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“Only you don’t know exactly what.”
“Yeah. How did you know that?”
“Because Jerome said the same thing. Why don’t you talk to him? Maybe between the two of you, you can figure it out.”
8
Holly can’t sleep that night. She lies on her back, hands folded between her breasts, looking up into the dark. She thinks about Bonnie’s bike, just begging to be stolen. She thinks about Peter Steinman, known as Stinky to his friends. Skateboard abandoned but returned to his mother. Does Bonnie’s mother have Bonnie’s bike? Of course she does. She thinks about Keisha, saying love was lost but plenty was left. And she thinks about Ellen Craslow. That’s what’s keeping her awake.
She gets up, goes to her desktop, and opens Twitter. Using her favorite alias—LaurenBacallFan—she messages each of the dozen Craslows, asking if any of them have information about Ellen Craslow from Bibb County, Georgia. She attaches each query to each Craslow’s last tweet. This doesn’t allow for privacy, but so what? None of them have more than a dozen followers. With that done she goes back to bed. For awhile she still can’t sleep, nagged by the idea that it was somehow a wrong move, but how can it be? Not doing it would have been the wrong one. Right?
Right.
At last she drops off. And dreams of her mother.
February 15, 2021–March 27, 2021
1
Barbara and Olivia Kingsbury begin their meetings. There is always tea brought by Marie Duchamp, who seems to have an endless supply of white shirts and fawn-colored slacks. There are always cookies. Sometimes ginger snaps, sometimes shortbread fingers, sometimes Chips Ahoy, most commonly Oreos. Olivia Kingsbury is partial to Oreos. Every morning at nine Marie appears in the doorway of the living room and tells them that it’s time to stop. Barbara shoulders her backpack and heads for school. She can Zoom her classes from home but has permission to use the library, where there are fewer distractions.
By mid-March, she is giving Olivia a kiss on the cheek before leaving.
Barbara’s parents know that she has a special project of some kind and assume it’s at school. Jerome guesses it’s somewhere else but doesn’t pry for details. Several times Barbara comes close to telling them about her meetings with Olivia. What mostly holds her back is Jerome’s special project, the book he’s writing about their great-grandfather, a book that’s going to be published. She doesn’t want her big brother to think she’s copying him, or trying somehow to draft off his success. Also, it’s poetry. That seems pretty frou-frou to Barbara compared to her brother’s sturdy, well-researched history of Black gangsters in Depression-era Chicago. Further also, it’s her own thing. Secret, like the diary she kept in her early teen years, read over when she was seventeen (as much of it as she could bear, at least) and then burned one day when everyone was gone.
To each meeting—each seminar—she brings a new poem. Olivia insists on it. When Barbara says some of the new ones aren’t good, aren’t finished, the old poet waves her objections away. Says it doesn’t matter. Says the important thing is to keep the channel open and the words flowing. “If you don’t,” she says, “your channel may silt up. And then dry up.”
They read aloud… or rather Barbara does; Olivia picks the poems but says she has to save what remains of her voice. They read Dickey, Roethke, Plath, Moore, Bishop, Karr, Eliot, even Ogden Nash. One day she asks Barbara to read “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay. Barbara does, and when she’s finished, Olivia asks Barbara if she finds the poem racist.
“Oh sure,” Barbara says, and laughs. “It’s racist as hell. ‘Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room’? Are you kidding me?”
“So you don’t like it.”
“No. I loved it.” And peals laughter again, partly in amazement.
“Why do you?”
“The rhythm! It’s like tromping feet! Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. It’s like a song you can’t get out of your head, a total earworm.”
“Does poetry transcend race?”
“Yes!”
“Does it transcend racism?”
Barbara has to think. In this room of tea and cookies, she always has to think. But it excites her, almost exalts her. She never feels more alive than she does in the presence of this wrinkled old woman with the raging eyes.
“No.”
“Ah.”
“But if I could write a poem like this about Maleek Dutton, I totally would. Only the boomlay-boom would be a gunshot. He’s the kid who—”
“I know who he was,” Olivia says, and gestures to the television. “Why don’t you try doing that?”
“Because I’m not ready,” Barbara says.
2
