Keira Knightley's Snaggle Tooth

I just watched Pride and Prejudice for the hundredth time; it's nice to see another girl with a snaggle tooth just like mine depicted in the media as a great Hollywood beauty. When you're marginalized, it means a lot to see people who look like you on television. Ask any African-American woman how she felt back in the '60s when she saw Lieutenant Uhura at her little control table on Star Trek. That's right. That's a woman driving that spaceship. That's a black woman driving that spaceship. It was a historical moment. That's why when I see snaggle toothed girls in the movies-- leading ladies at that-- it affirms what I already know. I'm not just the "before" pic at the dentist office. I'm Keira Knightley. We are beautiful. We're rising above the oppression of conventional beauty. We're changing things. We're not opening up beer bottles for your amusement anymore. If you need us, we're standing like enchanting wood nymphs in the field, having our faces tenderly cupped by Mr. Darcy.

Virginia Woolf Time Machine

I've been fantasizing about this time machine that would enable me to slash a direct path through the universe to my favorite writers, right to the moment before they die. I want to save them. I'd be such a hero, they'd name the English department wing of York College after me: the AZ School of Literary Suicide Prevention. The pamphlet has a picture of Hemingway on it, sitting at his desk, with me sitting on it facing him, embracing him lightly. He's shaking his head with delight. In the background, my assistant in a white lab coat is gently putting the revolver back in the case and explaining everything he needs to do to cross over the time portal.

Or, the moment before Virginia Woolf dips her foot into the river, I could be there. I will beg and plead. Come with me, I'll say. To 2011. To my house in New Jersey. I will make you coffee. You can take the train into East Village. You'll love it. I can get you some Cymbalta or Paxil and a laptop and I think it'll be okay. Don't go.

All this maybe because I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway this week. Like Clarissa, I can float through the day, thinking about the past, the characters over the years I've met, the friends who've come and gone. All the mistakes and misunderstandings, the things that went unsaid. The part when she sits on her sofa with her visiting ex-suitor Peter... watching him play with his knife and getting all flustered and annoyed. It's all charged up with the unsaid. How he's thinking she's going to judge him for getting a divorce and loving a married woman (some younger girl he just met) and how he feels he needs to prove something to her, that someone desires him, and that Mrs. Dalloway needs to be reminded after all these years that she should feel regretful that she didn't marry him. And he's thinking all this, and then he cries all of a sudden (I thought the Brits were repressed), and they kiss on the couch. But I don't know if this is a passionate kiss or just an ambiguous polite kiss between friends. I'm too embarrassed to Sparknote it.

What I'm saying is, who wouldn't want a do-over? To go back and say, I should have told you....

I should have told you....

And of course, while we're at it, bending laws of time and space, why not save Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf?

You know this, though. If I brought over Ernest Hemingway through a time portal to my house, he would pillage for my three buck Chuck and eventually seal his fate with what he thought was his destiny. You can't fix it.

And Virginia Woolf would become a threat to me with her brilliance so I would have to make her stay with Allison or Jill ("She's so quick. She writes like ten poems a day. And they're good. I hate her face. Just let her stay with you. Also, she keeps crying.")

Or maybe the three of us would sit down in my living room and just talk and eat Chinese food.

"Thank you," they'd say in unison, marveling at the 21st century poem that is General Tso's chicken. "This is fun."

"I didn't know that so many people would be reading my books," Virginia might say.

"People don't really listen," Ernest might say. He's tipsy.

"I was out here listening all this time," I might reply.

Robert Plant Photo: 1973 Madison Square Garden

I'm wondering if this poem speaks for itself. In case it doesn't, there is nothing hotter than the footage of Robert Plant writhing on the stage of Madison Square Garden in 1973. He seems to be a combination of both male and female sexual energy. (His golden stomach and long hair and posturing). I can picture the millions of girls watching, the removed longing, the safe space of sexual admiration that only teen idols and their fans seem to create and re-create every generation.

Robert Plant's Stomach, 1973 Madison Square Garden

Across the slick madness
of young desire

I thought of you, your picture,
so many quiet breaths

between the years,

when men weren’t real to me,

yet lit up like Apollo
under my burning hand.

Holding Grudges, Or, Billy Was Mean to Me in Washington D.C.

When I was nine or so, my parents took my brother Billy and me to visit Washington, D.C. We stood at the White House gate and took the obligatory awkward family photo: I was wearing a pink T-shirt with a Smurfette iron-on. I squinted, gap toothed and pleased, at the camera. Billy was reluctantly standing a bit too far from me, his arms behind him, gripping the gate. His lack of proximity to me—suggesting irritation—appears to be the only thing he could control that hot summer day. We followed our parents around in the July haze from monument to monument, pestering them with our endless squabbles, my perpetual whining and tattling. There is no parent stipend for taking your kids out for a bonding weekend, but looking back, I give Mom and Dad credit for bearing our bickering by alternating two methodologies: stoically ignoring us, but occasionally smacking us.

As we both gazed thoughtfully at the White House lawn with our cheeks stuffed with Tootsie Pops, I told my brother that President Reagan waved to me from the window. It was a falsehood so outrageous that no one bothered to pay much attention to it when I said it. But it irked Billy so much he had to give pause. “You lie all the time. You are such a liar.”

I don’t remember if I actually started crying, but I might have produced some tears. It simply tore me up, for some reason, that he didn’t believe me. Why couldn’t Ronald Reagan be working at his desk and look out the window and see me and give me a little encouraging wave? It seemed utterly logical to me. Of course, the idea violated every law of reason and physics (even if we could see through a White House window from so far away, Ronald Reagan was likely too busy to hang out around the perimeters of his house, waving to children).

In response to our little fight, my mother stood close to my brother, gripping him by the shoulders. She said something like, “Why don’t you just believe her? If she says she saw Ronald Reagan wave to her, you should believe her!” She was very upset with him. I guess she wanted him to learn to humor me because that’s how kids are: they shape the world according to their own desires, no matter how nonsensical. My dad is getting me a horse. The guy at the mall says I could be a model. Bruce Springsteen is coming to my school because I wrote him a letter. That sort of thing. Not really lies, because when I said them, some part of me believed it possible. The reality of a kid’s life is sometimes not that interesting. If I look closely enough, I might remember painful things: even going back and re-constructing them seems difficult. I’m prone to dipping those images with the careful glitter of my adult logic: well, all kids at that age feel ugly. I know that now. Or, it wasn’t really that bad. I got over it.

What am I hiding from?

I’m starting to think that everything that ever upset me in my life has to do with my ego. The incident at the White House—so minor, I’m sure my brother doesn’t remember it at all—is a typical annoying-kid story. But at the heart of the story is the kid who insists she’s right when she’s wrong, the kid who sulks and cries. Unlike my brother who readily forgives and moves on with his life (and to the next squabble, always threatening in the distance), I held grudges. Isn’t this thing I’m writing now some form of a grudge?

I still won’t forgive the kid in seventh grade who taunted me on the Matawan school bus. I can tell you his name. I can recount what he wore, what he said. I can hear his voice, lilting like a demonic elf from the parallel boy-universe. Right now, he’s probably a normal, nice enough family guy with a few kids and a mortgage in West Long Branch. But still, I hate that guy! In Hoboken in the early 00’s, he wanted to buy me a drink at the Cadillac Bar. He was filled with tipsy nostalgia for the good ol’ days. Instead of burying the hatchet, I was pleased to coldly decline. In my short little dress and with an artificial, flippant martini haze, I fancied myself a hot little number: the nerdy girl who’s now the most coveted prize in the room (well, something cute anyway). As if he’d remember that day on the bus! What an amazing conversation we might have had if I hadn’t been obsessed with that grudge.

Or what about the kid in the hallway who saw me passing between classes in fourth grade? She said loudly, “is that a boy or a girl?” And some kids started pointing and laughing. At the time I had a very short haircut I hated. I offset the bad haircut by wearing a trucker’s hat and baggy T-shirts and shorts; I was experimenting with a form of androgyny I thought might protect me from ridicule. Something like, if I look like a boy anyway from the neck up, I should just throw in the towel and be mostly boy. But I remember thinking, I’m wearing pierced earrings. My socks are pink. I’m clearly not a boy. She’s just being a jerk.

A few years later in middle school I saw that same girl at a school dance standing by herself. She was waiting for friends who hadn’t come yet. I, however, was with a large group of friends (middle school was a good time for me. I was quite popular for about six months. You know—the perm. I rocked Debbie Gibson ripped jeans and a black hat). She had the most appalling look of anxiety on her face. If I were an adult in that light-pulsing gymnasium seeing her, I might shake my head in sympathy, for the dreadful insecurity of the age. How at any moment, your social circle could collapse all around you. You could end up alone and humiliated as fast as the dee-jay changes records.

But the middle school girl in me still thinks, serves that little runt right! I hope she’s in therapy right now expressing the suppressed horror of junior high rejection and how that’s why she ended up getting herpes as an adult.

(Even as I typed that, I felt sort of awful. But then again, what balm for childhood grief than the bloodless immaturity of mocking italics?)

One of my students jokingly said to me yesterday, I think you became a teacher because you want revenge on all the girls who were mean to you.
I was sort of intrigued and horrified. I said, gosh, I hope not.
But you still hold grudges, said one girl who was a bit too smart, who was afraid to see herself end up like me. Holding grudges.

But then I told the class: I think I became a teacher to tell you that’s it all going to be okay. Look at me! I think I’m actually fine.

And we all smiled at each other, shaking our heads. And when I looked at their unreadable faces, their complicated little faces, I really was.

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.