Is he the dwarf, Milton? you finally say.
No that’s Pope. Milton’s the blind guy. Paradise Lost. His daughters had to write stuff down for him.
Well, anyway, you say. You look out the window at a field of rice, its sheaves of green leaning. Watching them, you remember a poem that you’re fairly sure she won’t know. You learned it off some standardized test, but they didn’t have poets’ names for fear that would lend test takers some clue:
…Coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass
I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream
Away in lines like seaweed on the tide
Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind.
You pause and scramble through your head for the next lines. You relocate yourself in the cafeteria where the test took place, how you stopped penciling in the empty bubbles, entirely stopped the test to memorize the lines—a contemporary poem was that rare a thing. Even in the relatively quiet test-taking room, you’d had to plug your ears, for even the heel clicks of the overseeing teacher were an intrusion.
Once again, you plug your ears—this time against the bus racket, as if to re-create the seashell roar from the moment you found the poem. Inside this roar, Meredith tugs your sleeve. You unplug your ears to the loud world, and she says:
The ripple and splash of rain on blurred glass
Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by,
Something I should have liked to say to you,
Something…the dry grass bent under the pane
…something of…
Now Meredith stalls, and after a brief inward drifting, you find the final lines:
A swaying clarity which blindly echoes
This lonely afternoon of memories
And missed desires, while the wintry rain
(Unspeakable the distance of the mind!)
Runs on the standing windows and away.
The bus rocks you both over the gritty roads of east Texas. Yet some immutable shift has altered the air around your bodies. Glib chatter is no longer possible. Your own need for braggadocio has been washed away in that moment of reciting together. Meredith’s round eyes seem to have grown even rounder.
Nemerov, she says. Howard Nemerov.
That’s who wrote it? you ask. This is data of the rarest kind. With a name you can ask your mother to find his poems in the college library.
(Which your mother does. Once you discover that he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, you draft an obsequious fan letter over the next few weeks, asking Meredith to correct various versions. Eventually Nemerov writes back a typed letter of thanks and encouragement. And nearly ten years later, he’ll be lecturing in Boston, and you’ll introduce yourself, and he’ll shake your hand and stare with wonder and say, My God. You’re that little girl from Texas.)
Meredith continues to nod slowly at you, and you at her. You’re lost in some capsule of wonder that will sustain you both in years to come beyond anything you could hope for. When a smile breaks large across her moon face, something worthwhile has been granted.
Chapter Twelve
WHILE BOYS ARE CRUISING ROADS in search of liquor or pussy or fistfights that can prove their adolescent prowess and vent their spleens, you and Meredith forge a friendship based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing virtually nothing. A camera trailing you would find neither plot nor action—two girls laze around on sofas in various stages of torpor reading or talking about what they will read or have read or plan to write or make or do in some vaporous future. Or dead silent in mutual paralysis, the two girls stare at a ceiling for hours, just watching idle thoughts drift by.
You languish on her mother’s sofa, Thomas Pynchon’s V. open on your chest. Meredith claims it’s the greatest book ever. You can’t get through the first chapter. Tedious as all get-out. Some sailor singing doodley-do sea chanteys and whatnot. In the Russian books at least if you write down the different names and nicknames, you can get a dim idea of who’s doing what to whom, and who the good guys are.
What we need’s a fainting couch, you say. Something in red velvet. It’s the longest string of words you’ve uttered in what seems like hours. You’ve been listening to the air conditioner’s roar.
Victorian? Meredith asks. She seems to have names for distinctions you haven’t yet begun to make.
And of what does that consist?
‘Of what? Of what?’ The wild beast has some syntax.
I mean it. Edify me.
I think all those curvy frou-frouy couches are Victorian. You know, like they have at Snooper’s Paradise. A slopey thing. With fringe.
I also wouldn’t mind a barge, like Cleopatra. I could really go for a barge, with some Nubian slave boys to fan me with palm fronds. Gliding under leaves of…
Meredith looks up to say, Elephantine leaves.
Dripping elephantine leaves, you say. Then, This book is all turkey gobble. Tell me again what’s so great about it.
Language, mostly. It’s a world created rather than a world described.
Come again.
He’s not trying to copy anything that’s real.
So he’s just making shit up?
Yep.
And that’s an upside thing?
Don’t read it if you don’t like it. I loved it.
You saying I’m not smart enough to read this. I’m just your noble savage friend.
More savage than noble, she says. I personally think you’re adorable. Extremely cute.
Cute is for poodles. I want to be dark and enigmatic.
You’re absolutely dark and cutely enigmatic. One of the untapped mines of literary genius.
This kind of banter is part of an unspoken contract whereby Meredith will pat you on the head a few times before she actually undertakes explaining whatever book has stumped you. The charade somehow dilutes the fact that the most meritory opinions invariably stem from Meredith. Without this oblique shoring up, the friendship would consist of her lecturing while you take notes.
Meredith finally says, Like the whole V thing. It keeps coming back up and back up—geese flying in a V, somebody’s shirt open to show their chest, the triangle of pubic hair. It accrues power, meaning. It becomes something.
And what exactly is the V thing?
Well, it’s a lot of stuff. It’s death, I guess, the arrowhead we’re all flying in…
From obscurity to oblivion. From this fucking suckhole to anywhere else on the goddamn planet. Tell me why if you don’t believe in God, how come you refuse to cuss?
Because I’m pure, untainted. My lips unsullied by obscenity.
And I’m the fucking whore of Babylon.
Cuss your brains out. It doesn’t bother me a bit.
Say fuck, c’mon.
I don’t want to.
What if you were in a play by T. S. Eliot, and a character had to say fuck, would you just not do it? Up and walk offstage? Leave your fellow thespians sputtering?
That’s not Eliot’s vocabulary.
But what if? Okay, who would say fuck? Other than me, of course, in my little foulmouthed self?
I don’t know. Maybe Beckett. Not Oscar Wilde or Eugene O’Neill—
These are people I don’t know.
Remember that two-person scene that Stephen kid from Beaumont did? Endless. Him and this other guy swishing around? Tugging off each other’s cowboy boots and putting them back on?
Waiting for Lefty?
For Godot. Waiting for Godot. That’s Beckett.
That didn’t make any fucking sense either. And I don’t remember anybody saying fuck. C’mon now, say it just the once.
In such ways do your days unwind in a haze of aimless blabbing with Meredith’s literary opinions introducing intervals of quality.
Every now and then someone tries to spur you both into a project. Mrs. Bright will ask why you don’t go play putt-
putt in the scalding heat, or your own mother will suggest drawing. To such ideas, you’ll both jovially claim to be “depressed out of our minds.” But depression as you bear it is less pathology than a kind of cerebral accessory.
Long, long are the hours of each leaden day for girls who’ve sworn to devote their entire beings to what they call “the life of the mind,” but who find themselves unfairly stranded in a town where the proudest sign in the library is one proclaiming every extant issue of Popular Mechanics.
The art forms or projects you occasionally rally to are markedly static and wholly conceptual, demanding nothing more than talk. After Meredith’s brother Michael brings home an underground comic called Despair, you spend hours concocting static theatrical tableaux that you’ve no real plans to perform, staged and epigrammatic scenes each a minute or so long.
Let’s say the curtain opens on a man and woman. She looks outside an upstage window, and both his hands clench the overstuffed chair arms. (Both hands: this is high drama.) There are small empty cans that once held Vienna sausage all over the coffee table and two plastic forks. She says, Harry, where’s Asia? He says, I don’t know. Let’s find it on the globe. She says, Where’s the globe? He says, It was burnt with all the other things. The curtain closes.
You spend hours generating titles and names for books or bands you’ll never even start. Meredith’s autobiography will be called Ennui on Me. Yours is Hooves Over Texas—a lusty brawling tale set under the savage Texas sky. You will form a soul group called the Chicken Supremes. These projects never endure the failures inherent to execution. They let you luxuriate in possibility.
The summer you and Meredith reread Franny and Zooey together, you evolve in a mystical direction, combing libraries and religious bookstores all over the county for a copy of the medieval Christian tome called The Pilgrim’s Way. It describes the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) that Franny chants mantralike during her unbelievably attractive nervous breakdown, the repetition being meant to burn the prayer into your very breath and heartbeat resulting in all kinds of tranquillity and saintliness.
When your mother fails to find the book in several Houston bookstores, you give that up and found a yoga club. (Hatha Yoga at the time being about as common as speaking Urdu.) You aim to achieve Nirvana itself. Hopefully before school starts.
But you’re no more smoothed down by yoga with Meredith than when your mother offered it as a way of calming your nerves before junior high. If you can’t pull off a pose the first few tries, you click on the TV and topple onto the sofa, watching a rerun of Father Knows Best and mocking it while you long to enter those well-mopped rooms where you’re certain the candy in the milk-glass dish hasn’t been soldered by humidity into sticky, inedible concrete.
Meanwhile, Meredith actually slides into poses. She also reads the yoga book that for years you’ve just studied the pictures of. There she finds various directions for cleansing—fasting, drinking buckets of lemon extract and room-temperature green tea. In one case, you’re meant to cleanse your sinuses by snorting up warm salt water that floods through your nasal passages and comes out your open mouth: a kind of hosing out of one’s sinus that Meredith masters right off. But your effort leaves your skull pounding as it does when you eat a snow cone too fast.
Later, Meredith constructs a meditation mat from a great rectangular piece of foam rubber as you watch. She covers it in a cotton madras the colors of grass and apricot culled from the cheapo remnant section of the fabric store. On the same trip, she picks up a bolt of black flowered cotton to sew you a floor-length monk’s robe with a hood. (You figure on being dressed right for transcendence once it hits.)
The next morning, you leave the house for Meredith’s wearing the monk’s robe and what you call Lecia’s slave-girl-of-Caesar sandals, with leather thongs that wrap around your calves. But unless they’re tied so tightly that your circulation’s cut off, they tend to slop down around your ankles. Halfway to Meredith’s, you untie them and sling them over your shoulder like a string of fish.
Thus monastically clad and unshod, you walk the tar-sticky roads holding your mother’s orange-and-black yoga book. About halfway there, a roaring truck draws up on the rough shoulder holding a whole crowd of bikini-clad girls and boys in cutoffs in back, including the luminous John Cleary sitting high on the side, a blue towel around his neck. Some girl asks real loud, where’s the Halloween party, while everybody else breaks in half laughing. Somebody (you want to think it’s John) says, C’mon you guys, and the truck roars off, leaving a wake of titters that you halfway believe visible—little clicking black birds swarming from the silver truck to where you stand, eyes welling up.
At the threshold of Meredith’s icily air-conditioned house afterward, she says, Well, hey. Don’t you look all Buddha’d up.
You shove past her, saying, Lemme in fast. I’m baking alive in this thing. You dive the length of the sofa, letting your hair shield your face since crying ruined this morning’s Egyptian eye makeup.
Unzip me, you say. I feel like a pork sausage in this thing.
Just a minute, she says, and tugs at the zipper behind you trying to manipulate it back into action.
You’re choking me to death there, you say. Your fingers claw toward the zipper tongue you can’t quite reach.
This is one of those old brass-looking zippers, she says.
It’s an old broke-dick zipper, is what it is, you say.
Another tug from behind, and the neckline chokes you. It yanks tight against your throat as if you’re being hauled up by some tether you’ve dared to lunge against.
Meredith says, You have to soap one sometimes to loosen it up.
You’re struggling to twist free when another choking tug comes, and in that instant, all the indignity from the truckload of kids seems to break into a thousand wide-flying shards.
I’ve almost got it, she says.
Well goddamn get it or get the fuck out the way.
Meredith lets go the fabric. She retreats in a movement both liquidy and sudden. Her shadow slides off you.
Drawing the robe over your head, you manage to yank it off and emerge blinking as from a tunnel. A handful of hair caught in the open zipper tore out several strands and left the back of your skull stinging. You’re standing there in cotton underpants and Penney’s bra feeling impossibly bare. Across the room, Meredith’s blank look says you’ve offended her.
She seems so colossally untouchable that you’re almost shocked she could be wounded. But her carriage is caved in slightly, like someone who’s received a hard slap. You’d like to take it all back, but the word sorry hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary. All you know how to do when faced with conflict lately is leave.
Maybe I should go home, you say.
Maybe you should, she says. She’s using the polite tone she saves for teachers and movie tellers. When you snatch up the monk’s robe, you don’t even know what fury it is that you’re so devoted to sustaining, just that you have to storm out. (Friendships often seize up at such an instant—the standoff in which two people either deepen to each other or part company. For decades you’ll tend to be counted among the parting variety.)
But you’re trying to work the zipper’s brass tongue, and it will not budge past the torn-out hair. And you can somehow feel Meredith looking at you. Her eyes have settled on your face as palpably as a shone light. Without moving an inch, she’s reached out some tendril.
She says, You need help. (It’s not a question.) She takes the robe and fools with the zipper, looking down while she asks, Were you crying when you got here?
In that moment, extremely athletic sobs burst from you. There’s great heaving rigor and an extreme runniness of nose. You feel like a fool and say so. Crying in your underpants. God. And when you tell her about the truck and the mockery, it seems like nothing really, the kind of thing that happens every day in Leechfield. So why can’t you even catch your breath in the gale force of it? You weep a while befo
re you can say much.
And Meredith listens. Finally, she says, Those people are just jerks. You can’t explain to her the ways they’re not, how John Cleary is really a glorious being even though he plays football and baseball—for to tell her that would betray some pact, leave her stranded in this strange world you’re fabricating together.
Later, Meredith works to change the zipper in the monk’s robe while you watch in her pink chenille wrapper. It’s a complex task that requires a wicked hook you’d expect a dentist to wield. Meredith handles it deftly, undoing the seams often without even tearing a thread. Bent to the work, she resembles some old fashioned girl from a calendar, her wild mass of hair electrified by the pale blue light through the curtains.
So she’s a little heavy, you think, what your mother would call Rubenesque. That shouldn’t blind everyone to her beauty. It does, of course. No one in that truck would invite her to go swimming or to a sleepover, though she has enormous entertainment value and a great heart. (Also in all your life, you would never see her commit an overtly cruel or vindictive act.) Somebody might invite you, and if you brought Meredith along, no one would be rude to her, for she had a bearing that usually thwarted such treatment. But no one would talk to her much or ask her back.
Suddenly you say, You look really pretty doing that.
Thanks, she says, and her face lights up with what you call her Rockette grin. Plus I’m a demon with a needle.
This is true, you say. Then you tell her how everybody in your family is hotheaded. The least little thing, and you blow. That’s the closest you can come to an apology.
Lots of native peoples are like that, she says. She takes up a tiny pair of scissors to snip a thread you would have torn with your teeth. Meredith’s civilized that way. (Soon she’ll speak excellent French.) She hands you the old zipper, saying, Here study this. There’ll be a quiz. Then she bends back to the task of pinning the new zipper in.
You say, It’s a big old geyser of my tresses caught in a broke-dick zipper.