Undercover (10 page)

Y
OU ARE BORN or you’re not born with a talent for hair; I came out on the loser’s side. I didn’t know, the next day, how to pin my hair as back and as high as my mother did, but I wore the clip nevertheless, and I wore it in my own way, because there’s nothing worse than being my age and being dependent on other people for good hair. Mom said, “If you start to feel sick, call.” Jilly said, “See you around.” I walked out the front door, down across the yard, and over those few blocks to school.

It was hard to remember the order of things—which bell was caution, which bell was real,
whether you went left with the first number on the locker dial, or spun the wheel around twice the other way. I got a woozy feeling trying to get it all right, and then that feeling passed.

The halls seemed rock-concert crowded, elbow to elbow, and the floor was that brown sludge color that floors can get after the snow outside gets old. I could see Jilly down by the water cooler showing her new boots to the fashionable crowd, and when Margie passed by, she looked at me twice, like I’d grown a fourth ear or something. “Hey, Margie,” I said, but she didn’t say “Hey” back. She was caught up in the crowd surge, like a leaf flushed down a river. Math, I thought. And social studies, and science. Take one thing at a time, and as it comes. My locker had that stale, needs-air smell. My pencil tips were as dull and blunt as the ends of used Magic Markers. Wire-spiraled notebooks and three-ring binders. Erasers and pens. One or another of the bells was ringing, but I couldn’t tell which one. I
felt someone standing close to me. I turned and it was Theo.

“Must have been some flu” is what he said.

“Fever,” I said. He seemed taller to me than he had before. He’d lost the dancing monkey. His eyes looked deep into mine. There were a million people with a million backpacks knocking all around us, and something whammed me from the rear. I felt my face go hot, touched the butterfly in my hair.

“You missed a big scene in Dr. Charmin’s class,” Theo said, stepping out of the way of a cresting crowd surge, closer to me.

“I did?”

“She threw Sarah into after-school detention.”

I laughed, grabbed the last of my things, and slammed my locker. “Serves her right,” I said. “For what?”

“For reading a Dylan Thomas poem with a French accent.”

“You’re kidding.” Theo was close. We were arm against arm. I could have reached for his hand.
How could I know—how can you tell?—if he was thinking of my hand?

“It was a riot.”

We were two on a raft with the mobs and multitudes, the elbows and knuckles, the catcalls and hollers. We were friends, or were we more? I kept checking for Lila, but she wasn’t there. I looked more closely at Theo. He’d changed the circle in his ear.

At the door of Mr. Marcoroon’s door, I half stepped in to check out the board and all that I in my feverish spell had missed. You ever see a piece of glass after it’s been shattered into pieces? That’s what I saw there—all these broken bits and squiggles, triangles and letters, question marks. I saw disaster in the making. Brain chaos.

“I can’t do this,” I said to Theo, who had waited.

“You’re a genius,” he said, laughing. “Don’t you remember?”

“Well, sure,” I said, “compared to you.” But the last bell had rung, and he was sliding away. I took my seat in Math Hell.

T
HAT AFTERNOON Dr. Charmin introduced the villanelle, another something French, she said, and powerful, giving Sarah a silencing look. The board had been chalked with what seemed like Greek to me—beats and syllables, paired rhymes and repetitions, the word
tercet
five times, and then the word
quatrain
. A few rows ahead of me and over, Theo was taking notes, his shoulders hunched and his back to me, but I knew I couldn’t study him, because Margie was studying me. “Welcome back, Elisa,” I heard Dr. Charmin saying, as if she’d just noticed I was there. “It’s nice
to see you looking well.” You couldn’t take a teacher’s word for something like that: Forty-eight eyes whisked toward me and stared. Theo winked.

We were all divided then into six sets of four and given copies of a poem. “You learn villanelles by listening to villanelles,” Dr. Charmin began again, as now she walked up and down the aisles, distributing the day’s work. “What we’re reading today is Elizabeth Bishop’s masterpiece ‘One Art.’ If you never read another villanelle in your life, then at least you will have this one swimming in your blood. Don’t try to do the poem’s mathematics just yet. Just read aloud when I tell you to, and listen for the patterns.

“This group here,” Dr. Charmin pointed. “Take the first tercet. And so on”—she gestured again—“as it goes.”

“Like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ for adults,” someone mumbled, though nobody, in the post-Sarah administration, even dared to laugh.

“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master;’” the
designated group began, not in sync at first, then finding its stride:

“Second tercet?” Dr. Charmin said, raising her hand like a maestro, and commanding from Sarah, Theo, Mitchell, and only-ever-gives-dumb-answers Lurch a choral-quality response:

Then the third tercet was brought to full voice and released, and then the fourth, and finally the fifth, which was my own, which I read with Candy, Daniel, and Hart, who sit in the back of the room hoping they’ll never be noticed and made like background vocals to my solo act:

“The quatrain,” Dr. Chamin said, and it was read, then there was silence. “It’s fierce, isn’t it?” she suggested. “Fierce, and also quite a surprise. You have to have something to say when you write, and Bishop says it all. What’s more, she does it within the strictures of a very particular form. So what, in the end, is a villanelle?”

“Tercets and quatrains,” Matt said.

“Five of the first, one of the latter.” Dr. Charmin nodded. “But beyond all that, what’s the pattern? Look at the poem. Which lines repeat? How are they changed, with the repeating?”

“Master and disaster,” Theo said, “are the big words.”

“And not just the words themselves—right, Theo?—but also the lines that they’re attached to.”

“Right.”

“Somebody tell me how Elizabeth Bishop has taken chances.”

“The last line,” I said, when nobody else would, “looks like a note to self.”

“What else?”

“It isn’t a perfect one-hundred-percent copy of the lines it’s supposed to be patterned off of.”

“Which means?”

“That the meaning was fiercer than the form right there? Or that maybe you show fierceness by breaking form?”

“Interesting perspective, Elisa. Thank you.”

“Are we going to have to write villanelles?” It was Margie, wanting to know.

“Of course we are. This is Honors English.”

“But it looks so hard,” said Candy. Sarah sighed really loudly but said nothing.

“I’m giving you the rest of the class,” Dr. Charmin said, “to get started. Ask me questions, if you have them.”

There was the sound, then, of paper being torn
from notebooks, of feet shuffling out, chairs being pushed back, elbows hitting desks. I stole a look at Theo, pushing the blank page around before him. Then I saw Margie watching me watch Theo. She made a face and cracked her gum.

I
T USED TO BE in winter that I dreamed of summer, when I could go out and hunt all day on behalf of Stash O’ Nature. Drinkable skies, I’d think of, and amber sun. Kitschy color in the garden. A little stir through an open door. The yakking of frogs. I liked darkness bowing out to light. I liked glisten on the grass, the pinkest morning. Sometimes the closest we get to being where we want to be is imagining we’re already there. I used to dream of summer in winter, of hitching all my thinking to the sun.

But now it was the moon I wanted, to lamp up
my pond in the woods. The indigo shadows and the statue girl, the book she held that had no words but seemed to tell a story. Track the changes, Dad had said, and this was one: I’d become a winter girl. I’d found my variety of loveliness on a pair of stolen skates.

Jilly and Mom were out that night—Jilly with Elaine and Mom at the gardening class she took at the local community college. That left me alone and well enough to fly. To cut through the cul-de-sac and down, along the stream, between the shadows. It was a most outstanding cold, the air like ice cubes up against the skin. I could run and I could slide and I could ride the icy snow, and I was fever thin, but I didn’t mind; I was back where I belonged. I kept running until I could run no more. I walked the rest of the way through the shadows to the pond, to the shack, to the dock’s end. I laced the old skates on.

Do you know the musical
West Side Story
, with that white tough Tony and that Puerto Rican Maria
making like Romeo and Juliet? You know that song “Somewhere,” about peace and quiet and open air? “There’s a place for us,” it starts, the first word becoming the next word, slowly. “There’s a time for us.” Each note as pure as a promise.

I skated to the middle of the pond. I stood up straight. I pushed outside edge right, then outside edge left, then swept myself into the music, assembling all my speed and bending my knees. When I jumped, my speed carried me high, forward; it lifted the song right off its feet. When I landed, I made my toe picks quiet—made swish and leap my only sounds. I crossed over and over and over, then leaned back against the night, pointing my right foot east, pointing my left foot west, and drawing, just like a pencil would, a long, crisp, curving line. That was me, the girl above the pond. Me with my arms thrown out and the night behind me, the night holding me up, for that’s how it’s done. I was the beginning and the end, the poem I had yet to write, transcendent, which is not the same thing,
not the same thing in the least, as being invisible. I was what the moon was shining its spotlight on.

Words for the future:

“Somewhere” is a song. It is a pond, at night.

O
NCE I SAW A PICTURE of Mom and Dad together on the day they bought the house we live in now. They were sitting on the stoop, knee to knee—Mom’s long yellow skirt warm and buttering to the ground, her collar tips all purple pansied; that was when my mother sewed, when all her clothes were, as she liked to say, stunning originals. A thin black band held back her corn-silk hair, and there were diamonds in her ear-lobes. Dad was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants with a crease down each leg, but he was still looking at Mom like he was surprised to find
her on the stoop right next to him. My mother had taken her tall-heeled sandals off and tossed some daisy stems across her yellow lap. Dad did not wear glasses yet. In his hand was a bowl of strawberries, fresh picked from the patch out back.

In that picture of my parents, it is just the two of them—the front door black because Dad had not yet varnished it dark green, the old pots of begonias without their cracks, the hanging plaque—
ONE HOUSE ONE HOME
—still sitting on a barrel at that antique store where my parents would, as the story went, find it, claim it, bring it back, and nail it to their castle. I could never figure how that photograph of my parents came to be—who came close enough to their private world to steal a glimpse like that.

By the time I got home from the pond that night, Mom and Jilly were back from where they both had been. Their coats were thrown over the banister, and on the stairs they sat—Jilly two steps above Mom with one fist on one knee, her chin in the nest of that fist. They’d been talking, I guess,
but now they weren’t, or there I was, so they had stopped. “Hey,” Jilly said, and I said, “Hey.” “Where were you?” my mother asked, and I said, “Walking,” and she didn’t ask where or why. “Come here,” she said instead, in a way that made me understand she was not mad, just tired.

I pulled off my Christmas mittens, my Christmas parka, my Christmas scarf, my boots. I rolled up the cuffs of my snow-crusted jeans. In my thick white socks I skated across the floor of the wide beginning of our house, which isn’t really a hallway but has never been a room. Jilly lifted her chin from her fist, then put it down again. Mom wrapped one piece of her blond, blond hair around her longest finger. I knew, and I guess they knew I knew: Dad had called and there’d been another fight. Things were getting harder now, more scary. There was room for me on a step below. I took my place, beneath them.

So we sat that way, the three Cantor girls, in the house my parents had bought when they were
young. And even though you can’t remember what you were not born in time to see, I was thinking how it must have been—my parents harvesting the strawberry patch, my mother saying yes to daisies, my father amazed by the butter of the skirt that melted past Mom’s knees. I was thinking of the house before me, of time before I knew it, of Dad when he loved my mom so much that he would stand at the bottom of the steps imagining her beauty. I don’t know yet if beauty exists if there’s no one there to see it, but I know this: My mom needed Dad to see her now. To pick strawberries for her in winter.

In an hour we would all take every inch of Christmas down—the twinkle lights, the indoor wreaths, the ornaments hooked on the knobby tree. We would box up the Santas and the frosted birch twigs and untie all the bows and stuff the tinsel into a Ziploc bag in case we needed it next year. We would put away the jingle bells and the snowflake lamps and every last holly-and-mistletoe runner.
There would be a trail of needles everywhere beneath the carpet, couch, and chairs.

“What should we do with the Gump’s?” Jilly would say.

“Leave those be,” Mom would answer.

Later I would hear my mother crying behind her bedroom door.