“You’re a really good poet, Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.
I could see back to an afternoon when Ruth watched her teenage cousin undress to take a bath while Ruth sat on the bathroom rug, locked in the bathroom so her cousin could babysit her as she’d been told. Ruth had longed to touch her cousin’s skin and hair, longed to be held. I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls’ crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.
The last week of the symposium was always spent developing a final project, which the various schools would present in competition on the night before the parents returned to pick the students up. The competition wasn’t announced until the Saturday breakfast of that final week, but the kids had already begun planning for it anyway. It was always a better-mousetrap competition, and so the stakes were raised year after year. No one wanted to repeat a mousetrap that had already been built.
Samuel went in search of the kids with braces. He needed the tiny rubber bands orthodontists doled out. They would work to keep the tension tight on the guiding arm of his mousetrap. Lindsey begged clean tinfoil from the retired army cook. Their trap involved reflecting light in order to confuse the mice.
“What happens if they like the way they look?” Lindsey asked Samuel.
“They can’t see that clearly,” Samuel said. He was stripping the paper off the wire twists from the camp garbage bag supply. If a kid looked strangely at ordinary objects around the camp, he or she was most likely thinking of how it would serve the ultimate mousetrap.
“They’re pretty cute,” Lindsey said one afternoon.
Lindsey had spent the better part of the night before gathering field mice with string lures and putting them under the wire mesh of an empty rabbit hutch.
Samuel watched them intently. “I could be a vet, I guess,” he said, “but I don’t think I’d like cutting them open.”
“Do we have to kill them?” Lindsey asked. “It’s a better mousetrap, not a better mouse death camp.”
“Artie’s contributing little coffins made out of balsa wood,” Samuel said, laughing.
“That’s sick.”
“That’s Artie.”
“He supposedly had a crush on Susie,” Lindsey said.
“I know.”
“Does he talk about her?” Lindsey took a long thin stick and poked it through the mesh.
“He’s asked about you, actually,” Samuel said.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re okay, that you’ll be okay.”
The mice kept running from the stick into the corner, where they crawled on top of one another in a useless effort to flee. “Let’s build a mousetrap with a little purple velvet couch in it and we can rig up a latch so that when they sit on the couch, a door drops and little balls of cheese fall down. We can call it Wild Rodent Kingdom.”
Samuel didn’t press my sister like the adults did. He would talk in detail about mouse couch upholstery instead.
By that summer I had begun to spend less time watching from the gazebo because I could still see Earth as I walked the fields of heaven. The night would come and the javelin-throwers and shot-putters would leave for other heavens. Heavens where a girl like me didn’t fit in. Were they horrific, these other heavens? Worse than feeling so solitary among one’s living, growing peers? Or were they the stuff I dreamed about? Where you could be caught in a Norman Rockwell world forever. Turkey constantly being brought to a table full of family. A wry and twinkling relative carving up the bird.
If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then – singing – a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in.
