To show the laboring bosom’s deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint
—PHYLLIS WHEATLEY
ON SUNDAY MORNING, AS I cracked the turkey carcass apart at the joints and shredded the remaining meat from the bones, I planned the soup. It would be a simple turkey-and-rice soup, with plenty of julienned vegetables: ribs of celery, strips of carrots, a small potato grated into the broth for body, onions, garlic—a welcome-back-Amanda-no-one-else-loves-you-the-way-I-do kind of soup. Once I had the turkey bones simmering in my largest pot, I began grading papers, anxious to get them completed before my daughter returned with whatever disturbing news she had for me. I’d slipped Freddie Whitby’s essay to the bottom of the pile again, and this time it had stayed put. Finally, I placed the next-to-the-last paper in the stack of graded essays, and again contemplated Freddie’s opening salvo: “Poems are alot like life.” With the green pen, I underlined the Focus I’d written in the margin earlier, circled alot, scrawled Spelling! “Many people write poems when they want to know about life,” Freddie continued. Ditto, I wrote under the Focus. “I think Edger Allen Poe …” Spelling!, I wrote under the Ditto. “… wanted to know about life alot so he wrote poems.” My pen hovered over the margin as I decided what to address here: Get to the point! “I think Edger was really, really, really upset,” she went on, “about the vast and empty caverns of existential ignorance that underlie our common life.” Whaaa? “As a case in point, the infamous bird in Poe’s ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing, as emblem of an existentialist angst prescient of post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis, as enigmatic metaphor for a poetics of the abyss.” Surreal? Trope? Poesis? Poetics of the abyss? Shit! This was the language of professional literary criticism. Freddie Whitby could not possibly have written this analysis herself.
I finished reading the essay, which went on in the same vein for four and a half pages, scrawled your own language? in the margin, deliberated for two seconds about whether or not it would be inconsiderate to call Earlene at home on a weekend, then called Earlene. At home. On the weekend.
“As the Dean of Students,” I told her without preamble, “you should know about the blatant plagiarism I’ve just stumbled across.”
“Hello, Karen,” Earlene replied. “How are you? Nice to hear from you. Thanks for the wonderful meal on Thanksgiving.”
“Hi, Earlene. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I know this could wait until tomorrow, but I’m just so upset. Listen.” I read Freddie’s opening paragraph.
“Post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis,” Earlene said, and laughed. “My, but we do recruit a knowledgeable class of eighteen-year-olds these days.”
“What do I do about this?” I was angry. How stupid did this student think I was?
“Can you identify the source? I mean, we can make a charge of plagiarism based on the fact that the essay is written in a specialized vocabulary available to a college freshman only in the unlikely instance that she has graduate training in literature. But the college policy on academic honesty asks the professor to attempt to find the source from which the material was taken before making a formal accusation.”
I groaned. “Earlene, do you know how many millions of words of litcrit have been written about Poe? Do you know how busy I am at this time of year?”
“Just make an attempt,” she said soothingly. “Go to the library. Look at some books. You might be surprised, Karen. Sometimes the source just leaps into your hands. If you can’t find it, we’ll handle Ms. Whitby some other way.”
I slipped the offending paper, ungraded, in a folder separate from the others and jammed it into my briefcase, then turned on the CD player with its resident Emmylou Harris albums. I was in desperate need of Emmylou’s good honest voice. To the background of “Goin’ Back to Harlan,” I piled carrots, celery, onions, and garlic on the chopping block, and filled a pan with water for the brown rice. Thank God for my own wonderful daughter. Amanda was such a good kid; I was going to make her the very best turkey-rice soup in the entire world.
Amanda got home about two that afternoon, tired, hungry—and glum.
“Did you find your father?” I asked, tentatively, setting a bowl in front of her.
“No,” she replied, and, without further comment, began scarfing down the world’s best turkey soup.
“Oh.” I slipped into a chair across from her. “Was anyone able to tell you where he is?” With a serrated knife, I sliced two crusty whole wheat rolls and placed them on Amanda’s plate.
“No.” She continued to spoon up soup.
“Oh. Well, did you—” Amanda’s deliberate refusal to meet my gaze jolted me into a realization that I was asking too many questions. She’d tell me all about it when she was good and ready. Absently I buttered one of her rolls and ate it.
“Mom?” Amanda asked, when she’d finished her second helping of soup. She set the bowl to one side, and, over a cup of tea with honey, finally looked directly at me. “Mom? I’ve got something to ask you. Why don’t you ever talk about your family?”
The light from the hanging frosted-glass globe over the table illuminated the angular bone structure of Amanda’s face, cast the shadow of long lashes over cheeks blushed only by her own high coloring. Her short brown hair shone with red highlights. Her eyes challenged me.
My family? I hadn’t seen my family in years. The last time had been at my father’s funeral, when Amanda was only five. She and I had gone to the funeral, but I’d panicked and left before the coffin was carried out. My sisters never spoke to me again.
“What’s to tell?” I replied. I toyed with the ceramic rooster and hen salt and pepper shakers, dancing them back and forth between my hands. The rooster and the hen did a frantic little jig, stopped dead, faced each other, beaks touching. “My family never wanted anything to do with me after I left your father, you know. When Fred started hitting you”—Amanda paled, flinched—“and I walked out, my father was deathly afraid he’d have to support me—and you. The last time I phoned my family, honey, my father called me a slut and told me not to come back home. I’ve never told you about that because you didn’t need to know. But, since you’ve asked … And we’ve gotten along without them, haven’t we? We’ve done okay for ourselves.”
“Yeah.” Her voice had lost its tone of challenge. “But he’s dead now. He’s been dead for a long time. And Aunt Connie says …”
Aunt Connie! My heart sank at the sound of my sister’s name. Amanda had looked up my family.
“… she says you didn’t talk to anybody at the funeral. She says that now that you’re a big-time college professor you’ve got a swelled head. She says you think you’re too good for the rest of the family—”
“That’s bullshit! When you and I were in North Adams, my family wouldn’t even send me the bus fare home. For all they cared, we could have starved in the streets. I had to go to the Salvation Army for housing.” My face burned at the memory.
Amanda was staring at me, appalled. “I didn’t know any of this stuff. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I took a deep breath. “Why would I tell you? Total strangers at the Salvation Army were kinder to us than our own family. I’m not proud of that. The Sallies found us an apartment, got you into a day-care program, even made me an appointment with an admissions counselor at the state college. I think they saved our lives. Then I got a job waitressing and started going to school at night.”
“I remember when you worked at the truck stop. That was in North Adams, wasn’t it?”
“You remember that? You were just a tyke.”
“You used to bring home pie.”
“Yeah—we lived on stale truck-stop food, pie and muffins and stuff. I can’t believe you remember.”
She shrugged, granted me a disarming smile, and gestured toward her empty bowl. “That was great soup, Mom.” I took another deep breath, let it out slowly. This wasn’t the end of it, I knew, but I had my daughter back; maybe the soup had helped. But Amanda wasn’t done yet. “Listen, Mom, I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I really need to know who I am. I don’t feel like I’ll be satisfied until I know my … my … origins.” She was being delicate with me. Amanda and I had been a family forever, stale-pie dinners and all. Now she wanted to explore beyond that bond. I held my hands tightly together in my lap so I wouldn’t give in to the impulse to reach across the table and clutch her to me. On the CD player, Emmylou moved into “Orphan Girl.”
Amanda left for Georgetown at dawn on Monday, loaded down with turkey sandwiches, a plastic container of soup, and fresh molasses cookies, and I’d been up extra early to pack it all and say goodbye. I wanted to make certain I had time to photocopy Freddie Whitby’s plagiarized essay before I questioned her about it, so I got to campus a good half-hour early. As usual when I arrived in Dickinson Hall before the first class of the day, the corridors were dark and deserted. At least I assumed they were deserted, until a flick of the light switch caught a furtive shadow slipping around the corner in the general direction of the side door. I had the most extraordinary sense of déjà vu: Hadn’t this happened the last time I’d come into the office early? College campuses are heavily populated places, but I was hard put to think of a legitimate reason why anyone would lurk in the English Department hallways in the dark at seven-thirty A.M. on two Mondays in a row. When I got my office door open, I turned on all the lights in the room, including the little desk lamp. The fugitive shadow in the hallway was probably nothing but an anxiety phantom, a figment of my all-too-active imagination, but suddenly I had a yen for as much illumination as possible.
Pulling my department photocopy card from my wallet, I retrieved the folder with Freddie’s paper and carried it to the little copy room at the end of the first-floor hallway, flicking on each light switch I passed. Three copies of this plagiarized essay ought to do the trick: one for my records, one for the Department’s records, one for my report to the Dean. With a little persuasion and a chipped fingernail, the staple came loose from the pages. Then I slipped the essay into the multiple-pages slot of the multifunction photocopy machine and pressed the start button. The machine went through its various initial groanings, swallowed the first page of the essay as it was programmed to do, then, without warning, ground to a halt. The little display window read REMOVE JAMMED PAGES, FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS, BEGIN OVER. I groaned, more dramatically than the machine, and dutifully followed instructions. The machine jammed again. Shit! I removed the one page that the machine had gobbled, followed instructions, began over. The machine jammed. Double shit! After all my precautions, I was going to be late for class. I yanked open the front door of the machine for the third time, pressed down one green lever after another, probed all the photocopier’s secret inner compartments. Nothing. Began over. The machine jammed. It was now seven minutes of eight; I’d give it one more try. I pulled open the front door, pressed levers, opened compartments. Nothing. Wait! Was that infinitesimal scrap of white in the machine’s innermost bowels the corner of a sheet of paper? I yanked, and the offending sheet emerged. Good. Just enough time to copy Freddie’s masterpiece and get to class. As I crumpled up the retrieved sheet preliminary to tossing it in the wastebasket, a line of familiar handwriting caught my eye. Precise, print-like handwriting. Emmeline Foster’s handwriting. Suddenly alert, I laid the wrinkled page on the machine’s cover and carefully smoothed it out. My God! The last person to use this copy machine between the final day of class before Thanksgiving break and this very moment had photocopied Emmeline Foster’s purloined book of poems.