The Door to Your Room
"Black, Bellatrix!"
The dark haired, heavy eye lidded girl sneers at her once, before ascending the stool as though it were her throne.
"SLYTHERIN!"
First year, first day, feels like willingly standing in front of a vicious dragon and waiting to see whether it will let you be, or rip your head off your shoulders in a violent flurry. Alice can't much breathe, at first. Professor Gwimble has reached the I's, and she's plenty sure she might very well faint. The red head in front of her, looking vibrantly excited, doesn't help much, though she was nice enough on the train.
"Don't worry," a voice says in her ear.
She twirls around, startled, and comes face-to-face to a boy. As she steps back, she takes him into better view. A brown haired boy smiles at her, and she feels all the blood in her body race top speed to her face.
"Only, it's nothing to worry about, you know? So don't."
And then he's walking up to the Sorting Hat, and Alice realizes with a panic that she hadn't heard his name. When the sorting hat calls "GYFFINDOR!", she realizes she's next, and walks up to the sorting hat, a poem she read once riveting through her head.
Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted,
opening their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.
The hat laughs in her ear and says You've got gut, girl, reciting poetry at a time like this. That, or barking mad… Either way -
"GRYFFINDOR!"
Her breath catches somewhere from her chest to her mouth, and she runs to the table to find the boy's name.
---
Alice squeaks the only thing that comes to mind. "Avis!" and a flock of birds-birds, she thinks mournfully-erupt from the tip of her wand.
Bellatrix Black chuckles and easily casts the Blasting Curse, only instead of attacking Alice it attacked and shredded the flock of birds, leaving nothing but drifting, bloody white feathers. The girl sneers, and Alice throws up before she can stop herself.
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!
She folds in on herself amidst Slytherin laughter and wonders why that poem came to mind.
---
Frank Longbottom.
Her mother would love him, she thought, half-smiling to herself, as she watched him across the common room. Her view is obscured for a moment by Peter's head, as James and Sirius have hauled him up and are swinging him back and forth.
Lily, furious, screams at them to "Put him down! Put him down this instant!" to no heed from either boy. Then Remus, looking pacifying and positively worn down, with ripped clothes and new cuts and bruises all over his body, asks rather nicely if they would please both stop it, he doesn't think his nerves can take it and all, and Sirius immediately drops Peter.
So obvious, thinks Alice, admitting to herself that jealousy lies there. She steals another glance at Frank and her chest tightens up. Must be nice.
Unwittingly, a poem rises in her head, much as it always does. One from her favorite poet, another simple relation to life.
No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say,
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn. She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.
Right, thinks Alice, and turns back to her history paper.
---
Bellatrix and Alice make some odd partners, though it isn't as though they have a choice in the matter - Professor Binns chose for them.
"Look, I don't want much to do with this," Bellatrix says sharply, "You're not worth a fight, so you just do your part, and I'll do mine."
Alice opens her mouth to say "Fine" or something, but what comes out…
"Under my bowels, yellow with smoke,
it waits.
Under my eyes,
those milk bunnies,
it waits.
It is waiting.
It is waiting.
Mr. Doppelganger. My brother. My spouse.
Mr. Doppelganger. My enemy. My lover. "
Bellatrix stares ather with dark eyes, andshe feels herself blush. Sometimesshe runs away with herself… but this is the first timeshe'd ever accidentally said a poem aloud.
"What is that?" she asks.
"A… a poem…" Alice says, expecting the worst.
"What, you just memorize poems?"
"Well… yeah."
"Really?" she says skeptically, "Recite more, then."
So Alice does, and by the end, they've found each other to be oddly tolerable.
---
The end of seventh year is something like a beautiful light, blinding you to the harshness. She steps onto the train platform.
This, she thinks, is the last time I will step onto this platform.
She blinks. What if she had children? What if she became a teacher? It was silly to get sentimental over a simple platform. She'd be back here again, someday.
But a voice in the back of her head says this is it, this is the last time.
She drinks in a goodbye. Frank Longbottom waves at her, and her heart flutters a bit. Lily and James are leaving arm-in-arm, and Sirius's casual arm around Remus's shoulders poorly conceal that the arm wants more of a hold.
Surprise she thinks dryly.
Her poet's voice speaks into her mind's ear again.
Something
cold is in the air,
an aura of ice
and phlegm.
All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
The horizon bleeds
and sucks its thumb.
The little red thumb
goes out of sight.
And I wonder about
this lifetime with myself,
this dream I'm living.
I could eat the sky
like an apple
but I'd rather
ask the first star:
why am I here?
why do I live in this house?
who's responsible?
eh?
She catches sight of Bellatrix Black, who, at the last minute, spins around, eyes wide, hair framing her pale face. She sees Alice, and grins a mad sort of grin, and waves.
Alice waves back, feeling a rush of something… of future.
---
She's surprised as anyone that she ended up roommates with a Slytherin. But labels leave a person beyond the Hogwarts school grounds, and Bellatrix can be as pleasant a person as anyone when she wants to be.
They divide a chore list, and Bellatrix smirks, a, "What's next, then, picking out curtains?" hardly a breath away. Bellatrix, Alice thinks, Is the best Slytherin ever.
People are a bit biased towards Bell, and that angers her a bit. These are dark times, and Bell was a Slytherin, but that's no reason to be unkind. To judge. Bellatrix chooses dishes and laundry on Tuesday and Thursday, vacuuming, bills and groceries on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They split the weekend.
Bell works at a bookshop off Main, and Alice found herself a nice job at the Apothecary in Diagon Alley. Bell says she likes working around muggles, they don't stare at her so, but there's an edge to her voice as she says it.
I would like to bury
all the hating eyes
under the sand somewhere off
the North Atlantic and suffocate
them with the awful sand
and put all their colors to sleep
in that soft smother.
Poetry has words for everything.
---
It snows as she's working on Friday, snows like there isn't a tomorrow. And when he walks in, she's busy staring at the flakes drifting against the window sill, her lips dry with the beauty of it all.
He knocks on the desk, raps, rather, with his knuckles, and she jerks out of her dream state, apologizing, and then mouth agape as she sees who it is.
Nice weather, he says, laughing. How have things been with you? Great with me, just passed the test to go into Auror training. He smiles. You look great, and, you know, I always sort of fancied you in school. Too shy to ask you out, y'know?
His eyes are the warmest harbor she's ever seen.
---
She's breathless, and furiously cold, and so happy and excited.
Frank Longbottom wants to go out!
She runs home to tell Bellatrix.
---
come touch a copy of you
for I am at the mercy of rain,
for I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti
for I have left the long naps of Ann Arbor
and the church spires have turned to stumps.
The sea bangs into my cloister
for the politicians are dying,
and dying so hold me, my young dear,
hold me...
The yellow rose will turn to cinder
---
The wedding is gorgeous, and people are even saying that it could give James and Lily's a run for their money.
Frank's mother is there, Augusta, she so matriarchal and kind, insisting her dear Frank finally chose a good one, a keeper, with a good, pure face, and it's hard to help loving her as she would her own.
Alice invited Bellatrix, but she declined, and Alice understood, though she was a bit saddened. Anyhow, she has her own wedding coming up soon.
And it's everything.
And beautiful.
Lily cries like nothing.
As she walks down the aisle, she sees Sirius and Remus's fingers intertwined, and she winks and smiles in their direction. Remus looks surprised and blushes, while Sirius just grins at her.
And that, she supposes, is that.
They lived happily as you might expect
proving that mother-me-do
can be outgrown,
just as the fish on Friday,
just as a tricycle.
The world, some say,
is made up of couples.
A rose must have a stem.
---
Poems have trickled into her life, it seems, permanently. Her stomach is heavy with child, and Lily sits with her sometimes, and they gossip and laugh like the world isn't a horrible dark place.
As she watched James pull Lily into his arms, she sighed. This was life, and it was kind.
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
That poem fit her for Cinderella, though honestly Frank wasn't around much. Being an Auror absorbed his time, but she understood and was content.
And when the baby was being born, when little Neville was coming into this world, and Frank appeared huffing and puffing in the doorway, eyes excited and fearful, she was glad, even if this was darkness, it was only because there was so much light it was bound to cast shadows.
---
And when Bellatrix stood over her, mad grin spreading like some maniac disease, and spoke the word, wand pointed, it was like her soul being eaten alive. Her mind was coming along for the ride, too, it seemed.
There was knowledge there that Neville was safe with Augusta. Frank was somewhere else, hopefully, laughing with James.
It left room for that question.
Why?
She said it out loud, she thought, too.
She must have, because Bellatrix titters and sighs, reaches down, and says in her slow, sullen voice,
"Because, my dear, I think I loved you."
And then Alice goes away, living forever in a dream that could have once been.
---
Alice, with all her heart, feels there's someone she's supposed to remember. It's not the strict old lady, or the boy she brings, though she feels that they are important, too, the boy most of all. She gives him extraordinary gifts she finds, and she sees him clutch them, and it makes her happy.
But there is someone else.
It's not the man she loves, who dances with her, nor any of the other people in this place. Not the strange outsiders, nor the ones who control.
A poem she knows from the time before is what she needs to give this person - she thinks the person is small, and white as snow, with the night sky as hair that billows around her, grinning as wide and madly as any Cheshire cat.
All she needs, now, all she needs is to give her this poem she knows, because, she thinks, it was important. At some time, it was important, and it might still be so, she doesn't know. So she sends it, smiling, with her mind into the night, and watches it flutter on red stained wings, hopefully finding home.
By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color--no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
---End---
Poems by Anne Sexton