by Molly Pohlig
He turned and left so quickly that he likely did not hear Mrs. Pennington gasp. Iseult shrugged off the dead weight of that hot arm. “It would only have been surprising if he had said something kind,” Iseult said, putting on the chilly smile she reserved for company. Mrs. Pennington looked heartbroken, and Iseult could not bear it. On a better day Iseult would have tried to cheer her somehow, but this was not that better day.
14.
For the next week, Iseult considered the prospect of drowning as if she were in imminent danger of it. Her bed was her life raft, the floor the sea. Mrs. Pennington brought her meals on a tray. It was easy to plead sick because she could only get down the slightest morsels of food. She was hungry, but she didn’t care that she was hungry. She couldn’t maintain the feeling of caring long enough to complete an action. A spoonful of rice would leave the plate but then hover in midair, until it began to feel cumbersome and she put it down.
She was afraid. Of marriage. Of Jacob. Of leaving the only home she had known. Of leaving her father. As odious as he was, he was her father, and in the times when neither of them needed something from the other they coexisted as easily as if they each lived alone. She was afraid of what her mother’s place was to be in this new arrangement. She was afraid of telling Jacob about her mother.
It wasn’t that she had spent hours discussing her mother’s presence with Mrs. Pennington and her father, but Iseult knew that they knew. They might not agree with her assessment of the situation, but they knew. Mrs. Pennington accepted it as best she could, and would even awkwardly ask after Beatrice on occasion.
But Beatrice was gone.
Since the day after the lunch, she had been quiet. Iseult knew that this was her own fault, and she now regretted silencing her. She wasn’t sure what to do, as she’d never been in the position before of needing to hear her mother’s voice inside her.
So Iseult did the only thing she could do, and she went to see her mother.
As she entered the churchyard, the groundsman nodded to her and she nodded back. They often greeted each other thus at hours other people would regard as unsuitable. No one bothered her here. The minister, the parishioners, all knew of her, even though she and her father attended services infrequently, and apart from polite pleasantries they spoke to no one.
She wove her way through the graves, through the grass that tugged at her skirts like tiny hands. Not yet, she said to them silently. Not long, perhaps, but not yet.
Beatrice Wince’s tomb lay off to the side. The churchyard was very old, and shortly after her death there had been an all-consuming fad for the new. Beatrice was one of the last to have been interred there. They had been running out of room anyway. Several streets away was a more popular church and cemetery, with a new building and headstones that were guaranteed not to erode. There were graves here where the words were worn smooth by the weather, and only the mildewed records book inside the church could tell you whose body lay beneath, whose body was once wept over in a given spot.
Iseult hoped that by coming to the grave she would earn forgiveness without expressly having to ask for it. But she sat and sat, and that cottony stillness inside her head persisted. She chewed on her lower lip, pulling off a flake of dead skin and pondering her next move. She stared at her mother’s name. The letters had been traced by Iseult’s fingers in the way that other children love a favorite doll or bear until its hair falls out and its eyes become dull.
When she was small, she had believed that she could find out all sorts of secrets about her mother this way, and had spent so much time tracing the letters that she had dreams that consisted of nothing else, just her hands moving over the grave. And it was true that when she did this her mother spoke to her, but she spoke only of Iseult and never of herself as Iseult longed for her to do. It had made Iseult angry. She would ask endless questions but they were always deflected.
When she was ten or eleven, this had made her wonder whether it was true that, as everyone else said, she merely had the delusion that her mother was inside her. But she wasn’t crazy. She knew that. And her mother’s voice had always been there, she remembered its presence in her earliest memories, telling her not to pick up a stone at the seaside because it was dirty, whispering to her to slide her chubby child’s body under her bed while her father raged over some paltry misbehavior. Those thoughts hadn’t come from her own consciousness; she was certain of that.
And sometimes (not terribly often, it must be admitted), when Iseult was still in school, Beatrice would whisper the answer to a question, something Iseult wouldn’t have been able to know, about the number of bones in a blue whale, something like that. How Beatrice knew the answer herself was just another question, one that Iseult chalked up to the mysteries of the afterlife.
(It was a shame that Mr. Wince hadn’t known his own wife better, or he could have told his daughter how much Beatrice had enjoyed natural history, and the whole matter could have been cleared up. It might have even proven to Mr. Wince that his daughter wasn’t lying when she insisted that her mother lived inside her.)
* * *
mother please. it was wrong, very wrong of me to try and get you to go away. i needed a little time to myself, a small space in which to think. i wanted to know my own mind for once, and only my own mind. you are always in it. i wanted to make a choice on my own. but now i am not allowed even that. and it’s not right of me to change my mind about your opinion now but mother i need your help very badly. i have no one else and i realize that now. father says i must marry jacob whether i want to or not. i really think that he means to force me this time, and i am frightened of what that means. i don’t know what to do and i don’t know if it even matters what i do but i know if i don’t have you there have you here i will lose my mind. if i must see him again and you don’t go with me i don’t know what will happen. i will go down on my knees if i must only please do not deny me this request.
* * *
She paused for breath, eyeing the flagstones in case she would be required to lower herself onto them, but in that pause came a sound so welcome she nearly wept with relief.
* * *
from now on do you promise to listen to me iseult
yes mother of course i will. thank you. thank you. thank you. i don’t want to be without you i don’t think i can. i’m sorry.
i know you are. we will figure out what to do together i won’t let you be hurt my poor iseult so many times you’ve been hurt because of me i wish i could truly be where you are i wonder what your life would have been like with a proper mother to guide you.
don’t think of that mother it doesn’t matter it doesn’t bear considering. regret is not a worthwhile emotion. none of it was your fault. there’s nothing to make up for. you came back for me. and you’re here now. i need your help now so please tell me what to do i promise promise i will listen i will be good from now on.
let me see your hands when you say that
mother it has been years since i crossed my fingers to lie to you.… oh very well.
mind you clean under those fingernails before you see him again he will mistake you for the gardener.
so you aren’t angry that I met him? on my own?
you will not be alone again. you will never be alone again. i will be with you. nothing can part us now. if your father insists upon your marrying him then you must but you will not go into marriage alone. i am here i am there to protect you.
you think i should just let father have his way? shouldn’t i … scream and wail until he sends me to an asylum? shouldn’t i throw myself from the roof to teach him a lesson?
* * *
Icy fingers thrust upward from Iseult’s stomach and clutched at the inner workings of her throat. She identified a wet, choking noise coming from her head as the noise she was making as her mother shook her from the inside. She felt her eyes bulge, although whether from lack of air, or pain, or shock, she could not have said. She tried to close them so they wouldn’t fall out of her
head, and she gripped the side of the tomb with one hand, the other flailing about her throat, but there was nothing on the outside to be removed.
* * *
never say that again never think that again iseult never never if you die i die and i am not ready yet to die a second time.
Iseult tried to speak but it was no use with no air at her disposal. So she tried hard to think.
of course i won’t mother i spoke foolishly rashly i couldn’t i wouldn’t please stop.
As swiftly as it had started the grip released and Iseult felt she’d been dropped from a great height.
This had never happened before, her mother as such a physical manifestation. It was something she had always longed for, it was just that the manner was different than she had hoped.
your life is not your own not just your own. you must always consider the consequences that your actions have for me i have never chastised you for your foolhardiness always saved you from your errors and i see now that i was remiss in my duties. i will not make that mistake again.
* * *
Iseult was afraid to move a muscle for the next hour. She was afraid to think. Her mother was unperturbed. She was not silent, but neither was she upset. This comforted Iseult somewhat, but the earlier outburst had come from nowhere, so how was she to know what another one might look like, were it to come along?
She emptied her mind as much as possible of suppositions and fears. If impending marriage was truly unavoidable, then it was, and there was no use struggling in vain. If drowning was a surety, why fight? It would do you no good. Iseult at last rose shakily from the tomb and brushed off a few dry leaves.
Come along, said Iseult to her mother. Or maybe Beatrice said it to Iseult. Iseult was not sure.
* * *
Iseult was tired, but she didn’t think she was sleeping. She certainly didn’t remember sleeping, and she wasn’t any less tired. The clock never stopped ticking. She was never unaware of its presence, its insistence.
But she must be sleeping, because she is dreaming of Beatrice. In the dream (there was only the one), Beatrice flickers toward her in the snow, in the black and white of a photograph, in the wedding dress in which she must be freezing. She is talking, but Iseult cannot hear her, and she is talking too fast for Iseult to read her lips. But they must be conversing, for Beatrice pauses and listens and nods and responds. Then Beatrice starts to walk away, and Iseult sees a gaping tear in the gown’s left shoulder. Iseult runs toward her and she knows that she’s running because she can hear the crunch crunch crunch of her feet in the snow. She touches Beatrice’s shoulder, the skin so cold it is tinted blue, and she turns. Beatrice looks momentarily surprised, but then smiles shyly as if posing for her portrait to be painted, except her teeth and gums are coated in fresh red blood, and as she starts talking again, little driblets fly out over her lips and down her chin, spattering the bright snow. And then she is gone and Iseult is alone in a barren landscape under a hard shell of frost, and a forest of skeletal trees smudged into the horizon meets the gray sky, and spots of red blood are dissolving the snow with their heat.
And that’s how Iseult knew that she was asleep, because of bloody Beatrice in her dreams. She tossed and turned on her bed that was a boat and the spots of blood smeared throughout the dream made her seasick. Or was it the wedding dress causing her nausea?
She knew she was awake because Beatrice was talking again.
What did she say in this perpetual unchecked monologue? She talked about the wedding, about Jacob, about the entire Vinke family, about how to run a household, about what shade of ivory might flatter Iseult’s coloring best. Iseult could not escape the clatter of Beatrice’s voice, so she tried to let it wash over her like bathwater.
There had always been periods of Iseult’s life during which Beatrice’s voice became overwhelming to the point of madness. But just to the point. Every word was a drop of water in her ear, and Iseult sometimes tentatively prodded at her ear canal, making sure it wasn’t slowly widening or leaking moisture. Sometimes if she shook her head, quick and hard, she could shatter Beatrice’s voice, flinging it to the distant corners of the room, giving her a few minutes of respite. But the words returned without fail, each one assuming Beatrice’s ghostly form creeping on hands and knees, belly low, until she was back.
Oh, yes, at times Beatrice became almost, almost a physical being outside of Iseult. Iseult could get almost, almost close enough to touch her. On several occasions she even had gotten within reach, but the almost, almost certain knowledge that her hand would come up clutching only air prevented her from traversing the last few millimeters. After the bloodstained dreams began, Iseult averted her eyes from Beatrice’s physical manifestation, however slight.
* * *
And then one morning Mrs. Pennington broke in upon Iseult’s torpor, having spent the week tiptoeing in and out more quietly than the best nurse on record. Suddenly the drapes were pushed open, and Iseult could tell without opening her eyes that there were hands on hips, and that this was the end of her nonsense and that time was moving forward and was slipping through her hands. She opened her left eye, with effort, the lashes crusted with sleep and idle tears. Something like “What?” croaked from her throat, but it was parched and cobwebbed from disuse, and the word caused a fit of coughing. Mrs. Pennington’s blurry form made no move to offer her a glass of water. She waited until the coughing stopped.
“In two hours your aunt is coming to take you to the dressmaker, so we had better start making you look presentable.” The blurry form loomed in front of Iseult’s open eye, and a hand lifted a limp hank of Iseult’s hair, slippery with grease. There was a grumble. “Though Lord knows how I’m to be expected to pull off that miracle.”
Iseult rubbed her right eye free and sat up, swaying. Mrs. Pennington hustled Iseult into her robe, over her filthy nightgown. Iseult found herself being led to the bathroom, the path to which was already being worn out by Sarah, running back and forth to ensure that everything was in order. Iseult coughed the last of the dust from her throat and said, “Why the rush for the dressmaker? I don’t need any new dresses. My old ones are just fine.”
Mrs. Pennington jerked Iseult to a halt. She had to reach up slightly to put a hand on each side of Iseult’s face, Iseult having passed her in height the year that she turned twelve. “Darling girl,” she said. Iseult squirmed at the direct affection but didn’t wrench herself away. Mrs. Pennington’s eyes were darker than usual, full like the moon. “You are not going to escape this time.”
Iseult shuddered and backed herself out of Mrs. Pennington’s hands, bumping into the doorframe of the bathroom. The older woman made a helpless gesture, of comfort that could not be given. They stood in silence, not looking at each other; then Iseult turned her back, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door.
The bathroom filled with steam. Iseult shrugged out of her robe and nightgown, which slithered to the floor even more easily than usual, there being little flesh to impede their progress. She looked down at her feet as she extricated them from the puddle of fabric. They were visibly dirty. They usually were. Iseult wondered if this was something she would have to pay more attention to when she was married, and as usual, when that word ran through her mind, a drum began to beat in her stomach. She plunged a dirty foot into the bathtub.
There was a knock on the door and Iseult grunted her assent, pulling her legs in closer, trying not to be revulsed at the feeling of flesh against flesh, squashed and hot. Mrs. Pennington came in all brusqueness and control, the sentimentality of a few moments ago banished entirely. She launched into a steady stream of gossip as she dealt with Iseult’s hair.
The scent of lavender firmly overtook the sweaty, sour scent of her own self. Mrs. Pennington nattered on about the trouble with the new maid at No. 4, working up a lather on Iseult’s scalp that rocked her head in a slow rhythm. She relaxed her grip around her legs, and let herself imagine that no one was getting married at all.
* * *
don’t iseult don’t pretend to yourself you must accept that things are how they are from now on for us for both of us
can’t i for a moment, mother? just a lovely moment where i am myself and beholden to no one, not even you?
* * *
“Stop fidgeting about, Miss, you’re splashing water all over me and the floor!” Mrs. Pennington hopped up with a shriek, and a lock of wet hair slapped Iseult’s forehead, which she felt she deserved. She straightened up her back and stiffened her mind while the rinsing continued in silence.
* * *
you think i ruin everything it isn’t a very nice way to think about your mother.
i want what’s best for you and me for both of us
if you don’t marry now what life could either of us have with your father hounding us and he would you know would hound us to death
* * *
“Please leave me the soap, I can handle the rest,” said Iseult.
Mrs. Pennington slapped the bar into her hand, red-faced and annoyed.
“All right, but don’t you be thinking you can spend all day in here. You’re not going to be even a moment late for your aunt,” she said, wrapping Iseult’s wet hair in a towel so tightly that she felt her pulse banging away at her temples.
Iseult took the bar of soap in one hand and attacked until her skin turned red. How much of the life she knew was about to change beyond recognition? There would be her father’s absence, but she was pretty sure she could bear that. She would live in a different house. She looked around the bathroom as she went at her fingernails with a brush. It was a room she had been in every day of her life, but it held no particular charms for her. She assumed it would be no trouble to take her mother’s chair, and Mrs. Pennington. She did not know which of the two she would fight for if it came down to one or the other.