Pug Hill (22 page)

“Yes, yes, would you like to read one of my poems, then? I have some mimeographed.” Beth Anne reaches into her vinyl folder that doubles as a clipboard and begins shuffling through a stack of papers.

“No,” Amy says and crosses her arms in front of her. “I’d like to sit down now.”

“Okay, maybe for your next assignment it could be longer?” Beth Anne asks hopefully as Amy clomps to her seat and hunches down in it with her head bowed.

“Oh, yes,” Beth Anne remembers to ask, “What was your anxiety level?”

“A ten,” Amy snaps, and Beth Anne tells her, really rather nicely, “Well, you wouldn’t have known.” I think that it’s nice of Beth Anne that she doesn’t point out to Amy that she spent the entire one-minute duration of her haiku staring at the floor. I’m pretty sure I would not have been as nice.

“Okay, Alec, you’re up and then Hope.”

Alec picks Amy and they leave. I can’t even dedicate my thoughts to the fact that (even though, as I’ve said, I don’t lust after Alec) I don’t like that he picked Amy to be his partner, especially after her awful haiku. I am too busy trying to stave off an anxiety attack. I am too busy lamenting the fact that not one of the relaxation exercises we’ve learned can be done without drawing quite a lot of attention to oneself. Alec returns and reads something out of the
New Yorker.
I do manage to wonder if selecting poetry out of the
New Yorker
somehow trumps saying, “dude,” all the time or, more likely, if someone just told him he could find poems there. Other than that, I hear nothing. I sit and feel the torrent of activity in my stomach. I sweat. I seriously,
seriously
contemplate running out the door. And then, like a death knell, I hear, “Hope, who would you like your partner to be?”

And all I can think is
OH MY GOD, it’s time!
I try to get a grip, try not to think like that, because I’m pretty sure that is a hysterical way of thinking, and I’m pretty sure that a hysterical way of thinking is only going to make everything worse. I look up, around at my classmates. I want to know where it’s been hiding all this time, I’d just like to know:
Where is my normal?

Right at this moment, Lindsay returns. While, understandably, right now she may not be the best choice for a partner, I blurt out, “Lindsay!” She looks up at me as if she’s going to run away again, just like I want to. But instead she stands there calmly at the doorway, waits for Beth Anne to pass, and then for me, and follows us into the hall.

In the hall, Beth Anne smiles and touches each of our arms. “Practice your exercises,” she instructs, “and select a Deity, and talk about the things you might want to overcome.” She smiles at us again, so much like a den mother, and then she turns on her heel and is gone. As soon as she is back in the classroom, all I can think is,
Why did she have to go? Why couldn’t she stay?

“Are you okay?” I ask Lindsay.

“Yeah, you?”

“Not really,” I say, because a lot of the time I think what I really want is just to be understood. And at this very moment, if anyone can understand, I think Lindsay might be able to.

“Do you want to do The Lion together?” she asks.

The shakiness has started. I’m not even up there yet in front of all the many people, but that horrible sensation from my adrenaline kicking in has already started. I think about the video camera. I think about all the people. Although there are only seven other people in the room, it seems an amount so vast it can only be qualified as
all.
I think about the video camera. I clutch my book of poetry and think, how on earth am I going to make it through the next ten minutes? Lindsay is staring at me patiently, waiting for me to say something, and so I take a deep breath, and say, “Okay.”

I close my eyes and scrunch up my face tightly, tightly, tightly, and I wait until I hear the hissing sound coming from Lindsay. I open up my eyes and stick out my tongue and make the hideous sound, too.

Next, we each do a few rounds of One Nostril Breathing and there is, I have to say, a part of me that is relaxing, until Lindsay leans in a little closer and says, “Which Deity do you want to represent you?”

And I don’t know what to say, because I didn’t think about the Deities, because even though I don’t understand why, the Deities upset me. I want to ask Lindsay where she went when she ran out of class. She’s just looking at me now so serenely, waiting for me to answer, and I can’t believe I thought just a minute ago that I was relaxing.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

“You have green dangly earrings,” she says, reaching over to touch one, and then she adds on, “Why not Diana?” and I’m nothing if not a little bit lost.

“Okay, uh, Diana,” I say slowly, and she smiles at me. By now I’m too nauseous to smile back. I wonder if I might just throw up right here. I stare at her blankly and she stares back. She’s standing too close to me now. Once she stepped forward to get close enough to touch my earrings, afterwards, she never took a step back. You’d think most people would have taken a step back.

“Do you want to do The Lion again?” she asks.

“Okay,” I say and then I turn my back on her, because it’s not nice to look at someone and to have someone look at you while you are doing The Lion. I screw my face up as tight as I can and then I thrust my tongue out and hiss. Then the door opens, signaling it’s time for us to come back.

Lindsay gives me a thumbs-up sign, turns, and I follow her slowly, back into the room.

I walk slowly to the front of the room. I manage to clip my lavaliere mike onto the collar of my sweater without dropping it, and without too blatantly revealing my shaking hands to the rest of the class. I take a breath, and smile, and try as best as I can to Take the Room. I imagine I’m a celebrity standing poised on the red carpet, allowing the throngs and throngs of crazed paparazzi to take my picture.
Hope! Hope! Over here! This way!
I take another breath. I picture Alec in his underwear. I picture Lawrence reading his poem, and I remember how very good he was, and I try to think how I could be just as good. And I know I won’t be.

“I’m reading a poem by Stephen Dunn,” I say.

“Corners,”
I say, looking up. Even though a moment ago

I saw all these faces, now that I’ve started speaking in front of everyone, it’s not so much as if I am seeing everyone for the first time, but as if I’m seeing them all again after we had a big fight and didn’t talk for years. And that fight? It was completely my fault.

Beth Anne is smiling at me, soothingly and encouragingly, but it doesn’t help because the sweating has started. I take one hand from the book for a moment, and rest it on my stomach, trying futilely to quell the millions of little centipede feet running hard and fast across it.

“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 finished. And the fact that I actually finished, when it seemed there for a while like I never would, it gives me a little pause, it makes me think, just for a second, how maybe people are right when they say things like the only thing to fear is fear itself.

When asked about my anxiety level, I say, “Nine,” because as bad as it was, I know it could have been worse.

“Lindsay,” Beth Anne asks, “would you like to try again?”

“No!” she blurts out, her leg jerking out in front of her. “Not really.”

“Okay, class,” Beth Anne says, standing up very straight and Taking the Room, leading it by example, “I’m impressed with all of you. Everyone stood up very straight, which is so important, and everyone at least tried to Take the Room. I hope you all found that practicing the relaxation techniques outside helped to lessen the anxiety.” I see Lawrence nodding happily, vigorously. I have yet to believe that Lawrence, in fact, has any anxiety.

“I hope you’ve all seen that not only was tonight an opportunity to practice and to be taped”—she nods in the direction of the camera—“but also an opportunity to take ourselves out of the moment. Because you were busy thinking of your poems or, uh, your remote viewing.” She pauses, angles her body slightly away from Rachel. “You allowed yourself to forget a little about the actual public speaking.” I’m not altogether sure that happened for me, but I’m glad I was able to finish my poem.

“The next assignment is one that many students have found a great deal of success with, one that they get engaged with, and have found works really well to distract them from their anxiety.” Everyone waits. “For the next two classes, I want each of you to prepare a fifteen- to twenty-minute speech on this subject: The One That Got Away.”

Amy’s hand shoots up.

“Yes, Amy?”

“The One That Got Away? That seems a bit personal.”

“Well, yes, that’s part of the idea, to really put yourself out there, and also to come up with something on your own. Interpret the subject matter however you see fit.” She turns away from Amy and scans the room. “Any other questions? No? Okay, class, remember your groups, and when you’re preparing your speech, really let go, really get into it and come back willing to share. I know it’s a bit unorthodox but it indeed helps!” Beth Anne seems so excited. I almost feel bad for what I’ve been thinking: that the assignment makes no sense at all.