Before My Eyes (11 page)

I found her in a half dozen places on the Internet, and I am now at her blog, inside of her words. Claire's words. Stare at the particles, verbs, nouns, split infinitives, until they are in straight, even lines. I am reading a poem from Claire. My Claire. I absorb each syllable. I am not alone. I am with her.

The voice intrudes. Correct me: instructs.
I will sing of mercy and judgment. That is a poetic line. That is truth.

Her poem is not about mercy or judgment. I say this aloud, to the voice in my head. Problems arise with the poem. Not that I am a professional critic, yet even I can see beyond the words: the grammar is arbitrary.

Who makes the rules about where to break the line in a poem? Is there a rule book, like in sports, to consult? I understand from my private studies that there is a format for scripts and one must follow it or be punished by the film industry.

The words waver in and out of focus. I stare harder.

Is there a rule about periods versus commas versus semicolons at the end of the line? Doesn't a semicolon connect two independent clauses? Didn't my English teacher at that community college call semicolons the bastards of grammar and want them banned from papers? If there are no rules of grammar anymore, what does that say about our society? Have we given up even the basics of how to control our poetry?

I eat faster, more chips, more salsa.

Neurons ping my brain like an electrical storm. I shiver. I am in the center of the storm. Charged. I can smell ozone, a rarified acrid smell of fire in open skies. My left hand falls away from the chips. The back of my throat scratches for a cigarette and coffee. Cigarette. Coffee. Claire.

I never used to like coffee. I started drinking it at school, at that community college. One cup in the morning to get me going, and then, by the end of this year, spring semester, I drank ten or twelve oversized cups a day. I had a hot coffee in my hand when the English professor pressed me to sit down, to calm down. I was calm. He asked me to interpret the white spaces on the poem. One cannot read the invisible; one cannot read space. Skewered beliefs in space and connections and metaphor. And the coffee flew out of my hand, struck the professor in his face and arm, seared him. I apologized. My parents apologized. I am bereft of apologies.

Pound down the last of the chips.

Behave wisely, and so will our friend.

I have no friends, I want to scream: I am alone in my room. I have a gun in my drawer. I have bullets. But it would be insane to scream that out loud.

I fling the plastic bag to the floor. Scatter crumbs like broken shells. Waves crash over me. I am drowning at my desk.

Behave in the perfect way. The path is straight ahead.

I breathe from the gut. My head hurts, but the voice soothes. Before me, the words on the screen are, suddenly, straight and true. Focus, hard. The poem is for me to decode, and only I can do this, only I can understand her. Claire must know this.

Claire

Friday, 9:00
P.M
.

After checking on Izzy, now sleeping, I lift back the plaid curtains and search out from the front window for a sign of my father. If it were up to me, I'd strip all the faux early American—the flowered, the crocheted, and the cross-stitched—from the house. Strip this living room down to its bare essentials. My father won't let me store away even one embroidered pillow.

I try my father's cell phone again. I don't even bother leaving another message. I notice dirty dishes in front of the television in the den. I don't think they were there this morning. I carry the traces of him—my life is filled with dirty dishes—into the kitchen sink. I circle through the house, clean the plates, leave the kitchen spotless, double-check that the back door is locked, hurry around the kitchen to the front door, and double-check that lock, too, not that my house would be the first one on the block that anyone would ever think of breaking into. If someone wanted in, all they had to do was push through a flimsy window screen. One of my father's many cutbacks this summer was air-conditioning. I ram the swollen living room window up even farther as if that will cool down the house.

I press my face against the screen, wish for a breeze. I expect to see my father appear out of the shadows, into my sight, up the pathway of fieldstones. Nothing stirs, except the wings of crickets and the howling of dogs. The night is inside as much as outside.

I cross my arms, squeeze myself into my center. I throw my shoulders back even though they ache. My mother was all legs and curves and bounce, I mean she is, or will be again. I shake my arms loose as if swimming wildly through air. Nothing seems to fit me right anymore; my pants are too short, my shirt too tight. I feel like this is somebody else's body. If it were up to me, I would have a different body, bared to essentials—only necessary nouns and verbs, maybe an occasional adjective, never an adverb—a body, lips that someone would kiss. I feel like some revelation should be at hand. I move across the living room, past the two wing chairs, hers and his, pulled up close to each other, empty these past months. He should be home, but does it really matter? If he were home, he'd be in the alcove off the kitchen, watching some movie, something black-and-white, something with the sound turned up so as to compensate for the grim lack of color. He doesn't watch sports, doesn't care which baseball or football team wins or loses, like other dads. He likes happy endings, and that's why he says he watches old movies. If he doesn't come home until late tonight, we'll do fine without him.

I switch on the outdoor lights. Two dim bulbs flicker on and moths swoop in around them. We haven't been using the outdoor lights, also trying to cut back. But perhaps tonight he'll need them to find his way home. A car slows down before driving off. Something in the shadows, something shifts; hear a cry, another dog, long, lonesome. One outdoor bulb pops and dies out, and then the other—like what I imagine two gunshots would sound like. I flinch. A wave of darkness ripples over the house. I listen for Izzy. Silence. Finally, finally, on the couch, I am alone, unfettered, unburdened, unleashed … unconnected, unmasked, untapped, unseen, shifting through the shadows.

*   *   *

I won't be home.

Will be very late. Don't worry.

All is well here.

The message looks like a haiku by someone who can't count syllables.

No xxoo, no love. It is from my father, who hates all electronic communication, rarely e-mails, never texts. I don't know this person anymore. I punch in his cell phone number. I reach a robotic voice informing me that his box is full. I couldn't leave a message if I wanted to leave one. There's no connecting to him even if I could. I'm going to ream him out when he gets home, I think to myself, and realize that I'm suddenly sounding like the adult.

I type: Where is “here”? When will you be home?

His answer doesn't make sense: YMRRIQOW. I bet he's typed on the wrong keys and pressed send anyway. He'll be home when he gets home. Then I'm going to tell him that I've had enough. I don't want this feeling of being grown up and not grown up, ruptured from my old self—into what? Old enough to take care of the house, take care of my sister, to have all these responsibilities and yet not have any of—
of what?
Any fun? Any friends? I want a guy who wants—
what should he want?
What do I want? I just want a guy who isn't my father. A guy who doesn't need me to take care of everything. But who would want someone like me? I run my hands through the length of my hair and then across my lips as if checking that I'm whole. I know that I don't need my father or some guy. I can do this all just fine. Except, isn't there something or someone who will make me forget who I am—let me be someone other than the good daughter and sister—let me imagine that if I stood on the shore, the distance between the sea and the possibility of land was only as far as I could swim.

I get rid of my father's misshapen word. Go to my blog. And I am surprised by a message in my comments. Usually no one comments on my posts.

“Very thought-provoking poetry.”

Thought-provoking? I've never had a comment other than from a handful of friends on the school's literary magazine—and my mother—on my blog. The comment is from Brent. I don't know a Brent.

“Thank you!” I write back, thinking that he must have randomly found my blog.

In a minute another comment snaps in. “I like your use of metaphors,” he adds.

That will be that; we'll move on. But it's not.

“‘She is I; I am her.' Was this poem to anybody special, Claire? I understand if it's hard to talk about your writing. I find it hard, too. I have to tell you, you should use a period instead of a semicolon. They lead to disorder, not order.”

He's quoting the first line of a poem that I wrote earlier in the spring, immediately after my mother's stroke. Is he a writer, too? Is that why he's reading my blog? I really need to know who he is. And he has picked my favorite line in the poem.

“There is so much there. Like you are inside of these people, on the outside but looking in.”

That's exactly how I feel: I'm observing the world, taking mental notes, on the outside, close enough to see but far enough away. I peer at the screen, waiting.

Nothing. Blank. White.

“Where did he go?” I say aloud. I study his sentences. He likes to write in full sentences like me.

But he's gone as randomly as he found me, he's gone—leaving me hanging, alone, listening to the crickets. The sweat beads at my neck. I throw off my blanket.

Finally, after a long minute or two, he adds another comment. “I want our conversation to be private, is that okay with you? May I call you? I found your phone number online, too.”

His voice in my head is clear: gentle, halting, questioning, and shy.

The house phone rings and I race for it in the kitchen.

“Claire?” he says. He sounds just like I thought he would.

“Do I know you?”

“No,” he says after a pause, as if he wants to be sure and careful.

“Are you in high school?”

“Not in high school,” and then he adds, “not anymore.”

I knew it. I just hope he's not an old guy. That would be too weird. That would mean I'd have to hang up.

“If I don't know you, I shouldn't be talking with you. What's your last name?”

He tells me, and I hang up on him. I'll show him. But nothing comes up with that name on any search. This makes him more intriguing, absorbing, captivating—synonyms pile on one another.

Here is someone new.

I see if I can call his number back, and I can. It's local and knowing the phone numbers in North Lakeshore, I can tell it is from that part of town. I hope this isn't a prank. But he urgently asks, “Claire, are you okay?”

The shadows on the kitchen wall dance behind me. I am small against the exaggerated shapes of trees and this makes me feel slightly disoriented. The outlines grow, tremor, monstrous. “I didn't find out much about you,” I say, breaking from the shadows. I turn the kitchen lights on.

“Not much to find out. But I am concerned about you. Are you okay?”

My white T-shirt is clinging, damp. My hair is wrapped around the side of my neck. Everything inside me is tight and knotted, but I like hearing his voice. “I'm okay.”

“I sometimes feel like I'm standing at a window, looking out at the world. Or, I am a bug. Like Gregor Samsa? Kafka, do you know Kafka? Are you still on your blog? I am going to send you a link to a picture so you'll see that I am not vermin. You won't be able to download it, but it's the best picture that I have. Claire, is that okay?”

“Slow down. I shouldn't be talking with you.”

“Claire.”

“I don't know you.”

I return the phone to the receiver carefully, and trace along the walls to my bedroom, thinking: this is strange. Kafka? Of course I know Kafka. I had to read his novella,
Metamorphosis,
in eleventh grade, about a traveling salesman who wakes up one terrible morning as a bug. Who is this guy kidding? Believe me, if he thinks that I am some naive little girl, he has something else coming. I'm not clicking on any links.

I check in on Izzy, who is curled up in the corner of her bed. Unlike me, she is a light sleeper. Her head is thrown back on her flower pillow. She's tangled in her sheets, one thin leg on top and one lost inside. I straighten up the sheets and say to myself:
I love you more,
knowing I'm saying what my mother always said to me.
I love you more.
Izzy doesn't know that these are our mother's words. My mother always said that, like she always called me angel, even when I wasn't acting like one, like purple was her favorite color and lavender her favorite smell. There are things I remember about her, but other things I don't, like her face before the stroke.

Back in my bedroom, I climb back into bed but ignore the laptop. I scramble for a pen and some lined paper. I can write the old-fashioned way. Wasn't I going to try to write a haiku? Five, seven, five, isn't that the form? Five syllables are all I need for the first line. But I can't think of five. All I can think of is: I'm not going to click on his link.

I turn off the lights. Once again, I am alone in the house with the shadows.

*   *   *

After a half hour or more, in the dark and quiet, hearing his voice in my head say, “Claire,” I reach out and click on the link.

He's older than high school, maybe in college, twenty, or twenty-one even. He has dirty-blond hair and sideburns. He's striding across a campus with red stone buildings in the background. He is lanky and lean and muscled. He's not exactly smiling. Maybe he hates having his picture taken, like me. And he's carrying a book at his side. I can't make out the title, even though I zoom into it; the book is turned into his side. It's not a textbook, a slim paperback. His face is upturned toward the camera—forthright and intelligent and sincere. I think my mother would say he was interesting looking, if not a bit rakish. She used to like words like that: rakish. I zoom into his hand, the one curled around the book. It doesn't have the heft of a textbook. Maybe it's a graphic novel, or maybe a classic? Kafka? I inspect the picture closely. He doesn't look dangerous or weird at all. And he is tall.