The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (88 page)

There
is also indirect evidence for the landing. Amherst, frequently confused with Lakehurst, was obviously the inspiration for Orson Welles’s setting the radio version of
War of the Worlds
in New Jersey.
¹⁷
In addition, a number of the tombstones in West Cemetery are tilted at an angle, and, in some cases, have been knocked down, making it clear that the Martians landed not only
in Amherst, but in West Cemetery, very near Dickinson’s grave.

Wells describes the impact of the shell
^18
*
as producing “a blinding glare of vivid green light” followed by “such a concussion as I have never heard before or since.” He reports that the surrounding dirt “splashed,” creating a deep pit and exposing drainpipes and house foundations. Such an impact in West Cemetery would have uprooted
the surrounding coffins and broken them open, and the resultant light and noise clearly would have been enough to “wake the dead,” including the slumbering Dickinson.

That she was thus awakened, and that she considered the event an invasion of her privacy, is made clear in the longer poem, Number 186B, of which the first stanza reads: “I scarce was settled in the grave—When came—unwelcome guests—Who
pounded on my coffin lid—Intruders—in the dust—”
¹⁹

Why the “unwelcome guests” did not hurt her,
²⁰
in light of their usual behavior, and how she was able to vanquish them, are less apparent, and we must turn to H. G. Wells’s account of the Martians for answers.

On landing, Wells tells us, the Martians were completely helpless due to Earth’s greater gravity, and remained so until they were able
to build their fighting machines. During this period they would have posed no threat to Dickinson except that of company.
^21
*
she wrote in 1873.

Secondly,
they were basically big heads. Wells describes them as having eyes, a beak, some tentacles, and “a single large tympanic drum” at the back of the head which functioned as an ear. Wells theorized that the Martians were “descended from beings
not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands…at the expense of the body.” He concluded that, without the body’s vulnerability and senses, the brain would become “selfish and cruel” and take up mathematics,
²²
but Dickinson’s effect on them suggests that the overenhanced development of their neocortexes had turned them instead into poets.

The fact that they picked off people
with their heat-rays, sucked human blood, and spewed poisonous black smoke over entire counties, would seem to contraindicate poetic sensibility, but look how poets act. Take Shelley, for instance, who went off and left his first wife to drown herself in the Serpentine so he could marry a woman who wrote monster movies. Or Byron. The only people who had a kind word to say about him were his dogs.
²³
Take Robert Frost.
²⁴

The Martians’ identity as poets is corroborated by the fact that they landed seven shells in Great Britain, three in the Lake District,
²⁵
and none at all in Liverpool. It may have determined their decision to land in Amherst.

But they had reckoned without Dickinson’s determination and literary technique, as Number 186B makes clear.
²⁶
Stanza Two reads:

“Writ plain and clear” is obviously an exaggeration, but it is manifest that Dickinson wrote a note and delivered it to the Martians, as the next line makes even more evident: “They [indecipherable]
²⁷
it with an awed dismay—”

Dickinson
may have read it aloud or floated the note down to them in their landing pit in her usual fashion, or she may have unscrewed the shell and tossed it in, like a hand grenade.

Whatever the method of delivery, however, the result was “awed dismay” and then retreat, as the next line indicates:

“They—promptly took—their leave—”

It has been argued that Dickinson would have had no access to writing
implements in the graveyard, but this fails to take into consideration the Victorian lifestyle. Dickinson’s burial attire was a white dress, and all Victorian dresses had pockets.
^28
*

During the funeral Emily’s sister Lavinia placed two heliotropes in her sister’s hand, whispering that they were for her to take to the Lord. She may also have slipped a pencil and some Post-its into the coffin,
or Dickinson, in the habit of writing and distributing notes, may simply have planned ahead.
^29
*

In addition, grave poems
³⁰
are a well-known part of literary tradition. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the throes of grief after the death of his beloved Elizabeth Siddell, entwined poems in her auburn hair as she lay in her coffin.
^31
*

However the writing implements came to be there, Dickinson obviously
made prompt and effective use of them. She scribbled down several stanzas and sent them to the Martians, who were so distressed at them that they decided to abort their mission and return to Mars.

The exact cause of this deadly effect has been much debated, with several theories being advanced. Wells was convinced that microbes killed the Martians who landed in England, who had no defense against
Earth’s bacteria, but such bacteria would have taken several weeks to infect the Martians, and it was obviously Dickinson’s poems which caused them to leave, not dysentery.

Spencer
suggests that her illegible handwriting led the Martians to misread her message and take it as some sort of ultimatum. A. Huyfen argues that the advanced Martians, being good at punctuation, were appalled by her profligate
use of dashes and random capitalizing of letters. S. W. Lubbock proposes the theory that they were unnerved by the fact that all of her poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
^32
*
*

It seems obvious, however, that the most logical theory is that the Martians were wounded to the heart by Dickinson’s use of near-rhymes, which all advanced civilizations rightly abhor. Number 186B
contains two particularly egregious examples: “gone/alone” and “guests/dust,” and the burnt hole in 272? may indicate something even worse.

The near-rhyme theory is corroborated by H. G. Wells’s account of the damage done to London, a city in which Tennyson ruled supreme, and by an account of a near-landing in Ong, Nebraska, recorded by Muriel Addleson:

It is significant that the poem in question is Number 214, which rhymes
³⁵
“pearl” and “alcohol.”
³⁶
Dickinson saved Amherst from Martian invasion and then, as she says in the final two lines of 186B, “rearranged” her “grassy bed—/And Turned—and went To sleep.”

She does
not explain how the poems got from the cemetery to the hedge, and we
may never know for sure,
³⁷
as we may never know whether she was being indomitably brave or merely crabby.

What we do know is that these poems, along with a number of her other poems,
³⁸
document a heretofore unguessed-at Martian invasion. Poems 186B and 272?, therefore, should be reassigned to the Very Late or Deconstructionist Period, not only to give them their proper place as Dickinson’s last
and most significant poems, but also so that the full symbolism intended by Dickinson can be seen in their titles. The properly placed poems will be Numbers 1775 and 1776, respectively, a clear Dickinsonian reference to the Fourth of July,
^39
*
and to the second Independence Day she brought about by banishing
⁴⁰
the Martians from Amherst.

On Wednesday
Elizabeth’s
next-door neighbor came over. It was raining hard, but she had run across the yard without a raincoat or an umbrella, her hands jammed in her cardigan sweater pockets.

“Hi,” she said
breathlessly. “I live next door to you, and I just thought I’d pop in and say hi and see if you were getting settled in.” She reached in one of the sweater pockets and pulled out a
folded piece of paper. “I wrote down the name of our trash pickup. Your husband asked about it the other day.”

She handed it to her. “Thank you,” Elizabeth said. The young woman reminded her of Tib. Her hair was short and blond and brushed back in wings. Tib had worn hers like that when they were freshmen.

“Isn’t this weather awful?” the young woman said. “It usually doesn’t rain like this in
the fall.”

It had rained all fall when Elizabeth was a freshman. “Where’s your raincoat?” Tib had asked her when she unpacked her clothes and hung them up in the dorm room.

Tib was little and pretty, the kind of girl who probably had dozens of dates, the kind of girl who brought all the right clothes to college. Elizabeth hadn’t known what kind of clothes to bring. The brochure the college had
sent the freshmen had said to bring sweaters and skirts for class, a suit for rush, a formal. It hadn’t said anything about a raincoat.

“Do I need one?” Elizabeth had said.

“Well, it’s raining right now if that’s any indication,” Tib had said. “I thought it was starting to let up,” the neighbor said, “but it’s not. And it’s so cold.”

She shivered. Elizabeth saw that her cardigan was damp.

“I can turn the heat up,” Elizabeth said.

“No, I can’t stay. I know you’re trying to get unpacked. I’m sorry you had to move in in all this rain. We usually have beautiful weather here in the fall.” She smiled at Elizabeth. “Why am I telling you that? Your husband told me you went to school here. At the university.”

“It wasn’t a university back then. It was a state college.”

“Oh, right. Has
the campus changed a lot?”

Elizabeth
went over and looked at the thermostat. It showed the temperature as sixty-eight, but it felt colder. She turned it up to seventy-five. “No,” she said. “It’s just the same.”

“Listen, I can’t stay,” the young woman said. “And you’ve probably got a million things to do. I just came over to say hello and see if you’d like to come over tonight. I’m having a Tupperware
party.”

A Tupperware party, Elizabeth thought sadly. No wonder she reminds me of Tib.

“You don’t have to come. And if you come you don’t have to buy anything. It’s not going to be a big party. Just a few friends of mine. I think it would be a good way for you to meet some of the neighbors. I’m really only having the party because I have this friend who’s trying to get started selling Tupperware
and…” She stopped and looked anxiously at Elizabeth, holding her arms against her chest for warmth.

“I used to have a friend who sold Tupperware,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, then you probably have tons of it.”

The furnace came on with a deafening whoosh. “No,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t have any.”

“Please come,” the young woman had continued to say even on the front porch. “Not to buy anything. Just
to meet everybody.”

The rain was coming down hard again. She ran back across the lawn to her house, her arms wrapped tightly around her and her head down.

Elizabeth went back in the house and called Paul at his office.

“Is this really important, Elizabeth?” he said. “I’m supposed to meet with Dr. Brubaker in Admissions for lunch at noon, and I have a ton of paperwork.”

“The girl next door
invited me to a Tupperware party,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t want to say yes if you had anything planned for tonight.”

“A Tupperware party?!” he said. “I can’t believe you called me about something like that. You know how busy I am. Did you put your application in at Carter?”

“I’m going over there right now,” she said. “I was going to go this morning, but the…”

“Dr. Brubaker’s here,” he said,
and hung up the phone.

Elizabeth stood by the phone a minute, thinking about Tib, and then put on her raincoat and walked over to the old campus.

“It’s exactly the same as it was when we were freshmen,” Tib had said when Elizabeth told her about Paul’s new job. “I was up there last summer to get some transcripts, and I couldn’t believe it. It was raining, and I swear the sidewalks were covered
with exactly the same worms as they always were. Do you remember that yellow slicker you bought when you were a freshman?”

Tib had called Elizabeth from
Denver when they came out to look for a house. “I read in the alumni news that Paul was the new assistant dean,” she said as if nothing had ever happened. “The article didn’t say anything about you, but I thought I’d call on the off-chance that
you two were still married. I’m not.” Tib had insisted on taking her to lunch in Latimer Square. She had let her hair grow out, and she was too thin. She ordered a peach daiquiri and told Elizabeth all about her divorce. “I found out Jim was screwing some little slut at the office,” she had said, twirling the sprig of mint that had come with her drink, “and I couldn’t take it. He couldn’t see what
I was upset about. ‘So I fooled around, so what?’ he told me. ‘Everybody does it. When are you going to grow up?’ I never should have married the creep, but you don’t know you’re ruining your life when you do it, do you?”