How to Read Willa Cather

Sign up for a class you know nothing about simply because you like the professor. Tell your mother, a high school English teacher. Let her sigh on the phone. "Do King Arthur's Legends instead. That would actually be fun."

Stick with your original plan: you aren't really one for knights in armor anyway. Or, for that matter, fun, you suppose.

(The last drink you had was in Europe, and you were angry. You went to bed an hour later, already sober, still enraged. The hotel mattress smelled like mold, and the drunken Irish boys screamed out the street below. You still felt the Guinness from that afternoon in your throat, sore and black, molasses-burned. You swore you’d tell her, but you didn’t.)

-

Take Virgil the same semester.

Regret for the whole semester that you took Virgil.

Pull one of your earrings out during class. Engrave it like a shield; draw no war, no history, just a girl in a cornfield, staring right at you, as if asking, “Where are you?”

Don’t answer.

Wish at the end that you had read the Georgics instead.

-

You take too many baths at this school, you think, placing O’ Pioneers on the floor, next to the blue towels and yellow post-its. You pick at the small circles bursting on your feet. Where did these come from? Beigne little buds, they must be. Subtle infestation. That’s what you get for walking the hallway barefoot. Whoever said women were clean? No one who has gone to women’s college, that’s for sure.

You move to your legs, pale white and covered in hair. You should shave, your mother, the hippie, would say if she saw you. The veins underneath your skin are barely there, swimming like fish in a pond under the moonlight. You know they are there, living on, but they feel only slightly real, half-for-show, as if one wrong move, one lightning bolt, would swap them, dam the river, destroy the life below.

The hair between your legs is curly, baby-fine. You imagine a small child there burst in forward. Dreams are funny, aren't they? Hormones too. You wonder if the birth control--which you don't need--isn't doing its job.

You grab the Green Goddess razor and some soap, the wrong kind, and lather it beneath your armpits. You graze your skin with the thin metal, watching as your dead are uprooted, watching the plough destroy their fine bodies.

You leave the legs alone. You have no need to disturb them. You just want to wear that long dress without sleeves, is all.

After, you lay back in the tub, pull your hands to your breasts. You press down, clinical, like those pamphlets told you, not that you really think you will find anything. You are more fascinated with these bumps more than anything. The false crust from false milk in the barely-there nipples, the pink tips, floating in the yellow water like the ends of dying peonies.

You whisper to them, sinking. Are you really done yet?

They whisper back.

alexandra, samantha.

like alexander the great.

or samson and delilah.

alexander hamilton, samuel adams.

beer, booze, ploughs, refrigerators, homes, Green Goddess razor blades, empires, empresses, white roses, beheading, blood, drip, flow.

America the great.

america, the Beautiful?

mapped, by a man.

what is the point of flowering if

you are just going to be picked

anyway?

You rise from the water, cough out some water. Grab shampoo, honey-infused. Natural, in a plastic bottle.

what is a woman, anyway? your breasts will ask you.

How the hell are you supposed to know?

-

Buy a copy of Little House on the Prairie.

Bury it next to the rosebush growing outside your dorm. Water it. Wait for it to bloom.

Be unsurprised when it doesn’t.

Dig it up. You might need it for your thesis.

-

You build a fire pit one April night, a Saturday. Frolicking, you watch the flames rise and fall and rise again, embers dropping like the petals of decaying roses. The girl with the boy-short curls dances next to you, her blue eyes reflecting the blaze as she nearly slides backward from the elevated rock you both stand on. You hold her hand as you tug her off.

You wish you both were drunk.

You drag her to the center of the tiny green field, manmade for a women’s college. “Let’s spin until one of us falls over,” you dare her. She giggles in the dark; you can’t see her face any longer. Her body starts to whip, flapping, clapping the air around you, her curls getting caught in the wind. You wonder if she’d ever just float away into the sky, hang about the stars. An immortalized flower for you to watch from afar for evermore.

After all, you exist on silence.

You start to spin yourself. Blurring, twirling, you feel that high those friends always talk about, the one from the soil, from grass, and you feel yourself start to judge them, like the sour, self-righteous bitch you are. Who needs artificial nature, condensed weeds, when you have this? Impressionist colors, a sinking stomach, a heavy head, and arms that feel like they can lift you up and hide you between the tree branches of a thunderstorm, a whistling, mother-rocking-baby home, the kind of past you dream about, when your puzzle had fewer pieces.

You don’t stop when she calls your name the first time or the second time. You stop on three and swagger back to her, arms outstretched and free. She holds you for a second too long, rubbing the space between your neck and your bra.

When you pull away, she smiles that same smile, and your stomach twitches, still off-balance. She knows nothing.

Neither, you suppose, do you.

-

Tell all your friends that Willa Cather was gay.

Even if you still do not know what that means.

-

Unroot the goddamn rosebush. Plant it in front of your new dorm. Try not to worry about whether or not it is dead already. Prepare yourself for blossoms.

You won’t be here to see them anyway.

(You’ll be in Bath this springtime. Taking Virginia Woolf instead. You’ll just have to see the next blooming, when you come back. You have hope. And a girl to keep you updated.)

This is the author's first post. She notes that this blog will serve as a catalog of her reading as she works at her first publishing job this summer. She might write beyond. Some posts will be reviews or reflections, and some, like this piece, will be a creative response to the authors will inspire her. She appreciates your reading of her writings on reading.