“Then why did Santa put it in my stocking?”
I turned around but Timby’s door had opened and shut. By the time I swung back, he was bounding up the front steps. In the reflection of the school’s front door, I caught Timby’s eyelids smeared with rouge. I rolled down my window.
“You little sneak, get back here!”
The car behind me honked. Ah, well, he was the school’s problem now.
Me peeling out of Galer Street with seven child-free hours on the horizon? Cue the banjo getaway music.
“‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here—only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air—a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.’”
I’d nailed it, syllable for syllable.
Alonzo stuck out his hand. “Congratulations.”
You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?
Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.
Well, it rattled the hell out of me. I had a memoir to write. Yes, much of my memoir was going to be illustrations. No problem there. The words were the rub. With a book, I couldn’t just blather on in my accustomed way. Economy was everything. And economy wasn’t happening due to the abovementioned bad brain.
I got the big idea to sharpen my instrument by memorizing poems. My mother was an actress; she used to recite Shakespeare soliloquies before bed. It was amazing. (There! Amazing! If my brain weren’t so bad I might have said, It was proof she was disciplined and properly educated and may have had an inkling of her terrible fate.) So I did what anyone would do: I picked up the phone, called the University of Washington, and asked for their finest poetry teacher.
For the past year I’ve been meeting Alonzo Wrenn every Thursday morning at Lola for private lessons. He assigns me a poem. I recite it from memory, and the conversation gallops where it may. I pay him fifty bucks plus breakfast. Alonzo would buy me breakfast, so great is his love of poetry, but my will is stronger, so he accepts it and the crisp bill with a poet’s grace.
“What did you think?” Alonzo asked.
He was a big guy, younger than me, with a mop of mouse-colored hair atop his exceedingly kind face. He always wore a suit, linen in the summer, wool in the winter. Today’s was chocolate with a sheen; it must have been vintage, and under it a shirt the color of parchment. His tie was moiré, his pocket square starched white. (Joe’s mother made him wear a suit and tie to the dentist to show “respect for the profession.” Little Joe wearing a tie in the dentist’s chair = falling in love all over.)
“Can we start with what’s concretely happening in the poem?” I asked Alonzo. “What’s the term for that? The discrete incident?”
“The discriminated occasion.”
“The Discriminated Occasion!” I said. “You’d better make that the title of your autobiography.”
“I might prefer Discrete Incident.”
I unfolded my marked-up poem and launched in. “It starts with the hermit heiress who lives year-round on the summer island. I’m picturing Maine.”
Alonzo nodded, ceding it as a possibility.
“‘Her farmer,’” I said. “Is that her husband?”
“More like someone in her employ who farms her land.”
“Like you’re my poet,” I said.
“Like I’m your poet.”
“There’s lots of oranges,” I said. “But red too. Blue Hill is turning fox red. The red comes back later with the blood cells and the skunks’ eyes. God, doesn’t your heart break for the fairy decorator? Don’t you just want to go buy something in his shop? Don’t you want to just fix him up with the hermit heiress?”
“Now that you mention it,” Alonzo said with a laugh.
“Then the poet steps out of the shadows. He’s been saying ‘our’ up until now, but then it turns to ‘I.’ Is he called the poet or the narrator?”