Here So Far Away(29)
I’d learned the dangers of slagging Tracy off when it might be a matter of seconds before Bill got back together with her, so I handed him the Tupperware container and said, “Whatcha wearing, cowboy?”
His shirt had pivoted from Bryan Adams to the Lone Ranger.
“Lisa.” He tore a page out of his binder and used it as a napkin. “She took me shopping last night after I got back from shopping with you guys. Hope she finds that thing you have on as funny as you think she will because I can’t keep doubling up on all this girl stuff.”
“So far everyone else does.”
We had Miss Aker for homeroom, followed by English during first period. Lisa arrived a few minutes after the buzzer, flustered and waving a permission slip. She slid into a desk a few seats behind me and didn’t look my way.
Miss Aker—she of the prematurely white hair, long dresses, and practical socks ’n’ sneakers—said, “Now that you’re here, I can share our news. I’m delighted to tell everyone that Lisa has been chosen as the director of this year’s school play.” Spattered applause. “We thank the two other applicants for their efforts. Lisa, perhaps you could share your proposal and the changes to the production this year.”
Lisa stood up, already turning pink because she was allergic to public speaking. That’s when she noticed me and my shirt. Her mouth went slack, like her brain couldn’t compute what she was seeing, and then she seemed annoyed, as though I’d distracted her on purpose. She gave her head a shake, centered herself again. “So I went to see this theater troupe in the city, and it got me thinking about the different ways you could adapt a classic poem like ‘Evangeline.’ At first I was like, As a musical? Then I was like, No, with movement and acrobatics and miming—”
“And puppets and black light and kids from the short bus!” Doug said.
Miss Aker pointed to the door. “Office. It’s the nineties, Doug.”
No one but Miss Aker heard what Lisa said after that. Space needed to be gazed into; elastics weren’t pinging themselves. Lisa really did need someone to be the heavy. She also clearly needed someone to tell her that giving Longfellow’s “Evangeline” a circus vibe was a bad idea.
“. . . Jennifer P. will do costumes, Jennifer C. will do makeup, and Christina Veinot is the stage manager. Christina suggested it would be good to have an even split of juniors and seniors working on the play this year, and Miss Aker and I agreed.”
She did not agree. I could see it in the way she sat down again, eyes forward to avoid making eye contact with anyone. Tradition dictated that the Elevens ran the Christmas talent show and only did small production tasks and supporting parts in the play, graduating to bigger jobs in senior year. Lisa had paid her dues and so had all the other seniors who wanted to work on the play. Now she’d given half of it over to the Elevens, just because Christina had told her to.
Bill gave my back a can-you-believe-it jab.
“Onward!” Miss Aker shouted over the buzzer for first period. “To begin, I have a special poem that I’d like to share. It was written a long time ago by a local poet, someone who prefers to remain anonymous.”
“Is this person in the room at this moment?” Mike asked.
“I cannot reveal the author, but it’s a terrific example of confessional poetry.”
No one was buying the secret-author thing. Miss Aker used the same poem every year and always presented it with the same little speech. Rumor was she had a suitcase full of rejection letters from literary magazines.
“Mike, start us off. Read the first stanza, please.”
It was about two boys who hung out constantly. They raced all over town on their bikes, turned grass blades into reed instruments, shared a crush on the same girl, and wept together when they came upon a dead dog on the bank of a creek. But when they turned thirteen, they suddenly stopped being friends, the reason buried like a bone.
I liked it, in spite of Bill’s second, harder jab. It was plainly put, to the point. I didn’t understand writing something that had to be translated into real talk, especially since it seemed like no one ever agreed on the meaning. The only poet I’d gotten into was Sylvia Plath, whose poems were often savage and almost always interesting, even if you didn’t know what she was on about half the time.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise—
The beads of hot metal fly
“Who here has been friends for a long time?” Miss Aker said.
Bill practically shouted, “George and Lisa!”
I turned around to glare at him. He gave his cowboy collar a smug little tug, and I vowed he’d soon be rolled in a rug. (Who says I’m not a poet?)
“Perfect. Let’s hear a few memories of your friendship, girls, see if we could mine them. Lisa, what’s your earliest memory of George?”
After an uncomfortable pause, Lisa said, “Probably that time she blew a gasket in kindergarten because the teacher couldn’t find her Minnie Mouse hat.”
It was a minor fit, and not her earliest memory of me. The earliest, for both of us, was a skating recital of “The Farmer in the Dell.” Lisa played the Black Cat. I played the Cheese. At five, I was so small that my parents worried I had a growth disorder, but I could skate well for my age. I was the Cheese, le grand fromage de la dell! I skated frontward, I skated backward, I wiggled my yellow-costumed behind adorably. Then the Brown Cow ran me down and I fell. The audience went, Awww. Because of course the littlest one couldn’t stay on her feet. I knew I looked like a baby, and was grateful when the Black Cat with the luminous blond lashes and orange curls bubbling out of her hood laughed heartily, like I’d done it to be funny, and watched me get up all by myself. Years later I asked why she didn’t help and she said, “Because you didn’t want me to,” as though that would have been obvious to anyone but her.