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canaan

ellen orleans

Her sister knows how to be a girl. She used to like Barbie and Ken, now she likes dresses, make-up, and boys. Right on schedule.

Help me, I think I’m falling, in love again. . .

Willa sits on her sister’s bed, watching Court and Spark spin round the phonograph. Four glossy photos are pinned above the windows: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. All very hairy. Simon and Garfunkel are taped to the back of her bedroom door. They stare vacant-eyed, their bodies looming over a bridge. Above Felicia’s desk another poster: sand-colored walls, desert sky, gleaming domes. Jerusalem, it says.

Willa doesn’t spend much time in her sister’s room. Felicia’s a high school senior now and Willa’s only just started sixth grade. But today Felicia doesn’t seem to mind that she’s here, as she sits on the floor, pasting postcards, cocktail napkins, movie tickets, and love notes into her scrapbook. Willa’s sister has had a lot of boyfriends: Randy, Steve, Alan, and now a new one, Charlie Beam. Charlie has thick black hair and a curly beard. He wants to live in Israel, where he and Felicia spent last summer.

Felicia pastes and pastes while Willa examines her room. Green carpet, white bedspread, flower-power decals on her window shades. Felicia’s walls almost glow. Sunflower Yellow is the name of the color. Felicia has a special shelf that holds her brightly-colored wind-up clocks, another for her glass animals. Willa is afraid to go too near it. She keeps thinking of the expression, Bull in a china shop. Her body feels clumsy and thick.

Felicia’s bookshelf is filled with poetry books because Felicia is a poet herself. She is also the editor of the high school literary magazine, Visions, which has printed three of her poems. Willa has had an article printed in her school newspaper, the Burnet Hill Beacon, but it’s not the same.

Willa looks at the books: Shakespeare’s sonnets, the collected poems of John Keats, Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Her favorite authors are William Carlos Williams because his first and last name are almost the same and e.e. cummings because he uses all small letters. Her favorite title is Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuen. The title is so cool because it mixes up different senses.Willa makes up her own titles: Smell the Darkness. Taste the Noise.

Willa is careful not to touch anything in Felicia’s room, because everything here is delicate or valuable. She feels more at home in her brother’s room.

Joni Mitchell has stopped singing. Felicia lifts the needle, puts the record in the plastic slip, then in the cardboard cover. Last spring, Willa listened to Let It Be six times in a row on Felicia’s record player but forgot to put away the record. It sat near the radiator and melted.

Felicia puts on a new album, Rhymes and Reasons by Carole King, then returns to her scrapbook. Rhymes and Reasons—that’s a pretty good name, Willa thinks, almost as good as Listen to the Warm. A breeze comes in the window. Autumn.

Willa stays, watching Felicia paste flat all her memories: a napkin from Le Crêpe in New York, a playbill from Fiddler on the Roof, a yellow rose, smashed down from two weeks under the biggest dictionary in the house but still round enough to make a bump in the scrapbook pages.

Oh, I’ve been to Canaan and I won’t rest until I go back again . . .

"Carol King went to Canaan?" Willa asks. "Is she Jewish?"

Felicia shakes her head slowly. But Willa doesn’t think she’s shaking her head as an answer, but at Willa’s asking in the first place. She’s confused. Maybe Felicia doesn’t know that Canaan is the old name for Israel. But she has to know, she’s been in USY for years.

Willa tries again. "You’ve been to Canaan."

Felicia smiles. "Many times."

"I thought you only went once. Last summer."

Felicia keeps smiling, pastes another picture: she and Charlie by the Red Sea. The record spins round and round.