Annabel - Kathleen Winter [87]
He tried to explain. “Remember the last poem we did in English?”
“The one nobody had a clue what it meant?”
“By John Donne.” Brent Shiwack had complained that the word sublunary wasn’t even in the dictionary. But it had been. Wayne had looked it up. “Dull, sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense . . .”
“Wayne?”
“Yeah?”
“Those are words, right? A poem.”
“Yeah?”
“By some dead guy. Can’t you feel my hand?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you feel this?” She touched his jaw, his hipbone. She didn’t go for the centre of him right away but found places she knew would call to that centre and wake it. He resisted and she said, “I don’t want to go all the way, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not stupid.”
It was June and there was still snow on the Mealy Mountains. The wind blew over the snow before it came down here, and his shirt was thin. The alcohol had got to him too. This whole thing wasn’t what he wanted. The cold, the thistles. His teeth started to chatter.
“I have to pee.”
“Here.” She took something out of her dress and he was terrified it was a condom, but it was a pack of Sen-Sens. “Don’t let Mr. Ollerhead smell your breath. I’m going to use the bathroom too.”
Wayne did not have to pee. He noticed Wally Michelin’s date, Tim McPhail, at the canteen buying a Sprite and a Pepsi. He made sure his buttons were fastened and put a Sen-Sen under his tongue before asking Wally Michelin to dance. It wasn’t a slow dance; it was Cyndi Lauper singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” It did not create the moment he wanted to create at all, and he felt stupid. He realized Wally knew he was drunk. The music was loud, and instead of saying she would dance with him, Wally stood against the wall and said something he couldn’t hear, so he shouted.
“It’s okay,” he shouted, “if you don’t want to dance with me. I just wanted to say hi.” She opened her mouth again but there was no way he could hear her, and it reminded him of a terrible summer afternoon the June after she had lost her voice.
Wayne had walked beyond the apple tree blossoming behind Treadway’s shed to read My Darling, My Hamburger in the long grass. But the apple blossom had lured him back under the tree. He lay with the book on his chest, listening to bees, then to the rustling of beetles in the grass, then the robin who had her nest in the shed’s broken window, then the songbirds over the whole village. Once you tuned into a sound it led you to other sounds a place was making. Distant gulls, which usually sounded harsh, were softened that day, a Saturday, just as everything about gulls is softened on a blue, high day. The gull that is raucous and starved on a sleety November day becomes a different bird in the sun: wheeling white and gold, floating in ascending spirals — you can’t believe how high — and transparent, sun shining through its wings. Then, under the tree, Wayne had heard another sound: something injured, an animal hurt, or maddened. A hermit thrush rang its high, tumbling bells over the treetops, then the harsh sound came again, almost human. Wayne left his book under the tree and carefully, silently walked to where the sound came from. There was a clearing. Wally Michelin stood alone, opening her mouth with the awful sound coming out. The sound dropped as soon as it left her, and fell on the ground. She’s singing, Wayne had realized. She’s trying to remember Fauré. He had flushed in shame and embarrassment. He backed up, forgetting his book, which was a library book that would get rained on the next day, and he would have to pay the librarian eight dollars to order a new copy. He backed up and hoped Wally Michelin had not seen him. Wally had had her back to him, but with Wally you never knew.
Now here he was, saying something inane to her. Just wanted to say hi? Stupid. He didn’t want to say anything remotely like hi. He wanted to ask her if she had seen him in the clearing that day. He wanted to hear her voice again, even if it couldn’t sing. He wanted to hear her speak, to him alone, even if hi was