YOU THINK SMART MEANS WISE. THEN YOU HOPE it will soon. This past autumn, I ran along two parallel lines of wanting more ease and keeping myself endangered of strict consequences for selling poetry. After I branched out on Martha’s tip and word got across to the high school as well as to the Apocalypse school, money began coming in so hand over fist that the fear of going to the poorhouse if I went to Baltimore changed into a let-them-eat-cake ease. Clothes to wear up there began flying off layaway. You merely had to take out the savings passbook on the college tuition account I halved the profit into and check the interest compounding to remember the rewards of labor and thrift.
Caught up, I ignored common sense saying to deposit less into the college fund and have more time for the camp, and when they sent a bill for what I owed after the scholarship figure was discounted out, it was either shortchange the future, borrow from Laura, or stay home. I went up there owing her two hundred dollars, a drop in the bucket on the overall costs, but enough by itself to roil through your system at night like Ebenezer’s crumb of disturbing bad cheese, so I continued on with the poetry industry, at home, on the bus, on the low wall outside school, anywhere I could find to focus with the ghosts of broke pasts hovering over me.
If you felt strained by English, you could choose a precomposed poem for two dollars or get a custom-made one for four. Concrete poetry ran at least a dollar higher. Sonnets would’ve been five if they’d been assigned, but Mrs. Delacroix said teachers didn’t because it was equal to requiring students to explain the hydrogen bomb and it wasn’t worth the frustration to dwell on outsized skills at a school that excused you two days off a year to get in hay and kill hogs on your farm.
Twenty of the poems that made up a separate selection book, entitled Meditations on Life Passing You By, came in a flat rush while I was on the way to Baltimore, trying to keep everything about the trip from getting out from under me. When the train pulled away from our station, I had to crawl over a lady to wave out the window at Laura, Stuart and his mother, Starletta and her mother who’d come by to say Study hard, make friends, we’ll be here when you get back. When I made it back to my seat I was too edgy to read and too knotted up to eat even a salted cracker out of my box lunch. Before I knew it, I’d started getting up and down and attracting looks to where I wanted to tell people, I’m just overwhelmed is all.
The lady looked at me like she wanted to ask me whether my mother had packed me with some kind of pill but instead she asked where I was headed, and I told her I was going to learn about how artistic things compare and contrast with science. God knows how much time I’d chewed up wondering things like how somebody first put math and moods together in iambic pentameter, the truth of van Gogh’s ear issue, why so many great geniuses have bad wrecks for lives, for example, how Poe was full of a lust for life yet crippled by his appetites and jealousy.
She said, Where are you going to do that?
In Baltimore, I said, where Poe finally threw up his hands and fell, on a walking tour. Speaking of which, I wouldn’t mind hitting my shoes with the polish a time or two more before we get there. I’ll be right back.
I’d gone by Laura’s old etiquette book for advice to young ladies traveling alone by rail because going to Baltimore on a train had a 1958 tinge to it. I’d used what Martha’s twin high school brothers had paid for two themes on the meaning of I Must Go Down to the Sea Again, and the bonus for making twin work different enough for the saddle oxfords. I realized while I was breaking them in I’d need to rest my feet in my sneakers but the porter said people don’t go back into their belongings once they’re checked in. I was going to ask the lady if she’d ask him on my behalf and explain I wasn’t planning to get in the baggage compartment and ramble, but when I got to my seat, she’d given it up to another lady she said was a friend, though they couldn’t have been better strangers.
I got my satchel and purse from the overhead, saying I thought seats were assigned in first class and knowing she’d say there were a dozen more and she and her buddy had to catch up, the way things unfold like a story that wastes your time when you know the plot and symbols by rote. The porter said to take any seat available. I had a chapter left in the only book that wasn’t packed in the bag he still wouldn’t allow me into, so tensing over the destination, cranked up with the thrill of train travel itself, and pitched at a level the gentleman beside me behaved like he didn’t want to endure. On the way back over him, I mentioned how I didn’t want to end up like a friend of mine who was still nursing blisters from Wolverines and said, Wish me luck on breaking in these hard shoes.
Stuart had actually been the one to rub them with saddle oil the previous evening, but giving a sales-looking man a practical reason for my walking up and down the aisle and crossing over rattling connections seemed more likely to discourage him from giving away my seat. I said I’d be back in a minute, but I found it took a while to check out the other compartments and see what conclusions you can draw about people in different classes and what the exceptions were, like if there were wealthy people in the back class looking like they enjoyed saving money or people like me in first class who seemed to be there on a scholarship or gift. After that, I remembered I’d told Laura I’d see if the berths were like the ones in Some Like It Hot, but the woman behind the counter in the dinette car said unless you sleep reared back in your chair, this was not a sleeping train.
She kept offering me something to eat, but you hear too many stories of young people going somewhere for the first time and spending all their money on the way there. I said I didn’t care for anything though her food looked good despite what I’d heard about them steaming everything by the engine. She said that was part of the legend of trains she could disprove by showing me where she took foods out of the freezer box and placed them directly into a miniature oven. Talking to someone about her job isn’t chatting with the person in the other seat, so I didn’t mind explaining about not wanting to arrive spent out or about the steam. When we stopped at Union Station in Washington DC, she said to come in with her while she picked up her family’s pastries and have a coffee and bagel with her at a table under the dome to see what that was like. I can say now that it was supersaturating without feeling dazey again, so anyone whose legs are prone to vibrate when something like the curved top of the world is revealed, should hold the rail or sit and allow the rushers to pass.
I thought I’d talked enough to the dinette woman to be quiet when I sat down again by the man, but when you take off from the station you’re blown out of a tunnel into a bright force of light, and I had to say, I apologize, but look at everything outside the window. I can’t believe we’re moving through it this fast, Mother of God, this is quick. It’s like it’s moving by you, but it’s entirely the opposite and something to think about. If you don’t mind me doing it, I’d like to write it down now and not wait and look back in tranquility and probably be wasteful forgetting. What do you think?
He said, I think that’d be fine. You go ahead and do that, but don’t hold it against me if I go to sleep.
I told him I envy sleep actually, and when he woke up in Baltimore three hours later he said the breakdown we’d had earlier would make him late for a job meeting. I didn’t want to lose the work and he wasn’t in the mood or I could’ve torn him out a poem entitled, On the Road to Nowhere Rapidly. There were twenty-five poems, with an overall theme of carpe diem with a sideline of Beauty. Titling it Meditations on Life Passing You By came from mixing the common sense of how I was watching out the window with the symbolism of how we all should stare out less and seize so much more. Four or five poems became alike when the breakdown stalled the scenery at a very small town with a couple of stores and a few houses. I got over the hump of repeatedly writing how depressed you’d have to be living there by finally writing,
If at first you cannot leave this village of woe,
Because you are bound to your relatives,
Look outside your window and see,
The train stalled outside your small depot,
And ask yourself what’s interesting about the tracks,
Sit on your low, ragged porches to think if you must,
Then hear the whistle,
I heard it,
It blows,
And see the train in the other direction, it goes,
I saw it,
It goes,
And if you ask your family what’s interesting about that,
And they say they have no clue,
Then say your good-byes and grab your suitcase,
And walk down your weedy town hill to board,
The next train that comes by,
For trains that go in one direction always come in the other,
And will bring you home again to visit dear old Mother.
I’d always counted Baltimore on the Southern side, and I’d expected the other students to hail from places I was used to meeting people from. I had no clue it was going to be more toward Harvard in the habits and ways people brought with them, so there was some rolling stomach panic going on when I realized I had to have conversations with people I hadn’t had time to mentally adapt myself to yet. You don’t hear how ignorant your accent makes you sound until you have to hear it against other accents, especially when you’re competing with people with the edge of the accent that makes them seem like automatic experts.
I decided the trick was to hush entirely or just avoid saying anything they could doubt, but I turned from being more or less confident to thoroughly flabbergasted when I got to the check-in area where chaperones introduce students around, and a clot I had to stand in wanted to know what it was like being a curiosity in a world of nonreaders and racists. I had to leave before the panic began leaking out in balls of forehead sweat or heavy breathing. I knew the truth about where I lived and also how whipped you feel after you try to explain something to people who don’t want to change their minds and would never understand how they could be the ignorant ones.
Johns Hopkins had the green quad, the archways, and a mix of modern and stone buildings, and when I followed the map to the dormitory and saw it was not only stone but many gabled, being stunned that I was spending the night in a building like this made it absolutely not matter that the people who’d just behaved like I was lost on the way to mop something up were going to be sleeping in there with me. The way the gables spiked in the sky and how you could imagine finding somebody up there in a dormer room, hunched over with a blanket around his shoulders, possibly coughing with tuberculosis, writing with papers strung and strewed everywhere, I didn’t care if they believed their fate included high matters of serious beauty and mine was to ask them whether they had any more silver I need to polish.
I noticed a thin girl with red hair and slippery white skin at the top of the steps, looking at name tags as girls went by her, and then as I passed her, she said, Stop, you’re my roommate. I need you to let me in to get my stuff out.
It was addling, but I understood how she so much hadn’t wanted to stay with a stranger that she was willing to sleep on the floor in the room with a girl she knew from home. I thought it was also grounds to try to get along, but once we were in the room, she was out so fast that I’m not sure if her name was Lola or Nola. I just thought, Well, more power to you and arranged my things around and studied through all the assignments we’d been sent for the weekend. I was glad to be around people who took the same thing that interested me seriously. But when classes started they looked set on not finding any pleasure in it, jumping on you the second you answered a question. For instance, when I said Hemingway’s stories are an example of where a writer uses a kind of science of reason to keep the emotions from getting out of hand, a long-legged boy in a sweater vest across from me at the table appeared to have no clue that you shouldn’t ask a stranger, especially a female, why she didn’t see the difference between reason and brain-damaged writing.
I said, I don’t know. Nobody’s ever asked me that kind of question. I can’t answer it.
The teacher let the boy ask me why, and I said, Because of the way it was put to me.
I fumed through that class and a couple more and finally got to a class I’d been looking forward to that was held walking around in a gallery of photographs of outstanding scenery from the meatpacking plant days of Chicago and the violent early days of trade unions marching in the streets. It occurred to me to ask a teacher, being careful to do it on the side, if people being able to take pictures more conveniently was connected to people starting to write realistically. While I was walking to the library and feeling a great deal of adrenaline over things the teacher had said I should look up about Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck, a girl I hadn’t noticed overhearing us came up beside me and said, I’m so tired of Sister Carrie I’d puke if I had to read it again.
I told her my teachers at home hadn’t assigned the book yet, knowing it sounded like I went to school in a floored pen, and while I was trying to think of what they could’ve been preoccupied for us to study instead, she told me she was homeschooled and her mother doted on particular periods and ignored others and it grated on her.
For mercy, she trotted, I imagined, to find somebody else to expose how much she knew to, which was such a running motive there and such a blaring one that any leftover nerves I’d had about Dr. Bok thinking I was a journey-proud brag became concern the letter was too timid and so quiet that it was for all intents and purposes Braille. Being the real thing, I thought, made you confident to say less than you know and not lord information, the kind of hard moral plateaus you shoot for and may sometimes miss. Outside a couple of severe introverts, what I saw said college could be full of characters like the ones who’d crawled in the windows and blistered the calm of Laura’s house, only this crowd got a sad charge out of narrating tours of the intellect and museums you hadn’t been on and letting you know you weren’t the first one to discover something. It didn’t matter if a thousand scholars studied how Madame Bovary probably wouldn’t have had to rot from the inside if she’d read better books in her girlhood, if the idea strikes you in Baltimore in a room full of people who say they already know, my theory is it’s still your personal news.
By the time the librarian worked down the row to me, I didn’t need her to explain their card catalog as much as I had to know where they kept the world atlases. She brought an outsized one to a table, and then I pressed my finger down on Baltimore and moved it down, thinking, I’m here, and I want to be there. When I’m there, I’ll want to be here again. I was standing by a map of the world in a city I’d never been to, and neither mother could see me, and after I measured from here to there with my fingers, I moved them around west to east, and the distance put me in the middle of the ocean and proved how far out of someone’s reach you could get, being pulled backward and pushed forward. Of all the things I’d learned and despite a knack for rapid imagining, I didn’t know how to feel at home out in the world or at home either, though all I could think to do next was close the book and wait for a train pointed toward there.