Three Story Set

I don't think I'll do this very often, but I really like these three little stories I constructed for an American Lit class. They're crafted out of inferences from an Ezra Pound poem.

The first voice is inspired by Levi, the youngest son in Zadie Smith's amazing novel On Beauty, the second voice is more or less my own, and the third is my grandmother as I envision her at age 10 or so.

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In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound, 1916


Voice One
Everybody knows how it is that nobody rides the bus anymore, except that everyone whose anyone rides it sometimes when they have to, like when they don’t have gas money or when your mom won’t come pick you up so late or you just want to drop in, all stealthy-like, to your brand new location and not let anyone see that the car your driving isn’t really the car they would want to be seen in, or that it doesn’t exist yet except in your savings account, which is in the old Coca-Cola tin that you found someplace dusty. So then you have to ride the bus. That’s okay most of the time, unless you really need to actually be somewhere pronto, you know, like maybe you have to pick up your little sister from the dentist or you just really need to get to see this movie because your brother and his friends keep going on about the part when if your mom was there, she’d cover your eyes. Maybe you have a job, and then you really don’t want to ride the bus, because chances are if you’re riding the bus and you have a job, you need to wear a nametag or maybe even a hat. In that case, you for sure don’t need to be seen. Even on the bus. You’d be better off walking yourself to wherever it is you feel you’ll be needing to go.

Voice Two
Where I come from - a place that often invokes grins or knowing looks that I’d rather not reciprocate - the bus is not a ferry for the infirm and recently released. It’s an experiment in urban sociology, one that I’ve enjoyed since I first made the decision to remain without a driver’s license. I love my hometown buses because they often smell like patchouli, and because my age places me in the middle rather than youngest quartile of their ridership. The offhanded upholstery of the seats and sideboards, reminiscent of the outskirts of a 1980’s skating rink, is so perfectly thin that comfort begins to seem like an unwanted luxury. On the bus, I sit up straight in my anonymity and open myself up to the judgment of my public transit peers. Will the stroller-maneuvering mother send her second child to sit by me, or will the older gentleman with the hammer and sickle pin on his lapel take the seat first? Will it be the headphoned and hooded boy who entered the bus as if an invisible and unpleasant force had pushed him up the steps? The matriarch and her little brood head to the back of the bus, the older gentleman settles gingerly into the row marked “reserved for the elderly” and the head bobbing teen gives me an appraising look before sitting, sideways, in the seat next to me. Wrinkled edges of a red and yellow striped shirt stick out from under one of his layers of insulation. He’s headed to work out at one of the fast food restaurants on 11th, and I can feel the lack of burger and fry enthusiasm radiating through his back. Now the rest of the passengers begin to file past the driver, wallets held open to expose their neon tickets. Only when all the window seats are full does the true sorting begin.

Voice Three

My mother used to say, as she glanced sideways at our father with a seasoned smirk on her face, that roses were one of the only gifts that God couldn’t give. My brother and I were included in that list of gifts, and we were meant to know it quite constantly. My father, however, did not often find himself gracing the pages of her sacred lectionary index. The roses, my brother and I knew, were something she wanted in a sort of whimsical way. She was quick to remind herself in a quiet voice that roses were, in fact, a gift from Our Father, but not from our father. He wasn’t one to give that kind of gift. He gave presents like a brand new yellow rain jacket when all the other girls at school were wearing red ones. He gave presents like what you might expect Santa to give if Santa had been an Eagle Scout. We don’t believe in Santa anymore, but we want to. It’s a hard place to be. My brother and me are in that awkwardness between absolute love and terrifying rebellion, and our parents know it. They have two of us to deal with, too, you know, which I have to think will be quite a bother. But right now we are still their darlings, we love them as no other human being can.
So now we are walking together, the two of us, back to the little townhouse where mother sits in her rain-watching space and knits in preparation for the winter that won’t be here for months yet. She is a hunter, a gatherer, a relic of the Depression who was born thirty years after those times had ended. She cans things, all sorts of things, and we wear crocheted sweaters to school in November. Our mother is not a woman who gets roses on a regular basis.
I hold the roses with all the strength of my eight years and they bounce along beside me, flowers down and stems up. Behind my brother and me is a trail that goes all the way back to the sign for the C Line, Red Train, and a man my father’s age bends down to tenderly pick up each petal as it falls. He cradles them in his hand for a moment, and then lets them go.