by Louise Hawes
“Here?” Coral Ann asked.
“Here and now,” our poet said. Then he did what everyone had been waiting for. He had the prof dig into that mysterious bag again and take out . . . embroidery hoops. I turned my phone off and watched as Rufus grabbed a single crutch for support; then, one by one, he handed a hoop to each of us. Some were made of wood, others were metal that caught the light. A few of the boys laughed as they took theirs, and one of them muttered something about knitting needles. My poet ignored them, passing out all the hoops except one. He held on to that last hoop, and looked around the class.
“It’s not easy to send these things very far,” he told us, “so I need someone with firepower.” His eyes landed on the biggest boy of all—guess who? “Mr. Vogel, will you help?”
And yes, Thatcher the Moose went and stood beside my poet. “Think you can launch this to the end of the yard?” Rufus asked.
Thatcher studied the lawn, which, in fact, had to be one of the biggest on the street. He nodded, but chose a wooden hoop instead of the metal one Rufus tried to hand him. “Don’t want to overshoot,” he said, without a trace of arrogance. It was clear that, unlike Caliban, this monster knew his own strength.
He pivoted, swept the hoop behind his back, and then hurled it like a Frisbee out across the grass. It landed at least sixty feet away, near a patch of weeds by the fence at the end of the yard.
“When you write a poem,” Rufus told us now, limping toward the fallen hoop, “you make your own world.” We followed him, watched him stand just over the hoop. “It’s only a little piece of the bigger world, mind. But it’s complete just as it is.” He leaned on one crutch, studying the grassy pie shape the wooden circle framed where it lay. “Everything you need is right inside.” He grinned. “And everything your reader needs, too.”
He asked us to get down on the grass, tell him what we saw in the hoop. Of course, most people said, “Grass,” and of course, Rufus asked them, “What else?”
After we’d found an ant, a brown cancer or growth on a grass blade, a clover bud, a yellow stone, and a small piece of string, he asked us to take out our own hoops and walk as far as we wanted, then hurl them away from us. “Wherever it lands,” he instructed, “make a world.”
For the next half hour, we each sat right where our hoop had landed and wrote a poem about what was inside it. Except for one couple who hooked their hoops together and threw them both at once, everyone was on their own. By now you know that Rufus had a way of getting people to get down and get real, right? This time wasn’t any different: The poems that came from drops of dew and dead moths and dry, dusty footprints were special to write, amazing to hear. As I watched a beetle nuzzle a fallen wisteria blossom lying just inside my hoop—and later, as Margaret described the secret, indecipherable letters her hoop had scratched in the sandy soil; as H rhapsodized about the twin star-shaped holes he’d found in a fallen leaf; and as our Eagle Scout prof read about a rock that grew moss on top and a nest of baby spiders underneath—I felt something like a poem or a prayer well up inside me. It was half gratitude, half grasping. I loved what was happening, and I didn’t want it to stop.
Part of that feeling, of course, came from knowing that there were no more love poems waiting for me. From knowing, instead, that when class was over and I went home, I’d be alone. More alone than I’d been for months and months. I wished I could stop feeling sorry for myself. Rufus had called it heartache, and that’s just how it felt: a sore, bruised place in my chest. This was no metaphor, no greeting-card sadness I could analyze and find new words for; it was a sharp, physical pain that reminded me almost every time I breathed that something big, something serious, was missing. It felt like I’d run a hundred miles uphill. And like I still had a hundred left to go.
The last poem of the day did nothing to lift my spirits. But I guess you could say it put a temporary end to my pity party, and made the sadness about someone besides me, me, me. It was Rufus himself who read just before class broke up. I don’t think he’d intended to write a poem at all, not until that bumblebee found our embroidery hoops. It was a bedraggled-looking thing, with a click instead of a buzz and a torn wing in the bargain. My poet spotted it first and put one finger by his mouth. “Shhh!” he said. “Look there.”
We watched the one-winged wonder limping over the metal clasps on the mound of hoops we’d given back. (Thatcher had piled them up for the prof to put into the bag, as if he always helped out, as if he were nearly human.) Well, most of us watched the bee. But I watched Rufus. And I saw something in his face change. I saw the same half frown he’d worn when he asked me to get serious about my poetry. There’s not as much time as you think. He studied that flightless creature inching its way toward who knew where, and he seemed a lot more than interested. It wasn’t just attention he was paying the bee; it was respect.
“There’s a poem in that old fellow,” he told us. “He can’t fly anymore, but it’s not always about the doing.” He looked at the bee, then at us. “Sometimes it’s just about the yearning.”
He took out his shabby notebook and, propped on his crutches, scribbled in its pages. He didn’t stop writing, didn’t pause to make changes or turn his pencil over to erase. He just kept scrawling while the rest of us held our breath. When he finally looked up from the notebook, it was as if he was lighter, freer. As if he’d put down something he was tired of carrying.
“I kept thinking,” he told us, “about what’s going to happen to this wounded veteran in a few months.” He watched the bee inspect a low-hanging hydrangea branch. Painfully, the tiny traveler crawled onto it, lured by the generous, floppy-headed flowers. “Wings or no wings, fall will finish him off.”
The poem Rufus read us then was short. Just long enough to put anyone who was listening, really listening, inside the body of a broken bee. Or an old man. It was hard to watch his face. It was easier to look at the grass.
As we put the hoops into the bag and walked back to the house, my poet took one last look at the bee, which had dragged its way to the center of the hydrangea bush. When it disappeared into the wide mouth of a sky-colored flower, he turned back toward the rest of us without a word. He handed his crutches to H, hauled himself up the steps, then made his way to the front door, where everyone had begun to line up for their double handshake. When my turn came, we both held on extra long.
* * * *
Her after-class dinner with my poet wasn’t something my mother was about to give up. Rufus insisted he didn’t want “another fuss,” so she promised to keep it simple. “Jocelyn and I will just throw together a few little nothings,” she told him. “Basic paper-plate fare, subsistence-level nourishment.”
Which is how I got corralled into helping my aunt and mom bring over at least a half dozen casseroles, promptly at six. There was vegetable bread pudding, tomato cobbler, baked chicken risotto, butternut spoon bread, and green beans. And last but not least, a lemon soufflé with raspberry sauce.
An hour, countless texts from Fry (as soon as I turned my phone back on, it started thumping away, regular as a heartbeat), and six empty oven dishes later, Rufus had been sweet-talked into doing an interview for Her. While our little dessert plates lay on the drain board, crusted with the remains of Aunt J.’s soufflé, and the dinner plates and glasses soaked in soapy water, we all sat in the living room and listened to Mom’s big plans for my poet.
“The entire staff of Her is salivating,” she confided, as flushed and happy as a girl talking about her prom. “I’m not sure the office will be big enough to hold all your admirers, Rufus.” She bubbled away, covering all five Ws. But as always with Mom, what, when, why, and where took a backseat to who: who would photograph Rufus; who would be invited to the magazine offices; who would get complimentary copies for promotion; and who would come home next week to join us for Rufus’s final dinner chez Wheeler. “Now that you’re able to navigate, Rufus, you simply mustn’t deprive me of this last hurrah,” was how she put it.
&n
bsp; I’ve said I was used to Mom letting me down, right? But on top of what Fry had done, it was especially hard to hear her description of our final dinner. I couldn’t picture H and Margaret fitting in with the who’s who she was determined to invite to that party. In fact, it was hard to imagine Wanda or me or any of my friends breaking bread with magazine editors, the writer in residence at every college within a fifty-mile radius, and Whale Point’s chamber of commerce, town council, and mayor. I had no idea how my mother even planned to squeeze everyone into our house, much less around the dining-room table.
I think it was right after she mentioned the mayor that Rufus spoke up. “Kate,” he told her, “if we’re going to celebrate before I leave, we’ve left some very important guests off your list.”
Mom laughed. “Of course, Rufus, how silly of me.” The prom queen smiled graciously at her date. “I’ll bet you’ve managed to make some friends here, despite the shameless way I’ve been monopolizing you.” She picked up the tablet from the coffee table. “We can always squeeze in one or two more.”
“I have made some friends. Seventeen of them. Eighteen if you include Charles, the instructor at the community college. And I’d like to count him among them.”
“I don’t understand, Rufus.” My mother’s hand was at her throat.
“I’m talking about my students, Katherine. I’d like to say good-bye to them all.” His smile was completely without apology. “Not with a whimper, but a bang.”
“Rufus, I don’t think—”
“I understand your lovely home is hardly big enough to accommodate a farewell of the dimensions I’m imagining.” Now my poet looked at me, a no-holds-barred, beaming smile. “But I happen to know someone in the restaurant business, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“But I—”
“I’d be glad to meet with your magazine people, my dear.” Rufus sounded as if he were talking to a child, an enthusiastic youngster he needed to calm and settle. “And feel free to invite anyone you like to my good-bye party. But I want you and your sister to be guests of honor there, not chief cook and bottle washer.”
Someone in the restaurant business. That could mean only one person.
“As for my students, I doubt there’ll be any objections to holding our last class at a restaurant.” He turned to me. “I think the felons deserve a break. And dinner out. Do you concur, Sarah?”
I did! I did! Rufus had bailed all of us out. It wasn’t easy to find bright spots in a day that included discovering your boyfriend was a fake. But the thought of our final class as a banquet definitely helped. Still, I hoped Rufus wasn’t being overly optimistic about his restaurant connection. After all, if what he’d hinted at was true, the glorious last hurrah he’d just described depended on a single, not-always-reliable individual—Shepherd Ryan, a.k.a. my father.
December Emissary
I am a bee of winter,
A stumbling, tufted drone.
Am I the last of my kind?
If feelings can be trusted,
I am deep alone.
I no longer climb the air,
but glad for morning’s chill,
dread night’s darker cold
as I weave my way
along the sill.
I know better than to test
bright, implacable glass,
but crawl slowly backward
toward the sweetness
of the past.
Wanda Asks About Mermaids and I Raise the Roof
Fry called six times that night. Once during the casseroles, twice during the soufflé, and three times after I’d helped Mom and Aunt J. carry everything home and we’d started putting the dishes away. I didn’t pick up; I couldn’t. First, I just wasn’t ready to face what I knew was coming next: When a princess finally realizes that her joust-happy prince isn’t, despite his 10-and-0 record, a winner, there’s only one kind of ending waiting up ahead. And it isn’t happy.
The other reason I let Fry’s ringtone (“We Are the Champions”) play until I couldn’t stand it anymore, until I put my phone on silent and slipped it into its case backward so I didn’t have to look at his picture, was more complicated, kinder maybe. It would just be too hard, you see, to listen to my formerly confident, can-do boyfriend try to talk his way out of a dead end. Why put him through that? He couldn’t be someone he wasn’t. He’d already tried, and all it did was hurt us both.
After I’d gone upstairs, after I’d let the last of Fry’s calls go to my log and deleted about ten texts (mostly from Fry, one from H raving about alliteration, along with a homegrown example that featured nothing but M words—yes, “Margaret” came first and last), I called Wanda. I owed her a report on the play. And besides, it would feel good to relive that special night at The Tempest, that BE happiness, by telling her all about it. Which I did, from beginning to end: from Rufus’s kindness to his fans, to the whispered talk with my poet at the end of the evening. The talk where he’d told me I was talented. And that he hoped I’d keep writing. When I got to that part, Wanda was sweetly, deliriously thrilled for me. “He said what?!!!” That hair of hers, those wide eyes—I could see them, even on the phone. “Oh, Sarah! Just think, you’re a protégé!”
“A what?”
“You know, a promising student. An heir apparent. The next in line.”
The line might go on. Isn’t that what Rufus had told me?
“You’ve been working side by side with the most famous poet in the world.” Wanda gasped, as if she’d put a hand over her mouth. “Why, you might even inspire a poem!”
I pictured Rufus’s face when he’d talked about his dead wife and sons. “I think his inspiration is gone,” I said. I already told you I’d been online by now, right? Which means I’d learned a lot about the way people (critics, readers, other writers) treat giants. When you’re a celebrity, especially one whose fame lasts longer than a few days or years, people think they own you. They take you apart and then they put you back together again, over and over. In some stories, Rufus was a villain, one who used and abused, who never learned to care about anyone but himself. In others, he was a Southern gentleman, a man of the land, misunderstood and alone. “He’s lost his whole family, you know.”
Wanda wasn’t even listening. “Because of you, he may start writing all over again.” A drawn-out groupie sigh. “Think of it! A whole series of elegies to Sarah!” She paused, thought for a moment. “Oh, wait. An elegy’s for someone who’s dead! The Sarah sonnets, how’s that?”
I laughed, but her mistake stuck in my mind. I remembered how Rufus had told me he didn’t have much time. What if my writing with him was as important to him as it was to me? Could I actually inspire someone? Someone who didn’t grade my kisses?
“We need to talk,” I told her. I wanted to make up for missing her birthday. I wanted to ask her advice—about Fry, about Rufus, about everything. “Let’s meet for high tea the way we used to. Can you walk into town tomorrow?”
Wanda didn’t answer, and I knew why. There was something between us. Or someone. Finally, cautiously, she said:
“Won’t you be with . . . ?”
“No,” I told her. “Fry and I—oh, Wanda, he was sending me these poems, and—”
“Rufus Baylor?”
“No, Fry,” I explained. “See, he started texting me these incredible, beautiful poems, but—”
“I know.” Wanda sounded impressed. “Muscles and metaphors. I’m happy for you, Sarah. And just a little bit jealous, too. Is that okay?”
“You don’t need to be, Wan. It turns out . . . listen, can you come tomorrow?”
She could. And I hung up feeling a little less lonely than when I’d called. I couldn’t wait to have a best friend again. To spend all afternoon, the way we used to, at one of the Carousel’s tea tables, devouring cupcakes and sharing . . . well, everything.
* * * *
Next afternoon, we met in the small tearoom behind the glass shelves heaped with pies, cakes, and rows of tiny ch
ocolate truffles decorated like flowers. We sat at a café table, downing glass after glass of sweet tea, along with two spice cupcakes covered with caramel frosting. I’d forgotten how Wanda and I almost always ordered the same thing when we went out.
And we talked the way we used to—about school and life and the bizarre questions only Wanda could come up with and worry about: Who invented fingerprints? Will the last person on Earth be lonelier than the first one was? Why do so many people believe in fairies, and so few believe in mermaids?
“Maybe,” I told her, licking caramel off one finger, “it’s because people think fairies will grant them wishes. Who ever heard of a mermaid lending a helping hand?”
“Hmmm.” Wanda was thinking and chewing at once. “Plus,” she decided when her plate was empty, “wings are a lot prettier than scales.”
“Or maybe it just takes a while to see the advantages of mermaids.” I’d finished my tea, my cupcake, and my stalling. “I used to believe in princesses,” I told her now. “But I think I’m switching to mermaids. They don’t have to sit on the sidelines at jousts, and they don’t have to pick anchovies off pizza.”
“Huh?”
And then I told her everything. I told her how sorry I was I’d let her slip out of my life. How I had believed in Fry. And in his poetry. How it was all a fairy tale. How I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next, but that I knew I wanted her around to share it.
Wanda sat so still for such a long time, I didn’t think she’d heard what I’d said. For a few seconds, I wondered if I’d ignored her too much, snubbed her so often that she could never forgive me. But then, as if she’d been feeling a happy pressure build, she exploded out of her seat. She gave a little-kid squeal and, running around the table and the remains of our high tea, gave me a hug it felt like I’d been waiting for forever.
It wasn’t just the cupcakes, then, that tasted scrumptious and illicit. I’d been hungry for this closeness, this fun, for a long time. So when Wanda suggested I hang out with some of the Untouchables over the weekend, I said yes before she’d even told me when or where. We made a pledge to meet the next day at the cove and sealed the oath with frosting, instead of blood, on each of our wrists. (Yes, that meant ordering more cupcakes, and no, we didn’t worry about the calories. Mermaids, we decided, didn’t count them.)