by Misa Sugiura
Any other day, I’d be stoked about a teacher taking this much interest in my opinions and my life. But Jamie has trig with the legendary Mrs. Byrd, the meanest, bitchiest, most old-school schoolmarm ever to set foot on a high school campus. I have to give this poem to Jamie before the bell rings, or she’ll never get it. With a minute to go, I extricate myself from my conversation with Ms. Owen. I tear down the breezeway, turn left, then right, then cut diagonally across the quad toward the math building. I still have to pass the science labs and go around another corner when the bell rings. Please, please, please let Mrs. Byrd be late. Please let her be sick and have a sub. Please let her be talking to another teacher. Please—
I turn the corner. It’s too late. There’s no one outside the classroom and the door is closed. Damn.
I could turn around. Jamie’s already got five poems. That’s plenty.
But the whole point of this plan was for me to face her and hand her the last poem myself and break the silence between us. The whole day has been leading up to this very moment—well, the very moment that was supposed to happen two minutes ago. I can’t back out now.
I’m going in.
I knock on the door and open it. Mrs. Byrd is already at the whiteboard going over a homework problem. The whole class turns around to stare at me as she stops mid-sentence, peers over her glasses, clearly annoyed at the interruption, and says icily, “May I help you?”
Her gaze is pure, unadulterated evil. Every cell of my body is screaming at me to mumble an apology and run away. Instead, I croak, “Yes, um, I have something for Jamie Ramirez.” I hold up the envelope and start toward Jamie’s desk—which is, as luck would have it, at the opposite end of the room. She starts getting out of her seat to meet me halfway.
“Jamie, sit down.”
Jamie sits.
Mrs. Byrd turns to address me.
“Is it a message from the office?”
“No.”
“Is it a medical emergency?”
“No.”
“Is it a family emergency?”
“No.”
“Then it can wait until after school.”
“Oh. Um, I’d rather just give it to her now, if that’s okay.”
“No, it is not okay. You just interrupted my class to give your friend a personal message. If it’s important to deliver it this minute, you can read it to her from where you are.”
“It’s kind of private.”
“Then you have a decision to make. Deliver the message out loud right now, or wait until after school.” I stare at her. “Well? You’re wasting valuable class time.” Wasting time? Who’s the one making a big production out of this? No wonder everyone hates her.
Jamie is watching me intently. She’s not shaking her head. She’s not smiling. Nothing about her body language is telling me it’s okay to wait until after school. She’s waiting for me to step up and read the poem. I look back at Mrs. Byrd, who is frowning at me with her arms folded, actually tapping her foot. Waiting for me to back down and leave. All around us, I can see the class’s gaze shifting from Jamie, to me, to Mrs. Byrd: Who’s going to crack?
It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? Jamie knows I was here, she knows I tried. She knows I have a poem for her. She has to know, after all the other poems, how I feel. She knows how uncomfortable I am with public displays of affection, how hard it is for me to reveal personal stuff to anyone (forget about Mrs. Byrd’s entire trig class).
Then I think about silence, and truth, and knowing—how Mom says that Japanese people don’t need to say a lot of words to know things that are true and deep, like feelings. And yet how the truth about my feelings for Jamie lies in the words I hold in my hand.
I think about gaman, how Yūko-san, Dad, and Mom all had to do it. Gaman isn’t just about enduring hardship in silence—and it’s not about backing down. It’s about stepping up and choosing which hardship you endure. And enduring it with grace because of something important, like honor, or family. Or someone important. Like Jamie.
“Make up your mind, please. Read or leave,” says Mrs. Byrd.
My mind is made up. With trembling hands, I open the envelope, and with trembling fingers I unfold the paper inside. I take a deep breath, and with a trembling voice, I begin.
“‘I Ask the Impossible,’ by Ana Castillo.”
It’s kind of a bold poem, because the impossible thing the speaker asks is to be loved forever, no matter what. No matter how isolated, no matter how tired, or bored, or old anyone gets, she asks to be loved with tenderness, without judgment. And at the end, she basically says, “because I love you no matter what.”
I’d like to be able to say that as I read, my trembling voice steadies and grows stronger, and finally rings clear and true on the last lines. But no, it’s shaky all the way through. And even though I know the poem by heart, I have to read it, all the way to the last line, after which I finally manage to lift my gaze from the paper and meet Jamie’s eyes.
But she looks down at her desk almost immediately, so I can’t tell what she’s thinking. I think I see the ghost of a smile playing on her lips, but I can’t be sure if it’s real or polite or if I just imagined it. Some of the boys are snickering. Some of the girls are putting hands over their hearts and going, “Ohhh.”
“Well,” says Mrs. Byrd. “That was . . . interesting. Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“Then please excuse yourself so that I can teach my class.” I put the poem back in the envelope and hand it to someone to pass to Jamie. I’m dying to exchange one last look with her, but she’s watching the progress of the envelope as it makes its way from hand to hand across the classroom.
“Good-bye,” says Mrs. Byrd, nodding toward the door.
“Bye.”
Psychology, my last class, is agonizing. I keep my phone on my desk, hidden under part of a notebook page so I can see if Jamie happens to text me during class. I have it on mute with the vibrate function off, obviously, so this necessitates me constantly flipping the page over to check for texts. So class goes something like this:
Mr. Albrecht: Jungian dream theory, blah, blah, blah . . .
Me: (flip) no
Mr. Albrecht: blah, animus, blah, blah, anima . . .
Me: (flip) no
Finally, the bell rings. I check my phone (no) and head to my locker, taking a detour past Jamie’s locker.
No Jamie.
Maybe she’ll be waiting at my locker.
No.
Maybe we missed each other, somehow. Maybe if I take a long time here, she’ll show up. But the only people who show up are Elaine and Hanh. “How’d fourth period go?”
“I don’t know.” I tell them the story, and they look appropriately horrified, and then encouragingly exhilarated.
“Oh, that’s so romantic!” Elaine exclaims. “It’s like something that happens in the movies—she’s totally going to take you back. I would.”
“Right? You totally stepped up for her,” says Hanh.
I’m not so sure. I mean, that she’ll take me back. “But what if she was embarrassed, or what if she thinks I was trying to manipulate her? You know, so she’d look bad rejecting me in front of all those people.”
“She did that once already, didn’t she? Anyway, you didn’t plan to read out loud, and you did it anyway. That’s the important thing. You totally killed it!”
“Yeah, I guess I did.” I’m starting to feel better now. Reggie, Thom, and Caleb appear and Hanh retells the story for them.
Caleb grimaces. “You must really like her a lot.”
“I do.”
“Lucky her.” And he smiles.
“The ball’s in her court now,” says Reggie sagely. “All you have to do is wait.”
Right. No problem. Just wait. That’s all I have to do.
On my way home, I finally get a text:
Thank you
But that’s it. What do I text back? You’re welcome? That seems a bit entitled.
I love you? When can we talk? Heart? Smiley face? I send her a heart. And a hopeful-looking smiley face.
She sends nothing.
41
IT’S TUESDAY, AND I’M A WRECK. EVERYONE kept texting me last night to check to see if Jamie had texted me yet. Every time I replied “no” my heart sank a little further.
I stalk Jamie between classes, but it doesn’t help. I walk by her table at lunch, but she’s not there. She’s avoiding me, I know it. The bell rings and I leave history, my last class of the day. I’m sure by now that it’s over. Jamie’s grateful to me for trying, she appreciates my effort, here’s a certificate, thanks for participating. I open my locker to trade my history textbook for my trig.
There’s the notebook.
I drop my bags and pick it up. I flip the pages, my heart pounding, past “Loose Woman,” past “In the Morning in Morocco,” past “Missing you.”
A poem. By Emily Dickinson. It begins, “Her breast is fit for pearls.”
With each line, my heart lifts a little. The fog clears. By the time I get to, “Her heart is fit for home— / I—a Sparrow—build there / . . . My perennial nest,” I am flying—above the trees, above the clouds—I’m practically in orbit. My heart is her home.
Someone clears their throat behind me.
Jamie.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I look down at the notebook in my hand, still open to the poem. “This is—do you mean it?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry it took so long—I wanted to get it perfect, you know? I wanted to surprise you. Like you surprised me. Holy shit, I did not think you were going to read that poem in front of everyone.”
“I hope it was okay.”
“It was . . . amazing. You were amazing.”
“I was terrified.”
Jamie laughs. “I could tell.” Then she takes a step forward. “But you did it anyway. You spoke up.”
Oh, right—speaking of speaking up. “I’m sorry I screwed up. I should have trusted you, I should have waited, I should have talked to you again instead of just rushing off with someone else. I should have—”
“Shhh.” Jamie puts a finger on my lips. “Later.”
She leans just the tiniest bit toward me, and my heart jumps.
“So like, I really want to kiss you right now,” she whispers. “But I know it’s not your thing . . . in public—”
I don’t even have to think about it. I step forward and kiss her. Because I want everyone to know the truth about how I feel.
POETRY JOURNAL, HONORS AMERICAN LITERATURE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18
“Cartographies of Silence”
by Adrienne Rich
From the very first line, I felt like Adrienne Rich was talking about my life in the past few weeks: “A conversation begins / with a lie.” She describes how even if you share a common language, it can split you apart. You can’t take stuff back—stuff you said but didn’t mean, stuff you meant but didn’t say.
I have trouble saying what I mean, especially if it’s personal. Sometimes I say things I don’t mean, just so I don’t have to say the things I do mean. Or sometimes I say exactly what I mean, and it still comes out all wrong. So sometimes I don’t say anything at all.
But I’ve realized that not saying anything at all can be the same as lying, or worse. Other people in my life have done this, too. Like the speaker says, “Silence can be a plan / rigorously executed.” She says more about silence, and I didn’t get most of it at first. She mentions a silent film called The Passion of Joan of Arc and the actress who starred in it, Renée Jeanne Falconetti. (Don’t be impressed, Ms. Owen. I had to Google all of this.) When I saw the images of Falconetti in the film, it helped me understand. Her face is haunting. It expresses pure emotion.
So I think Rich is asking this question: What if we could have silence that was really, truly pure, where it didn’t mean lying or hiding yourself or whatever? What if we could communicate the truth without all the words to screw it up?
Sometimes I wish that we could always do things that way. It would make life a lot easier.
Except it doesn’t work that way in real life. In real life, silence often is just lying, hiding, and dying.
In the end, even though language can mess us up, Rich ends up choosing “these words, these whispers, these conversations / from which time to time, the truth breaks moist and green.” I love that image of the truth, like some small, fragile thing that you have to take care of, but maybe it will grow into something strong and beautiful. It comes as a result of all the words, even the bad ones. It makes everything worth it.
42
“SANA, COME ON!”
I look up from the patch of beach that I’ve been examining to see Jamie waving her arms and hollering. She runs a few steps toward me and beckons me over to where she and the others are making their way through the narrow corridor that separates the ragged cliffside from a huge rock arch the size of an office building. At low tide, the corridor is a damp strip of sand. At high tide, it becomes a channel of frigid seawater so cold it makes your teeth hurt. Through this channel and beyond the cliff is the rest of the beach, where we’ve left our stuff.
“The tide’s coming in! If you wait too long, you’ll have to swim back to the other side!”
This morning, we had salt-pickled kombu seaweed and tiny sardines cooked in soy sauce for breakfast, and I imagined that I was in the undersea palace of the Dragon King, having a royal feast. Mom went crazy for our New Year’s breakfast. She spent a week preparing all the traditional good-luck foods: the sardines for abundance, the kombu for joy, black azuki beans for health, salty yellow fish eggs for many descendants, and prawns cooked in their shells for long life. Plus about a hundred other things. She doesn’t always go to such lengths. When we lived in Wisconsin, if she wanted to do a full-on New Year’s breakfast, she had to drive all the way to a special store in Illinois to get all the ingredients.
But this year, Yūko was invited to have New Year’s breakfast with us. Sorry—that’s Yūko-san. Mom insists that I speak of her with respect. I was setting the table when the doorbell rang. Mom answered it and called me over to introduce me. Yūko-san bowed deeply to me, apologized for all the suffering she’d caused, thanked me for understanding, and said she hoped we could become friends in the new year. Then she went into the kitchen to help Mom with her gazillion New Year’s dishes. Awk-ward.
I mean, Yūko-san is beautiful and nice and—as Mom has repeatedly pointed out to me—honorable. But to be honest, I’m still working to wrap my head around the idea of her and Dad being in love, of her and Dad being something permanent. I still don’t know how she’s supposed to fit into my life. Or how I’m supposed to fit into hers. And I still want Mom to find a life and a love of her own.
Yūko-san and Dad looked so happy together, though, and Mom seemed totally fine with the whole thing, laughing with Yūko-san about Dad’s bad habits and idiosyncrasies, and reminiscing about old times. Maybe it’s easier if you have history together. Yūko-san was wearing the pearl earrings that Dad gave her, and I thought about what he’d said so long ago about everyone having something powerful and precious inside them—especially Mom. Now I think I understand what he meant.
Jamie, JJ, Christina, and Arturo came to pick me up after breakfast, and off we went to the beach. I’ve invited the others to meet us here later: Reggie and Thom, Elaine and Jimmy, Janet, Hanh, Caleb, and a couple of others. Hopefully they’ll show up.
During winter break, the week after my epic performance in Mrs. Byrd’s classroom, Jamie and I met Christina, JJ, and Arturo at Psycho Donuts downtown. They were already sitting at a table when I arrived, holding hands with Jamie.
“So, props for standing up to The Bird.”
“Thanks.”
“And I liked that poem. ‘Elliptical.’ About how whites and Asians see Mexicans and Blacks—like we’re always ‘they.’ Like, people think they know about us, but they’re really just guessing an
d making stuff up and judging . . . so . . . yeah . . . that was pretty cool.”
“Oh,” I said, “yeah. I’m glad you liked the poem. I hoped you would. And I’m sorry about all the things I said.”
So that was good. The thing is, I’d thought the poem was actually about uncertainty, about how we can all look back at our lives and wonder what we could have done, thought, and said differently. But the instant I heard Christina’s interpretation, I saw that she was right. It made much more sense her way—white (and some Asian) people saying about Blacks and Latinos, “They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . We all wish they were more . . .” Thinking we’re trying to understand, but actually just sitting in judgment.
Duh. How could I have missed it? And here I was, thinking that I was smarter than her, even though Jamie told me she was smart. That I was nice and she was mean. Which, okay, yeah, Christina was no sweetheart. But I saw her through a veil of mistrust and—I’ll just say it—racism, and it colored the way I saw everything she did.
Maybe people get tired of trying to be nice to folks who keep saying, “They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . We all wish they were more . . .” Maybe it feels useless to keep explaining when no one listens. Maybe Christina is like the woman in Sandra Cisneros’s poem. The one who makes me uncomfortable but whom I admire. She just is who she is, and she shouldn’t have to apologize for it or explain it to anyone. Christina and I are still not a hundred percent comfortable with each other. We still tread on each other’s toes every once in a while. But it’s getting easier. We’re learning to trust and listen to each other enough to dig for the truth together.
The strange thing about this beach is that there is no sea glass. Smooth gray stones and pebbles, yes. Bits of creamy white seashell, sanded and polished until only the ghosts of their ridges and spines remain—yes. But no emerald green, no amber, no startling sapphire blue. Nothing that was tossed, sharp-edged and broken, into a world where it didn’t belong, and survived to become a rare and unexpected gift on an endless stretch of sand.