The Unsuitable

by Molly Pohlig

  * * *

  Mr. Wince straightened, reeling back slightly on drunken heels. “You shall marry, Iseult. Your mother has left me saddled with you long enough. If I am not to have her, I’ll be damned if I’ll be forced to look at your pinched face another year.”

  He crashed off to his study, receding into the bowels of the house until everything quieted again. Iseult’s fingers flinched into motion. Right: crack. Left: crack. Right: crack …

  Mrs. Pennington was too galled to appear at bedtime, and she sent Sarah to help Iseult out of her clothes. Silent Sarah, who was petrified of Iseult and could get her into her nightgown in five minutes flat. Iseult had only to smile at Sarah to send her rushing from the room, and she locked the door behind the fleeing maid.

  She pulled a battered black book from underneath her mattress and sat with it at her desk, scribbling down the particulars of the odious Mr. Finch. She blew out the candle and returned the book to its hiding place.

  Only a sickly stream of moonlight spattered the room now, but it was enough. Iseult stood in a pool of yellow light, working her nine toes into the plush carpet. She looked down at them. Poor little middle toe. No matter, it wasn’t coming back. She plunged her hand into the pocket of the dress that Sarah had so carelessly discarded over the chair and pulled out the first thing she touched, which happened to be a needle for leatherwork, ever so sharp. Be very careful. Don’t touch the end. Sharp as a bee’s sting, that.

  Her too-long nightdress swished against the edge of the rug and she seated herself at her dressing table. A shrug of her left shoulder freed the scar, a nest of sleeping snakes in the dimness. Iseult held her breath, held the needle, and jabbed: once, twice, three times. Three bubbles of blood grew until they merged and became a stream. The stress of the evening flowed out with the trickle, down over her breast, little ups and little downs over each rib. A stain bloomed on the cotton of her nightdress, and she would be scolded in the morning, but she was so routinely scolded that it made little difference. Mrs. Pennington would make a show of rounding up all of the sharp objects she could find, but she never found all of them, and Iseult always procured more. Poor Mrs. Pennington. She was sweet, but that wasn’t good enough.

  Iseult sat, relieved, breathing again at last, as the warm trickle turned cold. This respite would last her through a night’s sleep, at least. These … diversions bought her less and less peace these days.

  4.

  When had she first taken something sharp to her skin in the perverse hope of healing? She hated that initial scar, the living reminder that she had killed someone. No one of import had ever said that to her in so many words, but she had known for as long as she could remember that the scar and the death were intertwined, like the serpents of the caduceus that hung outside the pharmacy a few streets away. She knew that she had been born broken, and that her brokenness had something to do with why her mother never appeared. For a long time she thought that Beatrice had died of disappointment. There was no great revelation, no moment when the clouds parted and she knew exactly what had happened, no servant girl with loose lips trying to teach young Iseult a lesson. But somewhere over the course of the yearly visits to her mother’s grave (with Mrs. Pennington, of course; Mr. Wince was said to prefer solitary visits, which is to say that he had not once visited his wife’s grave after the funeral) she gradually learned the facts. Beatrice had been too small and delicate for the rigors of childbirth, and Iseult had gotten firmly stuck, her slick squirming body and legs dangling over the ground while her arms and head remained firmly wedged inside. The Winces had been doubly stuck, with a weepy, inexperienced midwife, whose one bright idea when faced with the prospect of both a mother and an infant in dire distress was to brace one panicky hand against poor Mrs. Wince’s hip and then yank on Iseult’s feet for all she was worth. Mrs. Wince had long since fainted from the pain, and Iseult’s head was still snugly in the womb, so the only one who heard the sickening crack of baby bones the second before Iseult burst forth into the world was the oafish midwife. It was a miracle she managed to catch Iseult before she hit the floor. She was so preoccupied with trying to arrange the squalling infant in a position in which the bone shard protruding from her skin wasn’t quite so noticeable that only when the doctor finally arrived (he’d had opera tickets) did anyone notice that Mrs. Wince had bled to death. The midwife was disgraced; the doctor lost a good many well-heeled patients and his practice never fully recovered; and as for the Winces, who had begun the day as two with every expectation of becoming three—well, they ended the day as still only two.

  The wound did not heal easily. Iseult endured a number of procedures in her childhood that were intended to improve matters, at least cosmetically. She was often in a good deal of pain, but she got the impression that it would be gauche to mention that. It was not her father who was behind these procedures. It was his sister, Iseult’s aunt Catherine, who largely controlled what happened to her. She would make proclamations as to the child’s dress, music lessons, and so forth, and Mrs. Pennington would faithfully carry them out, even if she might have grumbled about it now and then.

  The last surgery was performed when Iseult was fourteen. It did have the benefit of loosening the muscles so her father could at last stop telling her fruitlessly to stop slouching. It also increased the pain that Iseult was so loath to mention, and the scar, previously a pale jumble of lumps, was now a persistently inflamed knot, a throbbing weight that was never relieved. When Iseult’s father was told of the aesthetic results of this operation, he swore they were finished with doctors. Mrs. Pennington was the only one who guessed at the pain; she did what she could with massages and hot baths, which wasn’t much.

  It was a happy accident in Iseult’s eighteenth year that led to her own peculiar brand of relief. It was summer, and sickly hot outside. Her walk had pulled her to a small lake with the merest hint of a breeze coming off the water, and she fell asleep in the shade of a flowering pear tree. By the time she woke up, her neck felt twisted and raw, and she knew that she would be late for dinner, an unforgivable sin in the Wince household. Hastening home put a stitch in her side, and she just had time to throw herself in front of her mirror to try and tidy up. Mrs. Pennington made sure her hair would pass muster, and as she hurried downstairs she called over her shoulder, “And there’s a dreadful thread coming out the top of that dress. You’d best see to it before you come down!”

  Still out of breath, Iseult fumbled in her drawer for a pair of embroidery scissors, which were difficult enough to manage when one had all of one’s faculties about one. The offending thread sprang from the fabric of the neck, and would surely have caused Mr. Wince great distress. Wielding the scissors more like a knife, Iseult jabbed at the thread while pulling it with her other hand. This proved to be an exercise in futility, and in her frustration, she stabbed the open scissors through the fabric and into her scarred skin.

  Her mouth in the mirror made a perfect O as she waited for the pain to strike. But instead there was a peaceful numbness.

  * * *

  oh iseult what what what have you done?

  i’m not sure mother. are you hurt? have i hurt myself? it doesn’t hurt why doesn’t it hurt?

  * * *

  That was when Mrs. Pennington came back into the room and shrieked at the sight of a pair of scissors sticking out of Iseult’s neck. The shrieks brought Mr. Wince to the threshold when it became apparent that dinner would be delayed. He stormed off to eat his meal in peace, which was what he preferred anyway.

  Mrs. Pennington performed the delicate operation of removal herself, as the maid at the time was deathly afraid of blood. Iseult sat still and white-faced while Mrs. Pennington examined the dilemma from every angle, finding that the scissors had sunk at least an inch into the flesh. She did send the maid running for a glass of red wine, which she made Iseult down in one go. She apologized profusely in advance, warning Iseult that she would try her best not to hurt her further, but that meant she would h
ave to go slowly, and that might require some wiggling. Iseult shook her head sharply. Mrs. Pennington took that as a sign that the pain was too great for her to speak.

  “Best get it over with, dear. Close your eyes,” she said grimly.

  Iseult’s eyes remained wide. Mrs. Pennington placed one fat hand on Iseult’s shoulder, and with the other she gingerly grasped the handles.

  As Mrs. Pennington wiggled, the scissors snipped as scissors are meant to. Every bit of blood that escaped caused her to pause and gasp and lose her grip on the handles, which made things a good deal messier as she had to begin all over again. Once the scissors were finally out, though, order was restored and Mrs. Pennington deftly cut the ruined fabric, now heavy with blood, away from the wound. Iseult meekly apologized for making such a mess.

  Once she had been cleaned and bandaged and tucked up into bed, fed and fussed over, Iseult at last lay alone in the dark. Wobbly from the sight of so much of her own blood, she had done a very good impression of someone not registering great pain due to shock. But she wasn’t in shock. And she didn’t feel any pain. Well, not exactly. She felt it, but it felt … good. She hesitated to actually think so, but it felt good. When the blood had rushed out with the removal of the scissors, all of her usual anxiety had whooshed out of her with it.

  Moreover, her mother, whose voice she had heard whispering away while she wrestled with the errant thread, had whooshed away as well.

  Iseult lay in an unhappy patch of jaundiced moonlight and gingerly patted the bandage covering her wounded scar. She did not know it at the time, but it would become her favorite sound in years to come, that pat pat pit-a-pat of her fingers on her neck, as she gently, sweetly, soothingly coerced a new wound to sink into the scar. To sink into its place. It was so quiet it was almost not a sound, and Iseult alone could hear it, Iseult and Beatrice, buried deep within the scar.

  It wasn’t an unfamiliar sound that first night, either. Iseult had always loved the peculiar silence of falling snow, and would slip out of bed whenever snow fell, bundle herself in blankets and curl up on the cold window seat to listen to the almost-sound of it falling onto the sill. If you listened hard enough, if you watched it hard enough, you heard it. She would fall asleep watching the snowflakes disappear into themselves, listening to her mother say

  pat pat pit-a-pat

  And trying to watch each snowflake for as long as possible, trying to keep them separate instead of letting them merge when they landed in the white. She loved the dusky pink of the sky and the smell of burning leaves that came with it, and the quality of the air like a muffler was wrapped around her face. It had the same effect as her childhood pillow headdress, except that instead of putting her at a remove from the world, it seemed to put everyone at the same distance, at the same disadvantage, for once.

  * * *

  After the fateful Night of the Scissors, things were different. Or, things were the same, but Iseult could make them different if she needed to. She lived quietly, with her mother as her constant companion, a generally tolerable presence. She didn’t tell other people that her mother lived inside the scar on her neck. She found that this unsettled them, and they would refuse to believe her.

  When she became anxious or agitated, it was much the same as before. She felt a heat in her torso, like she was a little furnace, with her mother shoveling the coal. Her mother would get louder as the heat grew, and Iseult’s head would hurt. The things Beatrice said sounded so much like the words of everyone else that Iseult would respond to them out loud. And then, when she was asked whom she was speaking to, she found she couldn’t help herself. She would tell the truth. She was a great one for honesty. Lying never gets you anywhere.

  But after the Night of the Scissors, it was a new world. Iseult now had control. Anxiety loomed on the horizon: a social engagement, a lecture from her father, and her mother’s voice would rise as sure as the tide. Iseult would reach into her sewing reticule (when she was still allowed to keep such a thing), pull out a needle, and jab at the scar until her mother’s voice and the nausea receded.

  For many months it worked beautifully. A few smart stabs and all was blessed quiet for weeks. Mrs. Pennington grew suspicious when the scissor wound refused to heal, and there was a scene, but she resolved not to tell Mr. Wince. She did so only when the bloodstains kept cropping up. There was another scene, and there was much talk of doctors being consulted, but if a doctor was consulted—well then, someone would have to be told. Oh, no. That wouldn’t do. Instead, Iseult was inspected whenever she left the house, and whenever she returned.

  Beatrice regained control.

  * * *

  Iseult knew the ways in which she and Beatrice were and weren’t alike. Were: Thin; hair the color of dust; sparse eyelashes fringing gray eyes like pavement after a downpour, hard and watery. Long fingers and toes. A certain reserve. Weren’t: Beatrice had had a dainty nose that could have been sculpted painstakingly with a fine chisel. Iseult’s was strong and Roman, possibly completed in haste. Beatrice had been elegant and graceful; Iseult had a propensity to fidget, as if she were plugged into electric current. Beatrice was said to have had a serene smile. Iseult’s looked like something she’d had to study in a book, and never gotten the hang of.

  But Iseult knew the mother who lived inside her as well as she knew herself, as well as anyone can know themselves. She was noisy and nagging and over-opinionated. She was cruel and compassionate and bitter and sweet and vengeful and sad. She was a living creature inside Iseult’s body, as real as a sea creature hidden inside a shell. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can’t hear it rustling.

  * * *

  why do you wish me away my dear aren’t i haven’t i been amn’t i the only one who loves who understands who knows you? if i am gone then so are you i think i fear.

  but why can’t you help me rather than hurt? you always win and i want to win. i want what i want you to be quiet and with me i know you won’t go i’ll tug i’ll shove i’ll heave and toss but you won’t go so if you’re here i need you quieter please to let me be let me have a choice in what i say and what i do and who i become. please. please?

  but i am your mother iseult. if i don’t know what’s best who does i’ll tell you no one. no one is closer than we two. isn’t that wonderful?

  * * *

  Iseult was nineteen when they took everything sharp out of her grasp, and then she went seventeen months without so much as a pit-a-pat on her neck. Beatrice’s voice was a constant drone, and it grew so loud that she barely held a conversation with anyone during that period. It is hard to converse with someone when another person inside your own ears is drowning them out. It’s difficult to look interested when something inside you is trying to get to the other side of your skin. It’s not easy to stay calm when you’re worried that your lungs might have caught on fire. But just as a drowning man’s flailing is often mistaken for waving, Iseult was merely considered introspective.

  Mr. Wince had decided that after those many months of good behavior, after being checked for blood and sharp things and talk of Beatrice on a daily basis, Iseult was ready to be reintroduced to the outside world. At least, to his carefully curated version of the outside world. He decided to host a small dinner for the members of the steelworks’ board. Dignified, reasonable men and their exquisitely polite, reticent wives. One or two demure daughters, one or two awkward, blushing sons. Perhaps Iseult would even make a positive impression on one of these daughters, or better yet, a son. She was almost not unpleasant to be around. Quiet, but that was better than being disruptive. Mr. Wince felt a vague positivity as he headed into the evening.

  Iseult, having been warned weeks in advance about her fate, felt the engine in her stomach churn, and Beatrice had to shout to be heard over the whirring. Every day Iseult walked longer and farther, higher and harder and faster, trying to outrun the future, ending every day so exhausted she fell asleep over her dinner. Her father assumed that she was excited. Her dream
s were plagued with wretched visions, herself, in a wedding dress, chained to a faceless man, her mother sprung out fully formed on her shoulder while Iseult struggled vainly to keep a ladylike posture.

  She woke every morning feverish and wobbly, but what else could she do? Iseult had long ago learned that the more you wobble, the faster you have to keep moving. That way, if you fall it’s easier to understand than if you were simply standing still.

  She was subjected one blindingly sunny day to a walk with Aunt Catherine, Mrs. Pennington trailing behind at a respectful distance but ready to jump in should an opinion be required. Walks with Aunt Catherine were the antithesis of Iseult’s solitary rambles. Whereas Iseult charged recklessly, almost blindly, enjoying the places she ended up if she let fate determine her route, taking a turn simply because she never had before, Aunt Catherine followed a regimented path. They turned at the Anglican church, and again just past the hospital, and they entered the park not by the main entrance, but by the one just past. Aunt Catherine found the main entrance common and ostentatious. And she walked slowly. By the end of a walk with her aunt, Iseult’s nerves were frayed and jumbling, and she often had to take another walk alone to calm herself.

  “My dear Iseult,” Catherine said grandly, sounding very rehearsed, “since the unfortunate passing of your poor mother I have taken it upon myself to be as much of a replacement as I could.”

  * * *

  bitch that bitch she never cared for me always looked down her stubby nose didn’t care for me nor you