And We Stay (21 page)

Emily reaches up again and plays another key on the piano.
That’s for you, Ms. Albright
, she thinks.
And so is this one
. She presses another key to keep the first note from fading away into the old-house smell. Emily Dickinson had grown hyacinths indoors. It wouldn’t have smelled like an old house in the spring when the hyacinths bloomed. Emily unzips the book bag and lifts out the dress wrapped in the sweatshirt. Standing, she unrolls it so that it cascades in front of her. The dress is her size. Emily Dickinson was on the small side, like Emily Beam.

Emily jerks her turtleneck sweater over her head and tosses it on the floor of the now-dark parlor. She unbuttons the mother-of-pearl buttons and inches the dress over her head. As she stands there, breathing in another century, another lifetime, she is certain she is going to cry, she is sure her body will give itself over to grief, so she lifts the dress away from her head for fear she might ruin it with her tears. She puts her sweater on again and lays the dress over one shoulder, holding it in place. With her other hand, she unlaces her boots and works her feet out of them. She lifts her book bag over her other shoulder, and by feeling her way, she baby-steps up the stairs in her socks to the bedroom. The door is wide open. Through one of the windows, she can see the outline of Amber on the bench. The mannequin, blank-faced
and thin-lipped, stares out at nothing, the brown skirt of the dress like a bell. In the dusk, the bodice looks as if it’s made of thousands of tiny gold feathers.

When Emily was in kindergarten, she thought the moon was God’s eyeball, and she told Miss Claire, who smiled and said, “Perfect. God is a Cyclops.” Emily had no idea what a Cyclops was, but Miss Claire explained that it was a giant with a single eye in the middle of his face. Then Miss Claire told the class that a lot of people, moms and dads, grandmothers and grandfathers, really and truly believed that the moon was made of cheese. Emily and her classmates sat on their little squares of carpet, agape. For many of them, and for Emily, too, it was the first time that a grown-up had treated them as equals.
Listen, good children
, Miss Claire seemed to say,
you are more sensible than the masses. Trust your thoughts
.

It was the same way when Paul first took Emily into his confidence. She had felt like a chosen one. Not another girl but a boy had picked her to tell his secrets to.

On their first date, September 9, 1994, Emily and Paul were the youngest couple at Frank’s Tuscan Villa. Paul had made reservations at a corner table, and he pulled Emily’s chair out for her after the hostess set the menus down. At first, they’d made small talk. Emily could tell that Paul was nervous because he asked her questions he already knew the answers to: What is your favorite subject in school? (English.) What kind of music do you like? (Shawn Colvin, Indigo Girls, stuff like that.) Do you want to go to college? (Yes, very much.) Where? (I don’t know yet.) When the waiter came to take their order, Paul told Emily to order
anything she’d like. She ordered eggplant parmesan, which she’d never tried before, and a house salad with blue cheese dressing, which came with the meal. Paul ordered spaghetti and meatballs with no salad.

“This is delicious,” Emily said, pointing at the eggplant. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I don’t think I’ll have room for dessert. This portion is so huge.”

“You don’t have to eat it all.”

“Oh, but I want to,” Emily said.

It wasn’t easy to be on a first date eating Italian food. Emily was sure she’d end up with some of it on her light-blue sweater. Less than two minutes into the meal, Paul spilled sauce on the front of his white button-down.

That broke the ice. They laughed, and what was so fun, the most wonderful thing about the whole night, was that they talked about a lot of things Emily had never discussed with boys. Paul asked her what her favorite possession was. “My grandmother’s childhood dictionary,” she told him, because her grandmother, who had died when Emily was eleven, had drawn little pictures in the margins to help her remember the words. His, he said, was his driver’s license.

They had talked a lot about their grandparents. Paul had a good handshake, thanks to his grandfather, Gigi’s husband, who was the one who first taught Paul about the wide world of trees. On the day after Paul graduated from kindergarten, he and his grandpa had taken a long walk through the woods. His grandpa taught him how to identify trees by their leaves
and their bark. Life happened in the woods, his grandpa said, and so the woods were worth knowing. He told Paul what would happen to each tree when autumn came, what color the leaves would turn and when they would fall. The red oaks didn’t lose their leaves at all, and Paul decided then and there that they were his favorite.

“Mine too,” his grandpa said. He reached his hand out to Paul, and when Paul shook it, his grandpa said, “Darn, boy. We’ve got to work on that.”

“Show me,” Emily said to Paul. “How to shake hands.” She held out her right hand across the table, and with his own right hand, Paul gripped hers and shook once, down and up.

Come to find out, she
had
wanted dessert. Being with Paul made her hungry. He recommended the tiramisu, which they shared. On the way from Frank’s back to Emily’s house, Paul made a detour on a county road.

“Is it okay?” he asked. “If we park somewhere and talk some more?”

The road was lined with maples, which would have been a canopy of color had they been passing under it in the light of day. But it was dark, darker than any road Emily had ever ridden down. After a couple of miles, Paul turned left onto a gravel driveway, and the truck bounced its way up to an abandoned barn.

“There was a fire here a long time ago,” Paul said.

“I hope no one died. Or any cows or horses.”

“Whatever happened, it happened before we were born.” Paul turned off the engine. “I have a flashlight, if you want to look around.”

“No,” Emily said. “Let’s just sit here.” She placed her left hand on the seat, and Paul reached for it.

They sat for a minute, holding hands, the wind and the leaves speaking for them through the open windows.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to die in a fire,” Paul said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you wanted to be cremated anyway, you’d have nature doing the job for you. And you’d pass out from the smoke inhalation before the flames reached you and all that.”

Emily shuddered. “Do you want to be cremated?” she asked.

“Yeah. Ashes to ashes. I don’t believe everything the Bible says, but I believe some of it.”

“Like what? What parts do you believe?”

“The Do Unto Others part, for one thing. I totally believe in that. And I believe that life is a gift given by God or some higher power. But everlasting life?” Paul shook his head. “I’m not so sure about that one.”

“I’m not sure about that one, either,” said Emily. “Because God didn’t write the Bible. Men did, probably uneducated ones.”

She had said it to make Paul laugh, but he didn’t.

“I think about it, but then I have to make myself stop because it’s so depressing. All of the people in the world, and the animals, too, all of the people and animals that have ever lived, all of the trees, and all of the thousands and thousands of years before us, all of that life died, and all the people we know will die, too, and all of the people who are born after us, and so there’s no possible way we’ll see each other again
because how could we all fit up there in heaven?” He paused. “You probably think I’m crazy.”

“No,” Emily said. “No, I don’t.”

“Really?”

“I think you’re nice.”

Paul turned to her and touched her on the shoulder. “Can I kiss you?”

“I was hoping you would,” said Emily.

And they kissed, and it was a giant thing, but it was also quiet, like the biggest moments are. In the room where many poems were once written, Emily sinks to the single bed and cries for all that has been lost, and for all that will be.

When Emily lifts her head from the white coverlet, the room is so full of moonlight that she can read by it. She looks at her watch and taps it. There is no way it is only 7:55. She rises from the bed and walks over to the desk chair where the dress is arranged over the back of it as if a person had been sitting there and slipped out for a moment. Did she lay the dress out like that? She was upset, but she doesn’t remember doing it. She reaches into the pocket of the dress, feeling for the scrap of paper, which sticks itself, static-like, to her palm. Emily’s poetry notebook sits on top of the desk. She doesn’t remember putting that there, either. K.T.’s fountain pen rests next to the cover, the moonlight igniting the gold tip. Emily glances at the mannequin, who gazes back.

“Talk to me,” Emily says. “You said in one of your poems that you don’t believe in heaven. But have you changed your mind? Tell me. Tell me everything.”

The mannequin’s white lips almost move.

“Is it okay with you if I sit here?” Emily asks. She lowers herself into the chair and peels the scrap of paper from her palm and presses it to the flat surface of the desk, which smells of old wood. She runs both hands along its worn edges and reaches back to touch the dress, thinking of another pocket, the one in a boy’s pair of blue jeans, the one that once held a letter from a girl. Whatever happened to that letter? Did Paul burn it? Did he hide it under a mattress or slide it into a chest of treasures or leave it where it landed, a hidden part of a messy pile of laundry?

For minutes, Emily listens to the stillness in the room, which has its own private voice. It tells her that the unexpected maid is not an outside force. She may come as a surprise, yes, but she always comes from within. The maid is the muse, and the girl who discovers her must create for her a world of a meaning in which to live. Under the bright eye of the Cyclops moon, Emily Beam realizes that Emily Dickinson didn’t write 1,775 poems just to keep them all to herself. She knew they’d be found. She knew they’d be read. She knew they would prove to other daughters of America, and sons, too, all the survivors, that they are not alone.

Emily Beam opens her notebook to a blank page.

“Pocket,” the silence whispers.

“A crib for pencils,” Emily whispers back. “A home for matchbooks.”

“The night,” says the silence. “The whole night is shrinking.”

“Once upon a time,” says Emily, “this desk was a tree.”

“The paper was, too.”

“I knew a boy who grew trees. And I think that I loved him.”

“Morning fades,” says the silence.

“When I die,” asks Emily, “where will I go? What dark pocket of time will rock me to sleep?”

Emily Beam,
March 18, 1995

EMILY LEAVES THE WHITE DRESS WHERE IT IS AND WHERE, SHE IS SURE
, it wants to stay. Feeling as silly as a child, she walks over to the mannequin and says, “I don’t believe in heaven, either. But I wish I did.” With a last look at the room, Emily carries the earthy weight of herself down the graceful staircase. In the parlor, at the piano, her hands feel their way through the only song they know: “Chopsticks.” In the darkness, she can see the outline of the empty boots, which look smaller without her feet in them.