shins. Or wear a lot of rings maybe. Like an insane, abnormal number of rings.”

  Ella frowned. “I was thinking about getting a tattoo.”

  “You don’t have a tattoo yet? Oh, God. I’m not sure I can be seen with you, actually.”

  Ella looked around perfunctorily to see if the coast was clear. “Do you have one?”

  “I have the Chinese symbol for love tattooed on my left ankle.”

  “You do not.”

  “I can’t show it to you though, because these socks are really complicated.”

  “Be serious.”

  Jacob quietly used a headstone to scrape a bit of mud off his shoe. There was a poem engraved on it that he had never seen before, though he had been out in the graveyard a number of times and had, in his boredom, looked at all the sisters’ headstones plenty of times before. Somehow he must have missed this one. Or rather he felt as if he had read it before, ages ago in some anthology, for he half-remembered it even as he scanned the simple lines.

  It is a fearful thing

  to love what death can touch.

  A fearful thing

  to love, hope, dream:

  to be—

  to be,

  And oh! to lose.

  A thing for fools, this,

  and

  a holy thing,

  a holy thing

  to love.

  At some point as he looked at the inscription, Ella had come over and begun reading it too. She waited for him to say something. He thought about simply saying that he had no way of knowing if she’d be a great poet or not, and that the odds were heavily stacked in the “or not” column, and that even if she managed to find her way to the other side, it meant doing a lot of work for nearly no compensation or recognition whatsoever. But standing there, reading those words on the headstone, he found himself unable to give his usual answer.

  “I’ll tell you if you answer one thing for me first. In all seriousness. Why were you on the railing if you weren’t going to jump?”

  Ella took a sudden interest in the twigs around her feet, kicking them this way and that.

  “It was like being a little kid again. Like not
being afraid, at all, of anything. I don’t know if you’ve ever been way out in the ocean like that. I never had been before. But when you’re out there far enough that you can’t see land from any side? It’s just incredible. Like being on a new planet. There’s nothing man-made, just the sun setting and these clouds that are just on fire. Every color imaginable. The whole crayon box. And when the wind picked up, I couldn’t even hear the engines going, or the kids crying down by the pool, or the birds shrieking down by the snack bar . . . it was just all gone, and I felt like I was in heaven. I wasn’t afraid of anything. It was like I was weightless. But I swear to God, I didn’t want to jump.”

  Jacob wanted to hug her, or at least pat her shoulder or rub her head. He settled for holding a hand out and helping her to her feet.

  “Did you try telling Dr. McDisney on the boat about it? Or anyone here?”

  Ella shrugged. “I didn’t know how to describe it.”

  Jacob motioned for her to follow him back. “It is one of the hardest things there is to describe, in my experience.”

  “What is?”

  “Happiness. All these poems I’m digging up. That’s the theme—that’s what they are.”

  Ella spoke slowly, as if worried about mispronouncing something. “I was happy.”

  They walked back, slower this time, not afraid of being seen, right up to the side door. Jacob deposited Ella safely back in the common area without a single raised eyebrow (except from Paul, and who cared?). She went and played a game of backgammon with Maura, and the two of them spoke about daytime TV, and while Paul was distracted by a boy attempting to watercolor the windows, Jacob made his way over to the bookshelf and pulled out Tess of the D’Urbervilles.