Midterm Exam
Sarah Wheeler found the poem feathering from a pocket folder labeled “ENG350: Advanced Poetry Writing” in a blue plastic bin cluttered with college memorabilia: faded campus newspapers, notebooks, and photographs of friends in large sweatshirts and ponytails fastened by scrunchies, their young lithe skin. In several of the photographs was Tommy, who had been out of the house for almost two years, leaning in the group shots of her roommates, his white cap brim curled over his face and big smile.
With an English major’s habit to retain everything written, Sarah had kept most of her essays and poems and her anthologies, too, though she rarely revisited them, busy teaching modern novels to her tenth-grade honors classes.
Attached to the front of the poem, a half piece of paper explaining the assignment:
Write a poem, no less than 10 lines but no more than 20, centering on an object found in a place you have visited only once. This will count as your midterm exam grade.
Above her poem’s title “Payphone, Geneva, New York,” in blue ink was a handwritten grade A- slanted sideways with I really like this, Sarah. Love the ending. Plenty of lilies here, but where is the urine? from the college’s visiting poet, Benjamin Smith, whom she liked a great deal, who often spoke of his college football days, when Sarah mentioned that she played soccer.
“Every poem must have lilies and urine,” Smith would repeat to the students throughout Sarah’s senior fall semester. When most of her poems were returned, there was a reminder of this metaphor—to balance the sentimental with the real. Of all that she read in her literature classes, it was the Romantics she loved the most, her favorite Wordsworth and his “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey,” his “five summers” away from home like her four of college, she liked to think, how much she grew in that time, how distant home felt.
She still liked the poem, even though she agreed with Smith more today than she did back then. She was twenty-one when she wrote it, and it seemed even more maudlin given these difficult last couple of years: from the night she found the text messages on Tommy’s phone to the evening Sarah screamed to herself in her car, seeing, in the woman’s driveway, his car—after promises that the affair and his midlife crisis was over—the night he told her he’d be out playing softball. Five months later, they signed divorce papers.
Two decades before, when she had first received the directions for the take-home midterm, she thought of Geneva, specifically Geneva Stadium, and the weekend she spent where Tommy, whom she had been dating since sophomore year, played baseball in an upstate New York summer wood bat league—a place she had been once and would surely never see again.
“That’s the payphone,” said Tommy, leaning on the chain link fence next to the dugout, pointing behind the grandstand. “That’s where I call you.” She had just arrived, coming straight to the ballpark, after the six-hour drive from New Jersey, as Tommy and the Geneva Knights finished batting practice, when he spotted her stepping up into the bleacher behind their first base dugout.
Between the box office and the concession stood the payphone atop a gray base bolted to the cement ground. Though Tommy sometimes used the one in the dorm, there was little privacy there with the nearby echoey hallway, adjacent to the stairs, trying to speak only as loud as necessary, voices caroming off the hard floors.
On their college campus in spring, she could sweep in for Tommy’s home games, linger long enough for him to get an at-bat, escape before the harsh northeast dusk, when the late inning gray bore down cold on her and the young men. But on that summer night in Geneva, she was there for it all, even the pregame routine—the infield-outfield, as the coaches slapped fungos and the players whipped the ball around in a well-choreographed show of precision and grace. Then the dragging of the infield, the PA announcer blaring “Ladies and Gentlemen, your Geneva Knights!” as the young men dashed to their positions before holding still for the anthem.
As the game settled in, she enjoyed the sky above the stadium, the sun setting behind the third base dugout and the bordering woods, the emerging purple glow soaked up by streaks of clouds still visible above the poles and lights now fully glowing. Remembering that evening now, Sarah missed that boredom, when life was much simpler, with few responsibilities except a summer job at the beach and soccer and school returning in September.
During the game, Sarah kept unfolding open and folding closed the one-page program, that by the end, she had memorized for each player their college, their hometown, L or R for throwing and hitting, and their position. She wandered the small space behind the grandstand to pass some time, noticing again the payphone. It wasn’t what she pictured, when she would speak to him, especially the rainy night when Tommy, having returned late from a game in Hornell, leaned on the metal box that framed the phone—so plain in person—and pressed the numbers from a calling card, raising the card to take in the distant streetlight from Lyceum Street to help him see the digits. These were the images that came to mind when she wrote the poem.
Payphone, Geneva, New York
There’s a payphone in Geneva,
New York, close to the edge
Of America,
Where baseball players
In sullied uniforms call lovers,
The miracle of silver buttons
The silver armored cord, its hard-coiled
Grooves, black as the wires above,
Everything that is woven and invisible.
At the end of my youth,
The edge of this century,
Through baseball player promises
And a heavy rain,
An automated voice tells us
That time is running out,
One of us still talking
When the connection expires.
If she revised it today, this poem about youth and distance could find the grit that Smith demanded—with the smell of literal urine—in the memory of the last time she caught Tommy, collapsing into her house and the bathroom floor to vomit, the acidic smell from the toilet entwined forever with the end of her marriage and everything they shared, including Geneva and their alma mater, too, where they had wed in the campus church, the college chaplain declaring before his opening prayer, “It’s a pleasure to officiate this wedding and to marry these wonderful all-stars.”
But with the two years passing since the divorce, in good moments like this one, she could like the poem again, for the wordsmanship of “woven and invisible,” for the memory of her night in Geneva, but, mostly, for the day she finished writing it. It was after a soccer game, a Sunday fall afternoon win, walking off her home field with her teammates in the fading October sunlight, a snap of an early autumn breeze, remembering that she still had this midterm exam to finish. It was then when the idea of the calling card hit her—what a cool way to end it, she thought—and then came a lightened feeling, which now she missed most, that there was still some time—the fall and another semester—before graduation.
Sarah pressed the poem back into the folder. She would never regret the marriage and their two children, and she could still enjoy remembering her college days, especially that soccer afternoon, when she felt that everything good was still ahead of her. That was how she felt on the bleachers in Geneva, as Tommy first trotted out to the infield, turned and glanced up at her, flashing a wave with his open glove.
SCOTT PALMIERI is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Twin Bill, the Under Review, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.