Page 108 of The Second Draft
Anne swallowed, a little bashful. Was she eating too much, too fast? “What is it?”
“You’re awful pretty,” Sadie said, a little dreamily.
At some point, Anne had to give her cheeks a break from grinning. She might split them. “Takes one to know one, gorgeous.”
The color that filled Sadie’s face was visible even without the overhead lights. “Sweetheart, if you’re done, come sit down with me, all right? I want us to try out that idea of mine before it gets much later.”
Intrigued, Anne brushed the slaw off her hands with a napkin and followed Sadie to the dining room table. “You said earlier that I’m the clue. What did that mean?”
“One moment.” Sadie rustled in her bag, which was hanging from the corner of one chair, and pulled out a notebook and a pen. “We need the right equipment first.”
“You’re going to write something?”
“No. You are.”
Anne hadn’t expected that. She sat at the head of the table, the side Sadie usually took during Anne’s dinner parties. “Write what?”
“A poem,” Sadie said simply. She handed over the materials.
Anne fumbled the pen and nearly dropped the notebook, too. “Apoem?”
“Humor me. Any kind, any length. I don’t need to read it either. Write something just for yourself.”
“Butwhy?” Anne was bewildered. “I mean, you know how I feel about poetry—I don’t understand it, I’ve never liked it—”
“I told you once that you hated poetry because youwerepoetry.”
Those words had seared themselves under Anne’s skin for no reason she could identify at the time. She nodded.
“To be very clear, this isn’t an attempt to drag you into my profession.” Sadie put one warm hand on Anne’s shoulder. “I’m fully envisioning this as a one-time exercise, and that’s as it should be. The world needs poets, and the world needs poems. You’re the poem. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t get something out of an experiment, now that you’ve started to look at who you are. Poetry is time with yourself. Wordsworth said it best.That inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.”
“You said I didn’t like myself.” Anne remembered it so clearly. “At the same time you told me I was poetry.”
Sadie bent and kissed the top of her head. “I’m getting the feeling you’re starting to like yourself a little bit more.”
Anne stared at the notebook, its bright gold color a sharp contrast with the birch wood beneath it. She touched the cover.
“I can’t do what you do with language.” She remembered how she’d thought of it yesterday after she’d read Sadie’s email. “I can’t make flowers with it.”
Sadie smiled at her.
“You just did,” she said. “You always do. Because you’re a poem, sweetheart. Go ahead and write yourself down.”
Startled, Anne sat back in the chair. She still didn’t like poetry, and no matter what Sadie said, Anne didn’t have the same facility with words her beloved did. But four years with Sadie had made her see that there was beauty to be found everywhere. And maybe—maybe—it wouldn’t be so terrible to try something new. Something else.
After all, she’d made good friends with new experiences this past week.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot,” she said softly. “Just this once.”
“I’ll give you some space,” Sadie told her, a smile in her voice, and pressed her hand to Anne’s shoulder.
“No, please,” Anne said, still staring at the notebook. She pulled Sadie’s hand to her mouth, kissed it. “I want you to stay.”
“Then I’ll stay.” The response was immediate, pleased. “I’ll sit at the other end of the table so you won’t feel me breathing down your neck. Just take yourself into that blank space and see what happens.”
The sense of vastness Anne felt stretching in front of her was, somehow, not in the least intimidating. Who would she be? Who could she be? To be seen not just as reality but as possibility, too—Sadie had given her that. So much was still ahead.
As Sadie took her seat, Anne opened the book and smoothed down an empty page.
Slowly, carefully, she began to write.
