by Louise Hawes
Our poet nodded again, more slowly this time.
“Maybe it’s time to forgive yourself?”
* * * *
After the coffee cups were washed and put away, after we’d slipped Nella’s photo behind the last page of a dictionary to flatten her crease, it happened: Rufus and Sarah, sitting in a tree, W-R-I-T-I-N-G!!! He told me that what we’d write, though, wasn’t poetry; it was a warm-up. It was like stretching before you run, pliés before you dance. “Put down anything at all, Sarah,” he said. “Something that makes you glad to be alive. Or sorry you ever got out of bed—a feeling, a crack in the wall, a muscle cramp. It’s all fair game, and it’s all yours. You don’t have to share it with anyone.”
At first, I couldn’t get Nella out of my mind. Stay-at-home Nella. Sad Nella. Nella, withering like the flowers all around us. I sat still, waiting for her face to fade.
Rufus noticed. “Keep your pencil moving,” he told me. “No erasing, no stopping, no telling yourself it isn’t good enough.”
I picked up my pencil, determined to write about the first thing I laid eyes on. As it happened, it was one of the bouquets, moldering in its vase. I could almost smell the damp doneness, the rot. It seemed poetic and symbolic, that mass of dying flowers, and I had actually started writing away when I felt something tough and bony, something very insistent, scrubbing my legs. I looked down to find Carmen brushing herself against me. Cautiously, as if I were dipping my hand into a pot of hot water, I gave her an exploratory pat.
My fingers didn’t get bitten off! So I kept stroking her. Which set off a rumbling, a sort of electronic hum like a bullfrog on autopilot. That purr of Carmen’s, that grudging tribute, filled me up. Strangely, miraculously, it filled up my page, too. I forgot about Nella and the dead flowers; I wrote, instead, about how grateful that crusty old cat had made me feel, how happy tears had started up, how I had heard the word behind her purr: Stay.
But one thing I couldn’t forget, as we scribbled away together, was who was sitting right beside me: Every few minutes, I’d lift my head from my tablet to peek at Rufus, to say to myself, Are you dreaming? Did you really just have coffee with the greatest poet in the Western world? Can you possibly be writing with the man who drew peace and inspiration from Whale Point’s picturesque streets and friendly residents?
After we’d written pages and pages (before I knew it), Rufus said we could go poem hunting, looking for something in what we’d written that might be turned into a sonnet or a sestina or a haiku. I didn’t know what most of those were, so Rufus said I should just find a part of my scribbles that felt like the words to a song and write them down.
I tried to turn the dead flowers into a sad song, but it felt preachy, silly. So I used Mega Cat’s purr, the bullfrog thrum that had opened my heart, instead. I knew I wouldn’t have to read what I wrote, so I kind of had fun rearranging things, trying to make a whole poem that sounded like Carmen. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but soon our poet and I were reading to each other. He made sharing so easy, so natural, that I just fell into it.
First Rufus looked up, smiled, read me a line, and asked me what I thought. I told him, and that made me brave enough to read him something of my own that felt good. He nodded as I read, told me I was on the right track. And we kept on throwing each other lines, bits and pieces. “That’s a keeper,” he’d say. Or, “Who wishes they’d written that?” And he’d raise his own hand, grinning.
But not always. Once I decided to read him one of my fancy scribbles about the dying flowers. Those lines had sounded lyrical and tragic, after all, more like real poetry than a purr ever could. But he shook his head when he heard them. “Kill your darlings, Sarah,” he told me. “If you think the whole poem is different without them, take them out. They’re holding a place for something else, something that won’t stand out, something that will feel like home.”
So I went back to the page, and I played with the shapes and music there, banging on pots and pans. It got so I could hear when things fell into place, an almost noiseless whisper that said the words in my head nanoseconds before I found them. I’d write them down, and then I’d read them again, changing, shifting. Until mail dropped through the front door slot. Or Rufus’s chair squeaked. And I looked up. That’s when I’d remember who sat just a few feet from me, his fingers at his temples, his white head lowered over a poem. A poem that would probably be put in a book and memorized by kids like me all over the country.
Yes, I walked to Rufus’s place again the next morning. And the next. And the next. I wrote and I listened and I watched. I watched a lot: I studied the way Rufus sat, the way he held his pencil. (He never used pens, he said they “stopped the flow.”) I thought, This is the way a genius sits. I thought, See how his thumb wraps under his finger? I’d scratch my head like he did, try to hold my pencil (I took an oath to give all my pens to Mom and Jocelyn) the same way he did. And then I’d ask myself again, Are you dreaming this?
Most of my writing didn’t become poetry, but some of it did. I found the best poems started like burrs, things and feelings I couldn’t get rid of. Things that haunted and pricked until I gave them a shape, a place to be. Of course, my pages weren’t anything like Rufus’s, whose least little scribble came out sounding like a ready-made poem.
It was hard to believe, how they poured out of him. When I was little, a lady who raised butterflies put a newly hatched one on my hand. No one had to teach it to fly. In no time at all, it simply opened its wings and flew away. That’s what I thought of every time Rufus made a poem. He didn’t hem and haw, just spoke it through from beginning to end. It came out with full-size wings and just took off.
The only butterfly I hatched was a poem about Sarah Bernhardt, and about the feeling I got when I went out onstage. “Bravo,” Rufus told me, when I’d read it to him. “Let’s not fiddle with this one, Sarah. Sometimes it happens on the first try.”
* * * *
Did I tell Fry and H about morning pages? Would you? If I had, H would have insisted on going along, and I would have had to share our poet with him. Worse, I would have been forced to listen to more of the lines that had nearly managed to turn me off sea and sand. As for Fry, well, you can guess how he would have responded to my taking private lessons at our teacher’s house.
Besides, I didn’t want to ruin a good thing—no, a great thing. Choosing dinner with Rufus over an evening with my boyfriend, it turned out, made said boyfriend more attentive than ever. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had decided to fight for love. Now, every day meant a trip to the beach. Morning pages, after all, didn’t stop me from spending afternoons with Fry, making up and making out.
Except for poetry school, we were on vacation and the sun was finally out. So whenever I didn’t have to prep at Mamselle’s, we headed for the waves. There was nothing like the way Fry met a wave, and nothing like the joy on his face after riding in on a perfect A-frame. It was like studying Rufus at his desk, to watch that boy cut back toward the barrel of a giant wave. Every move was worth studying. Every second was precious.
Naturally, I couldn’t handle the mad waves Fry loved, but sometimes he’d paddle me out on his board. We’d come in together, horizontal, holding tight. Laughing. In between swims, the dunes made a perfect nest, breaking the wind but letting us listen to it rustling the sea grass. I don’t know if there have been studies done, but I can testify that salt definitely makes skin and lips taste better. Wilder:
SAND CRAB
(Burrowing in sand under our towel)
Scrrrrrrrtchtchtchtch. Sccccrrrrrtchtchtch. ScrrrrIIIIITTTCCCCHHHHHHH.
FRY
C’mere.
ME
(Pointing to one corner of our towel)
Listen.
FRY
(Leaning close)
What?
TWO SAND CRABS
(Digging together now)
ScrrrrrSCRITCHHHchhhhhh.
Sccccccc. Scurrrrr. SCRITCHHHHHHHHHHH.
SCRITCH? Scritch?
Scriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch. SCerch. CLERRRRCHHHHHH.
ME
(Pointing again)
There! Hear?
FRY
(Smiling, pulling me to him)
C’mere.
The only break in this chain of luscious days by the sea came with the second Saturday cleanup. As usual, the guys wielded hammers and spread spackle in one room, and most of the girls (except Cathi with an i, who turned out to be a shop major and very handy with a jigsaw) used Lysol and bleach in another. Just as Mr. Shettle had promised, this week was all about nailing and hammering, and Fry got to strap on a belt with two pockets, each bristling with pencils and wrenches and pliers. So it was no shock that the Secret Society of Power Tools kind of swallowed my prince up. It was hours before he and Thatcher and H stopped talking about the proper weight for a claw hammer and which was the best brand of cordless drill.
But once we’d hammered and scrubbed separately, Fry made it his business, for the whole next week, to bring us very close together. He was more thoughtful, more affectionate, and more sexy than ever. He still didn’t talk like a poet, or act like one, either. And he made me promise not to mention his poem in front of H. Which was all pretty confusing. But whenever he put his arms around me, I forgot to feel confused. And he put his arms around me a lot. Sure, I still had to pull his hands back to where there was no chance of forgetting what had happened with my mother and Shepherd. But there were also plenty of times where he seemed okay with just holding hands, with lying on the beach, warm and sun drugged, skin to skin.
It felt almost too good to be true: Starting each morning by sharing poems with someone so smart, so funny, so kind that he made me feel like a real artist. Then, as soon as I’d said good-bye to one poet, I met another on the beach. And if the second poet wasn’t interested in our writing together, there were plenty of other things he wanted to share with me.
Okay, with me and H: We still went most places with Fry’s second-in-command, especially if we wanted to drive to Ocean Beach, which was farther away but lots more secluded and had the best surf. Our constant companion’s heart, although he wasn’t the poet Fry had turned out to be, was definitely in the right place. “You know what?” H asked, on a day as bright as all the others. “Even if Julie never reads my poems, she’s started something here.” He tapped his skinny chest, grabbed his notebook, and opened a page across his beach towel. “I just can’t stop the flow, man.”
Fry was not exactly glowing with enthusiasm about his friend’s expanding poetry collection: “Kinney hasn’t got enough student papers to read?”
H didn’t notice. Or he didn’t care. He held up the notebook he now carried everywhere. “The problem is, I don’t think I can give all these poems to her at once.” He sounded as if he were parceling out ball gowns or major appliances. “I need to figure out which will make the best first impression, you know?”
“How do you know she hasn’t got a boyfriend?” Had Fry forgotten how much this meant to his friend? “I saw some guy in a uniform pick her up from school last week.”
“People have brothers, you know,” H told us. “And cousins and friends.” I guessed it didn’t matter what Fry said. H wasn’t listening to anything except his own thumping heart.
“It’s not like the end of the world,” Fry observed. He turned, frowned at a lone surfer in the waves as if the guy were doing it all wrong. “They’re just poems, just words.”
“Wait a minute.” H removed the pencil he now sported behind one ear, clearly a new-poet accessory. “Words can win fair ladies. You said so yourself.”
For a minute, the whole day felt like a dish someone had put much too close to the edge of the table. I checked out the slice of Fry’s profile I could see. I remembered how I’d felt about H and his Hallmark verse. The way the gulls had circled and circled as I tried to think of something good to say. I touched my guy’s shoulders, but he didn’t turn around. “It’s okay,” I told him. “As long as we know what’s real.”
“And do we, Sarah?” Fry was finally looking at me, but his eyes wore their low lids like shields. “What’s behind the words? Do you even know who I am?”
I wanted to laugh out loud. He’d just given me the gift of himself, just let me in farther than he ever had. I held up my phone with his poem front and center. “What more do I need to know?”
Fry winced as if a no-see-um had blustered its way onto the beach and bitten him. “Do you like football?”
“What’s football got to do with this, Fry?”
“Or NASCAR, Sarah? Do you like those races we go to at all?”
“Well, sure,” I lied. “A little.”
Fry turned silent, but H, who’d heard NASCAR mentioned, looked up from his writing. “Hey, man,” he contributed. “There’s no reason you can’t like NASCAR and poetry. I do.”
And just like that, H had pushed the dish back from the edge of the table and saved the day. Because now he thumbed through his notebook, which was filled mostly with poems for Miss Kinney, but also included lyrics on shoelaces, sunrise, and selected power tools. “This one’s called ‘Last Lap.’ It’s an ode to Dale Earnhardt. Want to hear it?”
“NOOOO!” Fry and I said it together, as if it were a synchronized routine we’d practiced, as if we’d just been waiting for H to ask. But our budding poet took the rebuff in stride. He grinned, sipped, and in an unconscious tribute to his jefe, told us just what Fry would have. “Your loss,” he said, and resumed his inspired scribbling.
If being a threesome provided comic relief, it also made it harder to deliver the dinner invitation I was determined to give Fry. I ended up whispering it under a beach towel. In between kisses. And I guess I was glad the way it turned out, because I didn’t have to fight for love, after all. At least not with my mother.
Fry’s RSVP was hardly formal, but it was perfectly clear. “Hell, no!” He was close to yelling, and he nearly upset the careful towel tent I’d constructed over our heads.
He helped me rebuild our cover, then in a lower voice informed me that I should not expect his presence at 328 High Court on Thursday evening. “Eating food I don’t recognize,” he said, “is not my idea of a good time.” He closed in for the kiss I’d interrupted with my invitation. “And neither is waiting for your mom and the happy rhymester to catch me using the wrong fork.”
Why was I surprised? I should have known Fry wouldn’t want to get dressed up and dust off his manners. Any more than he’d want to sit around talking about poetry. He insisted he got his inspiration from one place and one place only—me. And baking on that beach towel, haunch to haunch with my real-life poet prince, who cared about whether he sipped his soup? Or knew a sonnet from a sestina? Who cared about anything but making sure he had all the inspiration he needed?
So yes. Fry and I spent a lot more time kissing than talking. But in between kisses, I could hear the lines he’d texted me, could whisper them in my head: half-closed eyes, heartful sighs. And I could make him promise there would be more where those came from: your name on my lips, still and still. When there was nothing but sand between his bare right leg and my bare left one, when both of us had forgotten about prying eyes and all we could hear were each other’s heartbeats, I asked for a second installment.
“Another poem?” Fry’s lips brushed mine, teasing, and I could see his white teeth, his sly grin. “Sure, provided the next kiss meets my rigorous standards.”
“Rigorous standards?” I laughed at the words that sounded more like a contract than romance.
“Yep,” he told me. “That’s what cars have to meet. So why not girls?” Another grin, and warm fingers creeping from my hairline to the strap of my bathing suit.
I felt dizzy. Faint. “Okay,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else. Not with his hand where it was, not with his lips covering mine.
* * * *
Even Mamselle’s was bearable now. Better than bearable. Shepherd was out of harassment
mode and into something almost as embarrassing but a lot easier to take: He was trying to act like a father. The emphasis here, of course, was on trying. But since he was probably making it all up as he went along, working without a real-life model, I had to give him credit. Sure, he still lost his temper, and he still swore a blue streak, but he was an equal-opportunity yeller now. He took stuff out on everybody, not just me. In fact, not so much on me.
“Sarah,” he asked me Saturday night, “how’d the cleanup go? Got the roof on yet?”
I was headed into the kitchen with an order for a party of five (a party of FIVE!). I didn’t really have time to chat. “Not yet,” I told him. “We’re still picking up the pieces inside.”
“I know Sid down at Midtown Lumber,” he told me. “If you need some cheap timber or a good deal on shingles, let me know, okay?”
I remembered the Great Shingles Debate, but decided materials weren’t what Shepherd was really talking about. “Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll let our shop teacher know.”
Little things like that. Things that told me my father was thinking about what I was up to even when I wasn’t at Mamselle’s, breaking dishes. Things like the way he rolled his eyes now when the crockery hit the floor. Which, trust me, was a lot better than the tantrumation I was used to. Expecting Shepherd to lose it and finding that he didn’t, at least not always, might not sound like a major breakthrough to you. But you have to realize that if you’ve been living on an island with cannibals, meeting someone who doesn’t want you for breakfast feels right next door to a miracle.
Before I walk onstage, leave the safe
dark for that distant pool of light inside
a one-walled room, I want to be sick.
Bathed in sweat, I’m sure I’ll forget
what I’ve learned or say it too fast,
embarrass myself and the rest of the cast.
But then comes my cue, a word on which
so much depends (who stays, who goes),