And We Stay Read online

  they flutter over sheets

  of white, arching and rolling,

  the buttons abandoned

  no longer strained,

  no longer serving

  the need.

  Emily Beam, February 17, 1995

  With the aid of her fire-drill flashlight, Emily Beam learns that Emily Dickinson had been as interested in science as she was in poetry. She believed in step-by-step scientific proof, not grand leaps of faith. She believed in the smallest miracles of nature. Stalactites. A robin’s trill. The dizzying speed of hummingbirds, each plodding step of the tortoise.

  Emily Beam used to believe in those things, too. The survival of tadpoles. The transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. She knows that butterflies use antennae to lead them to potential mates. But what are humans supposed to use? What drew her to Paul, and he to her, was hard to say. They had walked the same halls for two years, and before that, they’d been at middle school together and in the same Sunday school class. What if they had just continued to coexist, as countless butterflies do?

  Lying in Cole Hankins’s parents’ bed at the party, the party that ended it all, Emily asked Paul if he had ever loved another girl.

  “It might not have been love,” he said, “but it was something.” That past summer, before Emily, there’d been a girl named Allison. Paul was working part-time at the farm where Allison’s horse boarded. Allison, who was two years older, loved her horse; she did not love Paul.

  “How could you tell?” Emily asked.

  “I could just tell.”

  “But how?”

  “She was always in a hurry around me,” he said.

  “Maybe you made her nervous,” Emily said.

  “No,” said Paul. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “So you never told Allison how you felt.”

  Paul shook his head.

  “You pined away in anonymity.”

  “Yep,” said Paul.

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid to risk it.”

  “Risk what?”

  “It.”

  Emily kissed his naked shoulder. “You risked it with me.”

  “You don’t feel like a risk.”

  “How do I feel, then?”

  “Safe.” He paused. “How do I feel?”

  “The same,” said Emily.

  Which wasn’t true, not entirely. Sometimes being with Paul felt safe, but sometimes it made her feel alone. He’d be drinking with his friends, and she wouldn’t be, not wholeheartedly, anyway. If a trapdoor opened up in the floor, she could drop through it without Paul noticing until it was time to drive her home.

  So Emily has decided that she won’t go to any more parties. She is her own entertainment. Tonight, while a busload of girls from ASG are at St. Mark’s Academy making out with boys in the bushes, Emily decides that she will stay in Room 15 with her books. She will order pizza and eat every slice.

  The Soul selects her own Society— / Then—shuts the Door, wrote Emily Dickinson in Poem 303. A century and a half later, Emily Beam will follow in Emily Dickinson’s footsteps.

  “So you don’t want me to sign you up for the Sadie Hawkins thing?” asks K.T. on their way to breakfast Saturday morning.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s the dance where the girls ask the boys. My God, Emily, you have lived a sheltered life.”

  Emily shrugs.

  “But St. Mark’s, being the elitists they are, call it the Snow Ball. It’s the same thing, though. Come on. There’ll be lots of guys there without dates. There’s this one guy, Sam—”

  Emily cuts her off. “I don’t think so.”

  As they enter the dining room, Annabelle waves them over, but Emily pretends not to see.

  “So what are you gonna do here all by yourself ?”

  “Study.”

  “Don’t you need a break?”

  “I can’t afford a break,” says Emily. “I want to get into Harvard.”

  “Harvard, Harvard.”

  “Though I doubt they’ll accept me.”

  “Sure they will,” says K.T. “Since you’ve made As on all of your tests—”

  “Except for Trigonometry.”

  “Oh, and what was that? An eighty-six? You know, I’ve learned something about you girls who study all the time.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You all have a pathological need to anticipate the future.”

  Emily smiles a little. “So that’s your theory, is it?”

  “Yeah. School coincides with the worldview that if you pay close enough attention, you can beat time at its own messed-up game.”

  “You ought to write that down,” says Emily. “Put it in one of those essays you’re always turning in late.”

  “Hey, if the weather’s nice, you want to go for a walk? Before I leave for St. Mark’s?”

  “Okay,” Emily says. She starts to add the tag line that she and her Grenfell County friends used to say to one another: “As long as you promise me you won’t do anything that I wouldn’t do.” Emily wishes she’d listened to her friends. She and Paul had been so historically dumb. They’d believed the bond would hold fast when all it took were a couple of crossed signals and parents to dissolve the glue. But some images stick, and the words that go along with them. So many things Paul told Emily, so many things Emily told Paul. It makes her want to weep a cupful of tears. Even if she writes 1,775 poems, she will not be able to preserve everything they did together, everything they said.

  Emily spends the rest of the day, in between classes and sometimes during them, reading The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. She wants to write poems like these, simple but smart. Very, very smart. Every now and then, she’ll come across one that sounds like a nursery rhyme that took a wrong turn down a dark alley. On her way to classes, Emily Beam walks to a beat in her new black boots and composes her own lost rhymes. But if she can hear them long enough to record them in her notebook—if they stay—even the faintest of poems can be found.

  I am just a girl on Earth

  Who writes her heart and brain.

  The world makes me a Poet; the world

  Gives me a name.

  When I die, they’ll take my life,

  Transform it in a snap,

  Sensation wild and circus,

  As if I were a quack—

  They’ll edit out my purest lines—

  Commas enter then.

  For clarity, is what they’ll say.

  I do not write for them.

  I write for me and you and God

  In case He puts an ear

  Up to my heart and listens

  For stranger kinds of prayer.

  • • •

  On a cold but sunny Saturday, K.T. takes Emily on one of the trails that start from the campus at Amherst College, just a few blocks away. “The college has made all these into a wildlife sanctuary,” K.T. tells her. As they walk through the brown fields, K.T. launches into a stand-up routine about all the weird people in her hometown, like the fat man who goes around showing anyone who passes by how far he has walked on his pedometer.

  “He never, ever loses weight,” K.T. tells Emily. “He’s walked everywhere for almost twenty-five years. He gave up his car during the 1970s energy crisis.”

  Emily smiles.

  “I wish you’d come with me tonight,” K.T. says.

  “Maybe next time,” Emily says.

  K.T. stops walking. “I want to be your friend. But sometimes I feel like you’re using me. Using all of us.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Emily.

  “Sure you do. ASG’s your hiding place. And I’m your beard.”

  “My what?”

  “Let me ask you a question. Are you a lesbian?”<
br />
  Emily bursts out laughing. “Is that what everyone thinks?”

  “Not everyone,” says K.T. “It’s okay if you are.”

  “I know it’s okay,” says Emily. “But I’m not.”

  “You’d rather have straight As than a boyfriend.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I get it,” says K.T. “I guess.”

  A bald eagle swoops out of nowhere over their heads and lands on a nearby fence post. “Oh,” says Emily with a gasp. “Oh, wow. I’ve never seen one, have you?”

  “No. Hey, guess what? We’re no longer National Bird Virgins.”

  K.T. and Emily try to give each other quiet high fives, but the eagle rises and disappears into the branches of a tree laced with new green.

  “Did you know that Ben Franklin campaigned for the wild turkey to be our national bird?” K.T. asks.

  “Actually, I did know that.”

  “It’s a sign,” K.T. says.

  “Of what?”

  “That you and I should room together again next year.”

  “Sure,” says Emily.

  “Maybe your work ethic will rub off on me,” says K.T. “But that’s not why I want to room with you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You’re gentle,” says K.T. “But you have inner strength. It’s comforting.”

  “I don’t feel very strong on the inside.” As a matter of fact, Emily wants to say, my insides feel like a hurricane, and not the eye part, either.

  “There’s a guy at St. Mark’s I’d like you to meet,” says K.T.

  “K.T.—”

  “Look, no pressure, okay? Whenever you’re ready. He’s like you, very Zen. He plays the cello. That’s how I know him. He’s had his heart broken, too.”

  Emily looks at her feet, watches them step across the stubbly grass at the same moment that something drops from a tree branch. She and K.T. bend down together. A pale-blue egg cracks open, yellow life slipping from it.

  “Oh, no,” says Emily and, without any warning whatsoever, the tears spring forth. K.T. puts her arm around Emily until she is able to stand and walk back to school.

  Robin’s Egg

  I am walking, I am out walking,

  I am out-walking winter—when

  a blue thing drops to the sidewalk,

  whole, the size of an eye.

  I look up—there’s sky but

  no tree to measure the tumble,

  no mother to gather the fallen,

  only color of day

  spread out like a sea.

  Neither human nor bird

  calls out for its rescue,

  vessel of being

  useless now

  as a tear.

  Emily Beam, February 18, 1995

  After finishing a small poem and a small pizza, Emily signs herself out for a stroll. She heads toward Main Street, cigarettes and matches tucked deep inside her coat pocket. In the drugstore, she buys more batteries for her flashlight and a three-pack of thick socks so that she doesn’t keep having to spend a whole dollar just to wash and dry the one pair she brought from home. And because the girl behind the counter looks to be underage, too, she takes her chances and asks for a pack of cigarettes, which the girl passes over without a word. Emily also buys a silly greeting card for K.T., nothing too sappy. The inside says, “Thank you for being you,” and on the front is a photograph of a small boy and a smaller girl, their backs to the camera, gazing up at a very tall tree. It reminds her of a story Paul told her one November night when they were sitting in his truck.

  “This one time when I was really young,” he said, reaching over for Emily’s hand, “Carey and I were building a fort together after school, and a golden maple leaf fell on my head like a little hat. I lifted it down and studied it. The leaf was so perfect that I shimmied up the trunk and tried to reattach it to a branch. I told Carey, who was, like, four, that the branch was the leaf’s mother, and the leaf was her perfect child. Then Carey started to cry.”

  Paul paused.

  “Why did she cry?” Emily asked.

  “I thought it was because she felt sad for the leaf and the branch. But she said she felt sad for me. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I know you, Paul, and you’re going to feel really bad if you can’t get the leaf to stay.’ Which, needless to say, I couldn’t. It floated back down to the ground. ‘You should keep it,’ Carey told me. ‘Put it on your dresser.’ But I said no—it would be lonely indoors.”

  “So what did you do with the leaf ?” Emily asked Paul.

  “I left it there on the ground just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” Emily asked.

  “Just in case it was magic,” said Paul. “I know it sounds stupid, but back then, I believed in that stuff. And the leaf was all golden and everything, so it wasn’t out of the question.”

  Paul had been right: magic is not out of the question. Outside the drugstore, Emily heads toward the bench, lighting a cigarette and checking her watch in the glow. It’s a little after nine, but because it’s Saturday night, she doesn’t have to be back till eleven. After smoking the cigarette down to the nub, Emily crushes the butt on the concrete with her boot and looks up at the sky, at the stars like tiny hands waving from a long way away. In the distance, a train rattles, but there’s no sign of people. The Dickinson place is dark except for the porch light. Emily walks to the iron gate, which creaks but yields, and she steps slowly up to the house. The light doesn’t wink at her this time. She leans back so she can see the second story. According to her book, the room on the left is where the poet slept and wrote, wrote and slept, for most of her life.

  Emily Dickinson was gone from home for only a year, when she was sent to a girls’ school ten miles away in South Hadley, a school now called Mount Holyoke College. When Emily Dickinson arrived there as a boarder at the age of sixteen, she was labeled as a girl “without hope,” one of 80 girls out of 234 who had refused to stand up at assembly and profess their faith in God. By the end of the year, 51 of those had either changed their minds or caved under pressure. But not Emily. She and 28 other girls had stayed true.

  This is the challenge: To stay. To stay true. That’s what the poems are—a test to see how truthful Emily Beam can be. The blank page listens, but it can’t talk back. Like the tree from which it comes, it has an innate ability to keep secrets. So far, Emily has kept her secret. Paul could have kept it, too. They could have lied to everyone and gone off and had the abortion—together. She and Paul could have rewritten history, sashaying their way into the future, putting the past in a box to store in the attic.

  Which secrets did Emily Dickinson commit to paper, and which were too damning to share with the trees? Three weeks into her year at boarding school, Emily Dickinson had chosen to stay in her room while the rest of the girls went outside to see a traveling menagerie as it passed through the town. What was it that had prevented her from celebrating the bears and monkeys? The windows of the yellow house at 280 Main Street aren’t giving anything away. In the dark, Emily Beam tiptoes across the front yard to the side of the house, where she finds a garden. She knows she is trespassing, but she can’t help it; something is drawing her with the pull of a magnet. The moon drops out of a cloud, lighting her way to a small cluster of flowers, their petals tipped with silver. Early crocuses. It is so far from spring. Emily bends to them, recalling a day long ago when she sat on her knees in the snow outside her front door, puffing hot breath onto the first crocus so it wouldn’t die.

  It is colder now than it was that day when her mother had to trick her into coming inside. She had lured Emily with hot chocolate. Emily takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and, with a finger, traces the outline of each purple flower. How can a thing so fragile push its way through the frozen dirt? She looks up at the moon, but it doesn’t tell her.

&
nbsp; Under its white, eerie glow, Emily feels something akin to wind but stronger and softer rock her from side to side. The motion is not at all scary because it’s so familiar. She does not have to fight to keep her balance; she allows it to take her, take her back. Warmth drapes her shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl, and a hand as soft as velvet slides her hair out of its ponytail and brushes it down her back. In her ear, a voice whispers, They are yours, all yours, go ahead. But the crocuses are too humbly triumphant. She leaves them in the earth, her eyes hot with tears, a new poem burning itself all the way down to her feet. She walks back to school composing her verse, composing herself.

  “I’m Emily—who are you,

  Passing through the night?”

  “I’m Emily, too. Lovely garden.”

  “Thank you kindly—it’s my light.

  People try to keep the dark

  From entering the soul—

  Though darkness is but who we were

  Before the light blinked on.”

  In 15 Hart Hall, Emily transposes the poem, called “The Meeting,” to a page with two other half-written poems and reads back over the one about the robin’s egg. Where’s the hope there? Emily thinks to herself. Although it’s a Saturday night and she’s alone, she is not entirely sure that it’s loneliness she feels. With loneliness, you’re trapped by the physical world, but with solitude, you’re at one with it, as she was for that moment kneeling by the perfect crocuses. Emily is growing accustomed to the loneliness when it comes, announcing itself in the bottom of her soup bowl, in the water left running in the sink, in the twilit sky just before stars. In French class yesterday, she found herself hollowed out by a painting of a woman in a café, a portrait by Degas.

  But it might be solitude rather than loneliness that surrounds her when she writes. Emily signs the card for K.T. and leaves it on K.T.’s pillow. Then she returns to her desk, turns to a blank page in her notebook, and makes a list of golden things.

  Magic eggs.

  Maple leaves.

  Wedding bands.

  Sunsets.

  Silence.

  For hours, poems roll in. Emily records them with the fountain pen that K.T. left on Emily’s desk as a surprise. K.T. taped a note to the pen, tucking them both inside the book that Madame Colche had lent her. “This will make you feel more connected to E.D.,” the note said. “P.S. Didn’t she write with one of these?”