Under Shifting Glass (2 page)

I look.

“Marvelous,” Si says, testing the flap. “You can do your homework and then—voilà!—fold it all away.”

“I hate it,” I say.

“It's a desk,” says Si. “Nobody hates a desk.”

The desk squats in my room. I don't touch it, I don't put anything in it, I don't even look at it more than I can help, but it certainly looks at me; it scowls and glowers and mocks me.

Here I am
, it says.
Just what you wanted, right? A bureau
.

I turn my back on that bureau. But it still stares at me—stares and stares out of the mirror.

I turn the mirror to face the wall.

Some weeks later, I hear Mom puffing up the stairs. She puffs more than the delivery men, because of carrying the weight of the babies curled together inside her. And also the weight of the worry they are causing.

“Jess,” she says, stopping by my door.

“Yes?”

“Jess—I wish you could have had the piano, too.”

And that makes me want to cry, the way things do when you think nobody understands but actually they do.

The next day my friend Zoe comes over.

Zoe is a dancer. She doesn't have the body of a dancer; she's not slim and poised. In fact she's quite big: big-boned and, increasingly, curvy. But when she dances, you think it is what she was born to do. I love watching Zoe dance. When Zoe dances, she's like me with the piano—nothing else exists, she loses herself in it.

Otherwise, we're not really very alike at all. She's loud and I'm quiet. She's funny and I'm not. And she likes boys. Mom says that's because, even though we're in the same grade at school, she's nearly twelve months older than me, and that makes a difference. Mom says it's also to do with the fact that she's the youngest child in their family.

Soon I will not be the youngest child in our family.

I will no longer be an only child.

Si says, “Girls grow up too fast these days.”

And I don't ask him what he means by this or whether he'd prefer Zoe (I've a feeling he doesn't like Zoe that much) to go back to wearing a romper, because this will only start A Discussion.

I have other friends, of course—Em, Alice—but it's Zoe I see most often, not least because she lives at the bottom of our cul-de-sac, so she just waltzes up and knocks on our door.

Like today.

Then she pounds up the stairs and bursts into my room. Sometimes I think I'll ask her if it's possible for her to come into a room so quietly no one would notice her, which is something I'm quite good at. But I'm not sure she'd understand the task, which is another reason I like her.

“Hi, hi, hi. Hi!” says Zoe. She wheels about, or tries to, which is when she comes face to face with the desk.

“What,” she says, “is that?!”

“It's a bureau,” I say.

“A what?”

“A bureau.”

“But what's it doing here?”

“It belonged to my Aunt Edie.”

“It's hideous,” she says. “And ancient.”

Ancient
is one of her favorite words. Anything more than two weeks old is ancient as far as Zoe is concerned.

“It's George the Third,” I say. Si again.

“Hideous, ancient, and
pre-owned
. Who'd want something that already belonged to some George whatever?” she says.

I'm going to explain that George Whatever didn't own this piece of furniture, that he just happened to be on the throne of England when it was made, but that would turn me into Si, so I don't.

“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned, and bashed up,” she continues.

Bashed up?

I actually take a look at the desk. It's not bashed up. And the wood isn't as dark as I'd thought, either; in fact it's a pale honey color and the grain is quite clear, so even though it's more than two hundred and fifty years old, you can still imagine the tree from which it was originally cut. There are dents in the surface, of course, and scratches, too, but it doesn't look bashed up, just as though it has lived a little: lived and survived.

“It's not bashed up,” I say.

“What?”

“And it's not hideous. Look at the locks,” I say. “Look at the handles.”

The locks and the handles are also not as I'd thought. They're not heavy, not funereal; in fact they're quite delicate. Around the keyholes are beautiful little curls of brass in the shape of leaves, and even the little brass-headed nails that hold the handles in place are carefully banged in to look like part of the pattern.

“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned, and IN THE WAY,” says Zoe. She pirouettes. “I mean, how is a person supposed to dance in this room anymore?”

Then she sees the mirror turned against the wall.

“And what's this?” she says. “Are you having a bad face day?”

She hangs the mirror the correct way around and checks to see if she has any pimples, which of course she doesn't. Even when she gets to be a teenager I doubt she'll have pimples. Things like that don't happen to Zoe.

“I'm sorry about the dancing, Zo,” I say. “But I really like this bureau. In fact,” I add, experimenting, “I think I love it.”

“Huh?” says Zoe, who's still searching for pimples.

Sometimes I think Zoe is a mirror. I look into her to find out who I really am.

As soon as Zoe leaves (flamboyant twirl and a shout of
Bye-eee
as she flies down the stairs), I take my chair and sit at the desk.

I never saw Aunt Edie at this desk, as I saw her so often at the piano. But she must have sat here, I realize. Sat writing letters, private things—not things you do when you have guests in the house. I pull out the runners (and Si is right about this, it isn't difficult at all) and lay down the lid.

Inside it is like a little castle. In the middle, there is a small arched doorway, the door itself hinged between two tiny carved wooden pillars. On either side of the door are stepped shelves and cubbyholes of different sizes, to store envelopes or paper, I suppose. There are also four drawers: two wide, shallow ones next to the pillars, and at either
edge of the desk two narrower, longer ones. The desktop itself slides away if you pull a little leather tab. Underneath is a cavernous little underdrawer.

“That's where they would have kept the inkwells,” says Si in passing.

I can see dark stains that could have been ink. People writing at this desk long before Aunt Edie. I imagine a quill pen scratching out a love letter. And suddenly those faraway people who sat at this desk, family or strangers, they don't seem so faraway at all. They seem joined to me by the desk and all the things that have been written and thought here. And then I think about Edie herself, and how maybe she loved this desk. Sun-bright Edie, maybe coming here to be quiet, to be still, to unfurl her own dark heart.

Then I know I want to claim this desk after all.

But I still don't put anything in the desk. Not until the morning my mother is to deliver the babies. This is going to be a long day, a difficult day. “We'll need to keep busy,” Gran says, “you and me.”

Gran has agreed to stay in the house with me so that Si can be in the operating room with Mom.

“It's an elective Cesarean, Jess,” says Si. “The surgery itself is quite safe.”

They have to go in the night before, as Mom is first on the list. Si stands in the hall holding Mom's suitcase.

“Don't worry, Jess,” Mom says, and stretches out her arms for me. But I can't get close, because of the babies. “I'll bring them home safe,” she whispers into my hair. “I will.”

“Time to go,” says Si.

I lie awake a long time that night. Keeping vigil. Watching. I imagine Mom being awake. And Si. And probably the babies too, waiting.

In the morning I skip breakfast.

“You're growing,” says Gran. “You have to eat.”

But I can't.

I go to my room and start on the desk. I have decided that I will put in some homework stuff, but also some private things. In one of the cubbyholes I lodge my English dictionary, my French dictionary, my class reader. I pay attention to the height of the books, their color, shuffling them about until I am sure that I have the correct book (the stubby French dictionary), in the middle. In the inkwell space, I put pens, pencils, glue, sticky tape, and my panda eraser with the eyes fallen off.

Then I move on to more precious things. Behind the little arched door, I put ScatCat. He's a threadbare gray, his fur worn thin from having slept in my arms every night for the first four years of my life. His jet-black eyes are deep and full of memories. I think I'd still be sleeping with him if Spike hadn't arrived. More about Spike later.

To keep Scat company, I add the family of green glass cats made, as I watched, by a glassmaker one summer vacation. Then I add a bracelet that Zoe made for me (braided
strands of pink and purple thread) and also one made by another good friend—Em—(purple and green) when we were in fourth grade. I once suggested we make a friendship bracelet for the three of us, winding Zoe's colors and Em's and mine (purple and blue) all together. Zoe laughed at me. She said friendship bracelets could only be exchanged one-to-one. That's what Best Friends meant, Zoe said. Didn't I understand about Best Friends? I close the little arched door.

Next I select my father's ivory slide rule. Not Si's slide rule, but one that belonged to my real father. Gran thrust it into my hand one day.

“Here,” she said, quite roughly. “Your father had this when he was about your age. You should have it now.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A slide rule, of course.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“It was how people did math,” said Gran. “Before calculators.”

Before calculators
sounded a bit like
Before the Ark
. It made my father seem further away, not nearer. Or it did until I held the slide rule. Carefully crafted in wood, overlaid with ivory (“I know we shouldn't really trade ivory,” said Gran, “but this elephant has been dead a long, long
while”), it's bigger and deeper than a normal ruler, with a closely fitting sliding section in the middle slightly broader than a pencil. Along all its edges, carved numbers are inked in black.

“It originally belonged to your grandfather. Passed down,” Gran said. She paused. “Useless now, I suppose. It's useless, isn't it?”

Gran talks to me quite often about my father, although only when we are alone. Normally it makes me uncomfortable, not because I'm not interested, but because she always seems to require a response from me and I'm never quite sure what that response should be. And the more she looks at me, the more she wants, the less I seem to be able to give. Though I think she believes that, if she talks about him enough, I'll remember him. It will unlock memories of my own. But I was only nine months old when he died and I remember nothing.

But the slide rule is different. It's the first thing I've ever held in my hands that he held in his.

“It's not useless,” I say. “I like it. Thank you.”

And all the roughness falls away from her.

I'm thinking all this as I select a drawer for my father's ivory slide rule. Right or left? I choose the right, slip it in. Then I change my mind.

I just change my mind.

I open the left drawer and transfer the slide rule. But it won't go, it won't fit. I push at it, feel the weight of its resistance. I push harder; the drawers are an equal pair, so what fits in one has to fit in the other.

Only it doesn't.

I pull out the right-hand drawer. It runs the full depth of the desk, plenty long enough for the slide rule. I pull out the left-hand drawer. It is less than half the length of its twin. Yet it isn't broken. It is as perfectly formed as on the day it was made.

Which is why I put my hand into the dark, secret space that lies behind that drawer.

And find the flask.

My heart gives a little thump. I've no idea, this first time, what I'm touching, except that it is cold and rounded and about the size of my hand. As I draw it out into the light, I feel how neatly its hard, shallow curves fit into my palm.

I call it a flask, but perhaps it is really a bottle, a flattish, rounded glass bottle with a cork. It is very plain, very ordinary, and yet it is like nothing I've ever seen before. The glass is clear—and not clear. There are bubbles in it, like seeds, or tiny silver fish, swimming. And the surface has strange whorls, like fingerprints or the shapes of contour lines on a map where there are mountains. I think I should be able to see inside, but I can't, quite, because the glass seems to shift and change depending on how the
light falls on it: now milky as a pearl; now flashing a million iridescent colors.

I sit and gaze at it for a long while, turning it over and over in my hands, watching its restless colors and patterns. It is a beautiful thing. I wonder how it came into being and who made it. It can't have been made by machine; it is too special, too individual. I remember the glassmaker who made my green cats and I imagine a similar man in a leather apron blowing life down a long tube into this glass, putting his own breath into it, lung to lung, pleased when the little vessel expanded. And then, as I keep looking, the contours don't look like contours anymore but ribs, and the bowl of glass a tiny rib cage.

I have these thoughts because of the babies. Everything in the last nine months has been about the babies. They get into and under everything. They aren't even born and they can make you frightened, they can make Mom cry, they can make me see things that aren't there under shifting glass. Because, all of a sudden, I think I can see something beneath the surface of the glass after all.

Something and nothing.

I do make things up. Si says, “You are certainly not a scientist, Jessica. Scientists look at the evidence and then they
come to a view.” But it's not just Si, it's Gran and even Mom. They say I make things up. I see things that aren't there. And hear them sometimes, too. Like now, beneath the glass, through the glass.