Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (2 page)

I am allergic to exposing my skin, which I think is the more mature approach to life.

I look down at my cast, about to say something about his sneeze-inducing cologne, and see that he’s written something he finds hilarious.

Something that made me cry in third grade.

We had a sub because our teacher was in an accident or got hepatitis or something. So we were not learning anything but were instructed to choose one of three activities: read quietly, sleep quietly, or play hangman (quietly). Derek came up with a puzzle and three of us were guessing. After a few guesses, here’s what I saw:

_A_ES   IS   _ _IEND_ESS

When I realized what it said, I gave up and went to a corner, where I allegedly cried, and as a result gained a short-lived reputation as a crybaby. (I was saved from this reputation a few days later when Benny Gordon cried so hard in dodgeball that he wet himself. The human body is a horrible thing.)

So now the phrase JAMES IS FRIENDLESS shouts huge letters across my forearm, leaving no room for sympathetic girls to draw hearts. This week just sucks.

“If I’m friendless, why are you hanging out with me?” I ask, trying to wipe the marker off before it dries.

“I tell people you’re my sociological experiment. Also, that your mom pays me to be nice to you.”

Later, in Physics, I am distracted by Beth because she seems to be distracted by me. Or by the reputation-crushing message Derek left on my cast. Whatever the case, the girl who didn’t look my way when the grill of a bus ruined my week is now shamelessly watching me calculate force with a dull-tipped pencil. Maybe she wants to confirm that I belong on the short bus.

Of course, I
want
her to look at me, but now that she is, I feel very objectified. This is probably how Beth would feel if she knew that I stared at the way her just-long-enough black hair stayed so nicely tucked behind her nearly perfect ears.

When class ends I am torn between an impulse to walk out of the classroom at the same time as Beth and my impulse to avoid human communication until my cast gets removed. On the verge of what promises to be a major anxiety attack, I decide to dart out the door. Secretly, though, I’m happy when I hear a girl calling out my name as I walk down the hall. Who wouldn’t be?

I don’t respond right away, which is why she calls out “Short Bus” for good measure. The hallway ignites with laughter.

I’ve played it a bit too coy, perhaps.

“Yes?” I turn around and try to calm my stomach butterflies.

“You’re the guy who got hit by the bus, right?”

I laugh and hold up my arm and tell her my names is James, that only enemies and strangers call me Short Bus.

“You’re Jorie’s brother?” she asks.

“Yes.” I was not aware that she knew my sister. “Why?”

“She—can we walk? I have gym and am notoriously late.”

(Is it wrong that when Beth mentions gym I imagine her changing in the girls’ locker room? Or is it wrong that I stop myself from imagining this?)

We walk.

“Your sister used to submit tons of poems to the
Amalgam.
”

“What’s that?”

Beth laughs as if this question is common.

“The school literary magazine, which no one reads. Jorie gave us stories sometimes too, but mostly poems.”

“I did not know this.” I think back. Jorie never told me about her publications. Maybe she assumed I read them and didn’t like them. I want to call her and say that I didn’t even know the magazine existed.

“She sent us so much stuff and she was, honestly, better than most of the people who submit. Even better than the other editor, who writes all this lame suburban angst. His parents are loaded and still married—what kind of angst could he have?”

“Yeah.” It’s the only thing to say to a green-eyed girl who might love poetry as much as I do.

“He didn’t write at all, and then he started reading Sylvia Plath and junk and tried to take over the magazine. Amazing how exposing sophomores to certain poets causes radiation sickness to their own writing.”

I get the sense that she really, really wants to talk about poetry. I should say something about Whitman. Oh, what? What? I’m blanking. Crap!

“Lots of the poems we published were written by your sister,” she mercifully continues. “We just made up different names to make it seem like the school was being represented well.”

She can tell I’m shocked, and then I’m more shocked because her fingers touch my forearm for one billion nanoseconds as she giggles. She’s looking at me. I am not invisible. I couldn’t invisible-ate myself if I tried.

“No one ever caught on?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“The school is big,” I suggest.

“Plus, no one really reads.” Beth’s laugh includes a charming snort. “Well, only a small percentage of the school. No one went out of their way to find out if Jake Growling really was a student here. Or Jane Air. Or Willy Hamlet.”

“
Willy Hamlet?
” I laugh louder than I’ve ever laughed at school.

“I guess I wanted to get caught.” She bites her lip. She’s a cliché of beauty!

We walk, and walking is good when it’s not just me weaving through the happy and dumb.

“I knew she wasn’t going to be around forever,” Beth continues. “She was due to graduate and all.”

She awkwardly squints down the hall as if she sees a recognizable face. I think she’s just trying to avoid the topic of my sister’s expulsion.

“You want me to write some poems or something?” I ask.

“Oh! No. I was wondering if you could see if she finished this big piece she was working on. It was a graphic story. Pictures and words graphic, not violent graphic.”

“Yes. I can.”

No, I probably can’t. I never snooped through Jorie’s room when she still occupied it. Going in there now is like grave robbing.

Maybe I can write Beth a thousand poems fueled by the image of her face right at this moment! Her face wears a delight and a shyness and a beauty that I imagine is unnatural for a girl named Beth who plays field hockey and shows up late to gym.

“Can you get it to me quick?” she asks, checking her phone but returning her gaze to me rapidly.

I want to be honest and say no, but who am I kidding? This is the only recent conversation I have wanted to last more than twelve seconds.

“Yawp.”

“Huh?” she says.

“I mean yes.”

“Great!” Beth hops with glee. (Later, in my slow-motion memory, I will see hundreds of strands of her hair floating down lit by sunlight even though we’re indoors. I will see freckles that I never noticed before. I will see how her lips could easily be described as plumlike.)

But right now she says she’s late for gym, and spins and runs off. I want to think something romantic because I’m convinced that something will happen with me and her. But damn my brain and my eyes—all I can think of is how wonderful her butt looks in those pants.

SINCE SHE LEFT
, I have been in Jorie’s room only twice, to reclaim CDs from the cluttered maw of her desk. Those visits—during the day, when the room still seemed inhabited—lasted seconds.

Once I’m sure my parents are asleep, I go into Jorie’s room and turn on the small lamp by the door. The shade has crude skulls cut into it. The skulls’ shadows shiver a bit on the walls. The lampshade is one of her late-night projects, for sure. Jorie enjoyed enhancing perfectly functional items. She drilled a hole in the side of her jewelry box that allowed her to shake out two earrings. She wore them regardless of whether they matched or not.

My mother has cleaned a little and my father righted the fallen bookcase, but the room still has that Jorie energy. She could be asleep beneath the rumpled bedspread right now. Clothes, papers, and books are strewn everywhere. She hated leaving used dishes in her room, but she’d walk on notebooks and pens and art supplies. Jorie never worried about keeping certain valuables protected. She returned a number of my CDs with catlike scratches or coffee rings and didn’t understand why I was annoyed.

But all this flotsam and jetsam is secondary to my purpose: tonight I’m looking for words and not-violent graphic images. I look through the half-dozen journals on her bookshelf. They stand too neatly for the room. It’s likely my mother has already skimmed through them, looking for evidence of sex and drugs and hatred. Instead, she saw lots of drawings. Pretty surreal fantasy stuff—fat fairies in skimpy clothes, spiky flowers covered in bees smoking cigarettes, dragons with butterfly wings and buck teeth. Some are from years ago, according to the dates (which are just as ornate as the drawings). One of the journals has text, which I only skim in order to feel a bit less guilty. It seems to be a story about a girl and her dog planning to help people in need but never getting around to it (at least not for the first few pages).

There are some sketches of the girl, her dog, and a bloated-looking frog-man who might be a villain or the principal of our school. Or both. The girl is Jorie-like. I can tell by the hair. Jorie liked to keep her hair relatively short and use rubber bands to make little ponytail spikes randomly on her head. I look over at her dresser and there’s still a huge container of tiny multicolored rubber bands. She went through thousands. Sure enough, the girl in this journal has spiky hair and bony knees (another very Jorie detail).

I’m struck by my first real memory about Jorie—one that has the arc of a story, anyway, and is not just a flash of images or feelings. When I was four, I was having a recurring nightmare—something about the Super Mario Brothers chasing me and making me eat huge bowls of cereal. After waking from that dream, I cried a lot, but I covered my mouth to keep from alerting anyone. I was afraid that the Mario Brothers would exact revenge if they knew I’d told on them. (The revenge, of course, would be to jump on my head before feeding me to Yoshi.)

One night Jorie came into my room and said she heard me crying. I told her about the dream and she told me about a dream she had where she was a teacher.

“Who wants to be a teacher?” she said. “I don’t want to be in school all day teaching people stuff I already know.”

I can’t remember what I said. Probably nothing. Jorie didn’t always make sense to me when we were little.

That night, to help me sleep, Jorie gave me one of her stuffed animals—a shark with these huge felt teeth.

“This shark eats bad dreams,” she said.

I carried it everywhere for months because it was soft and because it really did make my dreams go away.

Tonight, thinking of that shark, I put the journals back—loosely and disorganized, the way my sister would prefer.

I have a moment of profound, stomach-aching, palm-sweating guilt. I have many moments of guilt, actually, but this one feels acute and fresh. I’m not supposed to be in this room at night when my sister isn’t around and isn’t coming back.

I’m among the reasons she’s not here.

I know she wasn’t happy or safe here, but maybe if I’d helped her . . . . There are certain things that I did and certain things I failed to do.

Then, life decides to freak me the heck out: My cell phone vibrates with a text from Jorie! There’s no actual text, just a close-up image of some orange berries on thin limbs against an intense blue sky. I reply, asking if she’s okay, if she needs anything. She’s probably far away, falling asleep. I wait a few minutes but get no response.

I decide to leave the room forever, but then I step on The Board. A perfectly inconvenient floorboard located in a place where it cannot be avoided. It acts as an alarm, letting out the kind of jagged belch that can rouse even the heaviest of sleepers (i.e., my father).

As Jorie probably did many times, I freeze. I am convinced that I can remove my weight from the board without creating a follow-up—and more alarming—belch.

I have a few memories about this damn floorboard and the fights it started, but for the moment I begin to slowly lift my foot. Microscopically slow. In my head, I know I’m making no sound. I pretend it’s outer space in my sister’s room. Things happen but sound waves don’t travel.

In reality, though, the sound is not unlike a starving lion about to chainsaw through a thousand crying baby caribou.

“What the hell is going on?” My father’s voice cares not for walls. He speaks, you hear it.

I dart for the door, but once I’m in the hallway, the Brute spots me.

“What are you doing in her room?”

I turn around and see my father standing there—he’s an unimposing man this late at night. He sleeps in tightie-whities and an undershirt with yellow pit stains. It’s not that he’s a messy man—out of shape, unattractive, bearlike—or anything. He’s normally a shaven, successful man who lunches with people. He deals in commercial real estate. He once grabbed Jorie’s forearm so hard it bruised.

But in the cool glow of the evening, this is my lame father. His knees look girlish and bony. He reeks of cigarettes. He is angry.

I say I haven’t done anything in Jorie’s room.

“I’m gonna bolt that room shut. Now go to bed. You’re rude, making noise at
whatever-the-fuck-o’clock
it is.”

I apologize and go to my room, ready for another sleepless night. I don’t even mutter a “yawp” before closing the door.

FOR A YEAR
, I’ve been seeing an imaginary therapist. Her name is Dr. Bird. She is a large pigeon, human-size. She wears no clothes. Because she’s a bird. I imagine that we’re meeting in a dim therapy office. She doesn’t have a desk or a chair. She will pace and circle and bob her head while I talk.

Pigeons strike me as good listeners—they discern the voices of mates over the cacophony of the natural world. They move the right way too. A pigeon’s head-tilts suggest the kinds of things that I imagine therapists say: “Really?” or “How did that feel?” or “Tell me more.” Plus: one intense, glassy black eye staring at me, the neck-bob of agreement, the puffing of feathers when I’m being evasive.

Today, I start by telling her about the photo I got on my phone.

“It was a tree with orange berries and a blue sky. From Jorie.”