Quantum Girl Theory, page 13
She pressed her face deep into Polly’s pillow, and beneath the harsh detergent she could smell something else, something human and distinct. For months after Marjorie Ann Wise had disappeared, Mary—Paula—Paul—had slept with Wise’s paint-stained cardigan under her head, wanting to inhale whatever of Wise might be left there, whatever skin cells or turpentine or perfume. Paul had wanted all of it. And then she’d worn Wise’s watch every day, had slid into sleep at the sound of its ticking, right up until it had disappeared—had been taken from her, just as Wise had been.
Lying in the bed of a missing girl always jolted Mary back to that place, the ripped-open grief of loss, so much rougher, so much more shameful, than anything that had happened to her since. If Wise hadn’t disappeared, what might life have been?
And why hadn’t the Sight come to her early enough to save Wise?
It came now, Mary’s vision, finding her on her hands and knees, naked shins against the soft green carpet. Above her head, bare wood of the underside of a table. The scalloped hem of the lace tablecloth dripped over the table’s edge and obscured her vision of the room. The same table at which Mary had just eaten dinner. Everything bathed in a white-blue sunbeam hitting slant through the living room window.
Where was the Sight taking her?
Her mouth tasted like a cherry lollipop, and two of her fingers were pink and sticky.
Across the floor, she could see a woman’s stockinged ankles crossed in front of the sofa. She smelled cigarette smoke. One of the chairs facing the sofa appeared occupied, but it was canted away from her.
“Boys back yet?” The voice, an old woman’s, wavered.
“I told you, Adaline, Gurnie’s up in Fayetteville looking at a new tractor, and Clarence is on his way back from the farm.” Bernice’s voice was raised, as though placating someone hard of hearing.
“Oh no, he’s not,” said Adaline. “Oh no, oh no. He’s not.” A strong intake of breath.
Mary’s hand, a small child’s hand, reached up to pinch at a necklace around her neck, to run it along its chain; she felt the small vibration like a buzzing bee. Mary pinched at it again, trying to feel for its shape. The same medal she’d put on before bed. A thread between her and Polly.
And then suddenly Mary was somewhere else, was high above the ground. On a horse, the same horse from her earlier vision from Polly’s bed. High above the ground and looking down a steep embankment toward a body of water. A flash of bright red down below, and then Mary awoke, wailing.
Mary tried to memorize the image, the flash of red that must have been Evie’s red parka. The flash of red that connected Polly Starking to Evie—Mary gasped, sobbed against her will, seized with another girl’s terror.
Mary felt a depression on the mattress behind her and tensed; she turned to look back over her shoulder. Bernice, in a nightgown nearly identical to the one Mary wore, placed a hand on Mary’s shoulder. She soothed at Mary’s crown. “Shh shh shh,” Bernice whispered.
Did Bernice know it was Mary here, or had she come by pure loving instinct, groping in the dark to answer her daughter’s cries?
“Shh shh shh,” Bernice whispered again, cool palm on Mary’s hot head.
Mary loathed being touched—it broke her too easily. How hard it made her work to hold herself together. To not unbind her muscles, release her rigid neck. To not fall into fragments at the relief and the simple warmth of another person’s skin.
Mary fixed her jaw tight and set her face against the waves of repulsion and desire. She could feel a small humid circle on her cheek where Bernice’s hot breath landed over and over. Mary exhaled to a count of six. Inside her eyelids: Jack and her sweetheart, pressing together pruney fingertips. The sounds of the water moving around them, the contracting woods at night.
Mary looked up at Bernice’s face, her red-rimmed eyes, and another vision: Bernice, wearing the same pleated skirt and Peter Pan blouse as she’d worn the first day Mary entered Polly’s room. Day was breaking in the vision, and Bernice stood at the stove in the yellow kitchen, avoiding her reflection in the window. Gurnie walked into the room and poured himself a cup of coffee from the percolator. He put a hand on the back of Bernice’s head.
“Clarence swung by for the truck right early, but he’ll be back to pick me up. Any chance for some eggs?”
“What did he need the truck for?” Bernice said. Her voice sounded deadened, distant. Mary could feel her hollowness, edged by sparks of something else—suspicion, rancor. Bernice pulled eggs from the fridge and lit the burner beneath the skillet.
“Making another search pass through Smith Swamp,” Gurnie said.
Bernice hiccuped a sob, and Gurnie wrapped her up in his arms.
Time passed like a blink, and Bernice and Gurnie sat at the kitchen table with empty dishes before them. Mary could taste the salty egg yolk on the back of her teeth. The wide swinging sound of the front door opening. Gurnie stood up as Clarence entered the kitchen.
“Anything?” Gurnie asked.
Clarence removed his hat and shook his head.
“Did you really look?” Bernice said, suddenly, aggressively, rising from the table.
“Bernice?” Gurnie said.
“Did you really look, or did you just disappear like you do?” She stood facing Clarence, her soft hand curling into a fist. “Disappear and come back stinking of mud and sweat like some animal?”
Gurnie moved between Bernice and Clarence, but Bernice stretched to speak past his shoulder. “Did you go do whatever it was that made Adaline scream in the middle of the night? The thing that made her so sick at the end, the thing that made her refuse to go to sleep? Did you—” She lost herself on the last word, lost the muscle control in her legs and slumped toward the ground, where Gurnie swooped to catch her.
“What foolishness is this?” Gurnie whispered at her. “You know this man loved Paul like a daughter. You’re hurting, sugar, you’re just not yourself.”
And the Bernice in Mary’s vision, sobbing deeply into Gurnie’s flannel chest, gave way to the Bernice bent over Mary in Polly’s bed. “Okay now,” Bernice said, stiffer than she’d been a moment ago. She turned to go.
Watching the woman’s back, the sweep of her shoulder to her low spine, the small freckles on her upper arms, Mary wondered with some measure of anger what it was that Bernice and Adaline suspected, and what they might have been able to stop.
Follow these links to view this material as text (top to bottom): yearbook extract 1, newspaper exract, yearbook extract 2.
GHOSTWRITER
North Adams, Massachusetts, 1996
Your true reflection is found at the outer bounds of what you will do.
—Virginia Butler
Rescued from obscurity by a devoted advocate, Virginia Butler now holds the record for number of volume requests at the New York Public Library…
Eerily prescient…distinct voice…Life shortened by ovarian cancer over twenty years ago…Her overlooked and later celebrated first novel in which a young girl escapes the bounds of a wartime feminine existence to join the ranks of the natural world, nymphette of the forest…
—The New York Times, October 3, 1996
In Virginia Butler’s first book, a girl goes missing from her boarding school. It’s 1916, and the girl climbs to the top of a hill in her drab school uniform and burrows deep into the earth using only her fingers. Inside the hill, the girl builds herself an underground palace with tree roots for a hammock and a bouquet of lightning bugs for a lantern. She can make it rain with the right tug on the tulip bulbs, and if she presses on the embedded stones, boulders rise from the ground like standing figures to shadow the valley. In the story, the girl is free and she is god.
Paula Jean read that book in high school, lying on her stomach on the dirt floor of an old boys’ camp. Wise, who had pressed the book into Paula Jean’s hands in the first place, lay on her back beside Paul, smoking a cigarette with her blouse unbuttoned, shoulder pressed against Paul’s arm. Over time, that old camp cabin in the woods, shuttered because of the war, became their burrow away from the rest of the world, where they were free and they were gods.
And then Wise was lost and Paula Jean ran away and somehow decades later Paula Jean is here, in Virginia Butler’s empty house, standing at the dead woman’s stove, scraping the teakettle to the front burner and turning on the heat. It almost seemed that Virgie had called Paul to her all those years ago, as though she had known what would come: Paula Jean studying Virgie like a specimen until Paula Jean could impersonate Virgie as easily as she could be herself.
And so easily had Paula Jean become Virgie that it seemed preordained: Three volumes of forged correspondence, much of it between Paula Jean and Virgie. Two posthumously discovered novels. A half dozen reissues of Virginia Butler’s early work, with prefaces by Paula Jean. She’d slid into Virginia Butler’s place like a hand into a glove.
But the publishing house, once Virgie’s and now Paula Jean’s, has decided to send someone to pay her a visit.
The letter arrived today.
On our insurer’s insistence, we have instituted a new standard of due diligence…required to validate and photograph all of Virginia Butler’s original correspondence and manuscript drafts…apologize for the intrusion…unable to reach you by telephone…arrive on the 23rd…sorry for the inevitable inconvenience.
Paula Jean thinks better of the tea and pours three fingers of whiskey into her mug. She stabs at a lemon wedge with pointy clove studs.
* * *
—
The back door slams open on its own; the flames beneath the teakettle bluster and go out. Strong smell of gas. Paula Jean dead bolts the door and relights the burner. Her old bones creak. It’s easy to imagine it, an open door to a different lifetime: a muggy lover who’s just dropped beneath the faucet of the farmhouse sink for a gulp of cold water, smelling of sweet grass and diesel. A neighbor delivering a chess pie beneath a blue-gingham napkin with a wordless wave. In this life, though, it’s just Paula Jean standing alone, watching steam rise, willfully shackled to this kitchen where she begged for crumbs for too many years. She had come as a girl to escape her small miseries, and then up from the floorboards grew lashes that wrapped her ankles and held her in place for forty-four years.
She fingers the envelope. The Boston publisher—or more likely the secretary that types his mail—has addressed the letter to Paula Walton.
They misspelled it on the first book, too, missed her penciled correction, and just like that she became P. Walton, editor, unsexed and anonymous. In retrospect, she’s not sure why she let them take her name away so easily.
When she was in high school, it was Wise who had given her a new name. Paul. The sound of it still felt like Wise tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“God no, not Paul. That’s no name for a writer,” Virgie had said. The exasperated tone, the authority of it. As though Virgie were still standing right over Paula Jean’s shoulder.
Paula Jean had been filling Virginia Butler’s mug, her other palm resting on the egg-slicked diner counter between them. Paula embroidered on her waitress uniform in red script above her right breast. Fall of 1951. She had seen the leaflets in the library announcing Virginia Butler’s visit to Stamford that week, had long ago memorized the contemplative pose from her author photo on the jacket. The news of the visit, then Virgie’s appearance here, in Paula Jean’s diner, felt like a message from Wise. It had been five years since Paula Jean’s splashy run away from college, inspired—she’d never admitted to Virgie, as though Virgie hadn’t puzzled her out immediately—by that book Wise had given her. Seven years since Wise had gone.
“I’m not a writer,” Paul had said.
Virgie—though she wasn’t yet Virgie, she was Miss Butler, Dr. Butler, she endlessly reminded people—tipped a snowstorm of sugar into her mug and stirred the coffee with the lead end of her pencil. “I think we’ll see about that,” she had said.
Paula Jean hid her smile. A spark! The first notice anyone had paid her since she’d run away and watched her disappearance spill across the papers, since her mortified return home to Stamford six days later. Paul’s parents had quietly shut the bedroom door behind her and called up The Stamford Advocate to persuade them to drop the story. Her father wrote a check to cover the cost of the detective the paper had hired, threw in a bit to grease the wheels of the printing press. And then nothing was ever said about it again.
In that diner, after years of her parents’ averted eyes, Paula Jean had felt greedy for the attention, but Virgie had lost interest in her already, was marking up a manuscript with her dampened pencil tip.
This was one of the reasons it was so easy to take over after Virgie died: No one had ever gotten to know Virginia Butler. No one but Paula Jean.
Be me, Virgie would say when the telephone rang, echoing through the rotting old house, and with pleasure Paula Jean would oblige: to the gas man, the oncologist, the editor’s assistant at Virgie’s publishing house.
Photograph all of Virginia Butler’s original correspondence and manuscript drafts. This, out of the deep blue. After twenty-five years at this, Paula Jean has long since stopped lying awake at night over fears of being found out—and now here is the fear, frog-walking in on some Boston man’s legs.
After the first manuscript Paula Jean had sent to the publisher, the “collected” letters between herself and Virginia Butler, she’d sped home from the post office in Virgie’s ancient Cadillac to puke and sweat. But over time, seeing her words under Virgie’s name made sense. Her life as a champion for Virginia Butler’s legacy—edited by P. Walton—became its own kind of truth. Its own kind of home. Paula Jean had created some of the most anthologized, beloved, and discussed books of modern times. People named their children after Virgie’s—after her—characters. What further proof must that Boston man demand?
Even still, it’s that first novel of Virgie’s over which Paula Jean feels the most ownership. It had cast a spell over her first love affair, had been the first thing she’d ever said to Marjorie Ann Wise, the swaggering painter she’d been following to art class for weeks. What is that about? Wise sitting on the low wall outside the high school grounds, hair cut short the day after senior photos, three cigarettes tucked into her bobby sock. The soft tick of Wise’s wristwatch filling the silence after Paul’s question. Wise closed the book without marking her place. Her fingers were short and streaked with oil paint. You’re in Lawson’s third-period art, Wise said. She held the book out for Paul to take. Get it back to me on Friday.
Paula Jean had never read a book so quickly in her life. Within months she’d memorized it as well as she had memorized every mole and mark on Wise’s body, the dark hair that grew at the nape of her neck, the aluminum squeeze of happy pain she felt when Wise drove her fingers between Paul’s legs. Everything, the good and bad of them, came from that book, and didn’t that make it just as much Paul’s as Virgie’s?
It did. It must.
And yet Paula Jean’s stack of notebooks, in which she has kept painstaking notes of her decades of fabrication, will condemn her to anyone who looks. Her own rough drafts of Virgie’s letters, outlines of the posthumous novels, diagrams of Virgie’s sentences. The man behind the curtain, so to speak. Paula Jean thumbs through them now, seeking in them some evidence of her own righteousness. Shouldn’t all the work count for something? Shouldn’t it prove her authority? What could be more intimate than poring over the details of another’s life, than resurrecting her? Virgie didn’t have to spend years studying herself, memorizing her own tics and tells. Paula Jean knows Virgie better than Virgie could have ever known herself. Paula Jean has constructed a legacy, and she’s given every bit of the credit to a dead woman. She’s taken barely anything for herself, and of course no one has ever thanked her.
Paula Jean shuffles into the kitchen and shoves the notebooks into the cold oven. She can spin stories out of air, but material truth is less malleable.
Paula Jean’s already finished her toddy, and a woody sliver of clove is swimming around in her mouth, prickling her tongue and soft palate numb. Her mother taught her to make a hot toddy when she was only six. From a housekeeper, Paula Jean had learned to put clove oil on a cotton swab and press it against the gum whenever her sisters complained of toothaches. Her baby sister, Heather, slept with a cotton ball doused in the stuff pressed between her eyes for the six days Paula Jean was missing from college. “Eye ache,” she’d said over and over. “I ache, I ache.”
Paul and Wise had always hated the end of that first novel. A sign of an early and unsure novelist. A twist: not a god at all but a girl who slipped on ice and cracked open her skull before she made it a hundred yards from her dormitory, the sylvan euphoria nothing more than the fevered death throes of adolescence. They had rewritten it dozens of times, granting the girl the love affairs and conquests stolen from her by Virginia Butler’s limited imagination.
A few years ago, Paula Jean wrote an introduction to the reissued edition of the book, and she declared the ending a dozen pages best edited out of Butler’s legacy.
The author’s promise to her protagonist—you may be shaped and known by the adventures you have, you and the world may change each other in equal measure—has yet to be fulfilled, in our literature or our world. When is a girl no longer a girl? It’s an old joke, and Butler is too cowardly to change the punch line. [P. Walton, introduction, Her Home in the Burrow, Virginia Butler (Penguin Classics, 1988), vi.]
