Prairie Schooner

Prairie Schooner 77.3 (2003) 87-103

Percussion

Valerie Miner

The cheery, incomprehensible cab driver insisted on carrying that big gray suitcase down steep stone stairs to her basement door. Lucky thing, too, because Anna hadn't realized what "garden flat" meant. She had imagined rolling the bag into a street level apartment, which overlooked a backyard brimming with Scottish flowers.

A girl, twelve or thirteen, was opening the door for them. Not what Anna had expected either. Where were her parents?

"Books!" declared the cabbie, jovially heaving the scarred gray elephant over the transom.

"Yes," she nodded, hoping to please him with her seriousness. And with the tip. Pound coins. Pound bills. Bank of Scotland. Bank of England.

"Here's how the immersion heater for the tub works," the red-haired girl was explaining listlessly.

"No, lassie, you've given me too much," winked the driver to Anna, "that's a tenner. You just owe me five more quid."

The telephone was ringing, the way it did in films. Brring. Brring. More polite than the long siren-squawk of American phones.

The girl shrugged as if to say, "It's probably for you."

Anna lifted the receiver. "Hello?"

"Hello, this is Susan, Lydia's mum. Is everything OK down there? Is Lydia explaining things fully?"

"Yes, thanks."

"Would you like to come up for a bowl of soup and homemade bread before you start unpacking? You must be exhausted."

"I'd love a rain check, but I wouldn't make great company right now."

The cabbie was lugging down the last of her bags. [End Page 87]

Anna's friends teased her, but she believed a poet had a right to one phobia. Hers was noise. She required quiet for work, so she lived on the third floor of a widow's house in the more rural side of St. Paul, a choice that doubled her commute. And the year Mrs.Penny remodeled her kitchen, Anna had sought refuge in the public library. Not that she had a lot of time for refuge or for poetry. At Greenwin Community College, she taught five sections of comp - or if she were lucky, four sections and one literature class.

Anna was surrounded by other people's stories, graying Carmelita's struggle to keep her kids off drugs. Nineteen-year-old Arnold's difficulty holding down a job, attend college, and parent his three-year-old son. Her own mother's dying - an endless and yet far too sudden process.

Basically, Anna felt lucky. She had good friends, a job, a sweet lover, one book of poetry published and another on the way. Amazingly productive, colleagues said, although some seemed to imply "promiscuous" when they said "prolific."

Mother did die in the spring. Her loving, combative, hilarious, melancholy mother died in her own home, in her daughter's arms, during the spring Anna turned thirty-five.

Everything shifted after that. In June, Stephen left. He had seen her through Mother's death, she appreciated that, but he was forty and wanted to sow a few more wild oats. (The cliches weren't his most attractive feature.) So after ten years of togetherness, romance, partnership, Stephen cashed out his modest savings, took an unpaid leave from the high school, and set off across country with his Burmese cat Edie in their camper truck. He'd return, he promised, after he got this traveling out of his system.

They had a lovely farewell evening - sea bass, champagne, opera torte, long talk, good sex. In the morning, Anna realized she wasn't sure she wanted him to come back.

What she wanted was to finish the book. What she craved was time. Distance from other people's stories. What she needed was peace and quiet. And one steamy July afternoon, a miracle occurred: an air mail letter announcing that Anna had won a literary fellowship to Edinburgh for the following spring term. If it wasn't a miracle, it was a fluke. (Anna never won anything, not even from the dollar lottery tickets she bought weekly.) But the award letter spelled her name right...