Wonderland (25 page)

“Hilda, you are going to be sick—”

“Don’t touch me!”

Screaming. Stumbling backwards. The faces in the audience are scattered now. Hilda is baffled. Hilda clutches her own head. Her father tries to quiet her, but she jerks away from him. “You want to stuff me inside your mouth, I know you! I know you!” she cries. “You want to press me into a ball and pop me into your mouth, back where I came from! You want to eat us all up!”

“Hilda—”

And now another face appears—a boy has run up on stage
—

“Don’t touch me, any of you!” I cry
.

“Please, Hildie—” says this boy
.

Jesse
.

“No—”

“It’s all right, Hildie, it’s all right—”

Add to the date of the third Wednesday of April, 1265
.…

Father is going to take me home now, Jesse says
.

“No, don’t touch me! I don’t want—”

I am crying
.

Jesse takes hold of my hands
.

“You hurt Father’s feelings,” he whispers
.

Father is standing a few feet away—staring at us. Father is staring
.

“Father wants to kill me. Eat me,” I whisper
.

“No,” says Jesse
.

I am very cold. Someone is shivering on the surface of my skin
.

“I don’t want anyone to touch me.…”

And now I am weeping
.

Like a girl. Fourteen years old. My new dress is soiled, wrinkled, I am ashamed. I have been saying crazy things. Now the tower of numbers has faded … the last number has left my head … I am standing here with my brother, who is trying to talk to me, to explain something
.…

“… over to Father now? You don’t want to hurt his feelings,” Jesse says
.

“Yes.”

Jesse gives me a handkerchief. But I am too clumsy to use it. So he pats my forehead with it himself. Forehead, cheeks, chin. A thread of saliva hangs down from my mouth and Jesse wipes it away. He is very nervous—a tall, stout boy
,
the freckles on his face glowing from perspiration—but still he cleans me up as I stand here in my heavy hot body, weeping
.

“Now you’re all right, Hildie. Everything is all right,” he says
.

He takes me to Father
.

I stumble, almost lose my balance. I have to stop my mind from scattering and flying back to—to what?—to a question that doctor asked me? But now Father is speaking gently to me. There are tears in his eyes. He takes the handkerchief from Jesse and wipes my nose with it. I go into myself, coiling inward. Inward. Back to that small hollow space beneath my heart, where I will be safe
.

“My poor girl.… You don’t know what you said to your father … the awful things you said to your own father.…”

I am walking between Father and Jesse. Faces in the hallway peer at me but I don’t care. I am already deep inside myself. I am a good girl. I will not scream at Father ever again in my life
.

A drinking fountain. Oh, I am so thirsty! So thirsty! “Everybody loves you. You are a good, good girl,” Father is saying. “You are a genius and a very pretty young lady.” The water bubbles up onto my face, into my nose. I begin to cough
.

Now we are riding somewhere. Pavement, traffic. At the airport I sit without seeing anyone. I run the numbers back and forth in my mind, all the numbers on all the cards, rearranging them, multiplying them, dividing them by one another. Father reads to Jesse and me from a newspaper—an article about a woman in El Paso, Texas, who had five babies and named them One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. Father laughs at this. Must clip it out for the
Book of Fates,
he says. Hilda laughs like any fourteen-year-old girl, but I sit puzzled and silent and frightened. Where did those babies come from? What is a baby, exactly?

The seat belts do not fasten across our laps. Father and I are sitting together in the plane; Jesse sits across the aisle from us. The plane rises into the air. Hilda looks out the window, interested and perky, but I sit very still, in a panic. Panic. Hilda is a good, good girl, but I am not a girl at all, not even a woman. I don’t know what I am. Is there a part of the soul that is not male or female? Hilda loves Jesse, her own brother, but I am not Hilda and I do not love Jesse or even know who he is. I don’t understand him. “Look, Hilda,” Father says, to cheer me up, and he points out the window at what I am already looking at—a city down below of buildings, so many buildings—enormous buildings—a city of walls and streets and strangers—and they multiply out to the horizon, they cannot be held back, they have been created by Father, or men like Father, all over America
—

“Beautiful! Isn’t it beautiful?” Father says happily
.

I am eating peppermints, light, wafer-thin peppermints, because I am not
really hungry. Hilda eats, knowing that she will get an appetite as she eats; I am not hungry at all. I am dead. Down below there is a stretch of land that is made up only of buildings and houses, crisscrossed by roads, streets, avenues, highways, everything multiplying itself as we rise higher
—

We are at the center of the universe
.

“Jesse has promised not to say anything to your mother or to Frederich about what happened today,” Father says. “They wouldn’t understand. Hilda, don’t you want these? Aren’t you hungry?”

He hands the peppermints to me
.

No
.

“Yes, thank you, Father.”

I eat. I am curled up in a sac, in a body. A mountain of flesh on a cushioned seat. Stumps of legs ending in ankles and feet and shoes. Oh, I am resting here with my father; I am very tried
.

“We won’t take you on another trip like this for a while,” Father says. “Until you’re ready.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Until you are more mature, perhaps. Perfection is difficult, Hildie, but ultimately it is not as difficult as imperfection. The demands we make upon ourselves constitute our salvation. It is necessary to be perfect. It is not necessary to live.”

“Yes, Father.”

“How do you feel now, Hildie? Are you better?”

“Yes, Father.”

“You are a little tired?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Well, then. Sleep. Sleep, my dear.”

Hilda lays her head on Father’s shoulder and sleeps. I do not sleep. I do not think
.

I am dead
.

He was aware of her in the house with him, treading on the stairs heavily, sighing. When he worked at his mathematical problems—he was studying calculus on his own, with the help of one of the teachers at his school—he thought of her, in her room or downstairs where she
often worked, and he thought of her mother, the two of them mixed up in his mind, pressing against him with their soft, gelatinous bodies.

Hilda.

Mrs. Pedersen.

Sometimes his mind went blank. He did not like calculus; it seemed to him like a dream; there was nothing behind it, its formulations. Other textbooks did not trouble him like this—he could memorize anything that had a reality behind it. He did not have to touch this reality, to move his fingers across it, he had only to know that it existed somewhere and might be measured, might be cut out and held up triumphantly to the light.… But mathematics disturbed him. A stunning whirl of numbers, insubstantial numbers, signs with nothing behind them that somehow corresponded to ideas in the brain.… No, he could not understand. He sat in his room at the large, glass-topped desk Dr. Pedersen had bought for him, his hands kneading his face, until he gave up and went to ask Hilda for help.

What was a freak?

No, he did not ask her that. He asked her about his calculus problems, shyly, knowing that she was contemptuous of him. Each afternoon Hilda worked downstairs on the sun porch at the rear of the house, and Frederich worked in the music room, off and on, out of sight. When Jesse knocked on the opened door politely, he saw how severely his sister looked at him—her face strained, her small, close-set eyes leaping upon him. Jesse thought of the mother of that other prodigy, Oscar, who had called both her son and Hilda freaks. But what was a freak, exactly? Jesse was uneasy in his sister’s presence, unnerved by her solid, silent, ponderous face, her pudgy ink-stained fingers, her ironic smile, which was an exaggeration of her mother’s generous smile. She had a face drained of blood, of energy, and yet it was intensely alive, alert, suspicious, as if she could read his mind or was aware of him listening for her heavy footsteps on the stairs—Jesse listening for her sighing, her wistful, lonely sighing—Jesse conscious of her contempt. When she lowered her eyes, he gazed at her bluish lids, which were shaped like half-moons or thumbs, like her mother’s, quite thick and prominent against the bone above her eye. He stared at these eyelids, sensing the rapid movement of this girl’s mind, the incredible flash of illumination that always gave her the correct answers to any mathematical questions.

Always the correct answers.…

She was never wrong. But it gave her no joy, he saw. She was like an instrument to provide answers to questions; always polite to him, coolly polite now in the months since that examination in New York, always patient with him while he sat and tried to work out the problem in orderly, logical steps, using a normal method. He sat across from her at the table on the porch, his ankles linked around the bottom rung of his chair, his face turned down to the paper before him. He was slow and firm, pressing down hard with the point of his pencil, staring at the blank white paper and the numbers that slowly filled the page, always ending with the number Hilda had given him minutes before.

And he would sit back, dazed, exhausted.

What was a freak?

She was like a princess in this part of the house, “her” part of the house. She liked the sun porch and worked down there every afternoon, sitting with a piece of long yellow scrap paper before her, doodling with a fountain pen, thinking. Occasionally she wrote down a number. But most of the time she drew lines and circles and meaningless figures. It was impossible to know what she was doing. She could not explain. She had no interest in explaining. Dr. Pedersen had encouraged her to begin a correspondence with someone in England, and she had answered a few of this unknown man’s letters, but then she gave up, bored. She was always alone like this, always thinking. Fallen deep in thought. Jesse came to the doorway with the tentative note of Frederich’s piano behind him, and he saw how sharply Hilda’s eyes swung up to him, as if out of a dark, somber spell; her face became more guarded and strained.

“Oh, you want help again today …?” she said ironically.

The sun porch was a large airy room at the rear of the house. Two walls were made entirely of glass. Everywhere were Mrs. Pedersen’s plants—some in large earthenware pots, some hanging in delicate china bowls, pots of small-leafed ivy, pots of flowers, even an orange tree in a dumpy ceramic pot, all the plants erect and bright and mysterious to Jesse. They had about them the shiny, hopeful manner of Mrs. Pedersen herself, only wanting to please.

Since the trip to New York, Hilda had grown more silent in Jesse’s presence. She had gained weight. Beneath her chin flesh was squeezed cruelly, as if held back. She helped him with his work in silence,
scrawling answers for him. In the background Frederich was working at his music—always the slow notes, the single notes, falling with the precision of icicles, relentless and maddening. For many months Jesse had often shut his eyes hard, grimacing, in order to bear his brother’s music, but nothing changed, the notes did not stop or speed up, they did not blossom into anything, and after a while Jesse really stopped hearing them.
What is a freak? Was he turning into a freak himself?

When Jesse and Hilda worked together, Mrs. Pedersen sometimes hovered in the doorway, come to water her plants or to pinch off buds or to join them in a snack, tempting them with food. Hilda would often turn irritably away from her mother. “I can’t concentrate with you here, Mother. Your breathing annoys me. You make the floor creak.”

Jesse was shocked at her rudeness.

“Mother makes the floor sag,” Hilda said. “The whole house will collapse around her one of these days.”

“She’s just teasing,” Jesse told Mrs. Pedersen.

“She’s always teasing me, she’s always picking on me,” Mrs. Pedersen said hesitantly, but with a little smile, while her daughter sat looking away from her, drumming her fingers. “That’s because she spends too much time alone … she should get outside with other girls … she’s always teasing me because we’re home here together all day long, every day.…” She would laugh breathlessly, as if her daughter’s odd behavior were just a joke. But, once allowed on the porch, she became animated and jovial; she peered at Jesse’s calculus textbook and at the pages of numbers and symbols he had been working with, and shook her head. “At first it was just Hilda who could manage things like that, and now you too.… When you came to live with us, Jesse, I was grateful for you because you were just like me. I said to Dr. Pedersen, thank heavens he’s like me! He isn’t like those other two! But
now
—now you’re getting like Hilda herself—”

“No, not like Hilda,” Jesse said quickly.

Hilda snickered.

“There’s a big difference between us,” Jesse said.

“But at least you’re going to college. I’m so proud of you, skipping a year of high school and being accepted at college already, so fast.… Dr. Pedersen is very proud of you too. He might not say so, but he is. Our little friend here, Hilda, has refused to continue her education at
all. It seems to everyone in the family that a genius might want to develop herself as far as possible, but not our Hilda.”

Jesse had been accepted at the University of Michigan for the fall semester; he had written for syllabi for some of his courses and was preparing for them. But he was embarrassed to talk about this in front of Hilda.