THE HEADSTRONG YOUNG STRANGER stood defiantly at my doorstep, demanding an audience with Chief Leopard Frog.
"And whom shall I say is calling?" I replied as formally as I could under the circumstances.
"The assistant to the assistant editor for light features for Poetry Week magazine," she announced with considerable pride. "Miss Merilee Rowling."
"Have you had lunch?" I asked.
"They serve lunch around here?" she replied. "Where?"
"I can make you a tomato sandwich," I told her. "Do you like mayonnaise?"
"I'd eat anything," she said. "It took me forever to find this place, and I'm famished."
"Please come in," I said, although as events would turn out, I should have said, "Please go back the way you came."
Since mail was stacked up on all the kitchen countertops, we had our sandwiches in the living room. Merilee Rowling sat in my dead grandmother's rocking chair. I sat on the torn sofa.
"What happened to this town?" Merilee Rowling asked between bites.
"Bad luck," I answered. "Same as lots of towns."
"I live in a big city," she said. "Our bad luck comes and goes and nobody notices."
"Everybody noticed here," I explained. "That's why they left."
"Hmm," said Merilee Rowling. "Yet one of the country's greatest undiscovered poets stayed."
"I guess you could say that," I replied. "Would you care for some chips?"
"Sure, anything," she answered. "Chips, Fritos, pork rinds—whatever you've got."
To my mind, Merilee Rowling didn't look any older than Maureen Balderson, but I suppose she had to be, because she had a job and had driven a car all the way from back east, and you don't do that if you're fifteen years old.
It turned out that Merilee Rowling was seventeen, almost eighteen, and had just gotten out of high school. She decided not to go to college because, as she put it, "How can you see the world if you're stuck in one place?"
I thought about that one long and hard.
"So you've seen the world?" I asked.
"Not all of it," she replied. "But I've seen a lot more than I'd seen by this time last year."
"And how does Paisley stack up?" I inquired.
Merilee Rowling choked on a Triscuit.
"You must be kidding," she said.
As our conversation continued, a blaze burst up beside the road in front of the house. My mother was burning dried pumpkin leaves.
"Maybe you should turn your car off," I suggested. "Just for safety's sake. Plus, if you run out of gas, you won't see any more of the world except Paisley."
"Oh my gosh!" she exclaimed. "How careless of me."
When she jumped up from the rocking chair I noticed for the first time how cute she was. She reminded me of a girl I'd seen on TV, a guest on Oprah, who was starring in a new TV series, something about witches and high school.
Why does it take me so long to notice things? Is it because I'm not looking through my camera?
While Merilee Rowling was outside dealing with her car and, unfortunately, meeting my pyromaniac mother, I recalled a story I'd read when I was merely a child, no more than six years old.
It was about two children, a boy and a girl, who'd been skating on a frozen pond, something commonplace in the olden days, and although they knew each other, they were merely neighbors, outside to enjoy whatever frolic winter affords.
Alas, as fate would have it, they fell through a patch of thin ice—certain death under most circumstances—but a kindly old woman saved them, got them out of their wet clothes, and tucked them into a feather bed, where she covered them with thick down comforters and brought them steaming pots of chamomile tea while drying their clothes on a rack by the fire.
In a way, the story was the opposite of the fairy tales in which the witch entices children into her sugarplum house only to toss them into the oven for dinner. I suppose that's why whoever wrote the story decided to write it. A good deed—doer protective of the happy ending.
But what I recalled from the story was something other than the kindness of a stranger.
I remembered the thrilling thought of being naked under the covers with a girl whom I knew but didn't know that well. I remembered it as being an exciting, exhilarating idea, a stroke of good fortune, and a reasonable outcome to pursue for one's entire life.
Some people think that children don't have such thoughts, but these people have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
As I say, I couldn't have been much older than six. Now, in my early adolescence, the idea seemed even more compelling.
What if, I thought, I could persuade Merilee Rowling to stay overnight at my house?
This was Paisley, Kansas. It was getting late. Where else could she go?
It's not as if Maureen Balderson would ever need to know, I assured myself.
Heh, heh, heh, I chuckled to myself, proud of the grandiosity of my sudden cleverness. Perhaps homeschooling isn't such a bad idea after all.