Before Linden could say anything, Stanton stepped into the foyer. “Scotch,” he announced. “Did I hear someone request Scotch? I just so happen to have the best bottle right this way. Come along.”
Linden shrugged his shoulders at Miranda and followed his wife and best friend into the other room. For the rest of the party, no one mentioned Scott at all. Before she left to go back to the city, Miranda cornered Avery. “Seriously,” she asked. “Where is Scott? Why is everyone being so strange?”
Avery put a manicured finger up in front of her lips. “Quiet. Don’t let Bunny hear you.”
“Why not? What is going on?”
“They say he quit everything and flew out to Oregon. But don’t ask. They refuse to speak about it. Linden even talked to your father about redoing his will.”
“But why? Why would Scott quit everything?”
“Some trouble with a girl. Drugs.”
“A girl? Drugs?”
“It happens,” Avery said. “I never expected it from him, but well, sometimes you never know what’s going through a person’s mind. Please just don’t mention it. Let’s just hope it blows over.”
But it didn’t blow over. Or hadn’t for the last six years. Until that email from Avery announced his return.
She tried to conjure up some righteous indignation at the email. A few times, “how dare he” escaped from her lips with barely a whisper as she paced around her apartment the night before. But she wasn’t mad at him. Mad, the burning feeling mixed with embarrassment and shame, was an emotion she reserved for herself. What if she was the reason he left and never spoke to them again? What if some girl meant her? With her needy groping of a childhood crush? What if he spared them both further embarrassment with his disappearance? Once again coming to her rescue by being a gentleman. She longed to get on a plane and run far, far away.
She pushed these thoughts from her mind as her students filed into the room. She expected a smaller batch because of the holiday, but this was ridiculous. Out of the eighteen assigned to her section only six sat around the table.
“Hello,” she said. “Let’s just give everyone a few minutes to arrive.”
Clementine, a girl who favored brown sweaters and overly sensible Earth shoes, sat at one end of the table. The red-headed Ronan took up occupancy two seats over from her. The stoner hippie kid who went by Tad sat two seats over from Ronan and so on. No one talked. They pulled out their phones and stared deeply into their radiant screens, content to ignore her and each other.
“Did everyone bring paper?” she asked. This was her fault if they hadn’t. At the beginning of the semester, she declared her classroom a paper-free zone. She held her hands over her head, her cell phone sitting majestically in front of her on the table. We will “ping” each other our poems in real time, she proclaimed. The students just nodded, undergraduates, already jaded. Now she could never tell if they were reading the poems their classmates had just sent or if they were surfing for porn or Facebook memes.
“Paper,” she said again, waving a few pieces that she pulled from her purse.
Everyone but Tad produced the required sheets and pens. She handed Tad the stack from her purse.
“Pen?” he asked.
Ronan flicked one at him across the table.
“Thank you, Ronan,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said, his brogue thick with just a few scant syllables.
Sometimes she picked him to read aloud just to hear him speak. When he did, she could close her eyes and imagine a weekend in Dublin, sitting in a pub, ordering a round of pints for mates and watching football on the television. They cheered in all the right places. When the home squad captured the final victory, the bloke next her let out a whoop in his brogue before sweeping her up for a kiss. When she leaned back to look into her Irishman’s eyes, his face always transformed into Scott’s.
She shook her head to pull herself back to the present moment. “So did you get my email about the flowers? Let’s use those to free write. Open form. Twenty minutes.”
She pushed the timer on her phone and left it at her place at the table. Normally she wrote with them, using the exercises to push herself, maybe even to compete against them. But today, with just these six, her heart wasn’t in it. Instead, she stood by the window and contemplated the growing darkness of the evening. Again, the lure of cancelling on her family and just showing up at the airport pulled at her. She could just book a ticket right there for the next plane out, even if it was headed for someplace unexciting like Cincinnati. She wouldn’t have to think about Scott Cramer in Cincinnati.
Ronan coughed the kind of cough you get from a multiyear cigarette habit. Miranda turned her head slightly, catching his eye to make sure he was okay. He pointed with his pencil toward Clementine who had drawn herself up into a ball. The hem of her skirt opened around her like tulip petals. Miranda saw the torn and ripped crotch of her tights. Tad angled himself for a better view, completely ignoring the blank paper and pen in front of him.
“Don’t forget time of year, now. Are these flowers natural? Tad? Your thoughts?”
“I don’t know,” Tad stammered, still not taking his off Clementine.
Miranda strode across the room and placed a hand on Clementine’s shoulder, pretending to look over her work. She stood there a bit too long, just enough to make the girl shift uncomfortably.
“Good, good,” Miranda said. She hadn’t read a word from the girl’s page, but it probably was good, usually was good. And frankly it was just an exercise, what did it matter anyway?
The twenty-minute timer sounded, and all six promptly put down their pens, breathing a sigh of relief.
“You know,” Miranda said, “we should probably wrap up. That is if you all don’t mind. I know a lot of you are probably leaving town, maybe even have plans to go out tonight.”
A few nodded; no one offered any complaints or protests about the early dismissal.
“I’ll collect the exercises and read them over break.”
They handed her the papers and left the room as quietly as they had come in.
“Ronan, could you stay a second?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a way that came out more like marm, which somehow made it less insulting than being called ma’am.
“Thank you,” she said. “About, you know, before.”
“Thank you?” he asked. He took a few steps closer to her. He smelled like pine trees and Ivory soap. Miranda fought the urge to inhale deeply; it wouldn’t be professional.
“With Clementine. And Tad.”
“Oh, him. Yes, well, anything to help a lady.”
“That’s nice of you, Ronan.”
“It’s not just nice. I mean it. Anything to help a lady.”
Miranda set the stack of papers down and caught his gaze. He locked his blue eyes on her, a regular Irish Rob Lowe.
“Anything,” he said again.
Her cheeks flushed; bowing her head, she rifled through the papers, pretending to organize them. “Oh,” she squeaked out. She wished herself some ingénue in a BBC production of Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters with flaxen hair neatly arranged instead of perpetually slipping from a ponytail. “Well, have a good Thanksgiving.”
“You, too, Miranda,” he said. He stood there for a minute, but she fought the urge to look up. After a few awkward moments, he turned and left the room, leaving her with her stack of poems to be graded.
“Good,” she thought to herself, “work for the weekend.” She would be able to whip them out of her bag and walk off into another room. “I have papers to grade,” she imagined calling out over her shoulder. “I really, simply must get this work done to enjoy the break properly.”
Her father would nod mutely. Bunny and Linden would understand. A family of lawyers expected people to work all the time. As for Scott, if he did magically re-appear, well, she didn’t know what Scott thought, at least not anymore, and frankly, she wished she didn’t care.<
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C H A P T E R
THAT NIGHT INSTEAD OF PACKING, Miranda opened a bottle of wine and pulled out the Scrabble board and her cell phone. It was the same board that Scott had left some six years earlier, but she didn’t really think about that. Well, she did, but only in the back of her mind. Tonight’s agenda was work. Serious stuff. Before granting her Ph.D., her committee chair admonished her to play with form. “Be creative and less stiff. Fight the rigidity,” he said, the vodka and tonic sloshing over the rim of his noon refreshment. He approved the committee’s recommendation to pass her, but added, “To publish, you must be more than what you are.” This stung.
At least she graduated, she reasoned with herself, just as she had planned. And she would teach. Also as she had planned. One couldn’t expect magic; couldn’t expect for someone like her, someone rigid, or as the chair said, stiff, to become a Poet with a capital P, an important person of arts and letters. Just finding poetry would have to be magic enough.
Her poems could be about broken coffee cups on ceramic tile floors, and no one needed to know the shattered mug had been her mother’s favorite. When she included an allusion to the dance of the seven veils, chemotherapy danced for death instead of Salome for Herod. But no one else needed to know that—at least not until her drunken committee chair member pushed the issue. He was right; as much as she revealed herself on the page, she also held back, using the metaphors and images to hide her bruised insides.
After earning her doctorate, Miranda didn’t touch poetry. She wrote articles on teaching poetry. Started groups that put snippets of poetry in unexpected places like bus station restrooms and interstate rest stops. She read her students’ work because she had to. She read her colleagues’ work because she had to, but she didn’t let poetry seep into her. She didn’t let it touch her soul. With her advisor’s words, poetry joined the long list of things that failed her, things that couldn’t be trusted to remain the same.
When she moved into this new apartment in May, she struggled to stow this Scrabble board in the top of the closet. The box, after years of benign neglect and being transported to six different yet equally squalid apartments, now ripped, and board and letters tumbled to the floor.
She bent to pick up the letters and was startled to find the p, o, e, and m tiles lined up next to her left foot. She lifted them up carefully and placed them on the board. From the m, she added a “y.” From that y, she add an “s”; above the “o” an “n.” Poem, My, Yes, No. The board spoke for itself. Or rather it spoke for her. Instead of shoving the box up high behind her tennis racquet and indoor soccer shoes, she left it out on the coffee table.
The next night and the night after that, she played with arranging the letters into little free verse poems. Strings of words built together to show something. Each day, she pushed herself. Then the stroke of genius came. Photograph the results. Using Instagram on her phone, she played around with documenting both the words on the board and the feel by messing with the filters. They were uploaded under the screen name, Blocked Poet. Joy, actual kick-up-her-heels joy, filled her. She raced home each day to play again with the words on the board and the picture. The years of tempering her expectations fell away, leaving her just the pleasure of creating something and sending it out into the world.
She even gained a few followers on the site, those people who attached themselves to any and every early adopter. After a few weeks, they started sharing her word sculptures. Then she linked the Instagram account to Twitter, and her numbers of followers and fans grew even more.
During the first week of the summer term, she looked over Amanda’s shoulder as she was supposedly reading Christine’s poem on self-harm and shockingly saw her own poem right there on a Facebook wall. Amanda quickly clicked on like and then returned to Christine’s work.
Her concentration abandoned her for the rest of that class. She wanted to get online and see exactly where her word sculptures had travelled.
That night, after a hasty dinner consisting of a slice of cold pizza, Miranda logged into the email address for Blocked Poet. She hadn’t used her school email address to sign up for Instagram and Twitter—too many horror stories about people being denied tenure or otherwise just embarrassing themselves with pictures online.
She never expected Blocked Poet to turn up among people she knew in real life. The posts were just for fun; some of them might even be embarrassing. But the only way she could see what the people in her life saw was to rejoin Facebook. When she earned her Master’s degree, she deleted her Facebook account and all memories of Stephan, the man-boy hybrid she had shacked up with during her last year there.
So she bit the techno-bullet and signed up, as her real self, and walked through all the steps. She even let the computer search her email contacts for friends she might “know.” A smattering of current and former students came up, like Amanda and Christine, her father’s law firm, and some classmates from high school who kept trying to organize off-year reunions. She hovered the mouse pointer over each one, deciding each time to click. It would be pathetic to have a Facebook account and no friends. She flipped through several screens of these people she may know until she saw it—Scott’s picture beaming up at her.
She didn’t hover for very long. Friend request sent.
Five months later, and he never clicked on accept. The others accepted, though. And from what Miranda could see, many people she actually knew on Facebook found her Blocked Poet sculptures from Instagram or Twitter and shared them. After the fear of embarrassment wore off, watching them spread across the internet brought her great pleasure; how many poets can watch their works being read in real time? How many poets get their work read at all? Sure, they weren’t Nobel Prize-winning caliber confections of words and emotions, but people liked them and shared them with their grandmothers and boyfriends and best friends alike. And for Miranda, that worked better than ignoring poetry altogether. Plus no one ever made the connection between her and the Blocked Poet; she could post whatever sappy word sculptures she wanted without fear.
Miranda took another sip of her wine and began rooting through the tiles. Friend, she laid down, with request off the r. Then sent off the t in request. Waiting, she added from the n in friend. And still from i as the final touch. She photographed it and added a black and white effect before posting.
If Scott wasn’t going to respond to her friend request, maybe there would be someone else in the universe who would.
C H A P T E R
JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE of New Haven, the traffic broke up. Miranda’s phone kept binging, almost in time to the Christmas music they inexplicably start playing on all the radio stations the day before Thanksgiving. Every time someone shared one of Blocked Poet’s sculptures her phone chimed in notification, or as Miranda liked to think, appreciation. Thank you, she said, thank you for making me feel like something I do matters to someone, whoever you are, bluefroggie_2112. She resisted the urge to pick up the phone and look at the recent list.
She swung into the driveway and almost rear-ended a station wagon. Bumper stickers covered the entire backside of the car. Miranda couldn’t imagine Avery being friends with anyone who wanted to Visualize Whirled Peas or vote for the Green Party. Maybe the housekeeper had a new car.
She walked through the front door, not knocking, though each time she returned here she felt more and more like she should knock. The blare of some television program from the den hit her; her father, almost deaf, was obviously watching some nature documentary.
“Avery,” she called out. “I’m home.”
The house smelled clean like every surface had just met a rag soaked in Lemon Pledge.
Avery strutted past on the balcony over the foyer, waving with one hand, cell phone clutched in the other.
With Avery indisposed, Miranda decided to rouse her dad from his television stupor. If he wasn’t at work, he liked to be in front of the television. Financial reports, sports programs, and the occasional crime drama. Typic
al stuff. Though once or twice, she and Avery had come home early and caught him watching Oprah. Sometimes when he gave her advice like, “you should always let the man call back first” or “never wear a short skirt on a first date,” Miranda and Avery would chide in unison, “Did you learn that on Oprah?” Her father’s rich olive skin would grow pink on the tops of his cheeks and nose, a trait of blushing that both he and Miranda shared.
“Dad,” she called out, loudly as she entered the den. Walnut bookshelves lined the room; an espresso leather sofa and plush easy chairs circled a massive, sixty-two inch flat screen, Stanton’s only request when Avery redecorated the last time. One room, he said, one room completely arranged to his likes instead of the whim of the latest designer. “A man cave,” she said. “How cliché.” But she told the designer to do it anyway. Though Avery may look every part the wicked, gold-digging stepmother, she had loved Stanton since the first time they had dinner together at a legal conference two years after Louise passed away. It didn’t help that Avery looked much younger than Stanton. For every bit of exercise he avoided, she did double, making their seven-year age difference appear to be fifteen or twenty. After she hit sixty, her hard work really began to show. Their mutual friends got soft in the middle, lost their ability to walk in heels, and started getting their hair cut in very short, manageable dos. Avery instead took up Pilates and started green juicing.
“Dad,” Miranda called out again, stepping down into the sunken room. The plush carpet mimicked walking on thick grass in a forest. She studied the big screen for a moment. A scene from some nature movie where the female penguin gives the male penguin the egg to keep warm played out in full high definition and Dolby sound. The sweeping views of the frozen world and James Earl Jones’ heartfelt commentary swallowed Miranda whole; mesmerized, the scene held her transfixed.
“Hello,” said a voice that was clearly not her father’s.
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