Thank you, Megan.
That was sweet.
My fiance threw away those Crocs for the very simple reason
that they smelled.
And she forbid me to buy a second pair for good reason.
But yeah, I love those shoes.
This is a bigger crowd than 210.
So that's my benchmark, my 210 classes.
This is, yes, my new book.
All those stories, as Megan said,
take place in right in or around Vaughn, Maine, which
is a town that does not exist really
but is based on the town where I grew up,
a tiny town in Maine on the Kennebec River.
And I've been trying--
I've been debating which story to read.
There's a story about adolescent-- a mock tragedy
about adolescent love, which has some humor in it,
or a story about an 83-year-old woman that's very depressing.
Humor.
OK.
I'm going to read the adolescent love story, which I guess--
you would say is a little bit rated R. So just--
no more R than Steve.
Steve is a walking R. OK.
And it's a longer story that I've cut down.
I've cut down severely.
Hopefully it'll still make sense.
And I like the way Steve offers a little explanation,
as poets often do.
But what I like about Steve's explanations
is that they seem blended into the poems.
But I would like to thank Steve for the reading,
and Megan and Frances and Gail for having us read here
tonight.
It's a real honor.
The story is called "She."
Oh, one more thing I'll say about this story,
as I adjust this thing, is it's a little bit of a wonky story.
It's a first person omniscient.
So those of you have taken my class, it's a kid--
a guy looking back to when he was a kid.
And he knows everyone's thoughts,
which it's a little known fact that this
is true of people in Maine, that they're all omniscient.
This is called "She."
"Everything Natalie said seem to herself
to have been said better by him.
He was less fond of speaking, however,
than he was of hitting people in the face, which
seemed a more likely source of her love
to those of us who were in speech class with him.
It could be, we reasoned, she was in love
with the kind of things he might say if he spoke more often.
It was easy for someone like David Dion
to be casual about fate.
He was still in junior high.
But high school girls picked him up in their daddy's cars
and had sex with him out at the pit.
No one I spoke to on a regular basis had even been to the pit.
It was hard to guess how old he was if you didn't already know,
if he hadn't tumbled down into your grade
from the grade above when he was held back.
He couldn't be that smart you could
tell from the way he grinded himself.
But he was smart enough to know he didn't have
to be loyal to any one girl.
In school, he sat two seats away from me in homeroom,
where he spilled over his desk, stroking his thin mustache,
and cracking his knuckles, one handed, one finger at a time.
In woodshop, we were partners making a gun rack.
I made the rack.
He kept it.
He slouched back in his chair, his elbows on the sill,
looking out the window from the corner
of his eye like a prisoner.
Not even the shop teacher said anything.
They were related, kids said.
He was related all over, mostly in the next county, where
every other ice fisherman was an uncle,
every other woman behind the cash register or not,
and the rest, cousins.
He could walk into any store out there and borrow 10 bucks.
He owed everyone, even me, at least that much.
I lent him $1 at a time.
He rolled the bills into joints and smoked them or sold them
for $2, making a few bucks, he said, for later at the bar.
Before Dion, Natalie and Ron, her boyfriend,
would walk down the hill after school,
passing my house crossing the tracks on their way
to the public library, which was where a lot of us went,
strange to say, when we had nothing else to do.
They walked alone holding hands, had
been going out since she was in sixth grade, he in junior high.
In sixth grade, people kissed on the playground.
But no one went out, went steady, held hands in public
at that age, except them.
Miss Hagel, the librarian, had no worries
when they sat down to hold hands across the top of the reading
table.
Others had to be watched and checked on,
would be up to nasty business in the stacks among the geography
books.
Ron and Natalie would only kiss each other
for half a minute on the grass in front of the library
while waiting for his mother to pick him up for dinner.
At first, it was hard to believe that Natalie had left Ron
and that she was together with Dion.
No one saw them holding hands or even talking in the daylight.
Denise reported seeing them kissing
in the dark behind the school.
And she was the first to confront Natalie about it,
about Ron.
Ron's over, she said.
How, Denise wanted to know.
How did this happen?
Natalie shrugged their shoulders.
One afternoon, the basketball team
stood on the court and their practice gear
not bouncing the ball staring off
in different directions in disbelief
that Dion had quit for her.
Mr. Dawson, the coach, was late.
He was never late.
They couldn't believe Dion was with her right now,
maybe often his brother's car or at his cousin's house where
both parents worked, or often Vaughn woods by the pond,
or out by the pit waiting for it to get dark,
or down by the river even, near the landing,
waiting for it to get dark.
Any of them would have traded places with Dion.
The game of basketball suddenly seemed
pointless next to the thought of his hand
on her hip and she and her green slacks and yellow sweater
bearing her face in his flannel shirt,
curling her fingers into his back,
closing her eyes to hide even from herself
how much she loved him.
When Mr. Dawson arrived, the team
was sitting on their practice balls
and on the bench with their heads low.
They hadn't noticed him come in, finger splayed out in the air.
The game of basketball seemed to him
a cruel drama written to parody his frustration.
And now he was forced to be its director.
They had only been together for a day.
But it seemed to Natalie as if they had been together forever.
There seemed no need to tell him anything.
With one glance, she knew he knew
the years they had not been together
were little more than preparation for this moment.
She could tell from the turn of his hand
hanging out the window of his brother's car
what he was thinking about.
He was thinking about her.
When he looked at her, she had to look away.
When he thought about her, she was thinking about him.
When he looked away, she looked at him.
When she looked away, she could feel him looking at her.
She realized now that she had always
been looking for him, even though they had always been
in school together, sitting just a few seats away,
standing across the playground from each other,
he with his friends at the corner of the school parking
lot by the dumpster, she with hers by the swing set.
She had seen him but not seen him.
She had been alive but not alive until now.
In the following days, she formed
a list of things she wanted to have and do and be without Ron.
She wanted a boat but not any boat,
a giant motor sailor they could take all the way down the coast
to Florida, so big there could be a storm
and they wouldn't even notice down
in the cabin below where there would
be a fireplace in a television VCR in one.
Who would be sailing the boat, Dion wanted to know.
They would hire someone for that.
But the rest of their life was imagined
in modest proportions-- dogs, golden collie mixes,
not pure at all, three children, a house
where everyone had a bedroom and there
was one extra for a guest, and some land with a view
of the hills around town.
She didn't want to live down by the river or so close
to a neighbor that you could see in their window at night.
She had never thought of living anywhere else.
He had thought of Montana.
Montana, the word sounded chewed in her mouth.
God, she said, shaking her head.
Other places-- Gardner, Farmingdale,
Monmouth-- those places, the only other places she knew,
were bad enough.
Imagine what people were like even further away.
No, she wanted to go to Florida though,
not to live just to go there as the Nasons did every winter,
taking their daughter Julie with them so that she came back
with a tan, even if she did look like a squirrel.
And no matter what time of year it
was, Natalie would have fresh flowers in every room
of the house, this idea from her mother of how people really
lived, and a horse in a red barn for her daughter,
and light blue carpeting in every room--
our room, she said, with a canopy bed.
But he didn't know what one was.
It has a kind of roof, like a tent, she explained.
He didn't see the point but pictured it anyway--
a bed with a tent in a room that already
had a ceiling and above that a roof.
He had pictured a cabin in Montana
where you could look up and see the nails from the roof
shingles coming through.
And lavender, she said.
No one would be allowed to smoke.
Every room would smell of lavender, like me,
she said, and pressed her wrist to his nose.
This was the smell of their future.
Well, none of us had been in love, not really until now.
Anything we had called love came back to us
as mockery in the face of this sudden flight from reason.
My friend Andy had said he was in love with Missy.
And it was a shame Missy was not in love with him.
A daily lament rose from him like the steam of the heat
from the pipes at school.
Andy's mother hit the counter with her fist in their house.
They're too young, she said, talking about Natalie
with Dion.
And we knew she was talking about their tongues running
along the inside of each other's teeth
and the suddenly anxious too tight grip of her hand
between his legs, and the taste of each other's skin,
and the smell of each other's bodies, and the feel of him
slipping inside her, and her settling down
over him, the shape of her mouth, the shape of his.
She was talking about their bodies
but thinking about the words they had used.
Everyone knew.
Love, finally growled, as if the creature
itself had risen from her dreams to take over her kitchen.