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At the idea of drinking more tea, Barbara’s heart sinks.
A trim young woman dressed in fawn-colored slacks and a plain white blouse comes in. She’s holding a silver tray with tea things on it and a plate of cookies. Oreos, in fact.
“Marie Duchamp, this is Barbara Robinson.”
“Very nice to meet you, Barbara,” Marie says. Then, to the old poet, “You have ninety minutes, Livvie. Then it’s naptime.”
Olivia sticks out her tongue. Marie returns the favor. Barbara is startled into laughter, and when the two women laugh with her, that sense of otherness mostly slips away. Barbara thinks this could be all right. She will even drink the tea. At least the cups are small, not like the bottomless mug she was faced with in the Harris house.
When Marie leaves, Olivia says, “She’s a boss, but a good boss. Without her, I’d be in assisted living. There is no one else.”
This Barbara knows, from her online research. Olivia Kingsbury had two children by two different lovers, a grandson by one of those children, and she has outlived all of them. The grandson who gave her the enormous fur coat died two years ago. If Olivia lives until the following summer, she will be a hundred years old.
“Peppermint tea,” Olivia says. “I’m allowed caffeine in the morning, but not the rest of the day. Occasional arrhythmia. Will you pour out, Barbara? A plink of cream—it’s the real stuff, not that wretched half and half—plus the veriest pinch of sugar.”
“To make the medicine go down,” Barbara ventures.
“Yes, and in the most delightful way.”
Barbara pours for both of them and at Olivia’s urging takes a couple of Oreos. The tea is good. There’s none of the strong, murky flavor that caused her to sneak most of Professor Harris’s brew down the sink. It’s actually sort of delightful. The word sprightly comes to mind.
They drink their tea and eat their cookies. Olivia munches two, spilling some crumbs down her front which she ignores. She asks Barbara about her family, her school, any sports in which she has participated (Barbara runs track and plays tennis), whether or not she has a boyfriend (not currently). She doesn’t discuss writing at all, and Barbara begins to think she won’t, that she has only been invited here today to break the monotony of another afternoon with no one to talk to but the woman who works for her. This is a disappointment, but not as big a one as Barbara might have expected. Olivia is sharp, gently witty, and current. There’s that big-screen TV, for instance. And Barbara was struck by Olivia’s casual use of the word fangirl, which isn’t one you expected to hear coming from an old lady.
It will only be later, walking home in a daze, that Barbara will realize that Olivia was circling the thing that has brought Barbara here, as if to outline its size and shape. Taking her measure. Listening to her talk. In a gentle and tactful manner, Barbara has been interrogated, as if at a job interview.
Marie comes for the tea things. Olivia and Barbara thank her. As soon as she’s gone, Olivia leans forward and says, “Tell me why you write poetry. Why do you even want to?”
Barbara looks down at her hands, then back up at the old poet sitting across from her. The old poet whose face is little more than a skin-covered skull, who has forgotten or ignored the Oreo crumbs littering the bodice of her dress, who is wearing blocky old-lady shoes and pink support hose, but whose eyes are bright and completely here. Barbara thinks they are fierce eyes. Raging, almost.
“Because I don’t understand the world. I hardly even see the world. It makes me crazy sometimes, and I’m not kidding.”
“All right, and does writing poems make the world more understandable and less crazy?”
Barbara thinks of how Ondowsky’s face changed in the elevator and how everything she thought she understood about reality fell to ruin when that happened. She thinks of stars at the edge of the universe, unseen but burning. Burning. And she laughs.
“No! Less understandable! More crazy! But there’s something about doing it… I can’t explain…”
“I think you can,” the old poet says.
Well, maybe. A little.
“Sometimes I write a line… or more than one… once in awhile a whole poem… and I think, ‘There. I got that right.’ And it satisfies. It’s like when you have an itch in the middle of your back, and you don’t think you’ll be able to reach it, but you can, just barely, and oh man, that… that sense of relief…”
The old poet says, “Destroying the itch brings relief. Doesn’t it?”
“Yes!” Barbara almost shouts it. “Yes! Or even like with an infection, a swelling, and you… you have to…”
“You have to express the pus,” Olivia says. She jerks a thumb like a hitchhiker. “They don’t teach that at the college, do they? No. The idea that the creative impulse is a way to get rid of poison… or a kind of creative defecation… no. They don’t teach that. They don’t dare. It’s too earthy. Too common. Tell me a line you wrote that you still like. That gave you that feeling of finally relieving the itch.”
Barbara thinks it over. She has stopped being nervous. She’s engaged. “Well, there’s a line in the poem Professor Harris sent you that I still like—This is the way birds stitch the sky closed at sunset. It’s not perfect, but—”
Olivia holds up a hand like a traffic cop. “In the poem I read you wrote in how. This is how birds stitch the sky closed at sunset.”
Barbara is amazed. Olivia has quoted the line exactly, although the poem isn’t in front of her. “Yes. It was Professor Harris who suggested the change from this is the way to this is how. So I put it in.”
“Because you thought her version of the line was better?”
Barbara starts to say yes, then pauses. This feels like a trap question. No, that’s not right, this woman doesn’t ask questions to trap (although Barbara thinks Emily Harris might). But it could be a test question.
