She Was Like That by Kate Walbert

Author:Kate Walbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

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What did she even remember of Edith Wharton? The ones she had loved were the Romantics, and Wharton was unlike any of those women, the women among the Romantics, women who seemed to, at a moment’s notice, drop their lives to sail to the continent with dying lovers, or tempestuous lovers, or lesbian lovers, towing their children behind or leaving their children behind or never having children at all. They changed their names and dressed like boys. They lived on nothing more than water and what they caught with their hands from the sea. Wharton, as she remembered, had been wealthy, a woman of society, or at least of means.

Not like Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, galumphing next to her brother as he walked through daffodils, or so Helen imagined, Dorothy calling to him from the lakeshore as he rowed one way and then another, as he watched the shadows, the play of light, reveling in his spots of time. Or maybe Dorothy hadn’t called to him from the lakeshore at all, maybe she had steered the boat. So many of the women did. Unnoticed. Quiet. Allowing the geniuses to concentrate and scribble. Scribblers, Smith called them; Smith himself, he let on, guilty of penning a sonnet or two. But alas his other tasks, namely education of overachieving midwesterners who couldn’t give a damn, got in his way. She had adored him: greasy-haired, shy, the fifth Beatle or the reincarnation of one of her hero poets, a graduate student charged with this discussion group, their TA. Then she had dried her hair straight and kept endless index cards with sentences written in her studied, loopy hand. Pens bought at the co-op for their colors, their promised clarity: green, purple, pink. Smith barely audible, mumbling and still—it was a terrible crush.

Plus, he smoked! His cigarette balanced in a glass ashtray he took out of his mailbag, stuffed with their papers he graded in his cramped hand, ellipses, she remembers, as if everything he wrote actually meant something more, something too overwhelming to articulate, too profound. First, always, he placed the ashtray on the wooden desk at the front of the room—those days when chairs still faced forward—and then slowly he took his rolling papers and bag of tobacco from his corduroy jacket, an olive green that nicely clashed with his khaki pants and tennis sneakers. He took a while, rolling the cigarette he would smoke as he recited his Wordsworth, his Byron, his Coleridge, his Shelley, at times pausing to pick tobacco from his tongue, or lip, the cigarette, almost gone, balanced against the sullied picture of Margaret Thatcher in the glass ashtray’s well. He would eventually stub the butt on her face in rebellion. His teeth were predictably long and yellow, yet his eyes, as she remembers, were a glorious, stormy gray.

Lately, to keep awake, she recites “Tintern Abbey,” her favorite, from the bookshelf in Big’s room that still holds those textbooks, Norton Anthology’s index to the Romantics. She had forgotten.

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