A Face in Every Window by Han Nolan

discovery changed Larry. He started seeing himself as a poet, and he invited other wannabe poets to the house at night to read and critique one another's work. When Larry read his poems to the group, his voice took on a haunted, moaning tone, and since he loved the English poets, he read with an English accent. After a while he started using the accent in his everyday speech, until, at last, it became his usual way of speaking. He began to use the word
bloody
a lot. He'd say, "It's bloody hot in here," or "I bloody well have a right to be in here, you swag." He started calling our meals
repasts,
and flashlights
torches,
the hood of the van a
bonnet,
and gas
petrol
all words he'd picked up from the poetry and the Agatha Christie mystery novels Bobbi had been taking out of the library and Larry had been snitching from her.
    Then I noticed Larry was wearing black turtlenecks all the time. He took out all his earrings except one, grew a goatee, and wore Mam's red plaid scarf around his neck, even indoors. He said the scarf was his signature. Every poet in the group had his or her own signature and own pose. Harold, the angry poet, wore his hair in a tangle of dreads and dressed in colorful African robes that came down to his ankles; Jerusha, a cellist and the most talented of the group, wore ties and men's suit pants; Leon, more interested in Jerusha than in poetry, wore tall L. L. Bean hunting boots with the laces wrapped around the boots like a ballerina's toe shoe; and Melanie, the nature poet, wore thin cashmere sweaters over long and lacy dresses she bought at the vintage clothing store in town.
    The poetry sessions at our house became so successful that Larry and his friends gathered there every night. They'd talk all night long, drinking cheap gallons of wine or sipping herbal teas, and Mam didn't mind a bit. She loved all the comings and goings of Larry's friends. She loved the crowd they made in the kitchen, squeezing in with the rest of us for dinner at a table built for four.
    "Now, isn't this cozy," she'd say, looking around the table at us and reaching out to squeeze someone's hand.
    She loved their poetry. She loved their moody, over-emotional existence, and the group sought her advice on everything from poetry to love, and a lot of that love went on right under our own roof. Larry and his friends passed themselves around, hooking up with one person one week, then moving on to another the next. I never saw the same coupling two weeks in a row, which meant there were a lot of lovers' quarrels and hurt feelings and making up going on all over the house.
    They argued about everything and Mam loved it. "I just love a fun fight," she'd say, after what she thought was an exhilarating argument over the looting of Egyptian pyramids, or euthanasia and living wills. Of course, most of the time they argued over poetry and poets, discussing the false lives and improper desires in'T. S. Eliot's
Waste Land
for hours on end, the air thick with cigarette smoke.
    Sometimes the discussions lasted so long the group would all stay the night, and I'd come down in the morning and find bodies scattered about the house, asleep in chairs, on the couch, on the floor, anywhere they happened to be when sleep overtook them. Sometimes I'd even find Mam asleep right alongside the others, covered in someone's old ratty coat I'd stand and watch her and wonder who she had become. I didn't know her anymore, and I didn't know the others, either, Larry or Bobbi or even Pap. All of them had become different people from who they were back home.
    Bobbi got a job at the veterinary clinic after school and became a foster parent to the stray cats, dogs, and ferrets she picked up at the SPCA once in a while. She and Pap loved the animals. They'd feed them, cuddle them, talk baby talk to them, and laugh together over the silly things the creatures did. Bobbi and Pap became close through the animals, and it changed both of them. Bobbi stopped yelling at everyone