For now.
Quack Quack Quack
Ah, the hilarity of the sixth-grade boy who thinks he deserves
his own show on Comedy Central just because he goes quack
when he spots the duct tape across my lips. Duck tape! Get it?
Call my agent!
The yuck-it-uppers surrounding him slap their thighs and bobble
their heads and go quack quack quack as I roll my eyes and let it
pass.
But of course it doesn’t pass. Between every class after that
I must endure the contagion of the quacking started by that
sixth-grade boy who is undoubtedly basking in his brilliance
and planning his career. I bet it
never occurs to him that he really isn’t funny. If he had any idea
how annoying I find this endless quacking, would he even care?
No. He wouldn’t even sweat it.
Cacophony
1. harsh discordance of sound; dissonance: a cacophony
of hoots, cackles, and wails
2. a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds:
the cacophony produced by city traffic at midday
—from the Greek: kakos, meaning “bad, evil” + phone,
meaning “voice”
It cannot be a coincidence that Mr. Daly chose cacophony
as the vocabulary word of the day. That jangle, that mangle
of language and sound that is the soundtrack of every day
in middle school is even louder to my ears today. It bounces off
my silence like hundreds of thousands of millions of tiny stones
hitting a windowpane behind which I can only watch and pray
the glass will not be broken. I never heard so much until
I spoke so little.
Bad voice, evil voice, multiplied, multiplying, each feeding
on each, reaching my ears with such hateful words, such lies,
such meaningless cackles and quacks, cracks about my sealed lips,
the clothes I’m wearing, the new shoes that are apparently just like
my favorite teacher’s. I can do nothing right, it seems.
This babble, this chatter, I tell myself that none of it matters,
that the important thing is to hold my head high and remember
why I am choosing to be silent. I am not a lezzie loser know-it-all
big mouth brown-nosing teacher’s pet showing off just to get
attention. No, whatever their intention, I will let my silence
speak louder than their cacophony.
The Silent Ones
There are others who are silent.
I’ve never noticed them before.
They don’t wear tape over their mouths
or look defiant. They look down, or
if their eyes happen to catch yours,
they look away. How many are there
who walk these halls unnoticed each day
while I talk and talk and the loud ones
shout and shove? What do they think of
when they study the floor or glance sideways,
taking a chance that they will not be seen?
What is it they, unseen, are seeing?
That Look
What is that look Ms. Wyman is giving me as we pass
in the hall, the one she wears with such showy
satisfaction? I’ve seen it before. It’s the I’ve-just-
come-from-talking-to-the-principal-and-you’re-
in-trouble look. Why so cheery about it, Ms. Wyman?
Why devote so much facial real estate to a gloat?
You hold the power
but maybe that wasn’t always so.
Maybe when you were my age you felt powerless too.
Were you made fun of then as you are now? Maybe
that explains why you try so hard to look so wise.
Maybe that explains the sadness in the corners
of your eyes.
The Other Side
Mr. Kiley sits on the other side of his desk
playing the part of the principal. Blah blah,
he is saying, his mouth turned down in self-
importance, or maybe to keep from laughing
at how ridiculous this is. I mean, he’s looking
into a face with duct tape where a mouth
ought to be. I hear him ask if I am listening
and I nod and try to look grateful that he’s
letting me keep the tape on until lunchtime,
even if after that IT MUST COME OFF!
I notice a photo on the wall behind him.
I don’t recognize him at first in that floppy hat
and the T-shirt with a guitar on it and his arms
around two boys on either side of him,
all three of them beaming like they just won
some big prize. The younger boy is missing
on the end of a line.
I’ll bet Mr. Kiley is a good granddad.
I’ll bet he swivels his chair a lot so he can look
at that photo and see those smiles. I’ll bet
he hates having to wear a tie all day and act
like it matters that some girl in his school
is wearing duct tape over her mouth.
I nod when he asks, “Agreed?” and shake
his hand when he extends it and leave
his office thinking I’ll never look at Mr. Kiley
in the same way again, now that I’ve seen
that photo behind his desk and have imagined
him swiveling his chair all day long
just to take another look.
How the Day Is Full of Surprises
The way I can see in ways I have never seen before.
The way I can hear when I’m not busy planning what I have to say.
The way I’m relieved not to be the smart, outspoken one everyone
expects me to be.
The way it feels good to take a break from the me I expect of myself.
The way none of my friends (except Skeezie) tease me but instead make
me feel that what I’m doing is real and that it matters.
The way Becca leaves me alone.
The way Ms. Wyman doesn’t call on me in math class and allows me not to
speak.
The way Ms. Watkins admires what I’m doing and likes my outfit and
doesn’t point out that we’re wearing the exact same shoes.
The way when the tape comes off, though I remain silent, the scoffing
and quacking and calling of names begin to fade away.
The way not talking begins to make me feel that I, too, am fading away.
The way a few kids give me a thumbs-up, including some of those who
are silent most days, who have become visible to me only
Today.
One More Surprise
DuShawn sits at his old table at lunch,
laughing with his old friends,
looks sideways when we pass in the hall,
never reaches for my hand,
keeps his crooked smile and his dimples
to himself.
The first time I speak
Skeezie says, “Ha! I knew you couldn’t last the whole day!”
“I was only trying to go to the end of school,” I say, the words
feeling strange in my mouth, like food whose taste I’d forgotten.
Shutting my locker, I ask the gang to wait for me before
we head to the Candy Kitchen.
I go to wash my hands. They aren’t especially dirty.
Perhaps it’s the loneliness I want to wash away.
Taken
The last stall is taken.
I recognize the shoes.
I turn to walk away
but don’t get very far
when the stall door opens
and there’s Becca Wrightsman,
looking like a rabbit
surprised in the headlights
of an oncoming car.
She doesn’t try to hide
eyes that have been crying.
She says to me simply,
“You don’t know everything.”
And goes to wash her face.
Not Knowing
“Has the cat got your tongue?” Bobby asks.
We are walking and I, uncharacteristically,
am not talking. “You can speak now,”
he prods, but all I can give him are uh-huhs
and nods. My mind is on Becca and why
she was crying. It’s on DuShawn and why
he was lying when he told me he couldn’t
see me later.
“Wait up!” Joe cries, and he
and Zachary surprise me with hugs from
behind. “Our hero!” Joe says. “We love
your courage, we love your mind!” “We
want to marry it!” says Zachary, though
how they’ll marry my mind I really
don’t know.
My mind is full of not knowing,
and if it’s true that not knowing is a kind
of strength, then at the rate I am going,
I will soon be the strongest girl
in the world.
Busy
He told me he’d be busy
when I asked him to come over,
there was something about something
that had suddenly come up
and he can’t see me all weekend
and I think it’s all baloney
or a worse word than baloney
but I don’t know about what
and I’m tired of not knowing
but I’ll wait it out till Monday
for whatever to blow over, then
I might just
kick
his
butt.
What Was Here
Running in the backyard,
trying to catch a ball and missing it,
I trip on what turns out to be
a two-by-four, the end post
of a swing set long gone.
“Remember, Joe?” I say,
“remember when we were little
and would swing out here
in the summer evenings,
counting fireflies, pumping
higher and higher,
racing to the moon?”
“We never did,” says Joe,
as hopeless at throwing balls
as I am at catching them.
What we are doing tossing
a ball around in my backyard
is anybody’s guess.
“Of course we did,” I insist.
“My mother made us lemonade
and those little butterscotch cookies.”
“Nope,” says Joe. “I never had
butterscotch cookies, and we never
raced to the moon.”
Joe can be so stubborn.
Then I remember:
That old swing set was taken down
the summer I was four,
the summer Joe moved in to
the house next door.
It was someone else I raced
to the moon, a girl who lived
down the street. It was Becca
who loved my mother’s
butterscotch cookies,
who counted fireflies,
who pointed her toes to the sky.
It is Becca who would remember
what was here.
Becca
She lived down the street.
Each spring the first tulips on the block
nodded hello from her mother’s garden.
When my mother told me she’d moved
to another town, using the word divorce,
I nodded in my most grown-up way,
not asking what it meant. I bent
down in their garden later that day,
picked a tulip to take home, peeked
through the window to make sure
they weren’t playing a trick, hiding inside
and waiting for me to seek.
The house was empty. The tulips,
all but the one drooping in my hand,
nodded goodbye as I turned away.
Grandma Finds Me
Grandma appears at the back door.
“Stay for supper, Joe?”
“Can’t,” says Joe, “but thanks.”
And off he goes to his house, running
and trying to kick his heels together in the air
and not quite making it and laughing
at himself for not quite making it,
as Grandma lets the screen door
shut softly behind her and comes to me,
pulling her braid over her shoulder
and stroking it like a cat. “I like Joe,”
she says. “I like how comfortable he is
in his own skin.”
We stroll around the yard, looking for
tulips. Grandma carries a pair of shears.
I love the word: shears. So old-fashioned
and yet it’s what she calls scissors
because it’s what her mother called them,
and it’s a way for her, she says,
to keep her mother near.
“What were girls like when you were my age?”
I ask as she bends and touches a yellow tulip
the way moments ago she’d touched my arm.
“Did they mess with your head?” I ask. “Did they
act like you were their friend and then talk about you
behind your back? Were there mean girls
when you were my age?”
Grandma’s shears go snip, and she straightens
herself to look me in the eye. “There have always
been mean girls, Addie. I just don’t know
that they were ever so well organized. But then
back in the day we didn’t have as many means
of organizing.” She leans over and snips. “Cell
phones and the Internet and what have you.
Cruelty has gone multimedia so production
has gone up.” She hands me the tulips
and we turn back to the house.
“Rise above it,” she says, her hand
on my shoulder. The air is turning colder
as I tell her, “I’ll try.”
Home
It isn’t because I was silent today
and took from the silence lessons to keep.
I have always loved this quiet time of the week,
or have for as long as I’ve been allowed
to stay up this late. Ten o’clock on Friday night.
Dinner has been eaten, the dishes have been washed
and dried, the cats are curled around somebody’s feet.
Kennedy mine, Johnson my mother’s. The PBS
documentary on sea turtles ended five minutes ago,
and the TV put to bed. I finger the edge
of my Garfield and Odie bookmark, flip the tassel aside,
find my place in The Secret Life of Bees. My father
in his chair is reading too but I can’t quite see the title,
and he is already so lost in the words I don’t want
to interrupt him to ask. My mother, nestled
in the other corner of the sofa, is knitting another hat
for another child who needs a hat somewhere in the world.
Johnson must be worn out from the day’s activities,
whatever they were for him, because he doesn’t lift
a paw to bat at the needles flashing and clicking
above his head or the yarn dangling inches from his
whiskers. Kennedy stretches and yawns, looks up at me
with one eye open, one eye closed. I’d tell him he’s got
&
nbsp; sticky-eye (that’s what I call it), but he’d just look at me
as if to say, Get a life.
Grandma shakes her head at something she’s just read,
takes off her drugstore glasses, and gazes into space.
She’ll be going home soon, sitting alone in the living room
she once shared with my grandfather, his chair empty
across from hers, his papers still stacked at its side.
I remember that chair, Grandpa sitting there, me
climbing up his leg and onto his knees when I was little
and he was still strong. How he would bounce me to Boston
to get a loaf of bread. Trot trot home again . . .
Grandma sighs, then winks when she sees me looking.
My mother curses a missed stitch, my father grunts
and turns a page. I roll my head slowly to relieve the crick
that has announced itself in my neck and return to my book
reluctantly, not quite ready to leave Paintbrush Falls, New York,
for Tiburon, South Carolina, to join Lily in her search for a home
when I have found what she is looking for right here.
A Nice Lunch
“I’ll make us a nice lunch,” Grandma says
the next morning when I find her packing
and go into a pout. “Just you and me.
Your parents will be out. Now, put your
lip back where it belongs.” She hands me
a shawl, the one she calls her Carmen
shawl. “Here,” she says, “this goes perfectly
with your eyes.”
“For keeps?” I ask as if I’m five years old.
“For keeps,” she says with a wink. “And I’m just
getting myself organized. I don’t leave until next week,
so who knows what other treasures I may yet
bestow upon you. In the meanwhile, how about
I make us a nice lunch?”