The Summer Without Men

whether something might not happen soon and picked me up again and are reading still, then I want to reach out for you and take your face in both my hands and cover you with kisses, kisses on your cheeks and chin and all over your forehead and one on the bridge of your (variously shaped) nose, because I am yours, all yours.
    I just wanted you to know.
    *   *   *
     
    Alice did not come to class. There were only the six, and when I asked if any of them knew whether Alice was ill, Ashley volunteered that it might be allergies; she was quite allergic to any number of substances, and a titter spread among them, a minor contagion of humor, which gave me an opportunity. “Allergies are funny?” I said.
    The girls went mum, and so we leapt into Stevens and Roethke and what it means to really look at something, anything, and how after a while, the thing becomes stranger and stranger, and I turned them all into phenomenologists and had them staring at pencils and erasers and my Kleenex pack and a cell phone and we wrote about looking and things and light.
    After class, Ashley, Emma, Nikki, and Nikki’s second incarnation, Joan, imparted the news that Alice had been a little “weird” lately and had “made a scene just yesterday because she couldn’t take a joke.” When I asked what the joke was, Peyton looked sheepish and moved her eyes away from mine. Jessie said in her high small voice that I should know by now that Alice “is kinda different.”
    I muddled forward, remarking that Alice was Alice, and I hadn’t been ticularly aware of any disturbing differences as such. We all had our idiosyncrasies and I ventured that she had seemed “up” during the last class (without letting on that I knew why), and she had written an amusing poem, so I was surprised that she couldn’t take a joke.
    Ashley was sucking on a mint or hard candy, and I watched her mouth move as she pushed the lozenge around in her mouth, her eyes meditative. “Well, she takes meds for something about her mood, you know, cause she’s a little…” Ashley gestured as if she were throwing balls in the air.
    “I didn’t know that,” Peyton said loudly.
    “She’s got ADHD, you mean?” Nikki said.
    “She didn’t say what it’s called; it’s something…” Ashley said, eyes clouded.
    “Half of school’s on something, Ritalin or something,” Peyton announced. “That’s no big deal.”
    I saw Emma give Peyton a hard reproving look. Emma was not subtle.
    Enlightenment about Alice was not forthcoming. I smiled at the little group gathered around me and said very slowly, “It may be hard to believe, but I was young once, too, and moreover, I remember being young. I remember being exactly your age, in fact, and I remember jokes, too.” It was a cinematic moment, and I was fully conscious of it. I did my best to don my most all-knowing, authoritative, good-teacher-beloved-by-the-students expression, a cross between Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brodie, and then I slapped Theodore Roethke shut, stood up, and made my exit. In the film, the camera would follow my back to the door, my high heels—sandals in reality—clipping smartly on the floorboards, and then I pause, just for a moment, and turn to look over my shoulder. The camera is now close. Only my face is visible, and on the screen, it is gigantic, perhaps twelve feet tall. I beam out at you, the audience, turn again, and the door shuts with a loud Foley click behind me.
    *   *   *
     
    Something seemed to be wrong with Abigail. My mother was sitting beside her on the sofa, stroking her back. Regina was making noises: high-pitched, staccato wails.
    “She fell,” Mama said to me, her face white. “Just now.”
    Abigail was examining her knees with a confused expression, and I felt a spasm of fear. I bent over her, took her hand, and asked all the usual questions, beginning with “Are you okay?” and moving on to particulars about pains and odd sensations. She didn’t answer but stared hard downward and then began shaking her head slowly.
    Regina flapped her hands in the air and in a strangled voice said, “I’m going to pthe string for help right now. I’m going into the bathroom to yank it. She can’t talk. Oh my God. I have to call Nigel. He’ll know what to do.” (Nigel was the Englishman, and exactly what he was going to do in Leeds for Abigail in Bonden was a secret known only to Regina.)
    Abigail turned her head toward her panicked friend and said in a loud