I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (15 page)

Her hair is blond, long. Bloated face, pretty eyes. Voice like a scratch. She always looks either ready to bolt or half-asleep. Going to work one morning, I find a pale condom, a knife, and somebody’s khakis on the concrete outside my door. The neighbor guy starts showing up at my work. “I want to learn about vitamins,” he says. He gets me explaining why I don’t drink. “I want to stop drinking,” he says. “Maybe you can help me.” I mainly straighten the shelves when he visits, keeping my eyes on the bottles. He
and his girlfriend get an eviction notice on their door. Maybe he thought he could move in with me. Bang my head on the wall.

Briefly, I have a new boyfriend whom I meet in the store. He buys me Merwin’s new book. At night I pull my gold chair directly in front of the fan and read. I recite his poem “Come Back” to everyone I know.

2.

Before I’d moved out of the architect’s house, I took a job meant for him. His beauty had attracted an agency that left a message inviting him to be an extra in a TV commercial at Pleasure Island. In his absence, I accepted, inviting my friend Billy from the store. I was told to dress up as if it were New Year’s Eve, told I’d been dancing in the street.

In
An Angel at My Table
, Janet Frame said, “I had little experience of many people; I knew them only in my heart.” At twenty-two, she’d sewn an everglaze dress for her first dance at Town Hall, recognizing the Maxima, Military Two-Step, the Destiny from dances in the hospital, thinking, “Ask me, ask me,” and no one did. A customer in the health food store said I should rent the movie of her life, that Janet Frame reminded him of me. I was embarrassed to see myself so clearly on screen, someone scoured open, always in need of a dark coat, a disguise to manage shopping, errands in the world, and I came to dislike the customer for noticing. I was just a clerk, but everyone wanted attention—these customers, the beautiful architect speaking from a room far within.

Sober, I didn’t think my dancing skills were good enough for television, so I enrolled in a dance school, saying I didn’t need eight weeks of lessons, just a quick course for my acting career. My teacher like a middle-aged waiter holding my arms like plates.
We were in a mirrored room with barres as for ballet. Alcohol on his breath in the afternoon. He guided my feet through the maze of shoes marked on the floor, like the chalk-drawn feet of crime victims, though I was pretty sure that these waltzlike boozy steps weren’t practical tools for my commercial.

Billy picked me up in a suit—it was cold, but I didn’t wear a coat, just a black bustier, tiny flounced skirt, shoulders freezing, dancing outside all night to the same minute or two of “Love Shack,” my dance teacher not having taught me any moves to the B-52s, but by then I didn’t care, flailing around when the music started.

The only business open was a candy shop. Full of chocolate and coffee, trying to stay warm, awake, getting paid our seventy dollars only if we stayed until morning, the full twelve hours. Before dawn we were herded into a theater, fed boxed lunches, then maybe thirty of us found an unlocked door, a game room, and slept on the floor, head to foot, for warmth, the TV people finding us like the police, making us dance until it felt like a drug, the lamps at night indistinguishable from my own closed eyes, my body at rest with everyone in the arcade.

3.

I kept dropping out of school. Wouldn’t do the assignments, wouldn’t show up. When I was close to meeting the requirements for my bachelor’s degree, I just stopped going completely. Got 3 F’s. Grade point destroyed, figured I’d never go back. But the teacher from my first creative writing class, the one who had showed me the boy’s story, he’d visit me at the health food store. When I’d been twenty and drinking every day, late for classes, absent for weeks, he had been my only friend at school. I’d sit
on the couch in his office with the naked female mannequin and wall-sized collage of models from magazines, and be calmed. He was fond of me like a troubled character in a novel, pulling for me. In the health food store, the owner would say, “You may be book smart, but you sure are stupid.” For years my teacher comes in, buys vitamins, says, “Come back to school.” So, I do.

In 1989, right before I graduate, another teacher tells me I’ve won a departmental award, for outstanding undergraduate poet. He’s smiling. I ask, “Are you sure?” There’s a ceremony. For the first time, I stand up in front of people and read a few poems. I have to rest my hands on the podium because they’re trembling. My voice shakes. But it doesn’t seem to matter—everyone quiet, listening.

I decide to go to graduate school even though, with work, I can take only a couple of classes at time. UCF accepts me into its new program in creative writing. A woman, Pamela, from one of my undergraduate writing classes, stops in at the health food store. She’s always in a rush, blond hair flying, fast talking. I know she works for UCF’s tutoring center and admire her for this, her good job. Once I’d worn a nicer dress to work at the store, and my coworker Lana said, “You could be a secretary in that.” I’d been a kind of secretary for the Weapons Department in Spain, but hadn’t applied for that job, just checked a box. Neither Lana nor I knew how to find work as a secretary, how to get a sit-down job. At the UCF tutoring center, there’s a woman whose job is parallel in responsibility to Pamela’s. “She hired an assistant,” Pamela says, scanning the vitamin shelves. “I don’t have an assistant.” It’s 1990. I know a door is opening. But I have to try, I have to speak. “I’d love to tutor,” I say. It happens so fast. “Well, if Kathy can hire someone, so can I,” Pamela says.

After that, I work at the health food store only on the weekends. At the center, I provide tutoring in writing to Pamela’s ESOL
students. It’s more money, $6 an hour, and everyone in the office is kind. It’s an atmosphere of helpfulness. I love working with one person at a time, the pace of it. It’s such a relief to have a skill, to know what to do. No one here says I’m stupid. Before workshop one night, Don, my poetry teacher who told me about my first writing award, is smiling at me. He says that the poem I submitted to the department’s literary magazine has won first place. There’s publication and a check for $100.

When I’m working on my master’s degree, my first writing teacher rents me the apartment on the back of his house in Oviedo. Close to Orlando, but rural. Originally, orange groves and celery farms. Now it’s just quiet. Up three flights of rickety stairs. For hours every day, my teacher’s dalmation, Pal (Palindrome), clangs her chain up and down my stairs, like Igor, some damned thing. At the landing, she peers into my window screen, a shadow dog, clanks back down.

The house is a hundred-year-old mansion he’d bought with his book money. On Lake Charm. Surrounded by huge old oaks, Spanish moss hanging like hair. I like old houses, but his spooks me—like being inside a game of Clue, the rooms always unfamiliar, angular, humid, the house too large to air-condition. He loans me a copy of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
with black mold on the pages.

My teacher tells me he’s going away for a couple days. I’m not allowed in the house while he’s gone. But a door from my apartment leads to a stairwell and the kitchen below. “I keep it unlocked” he said. “In case of fire.” He’s long divorced from a tiny, blond ballerina. Years ago, he was having a secret affair with a student in my class, another tiny, blond ballerina.

I didn’t like being shut out of the house. My friend Laurel had never been inside, so I invite her. She comes over and brings her camera. In one photo, I wear an antique-y sleeveless dress and bone fishnets, pose shoeless on the porch hammock—one foot in
the air. For another shot, I lean over the widow’s walk to wave at Laurel on the front lawn. Far inside the house, we find a tiny room off the kitchen, a stuck doorknob, so I lean into it. When the door opens, something crystal or glass crashes to the floor. It’s odd, as if it has been placed to fall if the door is opened. There may have been a key in the door. Shutting it, I see a murky window that looks out onto the yard.

There have been other student affairs by then too, a blond undergrad who interviews him for the paper, saying she wants to capture his flavor. He takes her to a dark country bar on Highway 50. For a long time he sees a young woman who looks like a twelve-year-old boy. I don’t find him attractive myself. After my teacher returns, he stands in the yard, holding an opened package. I come downstairs, hoping to get into my car, but he calls me over. He said there is a little room off the kitchen, a room where he does some writing—he keeps an old typewriter in there—and some object in the room is now broken. I smiled patiently, too nervous to hear exactly what I’ve broken. He speaks very, very slowly. A game to make me confess, and the game makes me angry.

He stares at me silently, pausing several times to do this. Then he takes a book out of the package in his hand, says it has arrived with no return address. It was Ann Bernays’s
Professor Romeo
. He asks, “Why would someone send this?” Did I have any idea? I think the book is brilliant, necessary. His perplexed face—how could he be surprised? It reminds me of my own pretending.

Don, my poetry teacher, recommends me for a writing retreat at an artists’ residency center about an hour away, near the beach. It’s free. I’m going to live with writers, composers, and painters from all over the country for three weeks. I get the time off from work. Before I leave for the retreat, Don tells me the English Department selected me for their outstanding graduate student award. There’s a ceremony again, a reading. It’s 1993. At the
podium, I remembered trembling there in 1989, how fast I’d read. I’m still a little nervous, but not overwhelmed. It’s as if the poems carry me when I read them.

The artists’ center is secluded in the woods. A sign reads, “Artists at Work.” No one has ever called my writing work. It’s as though the place itself respects me. In the painting studio, a beautiful barnlike space of cedar and glass looking out on the dark woods, a composer takes my hand, twirls me. I didn’t know I could be this happy.

When I come home, I’m so lonely, I go to an open mike at a coffee house. The owner befriends me, says, “I’m thinking of starting a different kind of open mike.” He doesn’t say what kind. “Would you run it for me?” I don’t know how to run anything, but I feel as if I should just say yes. Figure it out later. “Yes.” It becomes a literary organization that I create and run for five years, with a reading series, writing workshops, annual contests. It made me feel as though I can make something happen.

By the time I finish grad school, I’ve moved away from Lake Charm, and my teacher has brain cancer, seizures, trouble teaching. A red-haired girl loved him. The department chair asked if I would take over his classes for the semester, if necessary. It was my teacher who had marched me into the chair’s office two years prior and announced, “Kelle is available to teach,” as if it were the most lucky news. While I’d been at the tutoring center, I’d started teaching test prep classes, and then a private international language school opened up next door. Pamela got hired to teach fulltime, brought me in too (though in 1994, when a new director arrived and required all staff to have an MA in linguistics, I was out of a job). I’d walked across campus to my teacher’s office, and he’d helped me. Without my even asking. The next semester, I was an adjunct instructor of English for UCF and for two community colleges, teaching seven classes at four different campuses.

To the department chair, I said,
“
Yes, I can take over his classes.” A guilt close to my guilt over the dalmation. One day, I’d seen another dog with Pal in the yard. She’d been old then, elderly even—I should have chased off the male dog but was unsure what to do, how to interrupt behind glass. Pal had puppies in the garage, and that year she died. When the puppies were just born, suckling, exhausting her, hills of vanilla-colored blankets surrounding them, my teacher asked over and over, “How could this happen?” His questions always soft, as if he were only talking to himself, overheard.

The city of Brockton died years before I was born, but people kept on living there, one big cemetery. Empty shoe factories like massive headstones with thousands of tiny windows punched out, as if those inside had tried to flee. My dad was born in Brockton, like me. They had no car, not ever. No car, no TV, and sometimes only candles, no electricity. Once, when he was a boy, my dad was in the bathroom, on the seat, with a candle in his hand. He wondered what the candle in his hand could do, touched it to the curtains at the window, and watched everything go up. He won’t tell me much about Brockton, growing up. “You’ll just put it in a poem,” he says, sulking. As if I’m nothing but a spy who took over his daughter’s body. An eavesdropper. But I know some facts.

It was a town of mostly farms, until Micah Faxon invented Brockton’s retail shoe sales. There was no right or left shoe then, just a shoe you shaped into comfortability by wear. Micah cut the leather in town and traveled with his shoes on horseback to Boston. This was before sizes and molds and lasts—you just tried on a shoe to see if it fit. Micah like a prince with a glass slipper coming to find you.

The shoe factories were born when a sewing machine was invented that made it possible to sew the top of the shoe to the bottom, instead of nailing them together. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, the corner of Belmont and Main, near where Nana Smith, my dad’s mother, will be born, live, and die, the sun is bright on the street, crisscrossed with telephone wires, an iron quilt above the city. Black carriages of cars like funeral veils line up before the grist wheel, arched roofs raised in prayer. The street hums with electricity, the first power station in the country. Even Edison comes to town to see the first electric street railway.

My aunt Julia, Tommy’s mother, worked in one of the shoe factories. It was her first job out of high school. Now the factories are closed, and the work is gone. But there’s a new train to Boston, thirty minutes to South Station. One of the old shoe factories has been turned into expensive lofts. The place is called SoCo, for “So Cool” and “So Convenient,” and directionally, south of Court Street. You can get a ceiling of pure light, tall glass atriums good for sewing bone buttons, tiny stitches. A place of concentration, open sky.