“The Line”

As a high school sophomore taking my first steps beyond children’s literature, two writers woke me up to adult thoughts and language: e.e. cummings and John Berryman. Poetry was it for me after that. I typed out my favorite poems—crazy, surprising, modern poems—on my father’s typewriter, then used the school copy machine and made stapled booklets to hand out in the parking lot. My classmates threw them away at home, probably. No one tracked me down later to discuss which poem was their favorite.

It didn’t matter. In college my main interests were writing poetry and finding a boyfriend who read poetry. I won both my college’s poetry prizes and by senior year was the biggest fish in a very small pond.

Just for kicks in my final semester I took a short story course with a first-time teacher, James Robison. His first book had just come out so I bought it. All his stories were pared down and packed a weirdly efficient punch, which appealed to my poet-brain. My favorite was “The Line.” Robison told us that he’d tried to write it without climax or resolution, just a long straight line exploring a character’s day. I loved it. A story, like haiku, could succeed even if nothing happened.

I graduated and was released into the world thinking: You can write any way you want!

It took ten years to work all the poems out of my system and turn back to prose. I was working for a small New Age-y health and travel magazine when a friend of a friend who edited fiction at a big-time magazine agreed to read one of my stories. She praised its humor and concision, but had to pass. “Nothing happens in it,” she said.

Embarrassed, I returned to writing articles about hot-stone massage, losing weight with good fats, and how to photograph your aura. I had a baby, lost my job, and started a blog. I published a book of nonfiction, became a widow, and moved with my son to a small apartment. Unpacking, I came across James Robison and sat down to reread “The Line.”

A man’s wife has left him. She won’t let him call, but he can write as long as he confines his letters to ordinary things. He describes his commute into Boston, the shoulder blades of a woman on the ferry; the back-and-forth between two men at a cafe, who are possibly lovers; waiting in the pharmacy and trying to confess his almost-infidelity to the village mayor, who brusquely changes the subject.

So much, it turns out, happens in this story. Like a haiku, its slight shifts in perspective hint at a deeper emotional landscape, and there’s a little twist-tie at the end that bags it all up. At 22, I’d admired the technique and tried to copy it. At 57, I knew this guy. I’d been this guy. Everything he noticed in the world mirrored back a piece of himself that still could be healed.