Banshee. Rachel Dewoskin
then when it was over, it would be over and gone. Although—what was the line in that Heather McHugh poem about the hurricane, or was it a tornado? Anyway, the line happens after the storm:
It was over for maybe minutes.
Then it was never over.
Maybe this would be like that, never over, even once it ended.
“Coming,” I told Leah. I walked down the hallway, absurdly still in a towel, then doubled back to the bathroom and put my clothes on. I thought, while I was at not telling anyone about my illness, I also wouldn’t leave Charles. There was no reason to get divorced unless someone wanted to remarry, right? Although—I guess he would, actually.
Because that’s what men do, I thought, they remarry.
Maybe Leah and I should get married in white dresses, Leah with nothing under hers—no bra, no tank top, no underpants. We’d hold hands down an aisle and kiss in front of an audience of horrified relatives: Charles and his parents; Alexi, home from college; my mother, Sophia, slack-jawed; and who else? Oh my God. My older brother Hank and his wife, Sarah, and how about the students from my poetry seminar this semester? I’d assign them to write occasional poems and then appear myself, clutching a Sappho collection. I’d still be bandaged in my strapless gown, wound drains hanging like balloons from a car: Just married! Two drains on each side, blood collecting in their plastic bulbs. Someone would have to “strip” the drains and measure their fluid. Maybe I’d be able to do it myself. Would Charles still be willing, after this? Or I could twist Leah’s imagination for the rest of her life by asking her to do it: Hello, sexy fling, would you mind measuring the gore pouring from my wounds?
I had a sickening jolt of considering what the others in my class might think at Leah’s and my imaginary wedding. Or if they saw me now. What I myself might think of this if I saw me now—in other words, if my mind were still intact.
There were twelve graduate students in my workshop, all talented, one genuinely on her way to being a writer. I’d always prided myself on knowing who the stars were long before it was obvious to the world. It wasn’t always the ones whose writing was the most polished or gleaming, or even those—to my dismay when I was young—who worked the hardest or read the most. Once, it was a girl who consistently wore pants that rode below her pelvic bone. Every time she stood up, she flashed the entire class a band of waxed skin and I wondered, where do my responsibilities begin and end? Why had her mother not taught her to wear underpants? Or had she, and this was a rebellion? Was it obliviousness?
There was a quality about my best writers that was difficult to define—enormous talent and curiosity, yes, but also willingness. Maybe that makes me sound like a narcissist who, in addition to seducing my student in spite of having a loyal, diligent husband of nineteen years, also tries to turn young writers into other Samanthas. (Some wanted that, in fact—read Temporary Conditions when they were young and then showed up in this nowhere land of a university town to find me because they think my work helped form—or could help form—theirs).
But I’ve never wanted students who wrote my work. I’ve hardly even wanted to write it myself.
What I mean by “willing” is that they had to be able to discover what kinds of poems they could actually make, which required a willingness to recognize and acknowledge when they hadn’t figured out yet what they were capable of doing. Most people lack various components of this ability: some can’t tell in anyone’s work what’s successful and what isn’t. Others are blind only to their own work’s strengths and failures. Some can tell what’s wrong but haven’t learned to fix it. Not to mention the next requirement, which is to be open to making those poems you can make well, all while keeping enough variety and experimentation not to become an imitator of your own work—a problem I consider “being Jack Nicholson,” even though more than one student has pointed out to me that being Jack Nicholson would be awesome.
“But you know what I mean,” I say when that happens. “He just plays himself over and over.”
And they stare like a group of surprised deer, anxious to flee but unsure in which direction.
In the kitchenette, Leah stood at the counter, pouring orange juice into glasses embossed with cows. She was still naked, her stomach flat and stacked with muscles. I wondered if she ran, jumped, crunched. She pushed a round blue plate across the counter toward me.
“Don’t say I never wined and dined you,” she said. “Here, I’ll even get you a napkin.” She grinned at me, and I thought she was signaling that she was both too young to be believed and also wisely aware of how young she was or maybe seemed to me. I remember when I was young, having the constant irritated sense that I knew how little I knew. I reminded myself not to be a wise old woman now—why couldn’t I just revert to my younger self with Leah so we could enjoy each other?
She bent to open a drawer and pulled out a paper towel, so unselfconscious that I wondered what it felt like to be her. Maybe weightless. Her small, un-jeopardized breasts appeared immortal. She was still smiling, assembling this meal for me. Leah was a good person, composed of all the qualities I lacked. She was easily, fully human. And her poems, like her papers, were always oddly off the mark, but this made the fallible beauty in them somehow more compelling. And she was starkly unpretentious, a rarity in the workshop.
I looked down at the food, desperately flat on the plate. Leah was watching me. She came around to where I stood and stood behind me, put her hands on my hips, and slid them up and down like she was measuring something. I lifted the sandwich off the plate and took a bite. The cheddar was chalky and under-melted, the bread thick with congealed butter. I tried to avoid chewing, swallowed the doughy glob, and coughed out, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink now? I mean, to go with the sandwich?”
I felt like flinging all caution to the wind, and anyway, how was I going to get this sandwich down? I said, “Whiskey.”
“Oh, um, I have beer—is that okay?” Now she sounded shy, defeated. She hadn’t had the thing I’d asked for.
“Of course,” I said, even though I hate beer. It makes me feel like someone has pumped me full of air and hops and wheat or barley or whatever it’s made of. Plus, the smell. Like the woods at night, burning dirt.
She handed me a beer in a bottle, yellow as a urine sample.
“Aren’t you having one?” I asked, buying time, wondering where I could hide both the beer and the sandwich, collecting unwanted treasures from Leah.
“I don’t drink,” she said. “Bad history.”
I didn’t ask, didn’t want to know, just took a long, thirsty sip of the beer. It tasted better than I remembered beer tasting, although I thought suddenly that this was one of those beach beers, and she was supposed to have stuffed a slice of lime into its neck, right?
“I’ll be right back,” she told me, as if we were buddies on a field trip. Then she went to get dressed and I quickly wrapped the tragic sandwich in the paper towel and buried it in Leah’s beige trashcan, under melted candles, an empty bottle of cucumber lotion, and containers that had once contained pre-washed baby kale. I poured the bright beer down her sink.
My phone came alive then, buzzing in the back pocket of my jeans: Alexi. Her name ignited the new combination of fear and longing I felt every time I thought of my family. I hadn’t told her yet. We hadn’t told her yet. And now would I compound the announcement of my mortality with the one of my infidelity? “Your childhood was good—you’re welcome. But now that you’re nineteen, I have cancer and I’m sleeping with one of my students, who is barely older than you are, and dreaming of leaving your father for the first time in nineteen years of either being happy or deadening my fantasy life.”
Because I need more actual life for a minute, in case I die either of cancer or of some unpredictable disaster or complication during surgery three weeks from now.
Hard to imagine a way to put that euphemistically. I didn’t