The Copy Room Sestina

I was thinking about still being a teacher forty years from now (that would make me 73. If you follow the news, that's probably not an unrealistic retiring age). It was a frightening prospect. Our lunch room at work is straight out of the late seventies. It's a time capsule; if you move the furniture around a bit, you'll uncover fallen scraps of old notes from 1982: grade macbeth papers! buy milk!

I wonder if I'll be there so long, I'll sit next to some young and beautiful 23 year old and say, "this room hasn't changed since I started here in 2004." She'll say, "2004! I was only a baby then!"

Anyway, pondering the mildewy decor of our English teacher's lounge, I was feeling a kinship with the ghosts of these women who have passed through the halls of schools for the past few decades. Women who chose career over marriage; women who taught briefly but left to have a family, maybe with a regretful heart, maybe with relief. Women who went on to do other things.

It made me imagine a character: the unmarried, slightly mysterious older English teacher...I've had a few...bright and elegant. Maybe I'm channeling the teachers my mother had in the '60s in parochial school. What were their lives really like? I hope their lives were filled with more than just decades of Gatsby scantrons and essay grading (yes, I know. Teaching is more than that. But you know what I mean).

Anyway, I'm proud to say I wrote a sestina thinking about this idea. A sestina alternates six ending words in a specific pattern. It's supposed to be in iambic pentameter, but I couldn't swing it.

The Copy Room Sestina

Before school I find the copier cold to touch.
It requires the murmur of a pulled switch: though books
have kissed its glass face, it won’t stir easily. My hands
stumble like white birds, trying to make the copy
of the essay about some story that is about you.
There is nowhere else like this room.

Here’s a hive, a humming place, a room
where a machine stings with ink should I touch
the wrong gear, the wrong wheel. You
might say it’s easier to submit each page
I need, every packet, to some secretary to copy,
but I find it simpler to use my own hands.

I try to hide them, my hands,
because the light hides nothing in this room
and I already feel old, I feel like a copy,
a copy of young girl once lit up by the touch
of autumn rain in her mouth. But all the pages
inside me have lost their master. What about you?

And now you have copies to do, too. How like you
to stroll up to the machine with your able hands
and yank the lid like it’s your car door, the page
of your Hemingway nonsense clogging up the room
with smoke and men and nothing anywhere about touch,
nothing original to say. You just have to make a copy.

I wonder if this whole room—this universe even— is a copy,
somewhere replica me and replica you
shoot like comets and collate, the only feature where papers touch
inside the copy machine as intimate and lovely as praying hands.
There is so much I can say about this room.
(It is also a sexy place. But we aren’t on the same page.)

The problem with early morning copying is this. I have this book.
I come in ahead of the mob and hope to make copies.
But I start to think I may die someday standing in this room.
My heart is still thing, but it beats, wanting something—you—?
And I can’t escape the notion that my hands,
like a old watchmaker’s, wind down days with only this touch.

Here is what I fear: you are here making copies.
I am in this room, seeing you.
I have not lived. I have only copied from a book.

The Mast in the Sand, Barnegat Light, LBI

I had it in my head like a record refrain, some odd memory of my father a few years ago telling me about this wrecked boat in the sand somewhere on Long Beach Island, all the way out on the end by the Barnegat Lighthouse. His face was buried in the cheap newsprint of The Tin Can Sailor, a press for old Navy veterans. He showed me the picture. “Don’t you remember when I took you to see it when you were a kid?” I didn’t. We weren’t really Long Beach Island people and I wondered if my dad was mixing it up with some other sea curiosity. “I love it when things end up where they don’t belong,” mused my father, in his way, pensive and thoughtful in the way of an old salt, forced to live on the land and work for a utility company.

This past summer, I spent two weeks at a writing program in Boulder, Colorado trying to write this story about two kids who fell in love in Seaside Heights. The boy, Jason, is a baseball player and in one scene he takes her to this masthead, which sticks out a good fifteen feet into the air, the rest buried by sand. He has grandiose plans to dig up the boat moored underneath, to restore it, and take his female counterpart sailing around the world. I wanted this to be a romantic and significant moment in their relationship. Two kids driven by imagination finding themselves in a mystery. Perfect! I’m ready for my Pulitzer.

Jogging as if I was underwater through the high-altitude muck of Boulder, the image of that masthead kept presenting itself to me in an almost Jungian way. I decided to visit it as soon as I got home. After fourteen days of Buddhist education and half-assed meditation (since it turns out I can’t sit still to actually meditate, but I love the adoration of ringing bells), it seemed an almost cosmic invitation.

On my thirty-third birthday I took the trip down to South Jersey. I was meeting friends in Atlantic City to celebrate my birthday and my husband was in Chicago on business. It was a perfect opportunity to disappear for a few days and do what I liked. The summer still stretched charmingly before me and I was free to wander around the beach in my hat and sundress just like a character from a novel, or better: I will write my own novel, and this is research. An hour in the library before I left confirmed a few facts; the boat is the Sea King, foundered in 1963, and depending on the wind and erosion and other technical variables, locals have been measuring time by the boat’s position in the sand. People my mother’s age can remember playing on the boat as kids; these days, the mast is the only thing you can see, tipping to the sky like a reedy grandfather clock.

My friend Tim met me in Barnegat Light and escorted me to the right place: the 10th street beach where a few sun worshippers lounged, oily and brown and sleepy. It was swelteringly hot as we made our way down the path where the dunes were waist-high. The bright umbrellas dotting the shoreline were wavy and blurry, almost a mirage. Every step I took burned the soles of my feet so I carefully placed each one in the tiny strip of shadow against the wire and wood barrier fence.

About a hundred or so feet from the shoreline the mast stood like a huge crucifix in the heat, casting an impressive shadow. A sort of watchtower, slightly bent forward, cradling a few birds. The wood was baked and splintered and unforgivingly hot to the touch.
I tried to imagine my characters, the ones engendered in my brain, standing there. What would they say? How can this story take shape? Is there even a story?

As I looked and looked, my head felt empty save for the immediacy of the sun pelting my shoulders and back and my burning feet.

I didn’t bring my camera or a notebook anyway, so after a brief moment of looking, I made my way back to the car and drove to Atlantic City.

Driving down the parkway with the air conditioning on full blast, I thought about my dad’s delight in the idea that things sometimes end up where they aren’t supposed to be. Shoes on the side of the road or thrown up around telephone wires, for example. Or shopping lists that end up blowing around the edges of the supermarket parking lot. Or the slightly magnificent creepiness of a children’s toy, left behind in the road.

Of course, the person (mostly me) is standing there in the summer heat, gazing up at the mast in the sand, waiting for that moment, that moment that says, you haven’t been wasting your time. This will be a story. You aren’t being weird. This means something.

That person isn’t quite like the masthead, staring down the water for forty years, fixed and unfixed, depending on the whim of the wind. The person is not the thing in the wrong place.

I hope.

Things I Wish There Were Specific Words For

1. When I take a sip of something that I think is Sprite, but it turns out to be water. That feeling of disappointment mixed with it's-not-that-big-of-a-deal.

2. the feeling of being let down when I don't see anything in my email inbox, even at school, when emails usually signal more work.

3. the odd emotional tug on my heart when other people's children are being difficult and my friends say, "usually, she's so good" or "he's not usually like this." I feel a bit anxious and a bit sad and a bit bad in general but not enough to label it with those actual words.

4. the feeling that I need to talk to my mom when I'm in Shop-rite and I can't figure out what to cook for dinner but somehow I won't just call her and ask for help. It's not really laziness, not really pride, but something else! What is it??

5. the weird stab of something like annoyance, but also tinged with envy, when my husband gets the pancakes and I get the eggs and I want to split but he's not that interested in my eggs.

6. the awkward feeling I get at school when I keep bumping into the same person all day and I'm not sure if I have to say hi to them each time.

7.the urge to tell everyone how and when I lost my virginity but I know it's inappropriate.

My Grandma Really Wants to Cut Up Some Fruit For You

Just now, I'm watching my husband carefully add some raisins to his oatmeal. He has two bowls lined up on the counter and is emulating the style of the cooks on TV: everything he needs to make breakfast (carton of milk, currants, raisins) taken out of their homes and neatly lined up like little soldiers reporting for duty. He inquires if I want raisins in my oatmeal, or currants, or both.

It brought back a vivid memory of my grandmother who used to put out every cereal box we had on the kitchen table, with two bowls for my brother and me, and two spoons, and two different kinds of milk (whole milk and Lactaid for herself). This used to delight me to no end when I was a kid. Cereal buffet! Grandma has put out all the boxes! Maybe I will mix two different kinds together this morning; my mother never facilitated such options for me at breakfast.

Then she would start cutting up the fruit like a hundred people were coming over. Apples, pears, strawberries.

"Here," she'd say. "Eat this. Have some peach."

"No, grandma," I'd say. "I'm good with this cereal."

She would grow irate: "I cut up all this fruit for you!"

I can see her hands so clearly: small and white, the bright diced peach resting between her index finger and her thumb.

On mornings like this, when I committed to baking a birthday cake, or when I committed to doing anything domestic, I miss her; I miss grandmothers in general, how they always had kleenex, how they sat next to me in church and kept me quiet with sugar free candy, how they baby-sat me when my parents went out to dinner on those wintery nights when ordinarily I might have been afraid.

Roadhouse on AMC, can't go out now....

I don't know what it is exactly, but whenever I see that Patrick Swayze's bouncer-Christ sacrifice tome Roadhouse, I have to stop everything and watch it.

I think it's a combination of several factors. First, Swayze's messiah of the juke joint/speakeasy is pure hotness. He practices some kind of aikido or tai chi but approaches his new job with the calm prowess of a Western vigilante. He's on the classic Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey, but wow, who knew the journey would involve a monster truck squashing a car dealership?

And oh. That love scene with Kelly Lynch. Be still my cowgirl heart!
And oh. The dialogue. "Pain don't hurt" and a degree in NYU Philosophy. Come on over, Mr. Dalton. Come on over.