She waves the boats in from the sea.
One by one, they slide onto the sand-shore
with a thump that echoes
through her marrowed-out bones.
She shivers & shakes
as the sailors take her,
then cries through the aftercare,
the sailors feeding her mouthfuls of salted kelp,
saying they are sorry,
so sorry for what they’ve done.
Mr. Strane sets the poem on his desk and leans back in his chair, almost like he wants to distance himself from it. “You never title these,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “You should title them.” A minute passes and he doesn’t move or speak, only stares down at the poem.
Sitting there in silence, I’m smacked with the awful feeling that he’s tired of me, wants me to leave him alone. It makes me squeeze my eyes shut from embarrassment—for writing the blatantly sexy poem and thinking I could scheme and don a costume to get what I want, for reading too much into him loaning me a book and saying a few nice things. I saw what I wanted to see, convinced myself my fantasies were real. Sniffling like a little kid, I whisper that I’m sorry.
“Hey,” he says, suddenly soft. “Hey, why are you sorry?”
“Because,” I say, sucking in a breath. “Because I’m an idiot.”
“Why say that?” His arm is around my shoulders, pulling me in. “You’re nothing of the sort.”
When I was nine, I fell from the last tree I ever tried to climb. Him holding me feels just like that fall—how the earth came up to meet me rather than the other way around, the way the ground seemed to swallow me in the moments after landing. He and I are so close, if I tilt my head a few degrees, my cheek presses against his shoulder. I breathe in the wool of his sweater, the coffee and chalk dust smell of his skin, my mouth mere inches from his neck.
We stay like that, his arm holding me and my head against his shoulder, while laughter drifts in from the hallway and the downtown church bells mark the half hour. My knees press into his thigh; the back of my hand grazes his pant leg. Breathing shallow breaths into his neck, I will him to do something.
Then a small motion: his thumb strokes my shoulder.
I lift my face so my mouth almost touches his neck and I feel him swallow once, twice. It’s how he swallows—like he’s pushing something down within him—that gives me the courage to press my lips against his skin. It’s only a half kiss, but he shudders from it, and the feel of that makes me swell like a wave.
He kisses the top of my head then, his own half kiss, and again I press my mouth against his neck. It’s a dialogue of half actions, neither of us fully committed. There’s still a chance to turn away, change our minds. Half kisses can be forgotten but full kisses cannot. His hand squeezes my shoulder, tight and tighter, and something within my own body begins to rise. I struggle to force it down, worried that if I don’t, I might leap forward, grab him by the throat, and ruin the whole thing.
Then, without warning, he lets go. He draws away from me and then we aren’t touching at all. Behind his glasses, he blinks as though adjusting to new light. “We should talk about this,” he says.
“Ok.”
“This is serious.”
“I know.”
“We’re breaking a lot of rules.”
“I know,” I say, annoyed at the idea of him thinking I don’t realize this, that I haven’t already spent hours trying to figure out exactly how serious this is.
He looks me over, his face bewildered and hard. Under his breath, he mutters, “This is unreal.”
The second hand on the classroom clock ticks by. It’s still faculty service hour. The door is closed, but technically someone could come in at any moment.
“So, what is it that you want to do?” he asks.
It’s too big of a question. What I want depends on what he wants. “I don’t know.”
He turns toward the windows, crosses his arms over his chest. I don’t know isn’t a good answer. It’s what a child would say, not someone willing and capable of making up her own mind.
“I like being with you,” I say. He waits for me to offer more, and my eyes move around the classroom as I struggle for the right words. “I also like what we do.”
“What do you mean, ‘what we do’?” He wants me to say it, but I don’t know what to call it.
I gesture at the space between our bodies. “This.”
Smiling faintly, he says, “I like that, too. What about this?” He leans forward and touches the tips of his fingers to my knee. “Do you like this?”
Watching my face, his fingertips slide up my leg and keep sliding until they brush the crotch of my tights. Reflexively, my legs clamp together, trapping his hand.
“That was too far,” he acknowledges.
I shake my head, relax my legs. “It’s ok.”
“It’s not ok.” His hand slips out from under my skirt and he slides like liquid out of his chair and onto the floor. Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, “I’m going to ruin you.”
It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened so far, more surreal than him saying he wanted to kiss me or his hand stroking my leg. “I’m going to ruin you.” He says it with obvious torment, a glimpse into how much he’s thought about it, wrestled with it. He wants to do the right thing, doesn’t want to hurt me, but has resigned himself to the likelihood that he will.
With my hands hanging in midair above him, I take in his details: black hair, gray at the temples; the smooth grain of his beard ending at a clean-shaven line under his jaw. There’s a small cut on his neck, slightly inflamed, and I imagine him that morning in his bathroom, razor in hand, while I stood barefoot in my dorm room, smearing makeup on my face.
“I want to be a positive presence in your life,” he says. “Someone you can look back on and remember fondly, the funny old teacher who was pathetically in love with you but kept his hands to himself and was a good boy in the end.”
His head still heavy in my lap, my legs start to shake, my armpits and the backs of my knees break into a sweat. “Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.
“Some days I sit in your chair after you leave class. I rest my head on the table like I’m trying to breathe you in.” He lifts his head from my lap, rubs his face, and sits back on his heels. “What the fuck is the matter with me? I can’t tell you this. I’m going to give you nightmares.”
He hefts himself back into his chair, and I know I have to offer something to convince him I’m not afraid. I need to match him, show he isn’t alone. “I think about you all the time,” I say.
For a moment, his face brightens. He catches himself and scoffs. “Like hell you do.”
“All the time. I’m obsessed.”
“That I find hard to believe. Beautiful girls don’t fall in love with lecherous old men.”