Pug Hill - Alison Pace [70]
“I’ve sought out corner bars, lived in corner houses,” I say and it comes out so shaky, so timid, that the only way I feel I can remedy it is to speed it up.
I begin to speak very quickly and I can’t look up, I can only look at the book. The book, and my hands, are shaking so much that I am really quite sure that I’m about to drop the book. Part of me wants to stop it all and say, “Can I start over from the beginning?” just like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, only nowhere near as coordinated and definitely not as sexy. And I know that if I did ask to start over again, as Beth Anne said we should not be afraid to do, that it would all come out sounding much less like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance than like Lawrence when he messed up his birdie poem. But mostly, what keeps me from asking if I could start over, is that if I asked to start over, I would have to actually start over, and then I would be up here even longer.
“Hope,” Beth Anne says and I look up, and everyone looks very concerned. It occurs to me that it may have been a while since I said the last line. It occurs to me that I’ve been standing here for a while just staring at the shaking book in my hands, trying not to listen to the voices in my head, the ones I haven’t mentioned yet: the ones who have just come in from a bar where they’d been happily drinking margaritas, the ones who, when they walked in and saw what was happening, started jumping up and down and screaming, “Run! Run! Run, run out of this room! Run far away from it! Run from all of these people as fast as you can!”
At the top of the video camera there’s a blinking red light, and now that I’ve noticed it, I can’t seem to stop looking at it. I really might throw up. I really don’t want to leave the room but I might have to. I think I should pray. But I don’t know who to pray to, I never have. If I did, I would promise to do a million things, I would promise to volunteer and be a better person and all that, if I could just get through the rest of my poem.
“Hope,” I hear again, and still, I’m standing, and not speaking and the only difference is that now I’ve stopped staring at the book because I’ve been staring right into the vast abyss that is the video camera’s lens and, Oh for the love of God, how long has it been? I squeeze the book as hard as I can to stop it from shaking. I try to speak again, “Corner.” But it doesn’t come out sounding anything like “corner” at all; it comes out sounding much more like a croak, and I am at a loss. I don’t really know what to do. I reach up to tuck my hair behind my ears, but I can’t because it’s already in a ponytail. I put it in a ponytail before I came to class so that I wouldn’t be able to keep tucking it behind my ears, because that was going to make this so much frickin’ easier.
“Why don’t we step outside for a minute?” Beth Anne asks. I feel myself making the motion to tuck my already secured hair behind my ears, yet again. I notice that my hair is a little damp right by my ear, from all the sweating. Beth Anne gets up and walks through the door. I follow her.
Once we are in the hallway, Beth Anne reaches around and pulls the door shut behind us. We walk a few feet farther into the hallway.
She looks up at me; I never realized she was so small. The feeling that I am going to be sick has subsided. The sour, seasick feeling has been replaced by the feeling that I might, at any moment, start to cry. Beth Anne reaches up to me and puts a hand on my shoulder. I’m sure she’s about to tell me that I might be better suited for private lessons.
“Sometimes it helps if you just take a step back, if you just catch your breath for a minute.” I nod my head, and I wonder how long I’ve been needing to hear that.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I think we should do The Lion,” she suggests.
And when we get back inside, somehow I make it to the front of the room, and somehow I begin to read my poem.
I get all the way through the poem, and absolutely, I’m a little shaky, and definitely, I read a little fast. But, it all gets said, and it all gets