Paper Covers Rock (5 page)

A Fine Young Man

“Alex,” he begins, “you are a fine young man.” I almost start laughing. How many times have I heard that before? A million at least. And what meaning of “fine” does he intend here? I put my hand over my mouth, that’s how close I am
to cracking up. Because he thinks I am about to cry, he hands me a box of tissues. To keep from having to explain myself, and to be polite, I take one and kind of swipe at my eyes with it.

“Alex, you’re a fine young man, and we at Birch want you to know that we support you in your time of struggle. We are here for you, and God is here for you. If you don’t own a Bible, then I’d be happy to lend you one.”

I lie and say that I do.

“I think you will find solace in some of the Psalms and in the book of Job.”

“Isn’t he the one with all the patience?” I ask, to play along. If I play along, maybe I won’t have to come back. I am very good at playing along; it is one of my talents.

“Yes, yes, he was.” Reverend Black seems pleased and asks if I remember Job from religion class, which is required of all third-formers. I confess that I don’t, but I tell him I went to Sunday school as a child, a lie that comes out of nowhere. Why would I lie about that and tell the truth about not remembering his class? I am starting to sound like Holden Caulfield, and that does not make me happy, because he is just about my least favorite character in all of American literature.

The Rainbow Connection

“You will come to learn that God shows us His mercy in small ways. You may be walking along thinking about Thomas, for example, and up in the sky, a rainbow will appear. I’ve come to see that this is God’s way of reminding us that He is with us, and under His watch, all things are good.”

For an hour it is this kind of talk. I won’t bore you with any more details. I tell him a few things about how I feel about losing a friend, but none of them is true. I am not about to bare my soul to a man of the cloth, because that would make me as big a hypocrite as he is.

When my mother left us, my father sat me down and told me that I didn’t have to go to church anymore. He wasn’t going to force me, he said, because religion was a human invention. “Back when civilization was more primitive, when people possessed no scientific understanding of the world, they needed an explanation for why crops were destroyed by blights, why bad things happened to good people, what happened to them when they died. Death was much more a part of life than it is now; it was expected, even for young people, even for children—lots of disease, and no medicine, of course. Do you understand?”

Then he told me that my mother left because she was sad inside herself and that neither I nor he, outside forces, had anything to do with her sadness, that she had it before she knew us, and that if she chose to believe that God would take care of her, that was fine, but she would have to get medical help to get unsad.

I was only five years old, but I understood that my father was a college professor and that college professors had explanations for everything. Because they were more educated, they did not need religion to make sense of the world.

I do not tell Reverend Black that I’m not about to start believing in God just because Thomas Broughton died.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

No one notices me here. I look studious in my carrel. No one knows I’m not always doing my homework; no one knows I’m writing this book, or whatever it is I’m writing. Nobody will find me here.

Do you have any idea how hard a story is to write? My brain is jumpy, and my heart doesn’t know where to live. Is Male is such an imperfect narrator, but he will try to finish his tale.

13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.

(repetition, an effective narrative device)

14. Clay says to Thomas, “Take off your shorts. Take off your boxers.”

15. “No way,” slurs Thomas. “Not in front of a faggot.”

16. Clay goes ape-shit. He lunges at Thomas, but Glenn chases him down and tackles him. They roll around, Clay trying to pin Glenn, Glenn trying to pin Clay, until Clay staggers to his feet and shouts at Thomas, “I am going to kill you! When you get back to dorm, you are as good as dead!” I am not kidding. Those were his exact words, and, unlike Thomas’s, they were clear as a bell.

17. Clay thrashes off through the woods with his bottle of vodka.

18. I look at Thomas, who is drunk and laughing his head off.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 9:15 P.M
.

Wearing Down Seven Number-Two Pencils

Here in the library among the Great American Poets, most of whom are dead, I am using up lots of paper because of the rock. I need an editor. Scissors cut paper. Who am I to be writing a book? To quote Emily Dickinson, “I am Nobody,” but of course she was talking about God, not me.

And she may have a point there, I decide this morning. I push my chair back from the carrel. There has to be a photograph of Emily somewhere around here. I am lost in the smell of old books, I am lost trying to remember what day it is, and I am lost because I can’t find her photograph anywhere. I look at my watch. Almost time for class. I look at my syllabus for English. Miss Dovecott must really like Emily, because we only spent a couple of days on Walt. She should never have told us he was gay; we tuned out after that.

When I turn back to my carrel to pack up my things, Miss Dovecott is suddenly there. She is there and smiling at me. “You beat me to the punch,” she says, leaning over the partition.

“What punch?” I say, slamming this journal shut, thinking, God, I wish there were punch, I wish it were spiked, I wish that Miss Dovecott would drink a gallon of it and make crazy love to me.

“Emily Dickinson. I came to see if I could find the daguerreotype of her.”

Daguerreotype?

She is reading my mind, one I am trying to keep clean.

“It’s what they used before modern photography,” she tells me.

“I didn’t know that,” I say.

She is looking up at me. She has to. I am taller than she is. In class, she is taller than we are because we are always sitting. Now I am a giant. Fee, fi, fo, fum.

“I liked your essay,” she says. I am going, going deep, going into the deep of her brown eyes.

“ ‘What I Carry,’ ” she prompts.

“Oh. Oh,” I say. I am a scintillating conversationalist.

“I’ll give it back in class today. I think you’ll be pleased.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. Pleased, pleasing, pleasure. Pleasure me, Miss Dovecott. As she reaches up for the book, the one she is looking for, her sweater rises, and I see the skin of her lower back. I think about that skin all morning long and all through cross-country practice this afternoon while I’m running the trail. Ladies and gentlemen, it keeps me pumping for a good long while.

Green Fields

I heard about her before I ever saw her. A young female teacher, good-looking (as in, if she passed you on the street, you would turn your head to check her out), had come to Birch to teach fifth-form English. The minute my dad and I showed up for the start of my junior year and began moving my stuff into 313 Wimberley Hall, Joe Bonnin rushed in to tell me, trying to tone it down because my dad was with me, but I got the message: my new English teacher was a fox.

So let me use this page to record my first moments with Miss Dovecott, because if we become one of the great love stories of all time, these first moments should go on record, should they not?

I was seated with my eleven classmates (now ten) in the classroom. Through the panes of glass in the tall windows, morning light rained and ricocheted across our desks, our arms, our heads. The wooden door skidded along the floor, and her right foot entered in its tasseled brown loafer, the leg bare almost up to the knee. Then the left foot, and then she was standing before the big desk she claimed by setting books on top of it, books that slid away from each other. She looked up and faced us head-on, her gaze sweeping across us like wind over a field. She opened the middle drawer of her desk and drew out a sheet of paper, and in a low, calm voice, she read out our names. By the time she came to mine, I was quivering.

What I Carry

I am quivering, too, when she hands back the essay. She has given me an A-. Or, as she would put it, I have
earned
an A-. I dash back to my room after class, forgetting about my other life for a minute until I open the door and see that Clay’s bed has been removed by housekeeping. He has left me with Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs in their bathing suits, posters I take down, roll into thin tubes, and store in his empty closet. Except for the residue of tape on the walls, there is no trace of him visible, because this is my room now: lucky 313. So much space all to myself, but who is that? I am holding fast to the doorknob when Glenn enters without knocking and pushes me over.

“Stromm,” he says, reading my face, “what’s wrong?”

I tell him I might have written more than I should have and that Miss Dovecott invited me in to talk about what happened that day at the river. Big mistake. BIG MISTAKE.

“Give me the essay,” he says, stretching out his hand.

“Give me it.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Bullshit.” Glenn lunges for my book bag.

“You can look for it all you want,” I say, “but it’s not there.”

“Then, where it is?”

“She kept it,” I lie. It’s folded in half inside my journal/novel/whatever. My journal/novel/whatever is on the shelf in the library behind the giant volume of
Moby-Dick
, where it will stay. I do not dare, do not dare, carry it to dorm.

“You have to go back,” Glenn is saying. “You have to go
talk to her; otherwise, you look like you have something to hide.”

“Right,” I say.

What Miss Dovecott Wrote

(I like it so much that I am copying it here.)

I find it intimate, to be addressed by name; I find it thrilling, my name in her handwriting. A woman’s handwriting. Male teachers do not write personal notes on our work. They do not use words like “courage” in their comments.

202 Sellers Hall

So after cross-country practice, I do what Glenn says (Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!), but she is not there. On the walls of her classroom: quotations, quotations, quotations, copied in her neat, elegant handwriting, black marker on construction paper, all different colors.

“Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.”—Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry is all metaphor.”—Robert Frost

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson

“The title is the writer’s stamp of approval.”—Anonymous

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”—Herman Melville
. F
ck you, Her-man. (Is Male must censor his book because it is shelved in a school library.)

On her shelves: dictionaries, thesauri (is that a word?), grammar handbooks, short story anthologies, poetry collections, every Great American Novel known to man (and woman). A framed certificate inscribed to Haley Avis Dovecott, recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald English Award, Princeton University, May 1982.

On her desk: a photograph of a man and woman (her parents?) standing in front of a barn; a carved wooden box (inside, rubber bands and paper clips); stacks of homework to grade; her notes for English 500.

Her notes for English 500. My name in the top-right corner:
Alex
. The x trails down, begins the circle that loops around my name. My name is a bull’s-eye. X marks the spot.

Hide-and-Seek

I smell her all over the classroom, she smells like baby powder. I leave her a note, her name on top, mine on the bottom, to let her know I have reported in as she oh-so-subtly suggested I do.

Miss Dovecott strikes me as the type who could never have enough fresh flowers in her house. If I brought her flowers—which I will not do, don’t worry—she would probably remember them for the rest of her life. I believe that I
will publish a poem one day in Miss Dovecott’s secret voice, her non-lilting, non-teaching voice. It might go like this: