The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  Fry looked at our poet and then at the Lamium. As if he hadn’t even noticed them before, as if he were considering them for the first time. And maybe he was. Because even though he waited so long I thought he was stalling, it turned out he was time-traveling instead. That smile he’d hurled my way like a stealth bomber melted into a different look, the dreamy sort of face people get when they’re seeing a memory. “These flowers,” he told our poet at last, “are the exact same color as the bruise I got when I was six.” He looked at his arm, then back at the little flowers. “My dad had to pull me out of a riptide.” He shook his head, as if he’d surprised himself. “I was so proud of that spot on my wrist, I hoped it would never go away.”

  “A badge of love and pain,” Rufus wrote in the book. But it was hard to tell if Fry even heard the line at all. He didn’t move, hardly breathed, like he didn’t want to leave the beach he saw in his head. For just a minute, Mr. Cool disappeared and the boy sitting next to me seemed younger, more vulnerable. But then our poet moved on to someone else, and Fry blinked. The sly look was back in his eyes, the look that measured, locked people out.

  At first, Rufus was the only one to notice someone else had something to say. “I see you’ve got a notebook of your own, Charles,” he told Fenshaw. “Sure sign of a poet. I take it you write verse now and then?”

  For the second time in less than an hour, Fenshaw blushed. He snapped the notebook no one else had spotted closed. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Occasionally. I just thought . . . well, I’d like to remember the way those loose petals look.” He pointed to the petals one of the flowers had dropped, then stopped, embarrassed. Our poet nodded, asked him to go on and explain what he meant.

  “Well, sir, it’s just the way they’ve fallen on the grass there. I know it’s a sympathetic fallacy.” He looked at the blank stares and question marks we were telegraphing him. “I mean, I know I’m attributing human emotions to a natural object that can’t experience them. But”—he cleared his throat, gathering courage—“they look to me, sir, like . . .”

  Rufus nodded again.

  “Like tears, sir.”

  But Rufus didn’t let Fenshaw off any easier than he had the rest of us. “What kind of tears, Charles?” he asked, though his voice was gentle, and he seemed to be asking a question the prof wanted to answer, because this time there was no hesitation at all.

  “I’d say good-bye tears, sir.”

  “Good-bye?”

  “I suppose there can be hello tears, sir. But what I think of, when I look at those petals, is a child crying. A child who’s leaving home.”

  Our poet nodded. “Sympathetic or not, Charles,” he told the prof, “that fallacy of yours took you to a good place: ‘Petals small as a child’s tears good-bye.’ ”

  It felt a little like church again, and everyone got quiet. Until Baylor used his cane to stand up, then read our poem from his book. And of course, he was right. It was one-tenth Lamium and nine-tenths us. We had opened up, the way most people did around him. And that made the poem open up, too, wide as a flower at noon.

  H started it. While the poem was still settling in our heads, he clapped. Like he’d just heard the best concert performance ever. Fry joined in, then someone else, and pretty soon we were all clapping. (Yes, even Thatcher, though he might have been brushing something off his lap, it was hard to tell.) It felt good to make noise after being quiet so long. It felt better to have heard another brand-new poem. And it felt best of all that we’d helped write it.

  Rufus grinned. “I’m glad we’ve introduced the themes of love and pain,” he said. “Because I’m about to give you some more of both. You see, ladies and gentlemen, this course includes assignments.”

  Normally, there would have been groans and “I told you sos.” But Baylor was so full of surprises, we just sat there, waiting. One boy even got out a pencil and paper to take notes. “For next week,” our poet told us, “I want y’all to write a love poem.”

  Now somebody did groan, but H reached for the sky, waving his hand. “Sir,” he asked, “would it be okay to say that your sweetheart’s hair makes an honest man lie?”

  Our poet had a good memory, even for things he might have preferred to forget. “It would be if you hadn’t already written that line, Mr. Losada.” He tapped his coat pocket, and sure enough—there was H’s poem sticking out like a white handkerchief. “Besides, this assignment isn’t that kind of love poem.”

  “It’s not?” H, who had probably figured his homework was aced, sounded disappointed. “Then would it be okay to compare her lips to a pair of dead herring?” He directed a smug half wink at me, and I cringed, remembering my flip suggestion. Was this H’s way of getting back at me for not liking his poem?

  But suddenly Rufus was laughing. Long and loud. I didn’t know about the others, but by now I loved the sound of that laugh so much I would have done or said just about anything to make it happen. I guess it was the way he gave himself over to smiling and laughing, the way he seemed to forget there was anything else that needed doing.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. “You’re going to need to look in the mirror for this one.” He slipped the notebook back in his pocket, reached for his stick. “You see, I want you to write a love poem to yourself.” I could have been wrong, but now I got the feeling I’d had a few times before, the feeling that Rufus was looking just at me. “For some of you, who are blind to your own virtues, that may prove hard to do.”

  Lamium

  Migraine dreams, jagged seams,

  A badge of love and pain.

  Or dreamy eyes, sleepy eyes,

  Drooping, closing, losing light.

  Packages scattered under the tree,

  Some torn open, some tied tight.

  Is there a heartbeat in those purple veins?

  Are those embryos or mouths or rosary beads?

  The color of my first dress, gathered with love,

  Fairy cups stirred with blades of grass,

  Notes clustered on a windy score,

  Three blooms, three friends, alas!

  Grape flowers, cloud flowers, love flowers,

  Paper parasols upside down, a butterfly herd

  Stopped to rest by a deep green pool.

  Petals small as a child’s tears good-bye,

  Dropped stitches everywhere

  From a blanket the color of sky.

  Poetry Versus Medicine

  After class, Rufus returned H’s poetry. And do you know what he said when he handed back that mind-numbing love poem? “There’s a lot of strong feeling between these lines, young man, make no mistake.” The two of them talked for a long time afterward, and I didn’t hear most of what they said. I only know that, on the ride home, H announced he’d decided not to give his poem to Miss Kinney. Not yet, anyway. It needed, he conceded, some polishing. “There’s more stuff to learn,” he told us. “And I might as well learn it from the greatest poet alive.” He slipped a peek at Fry in his rearview. “While he still is, I mean.”

  Fry, on the other hand, was not in the mood for summer school. The first full week of vacation was just ahead, the waves were finally clean, so why waste any more time? He’d show up Saturday for the first cleanup, he told us, because there’d be someone from the court there. But he’d noticed that our poet didn’t take roll. “Plus,” he added, in the same sarcastic tone he’d begun to adopt whenever he mentioned Baylor, “I don’t feel like watching that dirty old man drool all over my girl.”

  I was torn between the sweet shock of being called his girl and outrage at his labeling Rufus Baylor a dirty old man. “You’re kidding, right?” I turned on Fry, who just folded those gorgeous arms of his and gave me the kind of sad smile you give someone who’s the last to know.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were doing homework with Baylor, huh?”

  That was easy. “Because I knew you’d start with this teacher’s-pet craziness.” I folded my arms right back, though I’m pr
etty sure my biceps weren’t impressing anyone. “And by the way, it was all my idea. He didn’t invite me or anything.”

  “Actually,” H told the rearview, “he did invite me.” He tried to look modest and cool at the same time, which pretty much added up to Portrait of the Artist as a Dipstick. He ran his fingers through his hair and gave the mirror a wink. “Yeah, Baylor says I should stop by anytime I have a question.” Another wink. “He says my work in progress should be nurtured.”

  I could think of other things that should be done to H’s poetry, but since he was sort of taking my side, I didn’t mention any of them.

  Fry ignored Baylor’s newest poetic disciple, and turned back to me. “Craziness? What’s crazy is you not noticing how that old guy looks at you when he talks. How he always calls on you first.”

  Was it true? For just a minute, I wondered if those times I’d felt Rufus Baylor taking his time with me, singling me out, were more than wishful thinking. But I was pretty sure that patience and attention were the same things he gave everyone.

  Besides, I had a suspicion there was more to Fry’s wanting to skip poetry school than trying to make vacation last. More, too, than the ridiculous notion that a world-famous poet would care about a teenage girl who’d helped set fire to his past. I decided Fry had let himself slip a little too far in that last class. His sensitive side had come out to play. Without warning. Without permission. Fry was all for fun, but he liked to be in charge.

  Me? I discovered that our new teacher was right. A love poem to myself was just about the hardest assignment I’d ever worked on. And I mean worked. As soon as I got home, I locked myself in my room and found a little notebook in my desk. After all, Baylor had said writing in a notebook was a sign you were a poet. But this book wasn’t like his ancient, abused spiral. It was completely unpoetic—brand new, bright red with a small yellow price tag that, pulling and scratching and even using spit, I couldn’t get off the cover. That tag reminded me that I was brand new, too. That I hadn’t spent years looking at things the way our poet had, filling up notebooks, finding the words that make a moment, a person, a feeling, different from any other.

  Still, my father-daughter talk with Shepherd had changed things. Hadn’t Rufus told Shepherd I’d helped him with his poem? Hadn’t Shepherd told me he had my back? Didn’t that prove beyond reasonable doubt that anything—anything at all—was possible?

  If Rufus Baylor believed in me, the way Shepherd believed in Manny, I didn’t want to let him down. Not again. Not any more than I already had. Besides, I’d learned for myself that the kind of word music that old man made was more exciting than anything I’d ever tried. (Not counting making out with Fry, which required outlasting H and two hovering mothers; or starring in The Glass Menagerie, which happened only in my dreams.)

  I sat on my bed and started writing, sure of just one thing: I didn’t want to go all gooey and rhymey, the way H had in his poem to Miss Kinney. Which is why I began with a sort of outline—I wrote down some of the reasons people might like me: I was a good listener; I loved animals; I was a pretty fair actress, even if seniors always got the parts I would have been perfect for; I knew how to make a hungry-wolf shadow with my hands on the bedroom wall; and I could skate backward. Listed all together, though, that stuff sounded more like a résumé than a love poem. Which is when I realized that it wasn’t other people who had to like me.

  I remembered how we’d stared and stared at those purple flowers. And suddenly, I also remembered what Baylor had told us we needed to do. As it turned out, swiping the oversize makeup mirror from Jocelyn’s room was easy. But looking into it was hard. Really hard.

  I double dog dare you. Try it: Pick up a mirror and tell yourself, eyeball to eyeball, “I love you.” Mean it. Know it.

  Those two quiet minutes we’d spent focused on Lamium? They’d flown by, compared with the eternity I spent forcing myself to study every pore and follicle I saw in my reflection.

  The first thing I noticed, probably the first thing everyone who looks in a mirror sees, were my eyes. It’s strange to look into your own eyes as if they were someone else’s, as if you hope to see someone you like. My eyes are gray blue, and the irises looked feathery and ragged in the glass, like wet bird feathers. They were, I realized, almost exactly the same color as Florinda Dear’s ball gown—after I’d left her in the yard overnight.

  Florinda Dear was my best doll, and I was only four years old when I forgot her in the garden chair. Next morning, Mom wrung out her elegant dress in the sink. (It had rained all night.) But my doll was still a mess, her hair clotted with twigs, her sleeves filthy, and the colors of her skirt all run together. “Too late to be sorry now,” my mother told me. And then she threw Florinda in the trash.

  Did sorry always come too late? I thought of my doll’s filthy dress, of our poet’s house, burned from the inside out. I almost put the mirror down. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Instead, I forced myself to stare into those torn irises, at the scolding mother and the girl I used to be. “I could have been a doctor’s wife,” the mother said. And the little girl’s heart was ragged, too. It wanted to melt away.

  Maybe melting was important. Because suddenly, it was easy to write about them both, the mother who knew it was too late to be sorry, and the daughter who didn’t. Not yet, at least. I guessed what I was writing wasn’t exactly a love poem, not in the way Rufus Baylor meant, anyway. It got all mixed up with feeling bad about Florinda Dear and worse about the beach cottage that wasn’t.

  Even so, writing it down felt like something I needed to do. And while I was scribbling away, I didn’t worry about anyone else reading it. It was sort of like flying. I got lighter and lighter as I wrote, and I didn’t ever want to come down.

  Naturally, what I’d jotted in my notebook a half hour later wasn’t a finished poem. I learned that the minute I read it over to myself out loud. Writing in that little book wasn’t the same as working on my laptop at all. When I typed a word and it took its place on the computer screen, it looked, well, official. Right. Real.

  But handwritten across the page, sounded out one by one, each word in my notebook had to earn its keep. I felt their shapes, tasted their edges, put them in different places, paired them with different neighbors. Over and over. It wasn’t flying anymore. It was more like playing with those long-ago pots and pans on the kitchen floor. The big pot made one sound, the little one another. Over and over.

  My mother must have had a thing about my playing with pots, real or metaphorical. Because I was in the middle of writing, saying words way too loud, rocking back and forth on my bed, when she knocked on my door. I went back years, to her brisk, impatient step, to those heels click-click-clicking on the kitchen floor. As if it were incriminating evidence, I tucked the tiny spiral under my pillow before I told her to come in.

  “Are you trying out for another play?” She looked around the room, but there was no script on my bed. “You’re rehearsing so loud, you missed the dinner bell.”

  Which, of course, was a lame remark, since we don’t have a dinner bell. Only voices loud enough to travel from the kitchen downstairs to every room in the house. (Unless Jocelyn decides to call extra softly, so I end up coming down late and she can make her famous Sarah-is-so-irresponsible speech.)

  “I’m not rehearsing,” I told my mother. “I’m writing a poem for class.”

  “I thought school was over tomorrow.” Her eyes still searched my room. What for? “Or are they giving summer homework now?”

  “Not class class,” I explained. “Rufus Baylor’s poetry school.”

  “That!” She said it with the same disdain she reserved for Shepherd’s name. “Let’s not even talk about that. I thought your sentence was served.”

  “There are still four more weeks,” I said. “And actually? It doesn’t feel much like punishment at all.” I wanted to tell her about stopping by Rufus’s house, about the poem, about flying. Who knows? I might have tried, if she hadn’t picked just that mome
nt to resume her never-ending, eternally boring medical-school monologue. She leaned against the doorframe, but stayed standing in the hall. “Frankly,” she said, “I can’t wait till this business is behind us. Once you’re in med school, people will have something else to talk about.”

  “That’s five years away, Mom.” I tried to get the mirror feeling back, the way I’d seen her just a few minutes ago. “And that’s if I even get into med school.”

  “There’s no if about it, missy.” I mentioned my mother’s pretty, right? But she can raise one eyebrow independently of the other, and when she does that, she looks sort of like Snow White’s evil stepmother—hot, but not someone you’d want to spend a lot of time with.

  “You’ve got the grades,” she told me now. “And you’ve already taken AP chemistry and biology. We’ve done everything right.”

  We? I didn’t remember my mother sweating through the four laws of thermodynamics or watching a half-sedated, half-dissected frog jump right off the lab counter.

  “Of course, Harvard is still the best, but we’d be fine with UNC, too.” She smiled generously, giving our home state the opportunity to provide my graduate education. “And naturally, it would mean your tuition would be one-third what you’d pay out of state.”

  I looked at her, really looked at her. And it didn’t surprise me that she wasn’t looking back. Just like Shepherd, just like Fry, just like everyone I knew, except maybe Rufus Baylor of the marble eyes, she was somewhere else—Katherine Wheeler’s fantasyland, population: one.

  “Mom, why is this so important to you?” Why don’t you go to med school? Why don’t you settle for UNC? After what Shepherd had told me at Shake It Baby, I thought I knew the answer, but I really, really wanted to hear it from her.