Musings

Poetry Sisters

When I first met Lorna, I was a bit intimidated. She was six feet tall, dark skinned and exotic, with high cheekbones and a voice she controlled like a musical instrument. She said she was 38 years old, taught theater, and had never been married.

I was a plump white middle-class adjunct professor, age 50, and married for the second time. What could we possibly have in common?

We met around a scarred conference table in an air conditioning-challenged room at William Paterson University in northern New Jersey. For high school teachers like Lorna, a summer poetry workshop was a pleasant way to earn three graduate credits. For adjunct English professors like me, it was an escape from Freshman Composition.

Our first assignment was to write a poem set in the kitchen. I wrote about coming home late at night from New York University, about my uneducated parents eating crullers and drinking coffee as I spoke of Plato and Chaucer. Lorna wrote about collard greens bubbling on the stove and a fat neighbor laughing so hard she fell off her chair. Her poem was so much richer, with screen doors slamming and juicy gossip spilling, and she read it as though it were the lyrics of a song.

There were fourteen of us in the poetry seminar that steamy July. We were encouraged to keep image journals, write a poem a night, and call each other if we needed moral support. I was surprised when Lorna called me that first night. We read our poems-in-progress and then just started chatting. It became a nightly ritual; soon we were revealing bits of our lives.

“I saw this fine black man at the Mobil station,” Lorna said. “He was the prettiest shade of café au lait with green eyes and a slow, easy smile, and you know he knew how to give a woman a good time.”

As Lorna talked and I listened, I almost wished I were single and ready to join in the fun. But I soon heard the sadness under her banter: “There are no men left out there for me,” she called to complain one night after a no-show blind date. “I mean decent, educated, churchgoing men who haven’t been in jail or on drugs or have three or four babies with different women.”

Within the safety of my marriage to a decent, educated, drug-free man, I began to live a bit vicariously through Lorna. Once I went to Harlem to hear her sing in the choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the most prestigious black churches in the country. One Sunday, she told me, she met a Ghanian immigrant there. He proposed marriage on the second date after she picked up the check, again. “He would have proposed to a skillet of chitlings to become a permanent resident,” she confided sadly, shaking her head so the metal beads at the ends of her corn rows clicked.

I nodded in sympathy as we drove off to a poetry reading in a smoke-filled tavern in Haledon, New Jersey, where a guy with crumbs in his beard bought us each a glass of watery Chablis, quoted Kerouac, and suggested a threesome. I was grossed out and speechless. Lorna just shrugged him off.

After the poetry workshop ended, we talked on the phone a couple of times a week, long silly “girlfriend” conversations, and met for dinner now and then. We celebrated when my daughter became pregnant and I consoled her when her brother was sent to jail again. Her kitchen poem won a prize from an up-and-coming literary magazine. Once in a while I got a poem published too.

For her fortieth birthday, Lorna decided to throw herself a big party. Everyone was asked to perform. I read a poem about a sexy guy smoking in a doorway, accompanied on the bass by DeShawn, the incredibly cool musician Lorna was currently in love with. I knew he sometimes showed up at her apartment at 3:00 a.m. after a gig at a nearby jazz club.

The next performers were Lorna’s mother, resplendent in a dress with big purple flowers, doing an elegant foxtrot with her stepfather, who wore a pinstriped suit and a wide tie. I watched them giving DeShawn, with his muscular legs bared to the upper thigh in tattered cutoffs, the once-over. They shook their heads. Definitely not a church goer.

Five months later Lorna called to announce she was getting married. To Thomas.

“Isn’t he the one from Georgia who was hanging around but you weren’t interested?”

There was silence on the other end. Then slowly, carefully, she explained, “Thomas has held a steady job for twenty years as a foreman in a box factory. He doesn’t drink. He’s divorced but his kids are grown. And he goes to church sometimes.”

“Aha,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. Lorna had just been accepted into a doctoral program while Thomas hadn’t even graduated from high school. I thought she was making a mistake but I said nothing; I didn’t want to lose her friendship.

Of course we went to the wedding, my husband and I, the only white people there. The minister from the Abyssinian Baptist Church performed the ceremony in Lorna’s modest Englewood, New Jersey church. Most of the women wore hats. I didn’t own one.

Lorna grandly recited a poem she had written for the occasion. Her smile as she said “I do” was triumphant.

At the reception, we were seated next to one of Lorna’s cousins who was wearing a red, green and purple African toga and matching headdress. In my understated beige dress and pearls, I felt as pale as the creamed chicken on my plate. We hung back when everyone else did the latest craze, the macarena, and the stroll (or something that reminded me of the stroll).

Then Lorna faded from my life, caught up in marital bliss, I hoped. Ten months later she resurfaced, calling to see if I wanted to attend an all-day poetry event in Princeton. It was summer again and we were both freed temporarily from our teaching positions. After we decided where to meet, there was a pause. “Thomas and I have separated,” she said in a tight voice.

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s a good, decent man.”

I waited.

“But not for me. “

“It was a beautiful wedding,” I said.

“Yes it was.” She began telling me about a poet doing a reading at Princeton, “a fine black man” who wrote about life on the Serengeti plains. She’d bought his first book and planned to get his autograph.

“Go for it!” I said. Odds were 1,000 to one the fine black poet was already involved with a woman. But Lorna didn’t need me to tell her that. I was selfishly happy to have my friend back.   A friend who coached me to read my poems aloud more dramatically. A friend who would catch my eye when someone was reading a pretentious or incomprehensible poem and make me choke with laughter. A true sister in poetry.