We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  Finally Khang stops talking altogether and just looks at me. And it dawns on me that she’s waiting for me to say something. She really does want to know where I got all that crap about Walt. So I start worrying that what Khang really thinks is that I stole that essay or paid someone to write it for me. Specifically you, Jo. I mean I’m sure in English class you never shut up about your buddy Walt and his metaphors for the American nation-building spirit et cetera. Khang probably figures that I’ve been exploiting our letter-writing relationship. Forcing you at knifepoint to do my essays for me or something.

  I don’t think she really thought this. Looking back on it now, I’m aware I was just being paranoid. But at the time I was standing there sort of panicking with guilt and shame about it. Trying to think of some sort of excuse.

  Finally my mouth opens and what comes out is, I guess I’m kind of a Walt Whitman fan. Yes, I said that. Kind of a Walt Whitman fan. I said it out loud, to a teacher.

  I didn’t even stop there though. I told her about Mark going to Afghanistan and about how I found out that Walt worked in that Civil War hospital.

  Khang said yes, she could sense I had a deep personal connection with the material. Her words: a deep personal connection.

  Then suddenly she changes the subject. She starts talking about how she wants to nominate me for this special college program she knows about, up in Duluth. A teacher nominates a student, Khang says, and if you get admitted they’ll pay for the whole thing. And they consider things besides your grades and SAT scores.

  What things, I ask her.

  The whole picture, Adam, she says. They do a holistic assessment of your potential. They’re interested in students like you, who might otherwise slip through the cracks. Students who would be the first member of their families to attend college.

  Bridge to Education is the name of the program. It’s at the University of Minnesota up there in Duluth. Khang says she’ll print off the information packet for me for next class.

  Now that I’m thinking it over, it was stupid. Writing that essay about Walt’s poem was a stupid thing to do. I mean it was a total fluke. I only did it because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. And I only did a good job on it because of all the things I’ve heard you say about Walt. Now Khang is expecting something I’ll never be able to deliver.

  This program is all the way up in Duluth. And college in general—I can already hear my uncle Viktor laughing at that one. I can hear everyone laughing actually.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Tuesday, November 24

  Dear Kurl,

  I, for one, am not laughing. I, for one, am delighted that Ms. Khang has finally recognized what was obvious to me from your very first letters: You’re a talented writer, Kurl. I suspect the compliment doesn’t mean very much coming from a wannabe poet like me, and piggybacking on a teacher’s praise, no less.

  But take, for example, the vivid detail with which you portrayed your after-class conversation with Ms. Khang. The comparison to a poodle sniffing at your crotch made me laugh aloud. Poor Ms. Khang! She hasn’t read your letters, Kurl, so it must have come out of nowhere for her. She must have been utterly gobsmacked to read your essay. She must have wondered if she was hallucinating it, if she was dreaming it. No wonder she couldn’t contain herself.

  You’re wrong about one thing, though: Ms. Khang doesn’t know the first thing about my literary tastes and aptitudes. Kurl, you must have noticed by now that in person, I am not particularly verbally inclined. To date I have never once opened my mouth in English class except to say “here” when she was handing out our first batch of letters from your class and wanted to know who Jonathan Hopkirk was. I don’t speak in any of my classes, in fact. I fear that my letters have given you a wildly inaccurate picture of my student persona.

  All of which makes me realize once more that your letters have given me a warped portrait of you, too, Kurl. A person can never really know another person, I suppose. Not all the way through.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  PS: Before you break off your correspondence with me again, would you please do me one favor? Would you tell me which part of Whitman’s poem you wrote about, and what you said about it?

  Wednesday, November 25

  Dear Little Jo,

  I wrote about grass actually. Probably the most straightforward part in Walt’s whole Leaves of Grass book is where he talks about the actual grass. Except the more I read it the less straightforward it seemed to me.

  I mean he starts it off simply enough, describing how a child grabs a handful of grass and asks him, What is the grass? And Walt gives a bunch of possible answers. Just sort of trying them out.

  At one point he goes, I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. What he means is it’s a symbol of his personality.

  I didn’t put this in my essay but if grass is the flag of anyone’s disposition it would be yours, Jo. Not a tidy mowed lawn either. I think Walt is picturing that kind of long grass on the riverbanks. When the wind comes along it churns and sways so that it looks like another river running alongside the real one.

  What I wrote in the essay was about grass growing from the mouths of corpses. The beautiful uncut hair of graves, Walt calls it. This is the part of the poem that got me thinking about Mark in Afghanistan. When you take the train up to the mall, you pass the VA hospital and on the other side is the military cemetery.

  Watch the cemetery when the train goes past and you notice two things: One, it goes on forever. All those matching white crosses. All those dead. I mean Mark must ride that train and think, How did I ever not die over there? Why all of them and not me? Two, the rows of crosses with their grass aisles between sort of sweep past your eyes when the train passes. They look like the spokes of a giant wheel laid on its side and turning fast. Thousands of bodies under the grass and turning back into grass.

  Walt Whitman worked in a veterans’ hospital and he saw all kinds of death. But somehow in this poem he looks at the cemetery grass and sees it as a good thing, a good sign. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, he says. I mean he’s more or less talking about the circle of life. But I pointed out how hopeful Walt is about death. He goes, To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

  For him to say things like that when war was all around him, and people were blinded or shell-shocked or their legs were blown off. I don’t know. In my essay I wrote that Walt’s kind of positive attitude seems ridiculous and dangerous. But it also seems like a revolution. I mean living with that kind of hope? That would change everything.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Monday, November 30, 7 p.m. + Tuesday, December 1, 8 a.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  After school today Bron pulled up to the bike racks in her parents’ Escalade. She doesn’t drive it to school very often, as it draws a lot of unsolicited attention, so I knew there must be a special plan.

  “Put Nelly in the back,” she ordered me.

  And then the car’s back door swung open, and you stepped out.

  “Oh, hi, Kurl,” I said. I felt everything at once: surprise, relief, embarrassment, joy.

  “Hi.” You lifted Nelly into the back as though she was made of drinking straws, and you rolled your eyes when you saw that tears had sprung to my eyes.

  “It’s not crying,” I said.

  “Sure,” you said. But you smiled.

  “It’s Sagittarius season,” Shayna announced when we’d climbed into the back seat. “We’re going to show Kurl Detritus. Can you believe he’s never been there? He’s going to nerd out so hard over all the old kitchen crap they have.”

  Sagittarius season means Bron has to buy birthday gifts for most of the Otulah-Tierney clan. Her mother, her grandmother, her sister Zorah, and her twin brothers, Izzy (Isaiah) and Ezra, all have birthdays in December.

  Lyle’s birthday is December 5, and then there’s Christmas just aro
und the corner, so for the last couple of years Shayna and I have teamed up with Bron and tackled all of our collective shopping at once.

  We stopped in at Basement Records but didn’t stay long, as none of the Otulah-Tierneys except Bron has a turntable, and Lyle already has every record in existence. Then it was onward to Detritus, which opened a few years ago on a street with nothing but a nail salon, a Mexican grocer, and a bunch of empty storefronts. Nobody thought it would survive, let alone become such a draw that a whole series of similar vintage stores would pop up in the same few blocks.

  I watched for your reaction, Kurl, as we entered the store. I wanted to see Detritus through your eyes. You stood still as the girls fanned out, Shayna disappearing behind a row of library ladders tethered to a heating duct, Bron exploring the drawers of an apothecary cabinet.

  You turned a slow circle on the spot, taking in the crumbling plaster cornices, the fireplace mantels, the factory carts. You sneezed. You said, “Historical stuff. I should have guessed. Right up your alley, Jo.”

  It was the first time I’d heard you say my name aloud since you stopped writing to me. I am not pointing this out to complain about it but to explain my reaction, which was to flee to the back of the store with the girls so you wouldn’t see me tear up again. It’s not crying, but it can certainly make me look pathetic, especially to someone who’s only recently resumed contact with me.

  It was a successful visit for Bron. Within ten minutes we’d found and paid for a velvet-backed oval mirror for Bron’s grandma, a brass swing-arm wall sconce for Zorah, and oversized tin letters I and E from a theater marquee for the twins.

  “Ready to go?” Bron said.

  “Not exactly,” you said. I wasn’t surprised, Kurl. I’d kept half an eye on you as we roved around the store, and you’d stayed in one small area, methodically surveying only about four square feet’s worth of merchandise. You were still examining the first item you’d picked up: a small portable lantern with a red glass shield that spelled out the product name in raised lettering: LITTLE WIZARD.

  “Those things run on kerosene,” Bron informed you. “They’re totally unsafe.”

  Obediently, you put the lantern back on its shelf.

  “Did you want to keep looking?” she said. But it was clear from her body language that Bronwyn was on a mission, and Bron on a mission means no dillydallying, no waffling, no lingering—three activities that more or less define my entire existence. She’d decided that our next stop was the mall.

  You said that, actually, you had to head home and would take the bus, since the mall is the opposite direction from your house. I decided to head home, too, since the mall is the opposite of what I consider a pleasant retail experience.

  I don’t know how I managed to forget about Nelly. The Escalade was turning the corner at the end of the street before I realized my bike was still in the back. Mine would be a different bus but the same stop as yours, on the other side of the park.

  The park was more beautiful than I remember ever seeing it before: Two-thirds of the leaves on the ground and the remaining one-third fluttering in the cool wind like party decorations. Some of the maples were uniformly orange except for a fiery red crown. You pointed out a section of grass hemmed in by fallen logs where they hadn’t mowed, and then we were talking about your Whitman essay. I told you I always thought of my mom when I read Walt’s lines about grass being the beautiful uncut hair of graves, and you asked me what she’d looked like.

  “Like Shayna,” I said, “apparently. Everyone says Shayna takes after her. But I don’t remember her very clearly.”

  “I didn’t even think of my dad’s grave,” you said. “The whole time I was writing the essay, I didn’t think of him.”

  “He’s not in the military cemetery?” I said.

  “No,” you said. “He’s in Faribault, where my grandparents used to live. I guess they bought a big family plot or something.”

  We spent a minute walking in silence, shushing along in the fallen leaves with our feet.

  “I sort of dig old pain under new pain,” you said.

  I asked you what you meant by that.

  “I don’t know. I almost never think of my dad.”

  “You think of Afghanistan, instead,” I guessed.

  “Yeah, or whatever crap is going on with my uncle,” you said. “Whatever’s newer, it sort of buries the older stuff.”

  I thought about that. Did I bury old pain under new pain? I liked to think I didn’t. I liked to think I didn’t bury anything but dealt with it, worked it out. “Maybe it’s an adaptive strategy,” I said. “Maybe if you laid out all the separate pieces of suffering, it would all hurt at once, and it’d be paralyzing. Crippling.”

  You looked at me. “It’s really hard for me to picture you not talking in class,” you said.

  “Public speaking is not one of my skills,” I said.

  “So what are your skills? Other than mandolin and singing?”

  I considered. “I’m fast.”

  “Like, running?” you said.

  “Yes, running,” I said. “You underestimate me because I’m wearing vintage two-tone oxfords instead of Reeboks.”

  You made a skeptical sound in your throat.

  “I’m serious; I’m fast,” I said. “And I can maneuver around obstacles, which is more than I could say for you.”

  “Fine,” you said. “You want to race?”

  I was fairly certain, despite my bravado, that you’d be faster, what with your longer legs and bulked-up leg muscles. So I dispensed with any on-your-mark preliminaries and took off, hoping to take you by surprise. And it must have worked momentarily, because I stayed ahead for eight or ten seconds before I heard you pounding up behind me like some kind of enraged buffalo.

  My adrenaline kicked in and I swerved, dodging this way and that through a stand of trees and leaping over fallen branches. But it didn’t even faze you for a second, did it? For you it must have been exactly like a football field full of opposing players. Dodge that guy, jump over that guy. It must have been pure muscle memory. Which is, I’m assuming, why you chose not to overtake me but to tackle me to the ground.

  From here in the safety of my army tent I will admit that no, you did not hit me with your full strength. Yes, you did twist us both rather expertly in the air so that we landed with you underneath, taking most of my weight. No, the wind wasn’t knocked out of me, nor did it really hurt when my cheekbone grazed the ground. Yes, there was a thick cushion of fallen leaves. But the surprise and indignity of it propelled me to play things up a little, briefly. Just a wince and a sniffle.

  “You okay?” Laughter was right under the words. You pulled up on your elbow, panting, peering into my face.

  “Well, a piano just fell on me,” I said, trying hard to sound wounded.

  “You asked for it. And I didn’t fall on you. If I did, you’d be hamburger.”

  I perceived that there would be no sympathy forthcoming, so I changed tack. I may be small, Kurl, but I grew up with an older sister who, back in the day, used to love a good scrap. I swung a leg over your hips and straddled you. You brought your hands up by reflex—what did you think I was going to do, punch you?—and I grabbed your wrists and lunged my weight forward so fast that you didn’t have time to brace, and you had to allow me to pin your arms to the ground above your head.

  “Jack the Giant Killer,” I crowed. “Brute strength is no match for agility—”

  You bench-pressed your forearms, with me attached to them, an inch or so off the ground. I hovered. You tensed to throw me off. “You little punk,” you said. Laughing, though. We were both laughing.

  Kurl, I don’t know who did what to whom. I felt you stirring at the precise moment I felt myself stirring. Forgive me the nineteenth-century terminology. I loathe the word erection. The only worse term for it is boner.

  Stirring at least accounts for the fact that it’s not always sexual, or not necessarily sexually motivated. It could have be
en the adrenaline still coursing through our veins. Or being physically starved for touch, for contact of any kind. You know those horrible studies where the baby monkeys will cuddle up to the robot mama monkey even though it’s wired to administer electric shocks? That’s the kind of starved I mean.

  Anyhow. We were stirring, you and me, and it was obvious that you were noticing me noticing you noticing me, and so forth. Your ears were red, and I felt the blood rush to my face, too.

  I mumbled something in the way of apology and let go of your arms. I was shifting my weight, looking for a way to fling myself into the leaves without making further accidental contact, when suddenly you sat straight up underneath me and grabbed hold of my waist.

  I saw it on your face, the struggle, like some kind of internal fistfight. We were nose to nose, inches away.

  I took a breath. “How about if I just kiss you,” I said, “and you can see what you think?”

  You shook your head. “No. No way,” you said. Not even one second’s hesitation.

  So I apologized again, and shifted to get off of you, and again you tightened your grip. What is this behavior with you and belt loops, Kurl? You’d hooked your fingers into my belt loops like they were a harness.

  I couldn’t move, and your face was so close to mine. That shadowy, locked-down look was in your eyes—that same look you cast my way at Paisley Park that time, when I was slow-dancing with that guy Rogan. I know, I know. I’m not supposed to read anything into your expressions—but, Kurl, your lockdown look in particular is so excruciatingly humiliating! I turned my head away from you, looking for escape.

  Shayna is yelling at me from downstairs. I’m late for school. I’ll drop this letter by Ms. Khang’s class after homeroom, if I don’t decide to burn it before then. I understand the risks involved in rehashing scenes that you may prefer to forget, Kurl.