Paper Covers Rock (9 page)

“Well, what’s your subject?”

“That’s the problem. I can’t think of anything to write about.” Glenn told me that he paused here, his face blank. “Except sex.”

From this point on, I am skeptical. As in, I’m not sure how reliable a narrator he is. Glenn says that at first, Miss Dovecott pretended not to hear him, and she placed her shaking hands under her thighs and stared down at her watch for a full minute. But soon enough, words were delivered to
Miss Dovecott from somewhere, and she spoke them: “You could write about how you can’t find your own song.”

“What do you mean?” Glenn asked.

“You just told me that you keep hearing Roethke’s words instead of your own. You could write about that, a poem about writer’s block. That could be the literal meaning. And then, if you think about it, that literal meaning could also work on a figurative level—how searching for words is comparable to searching for identity.”

“Oh.” Glenn proceeded slowly. “I thought you meant something else.”

According to him, her voice was quick, nervous. “What? What did you think I meant?”

“Never mind,” he tossed out.

“No, what? I’m curious.” But she wasn’t curious, Glenn explains; she was scared.

Which made it the perfect time to execute The Plan. “I thought you were saying that writer’s block could be the figurative meaning, and sexual frustration could be the literal.”

“You did not say that,” I interrupt.

“Hell, yeah, I did.”

“What did she do?”

“She asked me to leave.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “but then I looked at her and said, ‘You know how you’re always telling us to take whatever in life is confusing us and make a poem out of it to give the confusion some order? Maybe I should make some order out of all this frustration I’ve been having. Is that what you want me to do?’ ”

I want to punch him.

Miss Dovecott pushed her chair back. “I just want you to do what you can most easily connect with. What feels most honest, most real.” And that was true, I’m sure of it. It was the essential thing—what Miss Dovecott wanted for her students, and for herself. “And I also want you out of here,” she said.

“I completely unhinged her. Completely!” Glenn is jubilant.

“Okay, then,” I say calmly. “If she’s completely unhinged, then we got her. The God-Almighty Stupid Plan is over.”

“Oh, no way,” says Glenn, grabbing my shoulders and shaking them. “No effing way. We’re only halfway there. You are in this, my man.” He pulls me to him in a bear hug.

“What are you doing?” I say, pushing him off me. “What the hell are you doing? I’ve got to get back to work.” I gesture to the open books on my desk.

“English?”

“Yep. English.” I open the door so that he will leave me alone.

Glenn sashays a few steps to pick up my notebook. “Let me see.”

“Put it down,” I say.

“No. I want to see what the belle of Birch is writing.” But there isn’t anything to see—the page is blank—and he throws my notebook at me.

What Thomas Said on the Rock Right Before He Dove: Verbatim

“I saw Clay and Glenn yesterday in the bathroom. They were both coming out of the far left shower at the same time.
Claybrook was sweating like a homo. Is Everson a homo, too?”

What Thomas Really Saw, According to Glenn: Paraphrase

Clay and Glenn in the dorm bathroom, Clay in the left shower, Glenn in the middle one next to it. Glenn had run out of shampoo. He was borrowing Clay’s shampoo.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 7:12 A.M
.

Insomnia, the Sequel

Four a.m. No poems in my head. I want to sneak off dorm with my flashlight, but I’m scared I’ll be caught even though no one is awake at this hour and the masters on duty turn in at midnight. Birch doesn’t need a security guard. It’s already secure: nowhere to run, not a town within miles. Isolation, desolation.

I picture the rock and the night gathered around it. What cliché did Reverend Black use? “Thomas Broughton did not die in vain; he was part of God’s plan, a bigger plan than any of us can imagine.” Language about death is full of clichés.

Lying there in my bed, I know in my soul of souls that even God does not have the power to intervene in a world where centuries of evil have rooted beneath the surface of everything, a system so complex that no one, not even He,
can hack it apart. My father is right: humans made God up to satisfy their own needs.

Trying to Write Poems at 5:00 a.m. but not Getting Past the First Line

Rock, Paper, Scissors

While Glenn is giving Thomas CPR on the riverbank, I tell him what Thomas said, what he saw in the bathroom. “Shut up, Stromm,” Glenn tells me. But a few minutes later as we are walking up the hill behind Miss Dovecott and the two paramedics, he slips me a stick of gum and glares as he whispers, “Thomas didn’t know what he was seeing. Remember that.” And so I nod, remembering.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 5:56 P.M
.

Trying to Do My English Homework That I Didn’t Do the Night Before

This morning, I am the first person in the library, or so I think. I settle into my carrel and am huddled over a blank sheet of paper when I hear someone, a student’s voice I don’t recognize, say her name on the other side of the shelves. I sit straight and cold, a column of marble.

“Miss Dovecott was walking down from the top of the hill.”

“In the dark?” asks another unfamiliar voice.

“Yeah. It was late.”

“That’s not so weird. English teachers are drawn to the dark side. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“Everson said he could see her flashlight from his window.”

“But how could he see that far? Wimberley Hall’s like a mile away.”

“Think about it. The trees are bare now. You can see pretty far when there aren’t any leaves, especially from the third floor, and anyway, the flashlight stopped at the infirmary.”

“It could have been Nurse Patty.”

“Have you seen Nurse Patty ever leave the building? It’s like she’s glued to it or something.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean it was Miss Dovecott. It might not have even been a girl.”

“It was definitely a girl, Everson said, and she was running. No other girl around here can run that fast.”

The breakfast bell rings, and the two guys, whom I still can’t place (we all sound alike), rustle into their jackets. I duck behind the carrel, listening to the sound of their boots fade. So Glenn said he saw Miss Dovecott last night walking the trail with a flashlight, and he told some other guy, but why didn’t he tell me? My head is like a sewing basket full of needles without a single spool of thread.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 8:45 P.M
.

Homework assignment for October 19, English 500. (“Get out your syllabi; we’re making another change,” Miss Dovecott announces.)

You are a woman at a yard sale early one Saturday morning. Picture these four items on the sale table: a stuffed monkey, a
fishing pole, a dead butterfly in a frame, an empty vodka bottle. “Buy” one of the items and, in this woman’s voice (first person), describe where you think the item has been (its past) and where it is going (its future). Describe what attracted you to the item in the first place. Title the piece with the woman’s name, first and last. (Two pages handwritten or one page typed.)

What Glenn Whispers to Me on the Way Out of Class

“She knows. Don’t choose the bottle.”

Scissors, Paper, Rock

The bottle of vodka was empty when Clay left the scene. What if he chucked it into the woods on his way up to campus? Where is that bottle now? I can’t believe three weeks have gone by and I haven’t thought to ask. Blame it on lack of sleep, which skews things, turns them backward and upside down. Like vodka does.

I wonder now if Thomas had ever had a sip of vodka before September 30. We all act in front of our friends here at Birch like we’re these big partyers when we’re at home, but I had always believed that Thomas was telling the truth about going through a six-pack of beer without even feeling it. But liquor is different, my dad likes to tell me; once liquor enters a sane person’s veins, it can turn him crazy in a way that beer cannot.

After I jump from the rock with all that vodka in my stomach and plunge into the river, I think about what I learned in fourth grade—that 60 percent of me is water.

Running

Miss Dovecott sometimes runs around the track after school. I am walking by this afternoon on my way to practice when I hear Mr. Southey, the JV football coach, whistle at her. She pretends not to hear him, but she hears me when I call out to her. She looks happy to see me and waves and runs for at least fifty meters with a smile on her face.

It might be the running, not the poetry, keeping me sane. I can run the trails now with my eyes closed; I know where the fallen logs are, the exposed roots, the small gullies the rain has created. It has rained for the past two days—a straight, cold rain—but when I’m running, I can actually make myself believe that it’s poetic inspiration hitting my head, and it makes me go faster. Mr. Wellfleet doesn’t understand why my times are improving, but he is proud of me.

Glenn Albright Everson, III

He is convinced that Miss Dovecott is trying to smoke something out through the English assignment she gave us. He is certain that she is going to analyze our choices to see what it says about us. (He is also certain that Clay was telling the truth when he said he threw the bottle over the barbed-wire fence and into the ravine bordering the Birch School property.)

So Glenn writes about the fishing pole. The woman who buys it, Alice V. Allison, grew up in Maine and went out on the fishing boat with her grandfather when she was a child every single Saturday. Alice imagines that the pole belongs to the husband of the woman selling it, and he doesn’t know
that she’s selling it. He is going to be angry when he finds out, but the seller is tired of the fishing pole hitting her in the head every time she opens the bedroom closet. Alice breaks the pole and gives half to her daughter and half to her son, so that they can pretend they each have a magic wand because they are being brats (as usual) and are embarrassing her here at this yard sale in this very fine neighborhood.

Alexander (No Middle Name) Stromm (No Roman Numerals)

He had a stuffed monkey, still does, on his dresser at home. It was his mother’s, and one of the few things he remembers her saying about herself was that she used to dance all over the house with the monkey, up and down the stairs, and out onto the wide green lawn and up and down the sidewalks. She wanted to be Ginger Rogers when she grew up. But Alex’s dad wouldn’t let him play with the monkey until he was six because he could have pulled off the red ball on the monkey’s hat, put it into his mouth, and choked to death. By then, his mother was gone.

Alex writes about the monkey in the voice of Fanny Goole. Fanny is blind. She thinks the monkey is a baby doll because the monkey’s tail fell off long ago. She is aware that the doll has very big ears, so, ironically, Fanny Goole names the doll “Bad Monkey” and sleeps with it every night. You think right up until the end of the story that she has bought the doll/monkey for her daughter, but then you find out that it is for Fanny herself. Fanny is kind of retarded.

It is the stupidest thing I have ever written. That’s maybe because it is a stupid assignment to begin with. Okay, so I am
blaming my shortcomings on the woman I love. I am ashamed of my below-average and unoriginal self.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20, 3:00 P.M
.

Haley Avis Dovecott, Princeton University, Class of 1982, Magna cum Laude

I stop by her classroom during lunch today and apologize for my lackluster homework. She accepts my apology and tells me she’ll give me some extra time to do it over, to get it right. She says she hopes to meet my parents so that she can tell them what a dedicated student I am. I tell her that they aren’t able to come to Parents’ Weekend this year. Then I ask her about the certificate on the bookshelf, a reading award.

Reading, she tells me, is what she does best. She loves it because it uses the whole of her, the right and the left, the hemispheres of reason and imagination. She discovered as a child that a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a scary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.

She is talking to me, Miss Dovecott—Haley—is really talking to me. I ache to wrap her in my arms, which she is welcome to control any way she likes. On rare occasions, I have sat in class and envisioned my teachers in their apartments hunched over weak coffee or dazed like zombies standing at their closets, wishing for different lives. But Miss Dovecott doesn’t wish for a different life, she wishes to be with me right now, right here, telling me things.

She surprises me with a question: “How does reading make you feel?”

“I’ve never thought much about it,” I answer.

“Okay, then how does math make you feel?”

“Like I don’t know anything. Like a loser.”

“Now answer the question about reading,” she says.

“I guess reading makes me more interested in things—in the world, I mean. It makes me want to know more about people and how they think and what they have done with their lives.”

“Me too,” she says.

“Math doesn’t have that effect on me,” I add.

“That’s fine,” she says, “as long as you don’t scoff at other people’s fascination with numbers. Math is just as important as English. Numbers, like language, provide one with a way to arrange the world’s chaos. They are two kinds of truths, and science and history and art and psychology are other truths. The world is chaos, Alex. Your job in life is to figure out how to make some sense of the chaos. Me, I do it through words. Maybe that’s why I won this award. Maybe that’s what my professors were trying to tell me.”