Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (26 page)

R
uthie drives to the restaurant with the top down. The music is very loud. A woman is singing about broken hearts, which reminds me of my two hearts and how two is not enough. I put my hand on the rolled-down window and smile at myself in the small mirror. I barely recognize my own face with my hair whipping around it.

Ruthie shouts above the radio and the wind, There’s something I want to ask you!

I shout, What?

And she shouts, Why did you cut my hair when you were little, that time I was sleeping? I looked like an idiot!

I was trying to grow a tree, I say, using your hair as seeds in the backyard!

She looks at me.

I shout, I have the desire to put my hands straight up in the air.

Do it! she shouts.

And I think about it and then I do it. I curve my hands down and they pop back up. Ruthie takes one hand off the wheel and throws it toward the sky. She sings loudly along with the music. I don’t know the words but I don’t have to. It’s not that kind of song. I sing too. When the song ends, I pull my hands in. People do get decapitated in convertibles. I remember the decapitation photograph at Isley Wesler’s and then the mongrel king’s heart. Isley Wesler said the mongrel king was going to come for us, and I held on to the name Eppitt Clapp forever.

I say to Ruthie, You know how I ate the heart of a mongrel king?

I do remember that weirdness, she says.

He came to the house one day, I say.

The mongrel king? she says.

He knocked on the door, and Eleanor opened it, and I was there behind her like usual and you’d already run away. Wee-ette was in her room, sick by now. In fact, she died pretty soon after this. He said he was there to see Harriet Wolf.

I close my eyes with the wind churning up my hair and picture him in my head. He was old, wiry, and kind of nervous, like people who came to the door asking for Wee-ette always were. He had a hat in his hands.

He didn’t look like a mongrel king, I tell Ruthie. And he lied about it too. When Eleanor asked him if he was a Wolf scholar, he said he was. But he wasn’t anything like the Wolf scholars who came with notebooks and copies to get signed and mini cassette players. When Eleanor told him to shove off, he said, Just tell Harriet that Eppitt Clapp is here. Just tell her that. The name sprang up from my mind like a jack-in-the-box.

Eppitt Clapp? Ruthie says.

That’s the name of the mongrel king, I explain. Eleanor left the room pretending to go tell Wee-ette. Of course, she just dawdled a minute in the living room. She didn’t even go upstairs. But while she was gone, I said to the mongrel king, I have your heart. He looked at me very surprised. He said, You do? And I said, And I can’t give it back. How did you get it? he asked. And I told him that I got it at the Isley Wesler Museum of Antiquities. He said, Wesler’s passed on now. I said, That’s sad. He said, Is she going to let me see her? I said, Nope. Wee-ette doesn’t see people anymore. He said, Tell her Eppitt Clapp—. And I said, I know. I know. Eleanor came back and said, I’m sorry, sir. She’s not up to it. He stood there and he looked at me and I gave him a nod. He nodded back and then he wandered into the driveway. His car was parked on the street, but he stood there awhile, looking at the house like he’d been through all of this before and he was dazed by a memory.

Ruthie says, Eppitt Clapp, huh? Did you ever tell Wee-ette?

I told her the mongrel king had come for his heart, but she didn’t understand because she was dreaming toward the other side by then. But when she died, Eleanor and I were there, and she said his name. She called for him. She said, Eppitt, over and over. And she stared out the window. The heavy curtains were drawn back. I remember that a rosebud had sprung loose from the trellis and it was tapping the window. The windowpanes were all bright and she said, I do, Eppitt, I do. She looked at me and Eleanor and she said, My angels are looking on.

And? Ruthie says.

I told her that Eppitt had come for her. I said it again and again. She only said one word.

What was that? Ruthie asks.

Bloomed, I say. And then she died.

Ruthie’s eyes are watering, but I don’t know if it’s because she’s sad or if it’s the windy car. Bloomed, she says. Doomed and blessed. And then Ruthie coughs and sits up straighter. She says, I never heard that story before.

You weren’t here, I say.

Soon after that, we pull into a parking space not far from the restaurant. I can see its sign. She turns off the car and opens her pocketbook. I’m ready to get out of the car but she says, Wait. She opens her wallet and pulls out a small piece of pink paper. She unfolds it and hands it to me. It’s a letter addressed to Mom and signed Love, Hailey.

Are you sure I should read this? I ask, and she nods.

In the letter, Hailey tells Ruthie that she wants to live with her father because he knows who she is and she’s way more comfortable at his house. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

It’s strawberry-scented, Ruthie says. Smell it.

I tell her that I’m allergic to strawberries. But as soon as I say it, I’m not sure it’s true, and even if I am, these aren’t real strawberries. So I lift the pink paper to my nose and sniff it. The strawberry smell has faded, but I say, It’s still there. Just the littlest bit.

This is what restaurants are like: loud, busy, talking faces in chairs, small dining room table after small dining room table, booths too, all shoved up against the walls, windows that show you a porch, waiters, waitresses, circular trays, beaded water glasses.

We walk up to a podium like we might be asked to give a speech, but someone gets behind the podium and says, How many?

Ruthie tells her we’re meeting someone.

Our father, I say, like it’s the beginning of the prayer. I clarify. Not the prayer. The person. The man.

Oh, the woman says. I think he’s already here.

She walks us through a room with framed newspaper clippings on the walls. Wee-ette would like a restaurant with clippings all over the place. But one, I swear, one says, Dead Fell from Sky, in big huge print.

And I say to Ruthie, Dead Fell from Sky!

Don’t start, Tilton, she says. Not now.

I wonder if I am crazy. Even if a restaurant puts up famous clippings, especially of the local area, why would they put up
that
one? Who wants to eat while reading about dead people falling from the sky?

We follow the woman, who has two menus under her arm. She stops in front of a table. A man’s sitting there. But he’s not George Tarkington. This man is old and fat. His nose is no longer sharp and decurved. It’s rounded, as if he’s gotten fat on the tip of it, in addition to everywhere else, and there is a divot between his eyebrows like he has worried all his life or maybe just squinted a lot because he’s confused.

But this man stands up and he says, Ruth! And he hugs her.

Thanks for making this work, she says.

And then Ruthie grabs my hand and pulls me forward. Tilton, this is George.

I have no reaction.

So she says, Dad.

At this, the woman with the menus says, I’ll put these here. She lays them on the table and adds, Your waitress will be with you shortly, and then scurries away, duckfooted, flap, flap, flap.

But I thought she was our waitress, and this makes me wonder if we weren’t good enough somehow. Why is she leaving us? I say.

She’s not leaving us, Ruthie says. She has other customers.

George says, It’s really nice to see you, Tilton. I’d have recognized you anywhere! You were a beautiful baby, and look at you now.

I can’t look at me now, I say. There are no reflective surfaces.

We sit down in our booth seats, me next to Ruthie, scoot, scoot. George has a golden-brown drink that sits on the table, sweating. He’s sweating too. I am too. The sweat is pooling in my armpit trenches. I’ll soak Wee-ette’s dress. I know it. No one’s saying anything. They pick up their menus and so do I, but I can’t focus on any of the words, which are jumping around.

George puts his menu down. Do you all want to split some crabs? he asks. That’s what’s good here, you know.

That sounds great, Ruthie says. Some Old Bay Seasoning to make our lips burn a little. She looks at me.

I nod and smile, but I don’t want burning lips.

So, don’t you have some questions? George says.

Don’t you? Ruthie says.

Should we replay our lives up until this moment? George asks.

I could, I say. But it would take too long.

Exactly, George says. So what’s the highlight reel?

Jesus, Ruthie says.

Lordy! I say. Lordy, Lordy.

George says he likes golf. He’s been to four European countries. He once fell off a ski lift, a very bad incident, and he’s never forgiven the guy he was with, though he probably should before he dies.

The waitress, a completely different woman from the one who met us at the podium, tells us she’s going to be taking care of us. Her name is Janie. George explains our crab order. She leaves, and George resumes his highlight reel. He likes sushi and saw the Rolling Stones live a few times. He misses Edie.

Who’s that? I ask.

His second wife, Ruthie says.

And George says, No, my third.

So you did marry Marie Cultry? Ruthie asks.

Yes. Yes, I did, he says. But she left me, went home, and married a high-school sweetheart. Someone she’d dated right before she met her first husband, the one who died in the plane crash.

Did you love her? Ruthie asks, which seems very personal.

I loved your mother more, he says, but sometimes you make a rash decision and you’re forced to live by it.

And that makes no sense at all except I shot my hands up in the convertible and what if they’d been cut off and I had to live with it. I feel a little sickish, like I might make a decision right now and have to live with it forever. Janie the waitress brings us water glasses, and I’m glad she’s taking care of us, because I need to press the cold water glass to my wrists. She also puts down newspaper—more stories, more print, more ink. I think of Wee-ette. Ruthie is talking about academe like she loves to hate it.

The crabs come in a big stack. Their bodies lie on top of each other—bright pink and red—their beautiful serrated pincers, their antenna eyes. They’re hot. We’re given mallets and picks.

Dig in, Janie says.

And it begins. George and Ruthie rip off claws and bite chunks of white meat. Ruthie says Hailey likes soccer and camps. She talks about her first and second husbands. The crabs have pale undersides tinted slightly bluish. George pulls the softer exoskeleton like a tab on a soda. The hard shell unfastens, exposing puffy lung membranes, fine squiggly entrails, a paste of mustard-colored innards. George and Ruthie take turns dipping white meat in melted butter cups.

Lordy, I whisper, still holding my dead crab.

Are you going to eat? George says.

I sip my water but my hand is shaking and water spills on Wee-ette’s dress.

Tilton? George says. Tilton, you okay? I thought this was going pretty well. Am I wrong?

No, Ruthie says. It’s going fine.

But then I start talking aloud. I say, I once ate the heart of a mongrel king. Wee-ette said, My angels are looking on, and died, and after she was dead, Eleanor rubbed her body, trying to keep her warm and alive with us on this earth. And then my mother bought birds and tried to release them. But the birds just pecked around in the yard.

Book five,
Home for the Weary,
Ruthie whispers. After Daisy’s mother died, they released birds.

I’m afraid of many things, I say, but not birds. Birds breathe in their own bones. And the house tried to eat my mother. Albert Gottleib is dead. I can fix a lot of mechanical things. Coach Flynn did or did not defile children, but he did try to shoot me. I miss Wee-ette. This is her dress. I know more than you think I do. Benny Elderman used to wear fedoras but now he’s out of work and jogs at 3 p.m. I’m a widgeon. And I’m not convinced that you are my father.

That is when I start shaking, my whole body. The crab in my hand rattles the newsprint.

Ruthie takes the crab from my hand and puts it on the table. She says, Okay, Tilton. She pushes me from the booth, scoot, scoot. She takes one elbow and George takes the other.

My body is vibrating from the inside out. George gives a wad of bills to the woman behind the podium.

Why did you leave us? I shout at her.

But George answers, I didn’t want to. You have to believe me. I didn’t want to.

I’m shaking so badly that Ruthie hands her keys to George. He’ll drive and she’ll hold me tight in the backseat. Holding, holding, holding. The way my mother held me when I got like this as a kid.

Ruthie’s phone rings. She says, Hello? Ron?…What? Why would you go peeking in windows?…I told you not to come!…I can’t hear you! Is that Justin?…Why does he think that? Her voice goes hushed and rough. Go to the next-door neighbor’s house, she says. Get a key. We’re on our way. And then Ruthie shouts at George, Slow down! Jesus! You’ll get us all killed!

I think of the bedtime story, of George driving in the pouring rain. The sky is overcast. Clouds are moving in. We pass a great field, dotted with grackles. It was in a field like that, I say.

Hush, Ruthie says. Hush now.

It was in a field like that, I say again, where the dead fell from the sky. We are coming to the new ending.

I
n this house, I started to write. I bought a small desk, a typewriter, a stack of plain white paper. Just like the book my father had once given me, I would fill these pages. My old books of clippings from my four years with my mother were here, boxed in my old bedroom closet. I took them out into the backyard, put them in a metal bin, and burned them. I decided to reconstruct my life. I would turn one thing into another. I would tell a different kind of truth, a truthful kind of lie.

Or maybe it’s as simple as this: the past spoke to me and I was an untrustworthy translator. The people of my life moved quickly and then slowly through time. They skipped forward. They reverted to infancy. They were born again and again. No one stayed dead. That’s realism, isn’t it? Has anyone I’ve ever known stayed dead? Tuffy prowls the house, a lion in a bowler. The hawker hawks in his bow tie, “Lookee here! Lookee here!” Wolff paces the hall. My mother, she tells me tales of Killiney Hill. My father whispers that my genius was wasted—a girl, a girl, a girl.

And so I wrote girly, except that means I wrote of sex and death. Look at my work and you’ll see my life disguised. It’s all there, though, legs as bloody wings, a forest of moaning hoot owls, steam that’s good for one’s lungs rising up from a dark lake, fatherish madmen, parties, doves, captivity, gunshot wounds, blind mothers, wild animals dressed in suits and ties, roads that wound only in circles. Eppitt and I shifted and soon Weldon was kissing the nape of Daisy’s neck, the stem of her brain. Her lover, her phrenologist.

Dear Lord, did I write.

Eleanor was twisting within me. I knew, medically and rationally, that I was creating a human being, but I had no real concept of it. The idea is too absurd. How could I really believe that I was making boned hinges, muscles and ligaments of webbed pulleys attached to a system of varied weights, the marble work of skin, doughy thighs, the piping trim of dainty veins, rubbery joints, electric wiring, enamel—each tooth a white machine that would one day know how to muscle up like a razor clam. My God, these are
the most ordinary miracles of them all.

In the hospital I told them my husband was dead. I suffered alone like an animal that wants to crawl out of its skin—to birth or be birthed. Then there she was—anxious with her dark brow. She cried because she existed. It was an existential crisis, for both of us. This existence, it’s worth crying about.

Did I love her enough? I don’t think I was capable early on. I’d lost all the ones I loved. I was afraid of loving her because I was afraid of more loss. Still, I was amazed by her. When I wasn’t writing, I was gazing at her puckering face, her hands—gripping and ungripping. I began to know that her eyelids went pink just before a cough. When she was hungry, she nursed furiously. Frothy and pink, like a rabid piglet, she was a mauler, a lunatic with a madness for flesh. She squeezed my skin until it was blotched and nicked. Her fingernails were jagged.
Pinprick scabs jeweled my breasts. Her tongue was her wisest muscle, the wet engine of her discontent. It fastened itself by a purse bead of spit while her hands, elegant, conducted around her cheeks and sometimes primed the pump. But I felt she absorbed my sadness. Once she wrenched herself loose from suckling, she ate sorrow as one flexed hand always twisted to her open mouth so she could gnaw her own fist. She slept with her ear pressed to my freckled chest, cupped to my heart. And when she was awake, she stared back. She was a loud presence in the world. Born with a foothold, she squalled to keep it. Red-faced, she bawled her dissent. Sometimes I squalled with her.

Still, I wrote. I would wrap Eleanor in my robe, curl my arms around her, and bang on the typewriter.

Before she was old enough to have memories, I took a taxi out to the grounds of the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. I thought about telling them I was a writer, but I’d published nothing. So instead I told them that I was looking for my lost twin, a lost half of myself. It wasn’t untrue. They let me wander with a guard. There were children still, lots of them. Had anything changed? A little. There wasn’t hard labor. This was quieter work, mostly busywork. But aside from that, no, nothing had changed. Not at all. The world still put children away somewhere when it didn’t know what else to do with them.

I saw Eppitt then, in the six-paned flowery glass at the top of King’s Cottage. So long ago, but not over. I was a writer now.

In one of the basements on the grounds, Eleanor and I were left alone. I pawed through photographs until I found the one I would steal. At first, I thought it was just geese on a lawn, the way our white shirts caught the sun. But when I got it home, I put it under one of my father’s high-powered magnifying glasses until one of the faces, the one who’d
broken loose and was running downhill, arms flung open toward the camera and the photographer, bloomed wide.

It was my own face. Me, as a little girl. The only photograph of me from that time that exists. A goose trying to take flight. I burned it a few days later, obliterating this scrap of the truth of my past.

Time passed, and Eleanor grew to be the age I was in that photograph. I couldn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t have words for it. I couldn’t process my own life. I was trying to—by constructing an alternative. But she sensed a falsehood. I know she did. She resented me for it, and to be honest, I was jealous of her. She had a mother. It was all I’d ever wanted. How dare she want a father too?

And yet she did. One afternoon when she was seven years old, I was overworking a sordid rendition of “Danny Boy.” I dropped flats and sharps consistently. A gummy broth was boiling on the stove. A pot lid jiggled, a soft distant cymbal.

Eleanor—already an excellent young pupil with a good bit of muscular energy—stood and said, “I don’t have a father. But I know I did.”

I took up the charge with gynecological sterility—a formality I’d learned from institutions and libraries. “A woman has a vagina,” I started. “And a man has a penis. And…and then…” It had been so long that I worried I might get this wrong. Was I going to start talking about the Owl and the Good Wheel and Brumus? I stammered a bit, and then gathered myself and continued. “And then the man inserts his penis into the woman’s vagina, and the sperm—”

“What I want to know,” Eleanor said, “is, where’s that penis now?”

“You mean—”

“My father’s penis. That’s what I mean.” She didn’t even know how she sounded, and later in life, when she did understand her own tone, her frankness, it would be too late to change. Or perhaps she was too stubborn.

I said flatly, “You are a bastard, Eleanor. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

This was a surrender, but I made the best of it. “In fact,” I went on, “this is a good thing. Fathers can do a good deal of damage. I once knew a psychologist and he told me that people will often say they were never sure if they were loved by their fathers.” I was talking about Wolff, of course. “Grown-ups go into psychologists’ offices and cry like babies. You don’t have to worry about anything like that. Your father never knew you existed. How could he have scarred you by not loving you? You’ll see that you have an advantage.” Funk had seen advantages to our childhoods at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. Surely this would be an easy sell to someone more privileged, like Eleanor?

“What about
your
father?” she asked.

“He gave us all of this. The house, some funds. You can’t fault a man for providing!”

It was a lie. And Eleanor knew it. But what made her angry, I think, looking back, wasn’t that lie or even the fact that her father, wherever he was and for whatever reason, was gone. She was hurt that I was trying to put a positive spin on it. Insulted. She marched off to her bedroom, which is now her bedroom once more.

I wasn’t a good mother, Eleanor. But you are making up for my lack. I see you being pulled by the tide of these children, and you don’t complain about raising them alone, but I know your struggle. These children, beautiful girls, have gulls in their throats. They caw for you. There is the bludgeoning sun of summer followed by the chill rattle of winter and a cold bed. You press on, exhaustion sewn into your skin. You scrub floors on your knees. You shovel the walk alone in
the snow and salt the driveway. You take care of these children as you’ve always taken care of me. Did you ever have a childhood? Perhaps I mistook a daughter for a mother just as my own mother had on her deathbed. Is this my greatest sin?

I did look for your father once after you asked all those questions. I felt guilty and knew I had to try—for your sake, not my own. We went to Wildwood in winter. It was wet and gray. We cowered under the low sky. Not wanting you to know the purpose of the trip, I handed shopkeepers small notes that inquired after Eppitt, rather than talking about him aloud. But after looking at the notes, they all shook their heads.

I found instead the lion’s head. Tuffy, stuffed and on display, behind a plate glass storefront window. Dead because some mobster had decided to use him to shake me up. I’d come here out of guilt, and guilt sought me out. I found a church, sat Eleanor down in one of the pews, and went to confession.

“I wasn’t really married,” I said to the priest, “but I thought I was.”

“Were you married in the eyes of God, in the church?” he asked.

I thought of the twin sunlit sheets, a steeple, and the angels on the porches watching on. “Yes,” I said.

I walked out, holding tight to your arm, Eleanor. A gift from God.

Hold tight,
I thought,
hold tight.

I feel death inside of me now. It’s not far off. But sometimes death feels like the wings of a goose—sturdy, broad, a sloping lawn before me, the possibility of flight.