My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
is already out the door and halfway down the hall, Mr. Strane says he has something for me. He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and takes out a book.
“Is this for class?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “It’s for you.” He walks around the desk, puts the book in my hands: Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. “Have you read her?”
I shake my head, turn the book over. It’s worn, with a blue cloth cover. A scrap of paper sticks out between the pages as a makeshift bookmark.
“She’s a bit overdone,” Mr. Strane says. “But young women love her.”
I don’t know what he means by “overdone” but don’t want to ask. I flip through the book—flashes of poems—and stop at the bookmarked page; the title “Lady Lazarus” is capitalized in bold. “Why is this one marked?” I ask.
“Let me show you.”
Mr. Strane comes up beside me, turns the page. Standing so close to him feels like being swallowed; my head doesn’t reach his shoulder.
“Here.” He points to the lines:
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
He says, “That reminded me of you.” Then he reaches behind me and tugs on my ponytail.
I stare at the book as though I’m studying the poem, but the stanzas blur to black smears on a yellow page. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in response. It feels like I should laugh. I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.
In a quiet voice, Mr. Strane asks, “Is it ok that it reminded me of you?”
I lick my lips, lift my shoulders. “Sure.”
“Because the last thing I want is to overstep.”
Overstep. I’m not sure what he means by that, either, but the way he gazes down at me stops me from asking any questions. He suddenly seems both embarrassed and hopeful, like if I told him this wasn’t ok, he might start to cry.
So I smile, shake my head. “You’re not.”
He exhales. “Good,” he says, moving away from me, back to his desk. “Give it a read and let me know what you think. Maybe you’ll be inspired to write a poem or two.”
I leave the classroom and go straight to Gould, where I get into bed and read Ariel all the way through. I like the poems, but I’m more interested in figuring out why they reminded him of me and when this reminding might’ve happened—the afternoon with the leaf, maybe? Maple-red hair. I wonder how long he had this book in his desk drawer, if he waited awhile to decide whether to give it to me. Maybe he had to work up the courage.
I take the scrap of paper he used to mark “Lady Lazarus” and write in neat cursive, I rise with my red hair, then pin it to the corkboard above my desk. Adults are the only ones who ever say anything nice about my hair, but this is more than him being nice. He thinks about me. He thinks about me so much, certain things remind him of me. That means something.
I wait a few days before I return Ariel, dawdling at the end of class until everyone else leaves and then sliding the book onto his desk.
“Well?” He leans forward on his elbows, eager to hear what I have to say.
I hesitate, scrunch my nose. “She’s kind of self-absorbed.”
He laughs at that—a real laugh. “That’s fair. And I appreciate your honesty.”
“But I liked it,” I say. “Especially the one you marked.”
“I thought you would.” He steps over to the built-in bookcases, scans the shelves. “Here,” he says, handing me another book—Emily Dickinson. “Let’s see what you think of this.”
I don’t wait to give him back the Dickinson. The next day after class, I drop the book onto his desk and say, “Not a fan.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was kind of boring.”
“Boring!” He presses his palm over his chest. “Vanessa, you’re breaking my heart.”
“You said you appreciated my honesty,” I say with a laugh.
“I do,” he says. “I just appreciate it more when I’m in agreement with it.”
The next book he gives me is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is, according to Mr. Strane, the furthest thing from boring. “And she was a red-haired girl from Maine,” he says, “just like you.”
I carry his books with me, reading them whenever I can, every spare few minutes and through every meal. I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.
His attention makes me brave enough to show him drafts of my poems when he asks to read more of my work, and he returns them with critiques—not just praise but real suggestions for making the writing better. He circles words I’m already unsure about and writes, Best choice? Other words he crosses out altogether and writes, You could do better. On a poem I wrote in the middle of the night, after waking from a dream set in a place that seemed a mix of his classroom and my bedroom back home, he writes, Vanessa, this one scares me a little.
I start spending faculty service hour in his classroom, studying at the seminar table while he works at his desk and the windows drape October light over us both. Sometimes other students come in for help on assignments, but most of the time it’s only us. He asks me questions about myself, about growing up on Whalesback Lake, what I think of Browick, and what I want to do once I’m older. He says that for me the sky is the limit, that I possess a rare kind of intelligence, something that can’t be measured in grades or test scores.
“I worry sometimes about students like you,” he says. “Ones who come from tiny towns with run-down schools. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lost at a place like this. But you’re doing ok, aren’t you?”
I nod yes but wonder what he’s imagining when he says “run-down.” My old middle school wasn’t that bad.
“Just remember,” he says, “you’re special. You have something these dime-a-dozen overachievers can only dream of.” When he says “dime-a-dozen overachievers,” he gestures at the empty seats around the seminar table and I think of Jenny—her obsession with grades, how I once walked into our room to find her sobbing in bed with her boots still on, rock salt on her sheets, her precalculus midterm crumpled on the floor. She’d gotten an 88. Jenny, that’s still a B, I’d said, but it did nothing to console her. She just rolled toward the wall, hiding her face with her hands as she cried.
Another afternoon while he’s typing up lesson plans, Mr. Strane says out of nowhere, “I wonder what they think about you spending so much time with me.” I don’t know who he means by “they”—other students or teachers, or maybe he means everyone, reducing the entire world down to a collective other.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
“Because no one ever notices anything I do.”
“That isn’t true,” he says. “I notice you all the time.”
I look up from my notebook. He’s stopped typing, his fingers resting on top of the keys as he gazes at me, his face so tender it turns my body cold.
After that I imagine him watching me when I’m bleary-eyed at breakfast, when I’m walking downtown, when I’m alone in my room, pulling the elastic from my ponytail and crawling into bed with