Willa by Heart (14 page)

“Oh, I see,” Mariel says, “they told you to invite—”

“No,” I say. “I came to tell you that I'm going to be in
Our Town
after all. The Stage Manager. I
thought maybe you could fill me in on what I've missed at practices.”

“Truly?” Mariel says.

“Truly,” I say. “Do you have a bike? If we hurry, we'll be just in time for my father's famous barbecued chicken.”

“Of course you will go,” Mr. Sanchez says. He smiles, shooing his daughter away. “Go, Mariel, go enjoy.”

We bike alongside each other. The rim on the front tire of Mariel's bike is green. The rim on the back is orange.

“Mrs. Saperstone told me how you saved the Bramble Library,” she says.

We start talking about books. Mariel loved
Their Eyes Were Watching God
too. Right now she's reading
The Scarlet Letter,
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I make a mental note to put that on my summer list. Mariel says she and her father plan her lessons in the morning before he leaves for work. Mrs. Santiago, the lady in number 7, watches Nico and Sofia when Mariel needs to run errands or go to the library.

“No wonder you swim so early in the morning,”
I say. “It sounds like that's the only time you have to yourself.”

“It is okay,” Mariel says quickly. “In a family everybody has to do their part.”

Before I know it, we're back at the inn, walking toward the picnic tables, laughing about the director.

“What's with all the black?” Mariel says, giggling.

“I know,”
I say. “And what the heck is her name, anyway?”

And then Tina and Ruby are standing there, staring at us.

“We wondered where you went, Willa,” Tina says, not smiling.

Ruby is looking down at Mariel's old sneakers.

I introduce Mariel to my friends, painfully aware of how Tina and Ruby are sizing up Mariel's clothing. Green shorts, too long for the style this summer, pink T-shirt with chocolate fingerprints on the front.

Mariel follows their gaze. She swipes at the chocolate, making the stains worse. “I should have changed,” she says.

I feel my face getting hot. I look at Tina and Ruby with their perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect
summer-pink pedicures. “Come on, Mare, I've got a shirt you can borrow.”

When we walk inside the inn, Mariel says, “Your home is beautiful.”

As we head upstairs, I realize Mariel is more my mother's size. I fish a few shirts out of my mother's drawer. Mariel chooses a plain white pocket tee. My mother has a dozen of them. I start to say, “Don't worry about returning it,” but then I remember how insulted Rosie was on Mother's Day, and I decide Mariel is probably proud too.

In my room Mariel moves to my bookcase like metal to a magnet. “Wow,” she says, running her hand along the spines, just the way I would if I had just seen all these books. She tilts her head to read the titles. “Yes.” She nods, smiling. “Yes,” clearly recognizing some favorites of her own. “These are all yours?” she says. “You own them?”

“Yes.”

Mariel looks at me. “You are lucky.”

I smile and nod. “I know. Listen, anytime you want to borrow—”

“Thank you,” Mariel says, “but the library serves me fine.”

I think how sad it is that Mariel doesn't own the
books she reads. It must be hard for someone who loves books so much not to be able to write notes in the margin, circle lines she loves, draw little smiley faces and stars next to her favorite passages….

The first picnic of the summer is a smashing success. After dark we roast marshmallows in the old stone fireplace. “Look,” Mariel says, pointing, “a firefly.” Tina squints her eyes at Mariel, not smiling, but my other friends seem to like her okay.

Nana offers to put Mariel's bike in her station wagon and give her a lift home. “Thank you for inviting me, Willa,” Mariel says. “I had a wonderful time.”

“She's nice,” I write in my journal later.

But when I close my eyes to sleep, I picture Mariel hugging JFK. I picture them kissing during the wedding scene of
Our Town,
and I am wide awake again.

Why did I invite her to my house? Introduce her to my friends?

What was I thinking of?

EMILY:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER:
… The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.

—
Our Town

Sam is leaning against his desk leafing through a well-worn book when we file in to English class. It's June, and I feel that old familiar seesaw inside. Worried about finals, excited about vacation, worried about finals, excited about vacation. And this June I've also got two weddings and
Our Town
to think about too.

I look back at JFK. He winks at me and smiles.

We'll have the whole summer together. Just the two of us. Well, as soon as baseball is over, that is.

When we're settled at our desks, Sam adjusts
his glasses and reads aloud:

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”

My mind wanders, wondering about the little son Sam lost years ago. Did he have Sam's eyes? That Sam-smile that melts your heart?

“Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass,”
Sam says.

“Every summer I return to Whitman's grass and
Walden'
s pond. And each summer I find new treasures.”

Sam flips through
Leaves of Grass.
I know he's looking for some passage he has circled. It was Sam who taught me always to read a book with a pen in my hand.

Sam finds what he's looking for and continues:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
….
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

I look around the room. All eyes are on Sam. It is impossible to be bored or sleepy or distracted when someone is so passionately sharing his joy.

“This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.

“‘Bathes the globe,'” Sam repeats. “And this,” Sam says, leaning forward, “this takes my breath away….”

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

I write that in my notebook. “The journey-work of the stars.”

I think of stars as stationary. I know people see them fall, but I have never seen one move. I can't wait to buy
Leaves of Grass
so I can write in it, make it my own.

Sam picks up another book from his desk.
There's a frayed string hanging from the spine. Another well-worn, well-loved book. “My other summer friend,” Sam says.

He is silent for a few seconds. We watch him, waiting.

“Thoreau's
Walden,”
he says, tapping the book's cover like he's applauding it, now gently stroking it like a beloved pet. “I once thought of following in Thoreau's footsteps, going off and living alone in the woods to search my soul. I was burned out from teaching in an overcrowded school. My wife and son had died in a car crash the year before …”

The new girl, Shefali, gasps. She didn't know that about Sam.

“… and I was desperate to find some meaning in my life.” Sam slides his reading glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He looks so handsome and distinguished. I look around the room.
Do you all realize this man is my father?

Sam reads aloud from
Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“That's depressing,” Tina says.

I turn to her like she's crazy.
That's fascinating,
I think. I wonder if Sam still wishes he could go off and search his soul, alone. I think of Mariel's mother going off in search of her dream. I think how Mariel would love this class. I look at Tina. She's looking at Ruby. They roll their eyes.

“Don't these writers make you want to start your summer reading today?” Sam says.

There are a few snickers throughout the room.
Yes,
I think.
Yes.

“In just a few weeks,” Sam says, “you lucky people will have a whole long, glorious summer to lounge on the grass, soaking in books.”

“I'll be soaking in the sun,” Ruby says, and people laugh.

“That's right,” Sam says, “nothing better than reading on the beach.”

The bell rings, and we gather up to go.

“Don't forget. Our final text.
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Next week.”

It's late when I get home from practice. I love being the Stage Manager. Mrs. Saperstone was right. It's the best character. I've got some of the
greatest lines: “Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars—doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky.”

There's that journey theme again. What did Whitman say? “The journey-work of the stars.” Then Wilder's “crisscross journeys in the sky.” I love those lines. Poetry.

I remember the summer we first moved here to Bramble and I spotted that man next door putting poetry on the little billboard on his front lawn. I called him the Poet before I learned his real name.

His name was Sam—Sam Gracemore.

Soon his name will be “Dad.”

I can't find Sam in the inn. “I think he's outside,” Mom says.

The herb garden smells spicy. Dill, rosemary, thyme. The vegetable garden is thriving too. Sam is proud of his three types of lettuce, four kinds of peppers, this year.

It's dark back here, but the moon is bright. Sam is sitting on the stone bench in the center of the labyrinth. His eyes are closed. He looks peaceful.

Sam walks the labyrinth only early in the morning or late when the guests have retired for the night. He designed and planted this amazing maze himself. It's a circle within a circle within a circle. The narrow pathway is bordered on both sides by perennial flowers and shrubs. You enter and follow the outer rim, then curve inward, then outward, then inward again, weaving in closer, than farther away, then toward the center, then out to the border, as you make your way to the resting bench in the middle. The bench is the bull's-eye. I think of it as God's eye. Sam's sacred place.

I stand here staring at this good, good man who is now my father.

My birth father, William Frederick Havisham, was a man of big, brash, wild ideas. His crazy scheme to whisk my mother off on their honey-moon in a hot-air balloon ended in a tragedy. It took my mother more than a decade to overcome the shock and pain of his death. She was frozen like a statue with grief, too afraid or angry to love again.

Sam is a different sort of man. This labyrinth is his Walden Pond, his wild hot-air balloon. Sam's
dream is rooted strong in the earth. He won't float away from us.

I think about running through the labyrinth right now and giving Sam his Father's Day present early: “Happy Father's Day, Dad.”

I have practiced that moment over and over in my mind.

But no, I'll wait. I won't spoil the surprise.

Tina calls to talk about Suzanna Jubilee's wedding again.

The Blazers will descend on Bramble next Friday for the rehearsal dinner, sixteen bridesmaids and ushers in tow. Tina and Ruby are planning on sneaking in.

“Willa, think about it,” Tina says. “If those sixteen bridesmaids are beauty pageant winners, those ushers will be
cheesecakes.”

“Don't you mean ‘beefcakes'?” I say.

“Cheesecakes, beefcakes, wedding cakes. Who the cake cares, Willa? You worry about the words, all I want to do is feast my eyes on sixteen gorgeous, hunky guys.”

“But what about Jessie?” I ask. “Aren't you still going out?”

“What about him?” Tina says. “You know he's my love muffin. But a girl can still check out the bakery, right? Nothing wrong with looking at the cheesecakes.”