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A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child? . . . . . . I do not know what
it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about—the grass was a metaphor
for his hope. But that’s not all. He continues,
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Like grass is a metaphor for God’s greatness or something. . . .
Or I guess the grass is itself a child . . . .
And then soon after that,
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white.
So maybe the grass is a metaphor for our equality and our essential
connectedness, as Dr. Holden had said. And then finally, he says of grass,
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
So grass is death, too—it grows out of our buried bodies. The grass was so
many different things at once, it was bewildering. So grass is a metaphor for life,
and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for children, and for
God, and for hope.

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I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem.
But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me
think about all the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of
ways to see her. I’d been focused on what had become of her, but now with my
head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket
still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was who I was
looking for. If “What is the grass?” has such a complicated answer, I thought, so,
too, must “Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered
incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me
for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos.
I had to narrow her down, and I figured there had to be things here that I was
seeing wrong or not seeing. I wanted to tear off the roof and light up the whole
place so that I could see it all at once, instead of one flashlight beam at a time. I
put aside Margo’s blanket and shouted, loud enough for all the rats to hear, “I
Am Going To Find Something Here!”
I went through each desk in the office again, but it seemed more and more
obvious that Margo had used only the desk with the nail polish in the drawer and
the calendar set to June.
I ducked through a Troll Hole and made my way back to the library, walking
again through the abandoned metal shelves. On each shelf I looked for dustless
shapes that would tell me Margo had used this space for something, but I
couldn’t find any. But then my darting flashlight happened across something
atop the shelf in a corner of the room, right near the boarded-up storefront
window. It was the spine of a book.
The book was called Roadside America: Your Travel Guide, and had been
published in 1998, after this place had been abandoned. I flipped through it with
the flashlight crooked between neck and shoulder. The book listed hundreds of
attractions you could visit, from the world’s largest ball of twine in Darwin,
Minnesota, to the world’s largest ball of stamps in Omaha, Nebraska. Someone
had folded down the corners of several seemingly random pages. The book
wasn’t too dusty. Maybe SeaWorld was only the first stop on some kind of
whirlwind adventure. Yes. That made sense. That was Margo. She found out
about this place somehow, came here to gather her supplies, spent a night or two,
and then hit the road. I could imagine her pinballing among tourist traps.
As the last light fled from the holes in the ceiling, I found more books above
other bookshelves. The Rough Guide to Nepal; The Great Sights of Canada;
America by Car; Fodor’s Guide to the Bahamas; Let’s Go Bhutan. There seemed

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to be no connection at all among the books, except that they were all about
traveling and had all been published after the minimall was abandoned. I tucked
the Maglite under my chin, scooped up the books into a stack that extended from
my waist to my chest, and carried them into the empty room I was now
imagining as the bedroom.
So it turned out that I did spend prom night with Margo, just not quite as I’d
dreamed. Instead of busting into prom together, I sat against her rolled-up carpet
with her ratty blanket draped over my knees, alternately reading travel guides by
flashlight and sitting still in the dark as the cicadas hummed above and around
me.
Maybe she had sat here in the cacophonous darkness and felt some kind of
desperation take her over, and maybe she found it impossible to unthink the
thought of death. I could imagine that, of course.
But I could also imagine this: Margo picking these books up at various
garage sales, buying every travel guide she could get her hands on for a quarter
or less. And then coming here—even before she disappeared—to read the books
away from prying eyes. Reading them, trying to decide on destinations. Yes. She
would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating
up hundreds of miles a day with the help of a perpetual tailwind. And in this
imagining, she was alive. Had she brought me here to give me the clues to piece
together an itinerary? Maybe. Of course I was nowhere near an itinerary. Judging
from the books, she could be in Jamaica or Namibia, Topeka or Beijing. But I
had only just begun to look.

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