Quantum Girl Theory, page 10
Mary looked down at Clarence Starking’s feet, shod in dark-green galoshes.
She nodded and allowed Clarence to run ahead of her in the downpour to open the passenger door. Inside the truck, everything was slick and humid. Mary kept both fists visible in her lap, her pocketbook tented against her chest.
And just then the Sight took her, offered up again that distressed grandmother in a replay of the vision Mary had gotten at the supermarket, the clairvoyant grandmama who reached out to switch the back of a young boy’s legs, who now slapped at the adolescent version of that same boy in a fit of fear or frustration. Then that gesture of rage faded into another moment: One of the Starking brothers, face younger and rounder than that of the man who carefully closed Mary’s car door, brushed past the old woman shoulder first, in a rough gesture that tumbled her to the floor. From the rug, legs awkwardly beneath her, the old woman wrapped her arms around herself and twisted her lips to shout in the direction of the door, through which the young man had already left. The vision played like a silent film, and then the image faded to gray, and there was only this man sitting beside her, keying the ignition, and pulling into the driving black rain.
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PAPER DOLLS
Sarasota, Florida, 1967
Lynn had hoped George might have a companion for her before he left for his most recent trip. He’d been too busy, he’d said, and now Lynn sat alone in this house with nothing but a boring old puzzle for company.
“Too busy sharpening your ice pick,” she’d said, knowing that he hated when she used that name for his medical tools. With his back to her he had said, “You know, if we’d had children you wouldn’t need me to pay someone to be your friend.” Nasty man, sometimes.
Lynn had never wanted children, told George that his two sons were enough. His sons and her birds. Just enough space and love to share.
Anyway, George treated her like a child much of the time. She hated it, and she relied on it.
She’d done little more today than sip salty cinnamon tea and page through her book of leaf pressings. She’d never loved George’s boys all that much. They were quiet and studious and forever dissecting frogs. She hid in her rooms once they returned home from school, until it was time for dinner.
They didn’t live here any longer, though. They were men now, quiet and studious men, and the older, Samuel, had three more boys of his own—one set of twins, which Lynn’s mother always found terribly vulgar. Humans should not have litters, she had said. The younger and cleverer son, Cyril, worked at a laboratory, where he dissected bigger things, calf brains and piglets, she supposed.
Lynn’s upper lip twitched. In her solarium, dim in the waning evening light, Lynn spit onto the floor. She rubbed her bloated stomach, always empty, always looking full and heavy. When she pushed the wrought-iron chair back, it honked like a goose. From their cage, her Gouldian finches meeped and flicked their wings in reply. Through the glass on the other side of their cage, a large house cat stalked through the low grass.
The air was thick and perfumed today, and the fronds from the potted palm stuck to her bare shoulder as she passed. She liked the click of her hard-soled shoes on the tile. Click. Click click.
In the kitchen, someone new. A companion after all? But no, the someone new wore a blue uniform dress and stood sorting dry beans with red, chapped hands. Click. A cook, then. Click click. White-blond hair frizzed out from her downturned face.
“I’m Lynn,” Lynn said. “If you’re new, there are things you should know. I am allergic to bananas and bee stings and cheese. Turning thirty-five made my stomach a traitor to corn and also to nuts and seeds. Aspic makes me queasy, and dying animals make me cry. If you come across a dying animal, you must hide any evidence of it and deny that it ever was.”
Lynn squinted. There was something funny about those beans.
“I don’t like exotic meals,” she said. “My father used to eat haggis and goose eggs for lunch, and just looking made all us girls squeal. I prefer dry toast and soft-boiled eggs for lunch and light suppers except for on Sundays. Is it Sunday? Never mind. Whatever you’re making will do for tonight. Are you from Tallahassee?”
The new cook just nodded a bit without looking up from her task. Lynn was not one to manage her domestic help with as heavy a hand as her mother had, but this struck her as somewhat insolent.
Lynn sat her empty tea mug on the counter and spun it a bit, looking for patterns in the dregs.
“I suppose Dr. Frank hasn’t returned yet from his outing?” Lynn couldn’t remember where he’d gone; ever since the Remarkably Successful Procedure that corrected her broken mind, afternoons could vanish from memory without warning. She felt disoriented—without the past, how could she know where she was? It was certainly nearing dinnertime, though; the light was a golden pink, and she could hear the mosquitoes knocking against the screen door to the back patio. She thought to sniff the air—was dinner ready? Had she already eaten? But no, she smelled only lemons—it was winter, then, and the sun was setting early.
A motor sputtered outside the kitchen door. Who would mow the lawn at dusk? The mosquitoes alone!
“I was in love with a soldier once, and he was in love with me,” she said, still spinning her mug. “The day they told me he died, I fell down on our dining room floor and didn’t get up for two days.” He had lived next door to her family, and before he left for the Army, she would watch him out her bedroom window.
Would George’s boys join them for dinner? She looked over her shoulder toward the dining room, scouting for signs of their dissection tools. The room was dark, heavy drapes drawn against the sunset.
There used to be a large rectangular mirror on the wall behind the dining table. She remembered standing on the patio, smoking a cigarette, and watching the reflection of the sunset behind her, tiny blinking orangewhite sun changing the color of the entire sky. She remembered standing behind George’s boys and watching the mirror image of them pinning open a frog smaller than her palm. Where had that mirror gone? She pressed her dry lips together: When was the last time she’d had a cigarette?
Her first cigarette, she could remember that: breathy laughter behind the school building, hands and dungarees covered in paint, stinking of turpentine, and the other girl, the other painter, fumbling with a matchbook, her watch crystal winking in the sun, cigarette moving like a conductor’s baton as she screwed her lips in concentration.
Both of them so young, so, so beautiful. It was an image that floated past Lynn’s eyelids with some frequency. Before her Remarkably Successful Procedure, she might have known why she clutched at it so, but now it passed by like a bird winging past her window.
Lynn touched her palms to her cheeks, fingertips to the pouches beneath her eyes. She made believe she was a blind person, creating the image of her face with her hands. She closed her eyes. She conjured a mystic, a carnival crone with drooping jowls and deep-set eyes, heavy and sparse eyebrows, skin that felt like wrinkled wax paper.
If she dug in with the tips of her fingers, she could feel the gristle of scar tissue deep behind her eyelids; she once again remembered awakening from the Remarkably Successful Procedure with eyes that looked like eggplants and swollen lids that drooped into her vision. For two days she had been able to see clearly only when she looked down.
This was in fact the part she remembered best, the weeks in which she looked like an unlucky prizefighter. Even though George had promised her that she wouldn’t, she remembered too the slide of the metal ice picks into her eye sockets, both at once, chafing that tissuey skin right beside the bridge of her nose.
George didn’t like her to mention that part, the bruises or the temporary loss of sight, or the weeks when she couldn’t remember how to tie her shoes or how to toilet herself or the words for any of the things she knew or loved.
Lock it away—snick-snick sound with his tongue and teeth—lock it away with the other unpleasantness. Your life is a miracle. Tell yourself that story instead.
George had his own favorite story. From the New Testament: Jesus heals a mute by spitting on his own finger, touching it to the man’s tongue, and saying to him, I open you. When finally Lynn’s words had come back to her, when she spoke to the nurses and her sisters calmly about her preferred bloom for corsages, George said it was like she was a mute rendered vocal again. I open you, he whispered to her.
Lynn ghosted around the kitchen now, opening the low cupboards and drawers of hodgepodge, looking for—what was it? Her packet of cigarettes.
“Cook,” she said, “have you seen my cigarettes?”
“I didn’t realize you smoked,” the woman said. “It’s hard on the nerves, and the heart, too. Perhaps I could make you some cinnamon tea or you could work on your puzzle.”
Her jigsaw puzzle was scattered across the dining room table. She’d forgotten. Cook must have noticed, or she’d been watching Lynn.
“I won’t be the subject of surveillance in my own home, you know. I have a right to stand on my ground. I’m an American citizen.” Lynn clicked her heels on the kitchen’s red tile floor. And because she so liked the sound, she did it again. Click.
The new cook was counting out funny-looking beans.
Outside, a motor whirred to a stop. Someone would have to pick that puzzle up if the whole family was to eat here tonight.
“A soldier was in love with me once,” Lynn said to Cook. “And he died, and I was so Troubled and Excited my father shook me by the shoulders until my chin hit my chest.” She sat on a counter-side stool. “The war had already ended, so he couldn’t have died, then his letter arrived two days later. Handwriting as clear as though it were my own, and he said he was coming home. How could he have died if he said he was coming home? I have his letters still; I keep them in my book of leaf pressings.” She didn’t like the look on Cook’s face. “I’ll show you.”
Lynn clicked back to the solarium for her book. The sun had moved to the other side of the house, and the solarium was as gray as if coated in ash. In the solarium’s wide white birdcage, the pair of finches flitted when she drew close. In the dim light, she couldn’t see their colors or the movement of their eyes, but they meeped and hopped. Lynn tugged a loose thread from her red cardigan and shimmied it through the bars. The female finch dropped off her perch to pick it up; Lynn had been secreting nesting materials into there, hoping they might get broody.
Someone had spread fresh newspaper bits along the bottom of the cage. Lynn spotted the date. December 1. Why, that was her Disappearance Day. Her own private little anniversary, and she’d nearly missed it.
Lynn tried at length to fingertip the shredded bit of dated newspaper out of the cage. The bird must have disliked the intrusion; she swooped down to nick Lynn’s fingertip with her little beak.
On her Disappearance Day anniversary, Lynn liked to think about how much people had missed her. An idea like a warm blanket. When she was still in the hospital in Hartford, she collected all the clippings about her disappearance. She made a quilt of them and burrowed underneath it, smelling the unwashed scent of herself, delicious with the feeling of hiding inside the world. She could distract herself from her past that way, though even then the reasons behind her being there had grown walled off in her memory, amidst the ice baths and sedatives. She still felt acutely the rip of loss, though, and there was a wicked satisfaction to seeing the rest of the world search for her, to see her own devastation broadcast upon their faces. More people miss me than I remember knowing, she had said to the sweet-smelling nun who visited daily. The nun patted her hand and whispered at the nurses’ station about poor Miss Coleman, who was fixated on that missing college girl. What harm to let her have the articles? the nurses whispered. And Lynn was pleased at her unexpected skill in hiding.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka and left her dorm room.
Indeed she had, but the newspapers all left out the brawny men in white shirtsleeves who’d clamped her elbows and rushed her into the back of a long black car while everyone else was in class.
Lynn clicked to the table for her book and clicked back toward the kitchen. In the glass of the French doors, her reflection.
She had been pretty once.
At thirty-nine, Lynn’s mother had still been smooth-faced and trim, two babies born and two more to come.
After Lynn’s Remarkably Successful Procedure, the muscles in her face worked differently, some of them not at all. Her left side drooped when she smiled broadly, so she avoided smiling altogether. If she went missing now, no one would look for her. In the dining room, where there used to be a mirror, there now hung a portrait of George and Lynn. In the painting, Lynn was settled near George’s knee, and his large hand wrapped the back of her neck. She hadn’t sat for the portrait; George said it would be too much of a burden and didn’t she have her puzzles and her leaf pressings, and they used instead her old high school photo, the one that appeared in the papers all those years ago. She recognized the likeness but didn’t see herself in it.
Someone else had painted her portrait once, the same someone who had lit her first cigarette. That portrait had also been a terrible likeness, Lynn’s face muddled, a Caravaggio stream of impossible light hitting her bare breasts, her hands and feet disappearing into shadow to cheat the painter’s own shortcomings. The hiss of the match, the ticking of the painter’s watch as she cupped her hands around the tip of Lynn’s cigarette to shield the flame. Tick, tick. The flaring smell of sulfur mellowing into the catch of the tobacco threads, tick, tick, the painter hovering her hands longer than she needed to.
Click, click click, back to the kitchen.
A man entered through the side door. He was dressed in khaki short pants and a green shirt, wetted to his chest with perspiration. His ears stood out pink against the pale brown of the rest of his skin, and water drops slid down his neck. Was this George? She examined him further, his carriage and heavy breathing. No, no. This man was from the gardening company. There was a yellow tree insignia on his shirt, over his right breast. He put his hand on Cook’s shoulder, a gesture of familiarity, then leaned into the kitchen sink, where he drank water right from the tap. Without so much as a by-your-leave. Was she no longer here? Was she no longer the mistress of this house?
Never mind, though, because she had her book of leaf pressings. Cook had in fact made her a new cup of cinnamon tea, and Lynn sneered a bit at it before opening her book.
“Dr. Frank back yet?” the young man asked. Lynn lifted her head to answer him, perhaps to scold him for failing to address her properly, then saw that it was Cook to whom he’d been speaking.
“Tomorrow evening,” Cook said quietly, so quietly that Lynn had to lean forward to hear. “He gets into Sarasota at six, and his son will fetch him from the airport.”
“I lived in Sarasota, you know,” Lynn said, looking down at her book, thick and puffed with treasure, a grimoire. She turned the stiff pages so that it would appear as though she didn’t care whether she had their attention. “I lived there in an institution that my husband ran. For special girls, girls too tender for this horrible world.” The kitchen heated under the setting sun. “It was quite elite. I’ve always been very tender.”
Lynn reached for her mug, then remembered what was inside and withdrew her hand. “Dr. Frank gave me this album while I was there, in fact. I’d never seen such plants as they had in that state.”
“You are in Sarasota right now, Mrs. Frank,” Gardener said. Cook shot him a foul look.
“Is that so?” Lynn said. She sucked on her fingertip. She’d punctured it somewhere, and it was aching.
“Are you cold? You’re shivering,” Cook said, and pointed to Lynn’s hand, which was, come to see, tremoring slightly.
“I’ve always been quite tender,” Lynn said, and she tucked her hand into her skirts, deep in the warmth between her thighs. Throughout most of her childhood, her nose would bleed torrentially and without warning. Whenever you don’t get your way, her mother would say. Since moving to Florida, she no longer got nosebleeds—the humidity, George said—but even when she couldn’t remember how to tie her shoelaces, she could remember how the painter taught her to tend to the nosebleeds, to pinch the soft part of her nose and drop her chin to her chest, how the painter would wrap her hand around Lynn’s neck and hum.
Outside the screen door, a mist of insects rose up from the grass just as the sun hit the rooftop of the brick building that ran the length of the lawn. A woman in a blue uniform led a stumbling line of drab-dressed women toward the dining hall. One of the women stopped to pluck a blade of grass.
Gardener looked at Cook and whispered, “Where was he this time?”
Tick, tick.
“Cleveland, I think,” Cook said, her voice only slightly softer than regular volume. “Was a piece on the radio this morning on the drive in about some fool demonstration he gave, standing onstage and poking at some lady’s brain with an ice pick.” Cook raised her eyebrows and flicked her gaze toward Lynn, all of which Lynn watched. “He’s a right piece of work.”
“It’s called an orbitoclast,” Lynn said, but really there was no difference. The instrument George had used for her Remarkably Successful Procedure had originally been pulled from George’s own icebox, his father’s initials carved into the wooden handle, the veneer worn gray in spots.
“What time is dinner tonight?” Lynn asked Cook, using a schoolteacher tone of voice to draw the woman’s attention back to her assigned task.
“How long ago was it that you and Dr. Frank married?” Cook asked. The question was impertinent, wasn’t it, totally aside from Cook’s work.
“We married in 1951. Seventeen years ago this spring,” Lynn said. “I wore a smart plaid suit and carried a small button bouquet. My husband wore a top hat, and the judge performed the ceremony in my husband’s office at the institution. My parents were there, and my sisters. We had petit fours with lunch. Later that night I threw up my chicken salad sandwich.” Her mother once had told her that men expected certain things from wives, but Lynn had simply not been prepared. She had always been quite tender. After that first night, she had slept with George’s ice pick under her pillow for years.
