Miriam's Well Read online

  “Maybe let’s just try to figure out what the poem says,” suggested Miriam. “‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ What has feathers?”

  “Indians?”

  “Or maybe a bird?”

  “Vultures.”

  “Maybe a little bird, one that brushes your soul with its soft feathers.”

  “Crapola.”

  Miriam blushed, which finally gave her face a splash of color. But she hung in there. “It has to be a bird, because it perches. Oh, look here in the next stanza. It actually says it’s a bird.”

  “So what do I write down? The question on the worksheet is, ‘What does the image of feathers suggest?’”

  “Well, Adam, am I supposed to tell you the whole answer?” asked Miriam, and suddenly I felt like the dunderheads Diana’s always talking about. Maybe Diana wouldn’t have appreciated me as her poetry partner either.

  “You write down your answer, and I’ll write down mine,” I grumbled. She wrote left-handed, with her hand on top of her lines, so it was pretty hard to copy it without her noticing. I wrote something about softness, mooshy feathers, I don’t know what.

  “Next question,” Miriam said. “‘Does the narrator of this poem feel hopeful? Find the words in the poem that support your opinion.’”

  “Well, it says hope, that’s the first word,” I pointed out.

  “But does it keep on hoping?” Miriam asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why?” Dead air. “Well, Adam, just look at the kind of words that are used. Look at ‘sings,’ ‘sweetest,’ ‘warm.’ Aren’t these words that lift the soul?”

  “Oh, yeah? Look at the last verse. ‘Chillest’ and ‘strangest.’ Those words dump on the soul.”

  “So then you put down your answer, and I’ll put down mine.” She said it this time.

  “Mrs. Loomis, we’re not getting anywhere,” I protested.

  “In fact, you are,” the Big Bang said, her face buried in The Stranger.

  Miriam sucked on her pencil eraser. “You know what I can’t help thinking about when I think of poems of hope?”

  I couldn’t wait to hear. I also heard my stomach growling, because this was its sacred snack time.

  “That line from Isaiah—”

  “The Bible?” I could feel it coming. Hellfire and brimstone.

  “Don’t say it so contemptuously, Adam. Your name is from the Bible, you know. Listen to the line, ‘For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’ Isaiah 55:12. What do you think?”

  “I think you two have done enough for this afternoon,” Mrs. Loomis said, and it was the first time I was ever glad to hear her voice. At Loomis’s door, I waited to see which way Miriam would go, so I could take off in the opposite direction.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Told by Miriam

  Does Adam Bergen go out of his way to be immature and insensitive, or is it just a big cover-up? I thought about this all the way home. It took me nearly thirty minutes to get home, because I had to walk so slowly, and standing there waiting for the bus would have been worse. Each step caused a mean stab in my back, about where I thought my kidneys were, so I walked like I was carrying a pan of dishwater.

  Vultures! Were those the only birds he could think of for such a delicate poem? Was it boys in general, or just Adam? Or was it Jewish boys who thought up such things?

  He didn’t look Jewish, whatever Jewish looked like. I used to think it had something to do with a nose and black curly hair and a very short neck. That wasn’t Adam at all. Adam was lanky. Though he wasn’t actually tall, he walked on the balls of his feet with a lot of spring and height and looked like a prizefighter prancing around the ring. His hair was brown, not black, about the color of Brother James’s, and quite straight. It fell into his eyes; he always needed a haircut. And as for his nose, there was nothing extraordinary about it. It didn’t dominate his face, because his eyes did.

  Walking slowly down Thirteenth Street, I tried to get a clear picture of what Jewish looked like: Judd Hirsch, I thought, only Judd Hirsch wasn’t Jewish, or was he? He never played Jewish characters on TV.

  I was out of breath, so I stopped at the Amoco station a few blocks from our house and leaned against a Super Octane pump. An old man came out.

  “Whaddya need? A dime’s worth of gas for yer lawn mower? Free air for yer bicycle tires?”

  “No, sir, just a minute to rest,” I murmured, but I moved on. What if he recognized me and told the men next time they were in to fill up? I picked up my pace, trying not to wince as my heels hit the pavement. What was wrong? I’d had this pain for days and days. Growing pains, I’d thought, like the secret cramps I used to get in my thighs when I was in sixth grade and shooting up past most of the boys in the class. But after a couple of days, I admitted to myself that you didn’t get growing pains in the kidneys. Something else was wrong.

  Finally, I was home, and I collapsed on the zinnia couch with my shoes still on. “Dear God,” I prayed, “You tell us that You listen to the small as well as the great. Brother James is the greatest man I know. He speaks to You on our behalf. I am just a small speck in Your universe, but I need You to listen to me now. I know that sickness is a curse that begins with Satan. I’m fighting it. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Please, whatever I’ve done, forgive me and cast out any unclean spirits that linger in me, because God, I’m not sure I can handle how much I hurt without disgracing myself.” I lay back on the stuffed needlepoint pillow. “Please help. Please help please help please.…”

  Mama found me there, I don’t know how long afterwards, but the shadows across the living room were long, and the room had taken on a late afternoon chill.

  “That does it, baby. I’m having Brother James come out. You are just not right.” Mama went to the phone, dialed as fast as the numbers would come back around, tapped her fingers on the wall. “This is Sister Louise, I need to talk to Brother James,” Mama said, as bossy as I’d ever heard her. But her voice soon changed. “Quite well, Brother James, yes. The men are well, also. But it’s my Miriam I’m troubling you about. Could you find the time for a visit today? Bless you, Brother.” She hung the phone gently on the wall. “He’ll be over within the hour,” Mama said. “We’ll get ready.” She slipped off my shoes, tucked the afghan around my legs, and put the Book in Gold Leaf on my lap. I thought about Isaiah, about the trees clapping their hands, but that would not be the passage Mama had in mind. Mama leaned across me and turned to a well-worn page in the Book of James. She read the first few words, to jog her memory, then recited the rest:

  “‘Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.’ What have you to confess, baby?”

  “Nothing, Mama.”

  “Darling, your body is telling you something. It’s telling you that your soul and your mind are wracked with worry over something you ought not to have done, or ought not to have thought. Tell me, baby. We can face anything together.”

  “There’s nothing, Mama.” I tried so hard to think of the sin she was looking for, the thing that caused such a vacuum in my soul that pain and disease could seep in to fill it. Mama took my hand.

  “We’ll just wait for Brother James,” she said.

  I felt his presence even before he rang the bell. It was as though he surrounded our house with a protective cloak; no down-drafts from the flue, no breeze from the cracked window could get through.

  A striking man was Brother James. Maybe six and a half feet tall, he made my Uncle Benjamin, who was an imposing man himself, seem puny. In the coo
ler months, except on Sundays, he always wore denim overalls and a blue plaid flannel shirt and western boots. The Book in Gold Leaf filled one pocket, penny candies that he passed out to all of us, the other.

  Now he strode across the room. The floorboards were weak and creaking beneath his studded, black boots. He touched Mama lightly on the shoulder, and she pulled the maple rocker up for him, just across from me.

  “Miriam,” he said, and the sound alone filled me with the joyous certainty that I had the most beautiful name in all of creation. “Your mama tells me you’re ailing.”

  “Yes, Brother James. I’ve been hot and peevish, that’s all.”

  “And why’s that, child?”

  “I don’t know, Brother James.”

  He turned to Mama. “Is it her time?” he asked, and Mama shook her head. I felt my ears go hot with embarrassment. He put his warm, work-rough hands to my cheeks. I was terrified that he would feel the lies in my face. “Something troubles her soul, Sister Louise.” He closed his eyes, his face nearly touching mine. I felt the bristles of his dark beard on my nose.

  “I am reading turmoil here, Miriam, anguish and doubt and terrible fear.” It was he, it was he I was afraid of, my silent mind shouted. He’ll know I’ve doubted. He’ll know I’ve lied. I took a shallow breath and reminded myself: no it was not he that I was to fear. He was warmth, comfort, wisdom, kindness. He was my father as surely as if he had given me to Mama, the way men do, eighteen years ago. He had not, though. Eighteen years ago I’d had a real father.

  He gently pulled his hands back from my face and folded them into the bib of his overalls. His eyes, nearly the color of robin’s eggs, came to rest on me. We three sat in the fertile silence that I was too weak to fight, and soon it was all out, everything I had tried to hide from Mama.

  “I’ve had this awful pain in my lower back,” I cried, “and it hurts every time I move. I fainted in school yesterday. Fainted. I woke up on the floor, and everyone was watching me. They sent me to the nurse’s office. She put a thermometer in my mouth and took my temperature. She said I had 101. I made her promise not to tell Mama, and now I’ve told everything,” I said, wailing like a three-year-old. And yet, as miserable as I was, somewhere in my mind I wondered, What would Adam Bergen think of a scene like this?

  “I swear, Brother James, I’ve turned to the Book in Gold Leaf for guidance, and I’ve read and read, but one passage keeps drifting to the front of my mind. Jeremiah, remember? ‘Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed; wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?’”

  “Oh, dear God,” Mama said.

  “Sister Louise.” Brother James moved his head ever so slightly, enough to tell Mama to go and leave us alone. She was reluctant, but we always did what Brother James said.

  “I’m ashamed to think that way, Brother James. Please help me.”

  Brother James said, barely loud enough for me to hear through the pounding in my head, “We read in Matthew 21:22, ‘And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.’ Have you asked in prayer to be rid of this pain and fever?”

  “Yes, Brother James.”

  “And nothing has changed?”

  I hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out: “It’s grown worse.”

  “You have asked in prayer, and Matthew tells us whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, is that true?”

  “If you have faith, Brother James.”

  “Do you have faith, Miriam?”

  “Not every minute of every day,” I confessed.

  “And each minute that you waiver, my child, is like a crack through which the dark spirit may be sucked into your soul. Each minute.” He closed his eyes, and I knew he was praying. Finally, he said, “Let us speak to the Lord together.”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Lord Jesus, Miriam and I ask Your ear. Say it with me, child.”

  “Dear Lord,” I began, then faltered.

  “You know the words.” Brother James nodded his head, encouraging me.

  “Lord, what am I to do? As You healed the lame, the halt, the blind, the dumb, and Miriam, my namesake, who suffered with leprosy, please remember me, too.” I looked to Brother James; was my prayer worthy? I used to be able to pray so easily.

  Brother James’s eyes were closed. I saw his eyeballs working beneath his eyelids. For a second I thought he was asleep. Then his soft, dreamlike voice said, “Go on.”

  “Yes. Oh, Lord, You who made the heavens and the earth with Your outstretched arm, nothing is too hard for You. I don’t think my meager little pain is too much for You to handle.”

  “Surely it is not,” Brother James said. “Have faith.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Ask Him, go on.”

  “How can I be stronger, Lord?” I waited, as though an answer might form in the ashes of the fireplace. I remembered the handwriting on the wall in the Book of Daniel. No message appeared on the wall for me; there was only the picture of a wheatfield, a barn, a silo, a lone horse.

  Perhaps Brother James sensed my attention wandering, or felt the air of expectancy I’d breathed into the room. He opened his eyes and took my hands in his. “We have prayed for your faith to be buttressed, Miriam, and for your faith to be as sturdy as the cedars of Lebanon.” He stood and placed both hands on my head, his fingers as light as hummingbirds. Lifting his own head toward the heavens, he said, “In the name of the Father and of our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave His life for our sins, and of the Holy Spirit. A-men.”

  “A-men,” I whispered.

  Brother James gave me a peppermint and told me he would see himself out. “God be with you.”

  With him gone, the down-draft was back, and Mama came with another blanket to wrap around me. I slept through dinner.

  By morning I felt much better. The pain in my back was a faint twinge, probably just because I’d been favoring it for days. I sank to my knees beside my bed and thanked God and Jesus and Brother James for still another miracle, and I vowed to be faithful every minute of every day, if only I would be spared the shame of the pain.

  At school, Adam was waiting for me in French. “I’ve got to have something to show her by third period,” he said, thrusting his copy of the poetry worksheet at me.

  “I thought you didn’t care about grades.” Did he read the unusual playfulness in my voice? I felt buoyant for the first time in weeks.

  “I don’t, but I’ve got to go to that debate tournament in Dodge City, and she’ll screw that up for me if I don’t look like I’m working on poetry. What about the stupid Robert Frost poem?”

  “‘Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,’” I quoted.

  “Yeah, right, that one. What’s this fire and ice stuff?”

  “Let’s say fire is passion, violence, apocalypse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s bad,” I said, hiding a smile. This Adam, he seemed to be causing smiles, or was it that I was liberated from my doubt and pain?

  “Okay, in twenty-five words or less, fire is passion, and ice is—what?—cold hatred?”

  “Worse,” I said.

  “Worse? What could be worse? Quick, the bell’s about to ring.”

  I said, “Worse than cold hatred is not caring at all.”

  “Yeah, I got it now. I’m not bad at this poetry stuff, am I?” He grinned, flashing the thin wire of his retainers, and I remembered only a couple of months before when his mouth was full of metal. But I hadn’t noticed when he got his braces off. How could I miss a thing like that?

  “Clahss, clahss, si-lahnce, s’il vous plaît,” Mrs. Kearney said. We hushed like a symphony crowd when the maestro lifts his baton. “Bonjour, mes élèves!”

  “Bonjour,” we all replied.

  “Bon Jovi,” Adam said. Oh, it was a good day. He had smiled at me. No, that wasn’t why it was a good day. It was a good day because Brother James had restored my faith, and b
ecause Robert Frost was almost as good as Emily Dickinson. And because Adam had smiled at me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Told by Adam

  In about five years, Diana would be an architect. Most of us in the senior class were planning to start planning any day, but Diana had always taken the right courses to guarantee her a spot in one of the top architecture schools in the country. That’s the kind of girl Diana was—she knew what she wanted. Me, for example. From the time we started going out, she couldn’t see any point in wasting her time or hot, wet whispers on any other guy in the school. One word sums up Diana: efficiency. Efficiency, and ambition, and brains. Three words. And she was a natural beauty. She had brown eyes as big and soft as Bambi’s. Usually they were laughing eyes, but she could make them wide and innocent when she needed to, or small and pointed when she was fiercely determined to blow a debate opponent into shrapnel.

  She wore her hair in shaggy brown curls that fluffed out around her face—none of that sticky processed stuff that feels like wet cotton candy.

  Everyone liked Diana, in spite of her incredible superiority and kissing-up behavior. She was never afraid to say whatever was on her mind or to stand up for the underdog. Come to think of it, she would have made a good socialist, except for the fact that she comes from generations of rich fathers who had rich fathers.

  My family could have been rich, since my father’s a lawyer, but he’s always taking no-win cases, or cases that pay in what he calls personal rewards. That’s his philosophy on my allowance, also, that the personal rewards of living in my family should compensate for the measly bucks. So I’m always interested in a good cheap date, not that I let girls pay my way, often.

  One of the cheapest things you could do in this town was to go to real estate open houses. The first Sunday of the Poetry-Is-a-Bitch phase of my life, there was a model house open at a new development. It was furnished down to every detail, including a pair of ceramic dalmations like you’d win on Wheel of Fortune.

  Of course, Diana and I had to pass as potential buyers, not kids, or we’d have been thrown out before she even opened her mouth. So we both dressed like Yuppies, in debate clothes, and I carried my debate briefcase, as though I’d just rushed over to the house after taking a deposition at a Senate hearing. I didn’t wear my retainers, either. I took them off as soon as I left the house, even though my mother was always warning me that I’d end up with fangs if I didn’t wear them.