Instead of Three Wishes (5 page)
Read Instead of Three Wishes Online
Authors: Megan Whalen Turner
Wake in the cool evening
when swallows seek their rest
Refreshed
as the moon rises.
At the end of John's breaktime, there was no sign of life in the high crane. The foreman climbed up.
The books were returned to the library. No one knew what to do with the boxes of chocolate and the cinnamon. The day-shift foreman took them home.
Several months later, the new crane operator pulled the foreman aside to tell him what he'd seen as he rolled by in his crane: two people, a young man and a woman, sitting on invisible furniture with their feet up, reading books and eating chocolates.
I
remember standing on the front steps of my great-aunt Charlotte's house. We were waiting for a cab, and my feet were cold. It was November, and I was wearing the kind of nice shoes that girls wore then with their best dresses. I thought that my feet would be too frozen to bend by the time the taxicab arrived, and I was considering clumping down the stairs like Frankenstein's monster, but I wasn't sure how Aunt Charlotte would take it. I'd been staying with her in her town house in Washington, D.C., for four gloomy days while my parents were away. My mother had said her aunt Charlotte was very reserved, but she was sure that I would like her once we got to know each other. I wondered how long that would take. Aunt Charlotte averaged twenty-five words a day, and ten of those were “Would you like some breakfast?” and “Would you like some lunch?” After four days, I didn't know her any better than I had when she'd come to meet my train at Union Station. I had tried to fill in the
silences and create a one-way conversation without much success. I wasn't sure that she had even noticed. It was only that morning that we had had our first real dialogue. She had invited me to join her that day for a trip to the National Gallery of Art. My mother had told me that Aunt Charlotte went to the NGA once a month without fail, and if I was invited, I should go, too. I wasn't much interested in paintings, but I said yes, I'd like to go, and went back upstairs to put on my best clothes.
When the cab finally arrived, I followed my aunt down the front steps with no Frankenstein imitations and climbed into the backseat beside her. It was an old cab. It smelled like cigarette smoke, and the vinyl on the seat was patched with squares of gray tape. The cabdriver wore a knit hat over his bushy hair. When he turned his head to ask where we wanted to go, all we could see were his hat and his hair and his nose. Aunt Charlotte said that we wanted to go to the National Gallery, and the cab pulled away from the curb with a lurch.
Aunt Charlotte looked over at me and folded her hands carefully in her lap. She said, “Well, Marguerite, you've told me a great deal about yourself in the last four days. I thought I'd tell you a little about myself and then we'd go see some friends of mine. How does that sound?”
I said that I thought it sounded fine, and after a moment of lacing and unlacing her fingers, my aunt began her story.
I was just about your age the year that we went to Ocracoke for Thanksgiving. My only brother was away at college, so it was just my father, my mother, and myself. Ocracoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina. We had a beach house there. It's very beautiful in the summer but doesn't have much to recommend it in November. Still, my father wanted to go, so we did. My mother was not pleased. She liked to go out in the afternoon and visit her friends and drink tea and eat little cakes and talk. None of her friends would be on Ocracoke in November. They were all in Washington, planning their next trips to London and Paris.
Unlike Mother, I was very pleased. Mother always took me visiting with her in the afternoons, and I hated it. I hated the tea and the little cakes and all the boring talk. I dreamed of someday being old enough to stay home.
My aunt paused, but then continued.
Home was not really much better. My brother was so much older than I was that I rarely saw him. I had a governess to teach me, so I didn't go to school and I didn't have any friends. I had never had friends, and I didn't know that I was missing them. In fact, I'd have to say I was something of a lump. I had a great many toys I never played with and a number of books I never read. Just about the only thing that I had any interest in was fitting together jigsaw puzzlesâ¦.
When we went to Ocracoke, we took the train
to Swan Quarter and the ferry from there to the island. I was surprised by how desolate it was in winter, with its skies gray and the bright colors of the tourists' umbrellas gone. Our beach house had to be opened up. It was damp and chilled until the furnance was lit and the sea air dried out. The other beach homes and the large resort hotel remained shuttered and closed. The streets were empty. The few winter visitors gathered for companionship at the smaller resort hotel. The men sat in the bar. The women spent their afternoons sharing tea and a limited supply of conversation.
After a week, my mother declared herself wrung dry of gossip and went back to Washington. I stayed with my father. Once Mother was gone, I knew I would be attending no more afternoon teas. I would have my days to myself. Mother left me her gold watch with instructions to see that my father ate lunch at twelve and dinner at six, and except for those meals I was entirely on my own.
I spent my days ruining the polish on my boots as I scuffed along the sand beaches looking for seashells. There was a hollow in the sand dunes, out of the wind, where I would sit for hours, choosing the best of the shells I had gathered. I was sitting there when I first met Olga Weathers. It was a cloudy day, like most November days. It was two-fifteen. At two-thirty I intended to return to the house and ask my father for a dime for ice cream. Every day I had asked, and every day he had shuffled through his
coat pocket until he had found the single dime waiting there. There was, of course, nowhere to buy ice cream on Ocracoke in November. The ice-cream stand was firmly boarded up. Every night when he took off his suit coat, I replaced the dime in its pocket, and asked for it again the next day.
Aunt Charlotte broke off again and looked at me. The cab had stopped in traffic at a red light. “You may someday find that there is a certain contentment to be found in ritual, Marguerite.” She went on with the story.
I was about to pile my chosen shells into my pockets and walk back into town when I saw a figure coming up the beach.
It was Olga Weathers. Never in my life, before or since, have I seen anyone like her. She was an enormous woman, probably six feet tall and as stout as the brawniest of the island's shrimpcatchers. She was wrapped in a man's overcoat that was unbuttoned down the front. Underneath, she had on a heavy brown dress that swept the sand as she waded through it. Gray streaks of hair streamed out of the bun on the top of her head. She lifted a hand to brush the hair out of her face, and as she did so, our eyes met. I smiled politely and then wished I'd been rude and looked away. She took my smile as an invitation and altered course to arrive beside me in my hollow. She settled next to me.
There is something awkward about adults who try to join children in their activities, but
Olga was different. When she sank into the sand, it was as if she had taken possession of the whole beach and I was the one out of place.
“You are the little girl who's come to stay in the bungalow on Ocean Avenue?” she said.
I admitted that I was.
She introduced herself. “My house is near yours. I watched you putting a jigsaw puzzle together on your porch yesterday. You worked very quickly.”
“It's an old puzzle,” I explained. “I've put it together before.”
“Is that fun? Putting together the same puzzle again?”
I shrugged. “It's something to do.”
“You like puzzles.”
I shrugged again. “They're something to do.”
The woman was quiet for a moment. I checked my watch.
“You have somewhere to go?”
Surprised at myself, I explained about the imaginary ice-cream cone and the circadian dime. “It has been nine days. I want to keep asking every day until we go home. I bet myself that he won't notice.”
“He sounds preoccupied,” said Olga.
I shrugged.
Olga said, “Go ask for your dime. Then come and see me at my house.” She heaved herself out of the sand. “I live in the gray house with the pink trim. I have some puzzles that you might like.” She swayed down the beach and disappeared between two sand dunes.
I collected the dime, then considered Olga Weathers's invitation. Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it to my head with a four-inch hatpin. I wore the hat because I knew that my mother never went visiting without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency. I crossed the street and knocked at the door of the house with the shell pink trim. When the door opened, I stepped into a living room at the bottom of the ocean. Heavy lace curtains admitted light that wavered back and forth across the greenish gray walls. The wood floors were polished to a light sand color, and on every flat surface were piled seashells of all descriptions. Somewhere someone was singing, or it might have been a radio playing. There was no one in the room besides myself. I looked around for Olga.
There was a hallway in front of me, and I followed it to the back of the house, where I found her on a sunporch that looked out over the salt marsh and the sand dunes. To my surprise, it was she who was singing as she pulled a comb through her hair. The bun was gone from the top of her head. Instead, her hair fell in waves of brown and gray down her back. With one motion, the comb swept from her forehead to her hair's distant ends.
I was captivated. My own hair was easily as long as Olga's, but it frizzed and knotted at every opportunity. When it was combed, it didn't float in perfect fans down to my shoulders.
When she saw me, out of the corner of her
eye, Olga stopped singing. She wrapped her hair around one hand and pinned it up with a few deft movements. When it was back in its conservative wrapper, she turned to me.
“I thought you weren't coming. I had just about given up.”
I smiled. “I had to get my hat.”
Olga had a jigsaw puzzle that was a painting of waves. She and I spent that afternoon on her living room floor putting it together. While we pieced the edge together, we talked. I didn't read books, and I didn't know many people, and I hadn't learned anything of any interest from my governess, so I had not much to say, but Olga seemed happy to talk about jigsaw puzzles. She agreed that finishing wasn't the important part. It was the contentment that came with the placement of each individual piece. She asked me if I thought that this was true of different kinds of puzzles as well.
I asked, “What kinds of puzzles?” Jigsaws were all I knew.
“Like riddles,” she said. “Like word problems. Do you like to solve word problems?”
I shook my head. “I don't know.”
“There are puzzles everywhere,” said Olga. “There are very simple kinds of puzzles, and there are kinds that grow more and more complicated. People are a puzzle. I like to piece together their actions in order to understand their thoughts.” She looked at me. “Sometimes puzzles are so complicated you don't recognize
them at first as puzzles.”
Olga lifted her bulk off the floor with a ladylike grunt and went to pull a painting from behind an armchair. “This is a puzzle,” she said. “This is very special, this painting. I looked for it for many years before I found it, and that was very satisfying, but,” she sighed, “there is more to the puzzle that I haven't solved yet, and that is very upsetting.”
It was an oil painting. Thousands of little dabs of paint had been put together to make a picture of a city. I wondered what was puzzling about it.
Olga looked thoughtfully at the painting and sighed. “I keep working on it.” She slipped the painting back behind the armchair and returned to the jigsaw.
I spent every afternoon thereafter with Olga and her puzzles. She asked me riddles and produced brainteasers. We fitted together jigsaw puzzles, and we talked. Some days she suggested a walk on the beach. Whenever we topped the sand dunes and looked over the ocean for the first time, Olga would pause. She looked so sad that I finally asked what distressed her. She shrugged.
“You are growing a little more sharp-eyed, Charlotte,” she said. “I am only wishing I could swim through the waves.”
“It will be warm again soon,” I said.
“It is not the cold that keeps me out of the water.”
“Can you not swim?” I asked. I couldn't imagine someone living surrounded by ocean and being unable to swim.
“I used to swim,” Olga explained, “like a fish. But then I changed.” She waved a hand at her heavy body and shrugged. “With a body like this I would sink like a stone.”
I looked her over and admitted to myself that Olga's bulk would be hard to propel through the water. I thought she must have been much thinner when she was younger.
“Do you go wading?” I asked. Lots of fat people did that.
“No, it only makes me sad to wade without swimming. But enough of that. We have puzzles still to be solved, and maybe someday I will swim again.”
One afternoon I sat in Olga's living room waiting while she talked on the porch to a fisherman about the weather. I pulled out her painting in order to look at it more closely and wondered again what there was about it that was puzzling. I thought at first it was a picture of a river running through the middle of a city, but then I realized that it was a picture of Venice, where there are canals instead of streets. There was a bridge so steep that it had steps going up one side and coming down the other. There were people and shops all along the sides of the canal, and thin black boats, like canoes, crisscrossed the water. The boats were called gondolas, and I thought that the bridge must be the Rialto. I had
read about it in my geography lessons. There were bright flags hanging from the bridge and the eaves of all of the buildings, and you could tell the sun was shining and the flags were blowing in the wind. When Olga came in, I asked her what the puzzle was.
“There is something hidden there, in Canaletto's painting,” explained Olga. “It was put there by a very unpleasant man.”
“You mean Canaletto?”
“No, not the artist, another man, who then hid the painting. So what I've been searching for has been doubly hidden.”
“Why did he hide it?”
“He knew that it was very precious to me. He hoped that I would marry him in order to get it back.”
“Wouldn't you?”
“No, even if I'd married him, he would have kept it and kept it and kept it, and I would never have been free. He thought I was helpless and had no choice, but I am not powerless, and I have a few friends. They helped me make a home on this island, and the people here pay me for what I can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh.” Olga shrugged. “Foretell them the weather, find their fish, sometimes call their boats home when they are lost. Simple things.”
I wasn't sure if she was joking or not. I asked, “What happened to the unpleasant man?”
“He was injured while hunting narwhals. The wound turned septic, and he died.”
“Good,” I said. If Olga said the man was bad, I believed her.
Olga lifted the picture behind the chair and sighed, “I just wish he had told me about the picture before he went off hunting narwhals.”
