The Rules of Love & Grammar by Mary Simses Read Free Book Online

want to fill the space that Renny used to take up, and who else is left to do the filling?
    Mom stands and collects the soup bowls. I follow her into the kitchen and spoon the chicken curry and rice into serving bowls while she puts the green beans on a platter. The only sounds are the clink and clank of utensils against metal and porcelain.
    We sit down at the table and pass around the food. “Your dad’s been busy this summer,” Mom says, and I’m relieved she’s changing the subject. “He’s been writing a lot.”
    I think about the envelope I saw in the kitchen. Small, blue spiral-bound notebooks of plain, white paper are what my father usually writes in, but he’ll use whatever is handy in order not to lose his train of thought. The word lightbulb, scrawled on the back of an electrician’s business card, might not be a reminder to have the electrician do something with the lightbulbs in the house. It might be the genesis of a poem about a man who, in changing a lightbulb, begins to think about his father, who was struck by lightning. In fact, that actually happened, and the poem my father wrote was called “Standing on a Ladder in the Kitchen.”
    “Is it going well?” I ask him. “The writing?” I think about the envelope. She leaves them in her wake. Was he writing about Renny?
    He takes the rice from my mother. “Yes,” he says. “It seems to be going well.”
    “Dad’s also teaching,” Mom says. “Modern poetry again. The master class.”
    “I figured that,” I say. “I saw some of the books.”
    My father takes the serving spoon and drops a large scoop of rice onto his plate. “I’ve been tinkering with the course. Switching out a few of the poets. Adding a little more Millay, some Elizabeth Bishop.”
    I’ve always liked Elizabeth Bishop, but I don’t say anything. No sense encouraging him.
    “I’m teaching the postmoderns in the fall,” he says, placing the bowl on the table. “Aren’t you a fan of Margaret Atwood? I thought I’d include her.” He keeps his gaze on me, his eyes encouraging me to respond.
    “I like some of her poetry.”
    “How about ‘The Moment’? Do you remember that one?”
    I pretend to think for a second. “Not really.”
    “That’s funny. I thought you once wrote a paper about it.”
    Freshman English. Mrs. Townsend. “Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know.”
    I take a few of the string beans from the platter and arrange them on my plate in neat lines. I can still feel his eyes on me.
    “So many implications,” he says as he helps himself to the curry. “Of course, the environmentalists like to take it literally. But there’s so much more—the idea that meaning in life comes only from striving. That as long as you’re striving, you’re part of the world, but once you stop…well, that’s when everything crumbles, isn’t it?”
    I wonder if he’s referring to me, specifically, and then he starts to recite the poem. His voice is slow and even, his poetry-reading voice, as he describes the narrator standing in the center of a room, which quickly becomes a house, then a half acre of land, a mile, and, finally, an entire country, all of which the narrator believes he can own, can lay claim to.
    My father stops, one side of his mouth rising expectantly as he waits for me to pick up the next line, the way we did when Renny and I were young and he would fill our heads with Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings. When we’d talk over dinner about imagery, metaphor, and rhyming schemes, discuss assonance and consonance, repetition and rhythm. We’d ponder Robert Frost’s “Birches,” and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” all in the course of one meal. But that was a long time ago, and I’m not looking to earn points from him anymore, to try to stake out my little corner of his universe. I’m sure he misses having Renny here to play this game with him. She was always more eager