What Is Visible: A Novel (9 page)

I
have tried to fatten myself for Doctor. He will be here in a week. My bones poke through my skin, and I think it is much nicer to touch the soft pillows of Tessy’s hands than to feel my birdy bones. But I must remember to eat, to eat more; I vow to chew and swallow all three meals every day. It is so hard, though, when I taste almost nothing. I move my jaws and grind my teeth and pass my tongue over the lumps of whatever it is that slides from the forks and spoons, but it seems a meaningless exercise.

I would much rather dip my fingers into the warm pond of the soup and plumb its depths for legumes, rend the slick skin from the chicken and peel away the sheaves of muscle until I reach the hardness of the bone, tear the bread into a hundred tiny pieces and roll them into buttered balls I juggle over my plate, squish through the pliant mounds of the potatoes, ravage the soft pulp of the baked aubergines, and burrow both fists into pie I will never know the sweetness of. Soak the whole feast in milk. The only delights of food for me are in its destruction, and it so disappoints me that I can no longer indulge my play now, not at my age and not at my station in life as the world’s most famous woman, second only to Queen Victoria (second only to
Julia
!).

Today, today, Doctor arrives today, and I am ready! I have eaten all my meals this week, even asking for seconds on several occasions, much to the surprise and delight of Wightie and Cook. I feel very cheerful and plump, no little bird, but a downy hen. All night I stayed up, unable to sleep, tiptoeing from my bed to the closet to pat down my new dress for wrinkles. I know it is clean because I have been saving it for Doctor’s return. I asked Jeannette for a yellow muslin, but when I showed it to Wight and asked did she like my yellow dress, she said it was brown. Brown! Jeannette said she couldn’t get yellow muslin for a good price, and besides this one matches my hair. I think I will look like a dung beetle when I wanted to look like a butterfly, fresh sprung. Green would have done, pink, or even red, but when I started in, Jeannette said, “If you pitch a fit, I won’t let you stand in reception for Doctor and the Missus at all.” Wight said brown is better for me anyway because it won’t show the food I drop as much as a lighter color would. It is very hard to let others make the decisions about one’s appearance. I learn a lot about the fashions from touching the ladies’ clothes, and I would like a ruched silk bonnet. I asked Doctor to bring me back a blue one in the French style. I hope he didn’t forget.

It’s the least he could do after he’s moved me out of his residence. Jeannette said he needed room for Julia and the baby, but I wrote to Doctor—I am your family too. You always said I was your dear daughter. “There are different ways of having children,” Jeannette says, “different kinds of families.” I know that. I am not with my own family; Doctor made me his daughter when I was seven, and now I’m being pushed aside by a mere babe, when I offered to be her sister as well? It is clearly Julia’s doing. If I believed in witches, which I don’t, I would say she’d cast a spell on Doctor. When I wrote to him, he said that Oliver and I were both his children out of love, but that baby Julia Romana was his child out of marriage. Then Jeannette said I could be her daughter too because she doesn’t have any children. None of it makes sense to me, but the more I ask, the more confused I become. And anyway, Oliver’s gone back to Maine, lolling, tongue out, like the fat and beloved family dog that he is.

My room in the Institution is not nearly so nice as my quarters in Doctor’s residence. There I had three big pillows, where here I have only one, and there I had a deep, soft carpet I could stick my littlest finger all the way in and that fitted to the edges of the wall, but here there is only a thin rug by the bed. But the worst is the bang and scamper of blind girls up and down the hall, and I have no lock on my door so they can sneak in any time, though Miss Wight told them not to bother me. Most of them I have no time for, no wish to know.

Tessy has grown taller than me, and other parts too. She says I will get bigger parts as well, but I’m not sure I want them. Doctor might not even recognize me, his dearest daughter! I have collected all his letters from Europe, tied with a ribbon with tight loops, hidden beneath my mattress. It’s not a large parcel, but I still wore out Swift’s fingers having her read them to me again and again. Now I have them all memorized, and so to open them, I pretend to turn a key in my ear, and then I mouth the words. I sent Doctor over one hundred letters, and I shall ask my new teacher to read them to me. I know Doctor will have saved them and carried them back with him over the ocean.

I have also written many letters that I never sent, letters that were secret, only for me and for God. Those I wrote in blood, though I was never sure if there was enough blood to write out all the words, so I had to keep making more little cuts with the metal label along my inner arm and thigh. It doesn’t hurt. I actually like it because it is the sharpest feeling I know. I push beyond the barriers of myself, and I am bigger for a moment, flowing out into the world. For me, it is not mutilation, but
experience
. Before Wightie came, Swift had asked me about the blood on my sheets, and then she hugged me and congratulated me that I had started to bleed. I was very surprised that everyone did this, but then she gave me rags to stuff between my legs and told me it would happen every month. I didn’t cut myself down there, but I didn’t tell her the truth. I asked why does the blood come out there and she said, “It is how God shows you that you are growing up.” It turns out that God loves blood too. I thought He did, and that is why He fills me with such joy every time the metal slices through my skin.

Swift said it was time for a corset after she’d found the blood. At first, I hated it—how tight she pulled its laces!―but after a couple of weeks, I began to thrill to its pinch. The more parts of my body that I can feel at once, the better. I certainly don’t fill it out like Tessy, but I enjoy the extra petticoats I get to wear over it. Before I wore only one or two in the winter, but Swift claimed that some ladies wear as many as ten, some of them corded, to achieve the right base. I only have three, though. Who would have thought I’d ever own three petticoats? Chemise, corset, crinoline, petticoats. The crinoline is my least favorite of my new accoutrements, like standing in a steel-hooped cage, a trapped sparrow. My waist is only one-and-a-half hands’ widths when I’m corseted, and then the dresses bloom outward with all the layers of flounces and furbelows beneath them. Every time I walk up or down the stairs, I must hold up my dress with one hand. Becoming a lady is hard work, but I am ready.

In the great hallway, waiting to receive Doctor, Jeannette has lined us up, but when I walk down the row, touching the shoulder of each person, I can tell immediately that she has not put us in the right order, so I move everyone about. Jeannette, me, the teachers, then Cook, nine of us. I’ll bet no one else is wearing
brown
. Sumner has brought them from the pier; he’d better not try to touch me with his giant, clumsy hands.

I know that Doctor is not here yet. I can always tell when he is in a room—the air warms and condenses almost imperceptibly and its weight tilts me gently in his direction, as if I were borne aloft on the high end of a seesaw, but losing balance, sliding slowly toward him on the ground. Julia does not bring warmth, but a coiling chill about my chest, while Sumner blocks all heat and wind. As for the child, we shall see. The floorboards tense and the heat circles. Doctor. After an agony of minutes, his hand is on mine, trying to write, but I wrap my arms around his waist, press my head against the buttons of his frock coat, and feel his great heart thudding against my ear. He is so happy to be back home with his Laura, it tells me! And then he has me at arm’s length, and I let him write, but I don’t even try to follow it, my head is still alive with the joy his heart has shared. He moves from me to the teachers, and I wait for the stiff caress of Julia. She is here, the floor shudders with the
plot-plot
of the solid heels of her traveling boots. There is a great rustling as Jeannette greets her, and then nothing. She has not greeted me. I start forward and Jeannette tries to stop me, but I shrug her off and hold my arms out wide, completely open to welcome Julia and the babe. The air is empty, but I stand my pose, waiting. Finally Julia’s ungloved fingers take mine, and she leans in to kiss me upon the cheek. I allow my arms to encircle her, but keep her bosom held away from me.

“Give me the baby,” I write.

And then her nails tap lightly, “Too small.”

For me, who has held a tiny kitten in my arms, and nursed it through sickness? Is the child a meringue that will crumble in my hands?

“Let me,” I say, and a moment passes before a delicate bundle is laid in my outstretched arms. I draw her slowly toward my chest, more careful than I have ever been, and press the tiny face against my cheek. It is cold and hard. The child is rigid in my arms. It is a doll! I don’t throw her; I just let go, and I feel her hit my feet and roll away.

Jeannette grabs my arm roughly and writes, “Laura doll.”

Oh, well, then I shouldn’t have thrown myself to the floor. Another Laura doll from far away. Another little me to add to my menagerie. Does Doctor believe me so stupid and vain that I want to spend my days hosting tea parties for all my mock selves? Is the baby being given to everyone else down the line, even to the teachers? My hands are much cleaner than their ink-stained ones. I hold one arm out into the air, my palm cupped downward, and I am content to wait. Minutes go by, and then there is a downy tuft beneath my palm, and I have only time to stroke the soft skull once, never reaching the face of my sister, before she is taken away. I rub my fingers together, the electricity of Julia Romana’s hair between them.

The dinner tonight is only for grown-ups, I am told, and Doctor says he will see me in his chambers in the morning. I am banished to eat with the blinds, who pester me for news of the happy couple. Julia has gotten very stout, I say, while Doctor is lean as a pistol. Perhaps she steals his food. The baby, the baby, they all want to know, and I stand and show them how I held her in my arms, nuzzling her angel face against mine. The girls grab at my elbows as if I really do hold the child. “She is a fairy baby,” I sign to them. “I felt her tiny wings concealed beneath her traveling gown. We are fortunate to have such a creature among us, but none of you are allowed to touch the child. Only I can hold my fairy sister, Julia Romana.” Tessy and the older girls laugh and say they don’t believe me, and caution the others that my words are not true. But they are, and the best of the children will know that in their hearts.

Tessy grabs my hand and writes, “I will tell you the secret.”

What secret? Who is she to know more than I?

Late that night, after everyone is asleep, I slide along the wall to Tessy’s room and slip into her bed. I touch lightly the back of her neck and she stirs, turns over. She gives me her hand.

“Tell me.” I feel her stretch and yawn, the breasts beneath her cotton gown rubbing against me.

“Sure?” she writes onto my palm, held close to her face, and I tap her hand.

“Doctor put his thing in Julia to make the baby,” she says.

“What thing?”

Her silky hair whips across my face. “Down Pozzo’s belly. Big thing on some of the horses.”

I have scratched low on Pozzo’s belly and also accidentally touched on a horse that fleshy, unnatural hose, but Wight said it is how they relieve themselves.

“Animals,” I remind Tessy. “Different.”

“All men have,” she writes and traces a long shape down my wrist. I shake my arm to rid myself of the tingle of the loathsome drawing.

“Animal!” I tell her again. Doctor has no such thing and I should know better than anyone; countless hours I have spent in his study, sitting on his lap, my arms around him, and there was nothing of dog or horse on my dear Doctor!

“Foolish,” Tessy says, and I want to slap her, but at the same time, her hand is so warm in mine, her chin nuzzled against my neck. How I wish I could sleep with her every night! Or any of the girls, for that matter, even the ones with lank hair or those I do not like, but Doctor won’t allow it. How could he understand how endless the nights are, how terrified I become in the complete stillness that I will never again feel the touch of another human being. I do not believe Tessy’s story, not for one second, but I cannot resist the sweetness of this moment for my body’s sake. Maybe I am an animal too.

The next morning I prepare for Doctor. I choose the blue dress, his favorite, though it’s grown a little tight. I keep my dresses in careful order by color so I’ll know which one I’m picking.

He makes me wait outside his study door, and I lean my head upon the frame, and as the minutes go by, I begin to knock my temple against the wood.
Doctor is back! Doctor is back!
is the rhythm I tap into my skull, harder and harder, until he opens the door and I almost fall in.

“What on earth?” he writes and pats at my head.

I apologize and take my usual seat, moving my chair up close.

“You are well?” he asks.

“Very grown.”

“I see. Proper young lady.”

It must be the corset; nevertheless, I am pleased that he sees that I am so different from the colt he left nearly two years ago. He fills my hand with his travels as he mouths them, allowing my fingers to float in front of his lips so that I can feel the different forces and velocities of the puffs of air as he exhales the names of places I will never touch: “London,” “Rome,” and then in a warm fluff of breath, “Paris.” “Paris,” he says again—he knows the exquisite pleasure that the rushing air of any
P
gives me—and in my excitement, I rub my fingers against his lips. They are slightly dry and chapped, maybe from riding in the wind. I am pulling open the lower lip with two fingers when he grasps my wrist firmly and pushes my hand down into my lap. I am too bold today; I have never tried to open Doctor’s mouth before. I can tell from the movement of his arm holding mine that he is leaning back and away from me.