Empire Falls

the baseball diamond .
    In truth, this jeering had a more profound effect on Miles than on Cindy Whiting, who either didn’t understand its import or was pretending not to. “What do they mean, ‘Go, Roby, go’?” she wondered innocently, causing Miles, who’d flushed crimson when the varsity trotted by, to glow even more hotly .
    Miles, hoping to keep Cindy from reiterating her declaration of love, took to directing their conversations to neutral academic subjects and often helped her with her homework, especially English, which happened to be his best subject and her worst. To Miles, her incomprehension had less to do with stupidity than with stubbornness. For some reason she angrily blamed each and every author in their literature text for her inability to deduce their intention and meaning, and when Miles tried to explain a troublesome passage or concept, her face became a mask of resentment and frustration. Poetry in particular infuriated her. To her way of thinking it was like pig Latin, designed for the sole purpose of allowing those in the know to enjoy the discomfort of those who weren’t. Miles suggested that poems weren’t really written in code, and that they weren’t nearly as difficult as she was making them, but in fact even simple, obvious metaphors threw her for a loop, and more sophisticated forms of figurative language filled her with angry indignation .
    “It’s simple,” Miles said one afternoon. “It’s called personification. The speaker of the poem is comparing death to a coachman. ‘Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me.’ ”
    “If that’s what she means, why doesn’t she just say it?”
    “She is saying it,” Miles said, pointing to the line. The girl’s failure to grasp something so simple mystified him. If anyone might be expected to have a feeling for Emily Dickinson, he’d have bet it would be Cindy, but she refused to even look at the page. The poem had made her feel inferior, so she wanted nothing more to do with it. Staring at the line in question would only deepen her conviction that there could be no justification for this or any other poem. “Why doesn’t she say it so I can understand it?” she insisted .
    Miles thought it might be wise not to answer this question, and so he said, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, “Well, do you understand it now that I’ve explained it?”
    “No,” she assured him mulishly and, as if to dissuade him from any further attempts at enlightenment, she emphatically closed the book, shoved it into her canvas bag, struggled to her feet, took up her cane and hobbled across the hall to the lavatory .
    In her anger and haste, however, she hadn’t completely closed the bag, and Miles noticed a thin paperback that didn’t look anything like a schoolbook wedged sideways among the texts. He had no business going through her things, but he couldn’t help wondering what sort of reading might appeal to someone so militantly resistant to the subtleties of language. The cover, depicting a summer camp setting with two giggling teenage girls sneaking off into the woods after a pair of beckoning teenage boys, looked innocent enough. It resembled those books aimed at seventh-grade girls, the kind read aloud at slumber parties, so Miles was surprised to discover that its contents , at least on the page whose corner was turned down, were mildly pornographic. The passage his eye fell on had two girls, presumably the same ones depicted on the cover, secretly watching half a dozen boys roughhousing in the river. The boys were all naked, and one of them, Jules, was particularly worthy of their attention. “ The thing between his legs, so strange and so thrilling, made Pam’s pussy pucker,” Miles read . This sentiment certainly required no gloss. He managed to slip the book into the canvas bag just as Cindy stepped back into the hall .
    “And what’s more,” she said, apparently taking up the discussion right where they’d left off, “I don’t believe you really understand those poems either. I think you’re just pretending.”
    “Fine,” Miles said, no longer interested in arguing the merits of poetry. The dreadful fact of the matter was that the passage he’d read, its ridiculous alliteration aside, had given him an erection, and there was something about knowing that Cindy Whiting read and presumably enjoyed such books that made the situation worse. When she settled onto the bench next