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Surf with P. B. Shelley
- University of Arkansas Press
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Surf with P. B. Shelley I don’t like poems or novels. I just teach them for cultural studies. Dear Theoryhead: I’ll admit that I fell out with Shelley, for your reasons, for about a day when I had just turned seventeen and discovered that truckstops in European locales were still truckstops, guard dogs still loud, and nobody was pointing through the crowd of tourists to my spiky, glowing heart, nobody shouting I was set apart for glory. All that day I rode the bus and brooded on the bodyguard who’d cussed me out, I thought, in German when I tried to genuflect at the poet’s house beside the great lake at Geneva. Brooded on the gulf between me—native of the wrong class, latitude, wrong side, wrong watershed— and Shelley. I identified instead (for the first time) with Harriet Westbrook, his first wife, and the clammy martyr’s nook she stood in, self-drowned. Condensation tears dripped down her blank pearl eyes and limestone ears. 47 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 47 Resenting lords and sons of baronets and Dukes of Hazzard on the TV sets throughout the lobby of the next hotel, the one in Nice, I didn’t feel compelled to write what I had felt. I didn’t feel a cloud of witnesses. I didn’t feel. My roommates knew the route for sneaking out past curfew to the beach. I went along. The cobblestones were echoing with songs from Rocky Horror; lights from its marquee and spotlit fountains led us toward the sea or, rather, the retaining wall. Below its balustrades was where we should not go: unlit, unguarded water’s edge. Deep black Leviathan. We ran for it. Stones clacked beneath our feet as we kicked off our shoes and rolled our jeans and waded in to bruise our ankles in the surf. Where was the shock of cold Atlantic we expected? Rocks or no rocks, we had never touched such warm seawater. We went farther in. Our swarm of schoolgirls fanning out into the waves turned into individuals. I laid my glasses on my sneakers and splashed back to sea, to float, a jellyfish’s sac, and then the riptide got me. Dragged along the rocky bottom by a force too strong for me, I tried to fight it, choked, and sank, 48 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 48 [3.88.254.50] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:15 GMT) and rose two times to yell but only drank when my mouth opened, couldn’t see, thought I was going to die the same way Shelley died, like him at last. Then, with no sight of land— this is no metaphor!—I saw a hand reach toward me. It was dim and blurry, stretched in my direction from a distance, etched in water. Grasping for it, I found air and swam again. I found that I could bear the current. I saw Nice shine like low stars and fetched up on the shingle, retching, far from anyone. A long way down the beach I heard my classmates calling, out of reach, and none of them saved me. No lifeguard claimed the job. I don’t know. I know who I named, and whether it was Shelley, or Westbrook, or a purgatory angel I mistook for Shelley, my point is that someone saw me, saved me. And it wasn’t Derrida. I scooped sea glass and gravel from my bra, then climbed the stairs. The songs and fountains played for me: bruised, scraped, innoculated, safe from all you fashionistas who’d reduce our work to driftwood, polished by abuse, a floating empty, toothsome theory’s thong— and I intend to live to prove you wrong. 49 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 49 ...