by Olga Grushin
The woman in the mirror is not the thirty-six-year-old mother pining for her children, distraught over her marriage, newly worn-out by the daily labors of scraping off anonymous vomit, her hair tucked away in a somber bun, her face blank like her future. The woman in the mirror is young and enigmatic, her metallic eyelids languid, her bob breathtakingly glamorous, her pink flower of a mouth made for deep moonlit kisses, her whole life in front of her still, one sweet, trembling, mysterious note of anticipation, just like the long, sensuous call of a trumpet that I now hear snaking through the house, emerging I know not from where. Neither do I know how I find myself wearing a cream beaded dress that cascades like shimmering water over my breasts, my hips, rustling and sparkling as I move, my knees defiantly bare; or where I got the high-heeled shoes that produce such delightfully assured tapping when Anita teaches me to dance the Charleston; or how I come to be perched on the piano lid, Greta on one side, Ginevra on the other, our arms linked through, flutes of champagne tipped against our lips, a thin ivory pipe with something dark and viscous inside its carved jade bowl being passed from mouth to mouth.
The smoke smells faintly of burnt flowers, distant lands, and lazy, languorous dreams in which everything unfolds in a warm, hazy, amber-hued harmony, and ever more drowsily, I watch as it curves into flowing shapes—transparent birds, dragons with coral wings, flying arches of medieval cathedrals. But when the soaring stone vaults threaten to rise all around me and my eyelids droop, the chirping children with bright eyes like bits of stained glass and taut mouths of ravenous sinners pull the glamorous young woman who was formerly me out of her reverie and take her up the stairs to the loft and up more stairs to the top of the widow’s tower and, somehow, up more stairs still, the steps luminously, inconceivably, rising through the air into the night skies above—and these skies are nothing like the measured, pale, sensible seaside skies of the world the former me left behind. This world is enchanting, and radiant, and full of whimsy; in this world, the air becomes floral scents become strands of celestial music become multiplying serpentine arabesques like the richest tapestries woven with gold threads become trees with entwined crystal branches become blue starlit clouds become infinities telescoping outward, merging with other infinities become boats that float toward us under light-suffused sails of sheer moonlight—and then I see that these truly are boats, drawing closer and closer.
And I count the boats, for numbers seem solid and sane, and I need to distract myself from the dawning terror of knowing that there is nothing but a void beneath my feet. One, two, four, seven, ten, twelve . . . Twelve boats—and I can already discern a beautiful youth standing at the heart of each, leaning on an upright oar like a statue posing to be admired, smiling at us, each smile so full of large, dazzling teeth.
“They are coming, they are coming for us!” the girls cry, and in their excitement they bob up and down on the blue heavenly shore, clicking and clacking their heels, all glittering and hard and jeweled like a plague of exotic, gorgeous insects.
“Oh, won’t we dance tonight!” one exclaims, and “Oh, look how hungry they are!” another exhales—and then, turning to the elegant young woman who was formerly me, they all press their hands against their scintillating chests, as if in prayer, and intone together: “Do stay, stay with us forever, we will have dances in the sky every night, it will be glorious, it will be splendid!”
“Please, do say yes,” Theda, the youngest, begs. “We will love you, you will take care of us, you will be like a mother to us!”
At this, I sway a little, then totter down one rung of the luminous ladder. Edna’s alarmed face is thrust close to me as she struggles to pull me back up.
“No, no, she means sister,” Edna whispers. “She means like a sister. A slightly older sister.”
But the words have been said, and as their meaning slowly sinks to the bottom of my soul, all the magic of the night seems to catch on their blunt, dull edge and slide sideways off the world. The boats waver, the intense blue of the stars starts to fade, and my desire to have mindless fun, to shrug off my past, to forget my future, if only for a few wild, careening hours—the desire to be young again leaks out of me, and I see myself through the multifaceted, glinting eyes of the insect girls, the girl-insects, I see myself as I really am, a lonely woman on the cusp of middle age, an anxious mother who has already made all her choices, all her mistakes. And now, once again, I remember my children, my own children, my flesh and blood, my daughter who used to love my bedtime stories, my son who used to spend hours conquering imaginary lands with his army of silver forks, my Angie, my Ro, deprived of my love, of my care, for so long, and the thought is like a sharp blade slicing cleanly through the fabric of this illusion, of all the illusions—and as the truth sinks in, so, too, heavily, inevitably, does my heart in my chest, and so do I, sinking, sinking back down through the air, the golden sky ladder disappearing above me rung by rung, the impassive insect faces of the eleven dancing princesses hanging over the edge of the cloud, staring after me, before vanishing out of sight, blinking out with the stars, with the magic.
The gray house meets me with the rickety floorboards of the balcony. I tear off the ridiculous high heels, then run down the widow’s watch tower, down past the loft, down past the second floor with its mutilated plant corpses. The first-floor parlor enfolds me in its dim, drafty silence. My head spinning, I hasten to find my old sensible shoes, to gather my bucket, my rags, when a woman’s voice sounds behind me.
“You,” the voice says, sadly, “are wearing my favorite dress.”
I drop the bucket just as a light flares up by the window, and there she sits, unmoving and prim, in the only hard-backed chair in the entire house, dressed all in brown, her hands set in resigned stillness on her squarely placed knees. The sight of her pierces my heart with the recognition of a kindred loneliness; but when I approach, I see that she is not like me, that she is still young, only a little older than the girls in the skies. Her face is heart-shaped and white, her eyes wise with grief. She reminds me of Angie, but something about her seems broken. I stop a few paces away, as my breath dies in my throat: a thin silver chain binds her wrists to the wall, and another chain binds her ankles.
“Are you . . .” But I cannot bring myself to ask what I want to ask, so I ask the question to which I know the answer already. “Are you Nora?”
“Nora, yes,” she says in some surprise, as though unused to the sound of her own name. Her voice is uncertain and pale, like the wind in the rushes, like old-age regret. “And who are you? I have never seen you here before. I return to this house every night in my dreams, you know, but it is always empty, my sisters are always away at their dances.” She sighs and, not waiting for me to answer, gestures for me to sit by her; when she raises her small white hand, the chain tinkles dejectedly. “I used to be just like them, once upon a time. Bright and reckless and fast. I made up poems—poems about music, about having wings, about boats in the sky—and many said I had a real gift, but I believed all gifts were meant to be tossed away freely, so I never wrote anything down. Every night, we climbed the stairs to the clouds and met with our lovers. Our lovers loved to watch us dance. We had such pretty feet, they said, and mine the prettiest. Every sunrise, in parting, we took off our beautiful shoes and threw them into the air, and our lovers caught them and drank champagne out of them, toasting our joy to come on the following night.
“But our fathers grew suspicious of all the shoes we kept buying, so they threatened to cut off our allowances, and when their threats had no effect, they sent men to spy on us. Men came, with butterfly nets, with magnifying glasses, with church hymnals, with thesauruses, with rulers, and tried to catch us, but we were clever and avoided them all, and some of them fell out of the skies and broke their necks. We watched them fall and cheered at their deaths, and perhaps that was wrong, and perhaps it was for our lighthearted cruelty that we were punished. For, after a while, there arrived a m
an with a perpetual frown and a white beard pointy as a knife, a man who hid his thoughts under a bowler hat. We heard rumors that he knew how to dissect dreams, knew why some women dreamed of balconies and kings, while others dreamed of wells and walking sticks, and that he would chase us through our dreams until he knew us and, knowing us, trapped us.
“We laughed at the rumors, and we laughed at him, at his arrogant folly, behind our hands, but in the end, he got the better of us. He followed us one night, dark as the night itself, up the golden ladder into the sky, and, once there, took copious notes of everything he saw—and as soon as he wrote something down, whatever it was vanished clean, just like it had never been. I cried for the moonbirds. I cried for the pearl lilies. I cried for the diamond-leafed trees. I knew it was only a matter of time before he spied the magnificent cloud boats with the splendid-toothed lovers. And so, to save my sisters’ happiness, I spoke to him, I promised to come down with him if only he would leave the rest alone. He was glad to have me, then, for I was like a bird in his hand. He took me home with him, and he put these on my wrists and my ankles, for, in spite of my promises, he did not trust me not to fly away. And every day now, I sit chained to his desk and recount my dreams for him, and he dips his dragon-claw pen into his golden inkstand and writes my words down in his thick notebooks, and he tears out the pages, and he swallows them after much mastication, and he grows ever fatter with fame. But I have my revenge on him, too, for every day I lie to him. I make up empty nonsense, fill his head and his belly with balconies and kings, wells and walking sticks, while in reality, what I dream of every night is this house, this dark, empty house of my former youth, with the vast blue skies above it and my young, beautiful sisters dancing free and joyous in the clouds. So, whoever you are,” and she points a see-through finger at me, jingling the chains lightly, “you are trespassing in my dream. And it is dangerous for you to be here, for the man in the bowler hat may begin to suspect the truth any day now and go back on the prowl through my soul. You’d better leave my dress behind, quick, and return to wherever you came from.”
And just like that, as though released from a nightmare, I am back in my own somber clothes, stumbling to the trolley stop through a pale pink morning, my bucket in my hand. On the trolley, on the train, my head is pounding, and it seems to me that all the other stern, darkly clad domestics are staring at me with disapproval. When I limp through the park toward my sister’s house, a short man, possibly wearing a bowler hat, darts out from behind a tree and flashes a camera in my eyes, and my insides grow heavy with ominous premonitions.
Melissa intercepts me by the front door, her forehead etched deep with insomnia.
“Where have you been, we’ve been worried sick about you, gone all night like that! Miss McKee is in the living room, waiting to speak with you. You should wash your face before you see her. And what in heaven’s name happened to your hair, who chopped it off like that?”
“Miss McKee?” I repeat, my temples splitting at the blazing trajectory that the sun is now drawing across the wintry sky. “Who is Miss McKee?”
Melissa gives me a withering look and strides off into the house, and I meekly follow her inside to discover Gwendolyn the witch sitting on my sister’s couch, tapping a pen against reams of paper spread out on the coffee table before her.
At the House in the Pines
“Perhaps I haven’t been sufficiently clear.” Her tone is stern, and yet again, she looks both like and unlike her previous incarnation, her gray hair cropped just as before but her face made colder, more impersonal, by a pair of glasses poised on the bridge of her nose, which seems to have shrunk even more in its dimensions, a far cry from the potato-shaped bulb of the chicken-legged hut and farther still from the hooked monstrosity of the crossroads. She is dressed quite formally, too, in a tailored pinstriped suit, which makes her look slimmer; or perhaps she has lost weight. “Your position is precarious as it is. Staying out all night, drinking, by the looks of you”—she gives me a chilly glance, the color and texture of steel, over her steel-rimmed glasses—“should not be permitted if you hope to reunite with your children. Now, when does your husband expect you to move back in with him?”
“Two weeks,” I whisper, chastised. “But I can’t. I won’t.”
“I should think not. In two weeks’ time, then, he will file for divorce, which will give him even more advantage over you. I recommend that we file ourselves before the time is up. We need to pick proper grounds for it, of course. Desertion is out, since you were the one who left him, and as for abuse, well, he was cruel and unpleasant, but he never did hit you, did he? Which leaves adultery, and here, I trust, we have ample—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I do not want to file anything.”
She clicks her tongue, impatiently. “As your lawyer—”
“No. Please. I do not want to do anything.” Panicked, I am pleading now, with her, with myself, with him, with the Powers That Be, in whose smooth, impartial workings I used to believe, used to not know not to believe, but which, I now fear, do not watch over me any longer—if ever they have. “Maybe he’ll see that parting is the best ending for both of us and agree to resolve everything peacefully?”
She drops her pen onto the table with much clatter to demonstrate the full extent of her exasperation. “The man is a classic bully in love with his own power. He will never agree to a peaceful resolution. Tell me what happened between you two in the last months of your marriage. There might be something there we could use.”
I stay stubbornly silent.
“This isn’t easy,” she says, relenting a little. “Why don’t you take a day or two to think it over, and in the meantime set up an appointment with Faye. Talking about things will clear your mind. Do call my office once you make your decision. We should aim to file by Monday. And look, I understand the desire to cut loose when a man hurts you, believe me, we’ve all been there, but you mustn’t forget that your entire future is at stake here. Last night was unwise. Let’s just hope there will be no repercussions.”
I am, in truth, not entirely certain what happened last night, but a stumble into the powder room revealed frightfully bloodshot eyes, lids painted in black and gray stripes, a glittering pink mouth slanted sideways, red blotches on my cheeks, and an unevenly chopped, bristly mop. After a single glance, I squeezed my eyes shut and would not look again, scrubbing blindly at my eyelids, at my lips, tugging a brush through the remains of my beautiful hair, too frightened to confirm that the dissipated reflection might have any connection to me, to my neat, respectable, hardworking self. And I now feel so distracted by wanting and, simultaneously, not wanting to recall what precisely led to my riding the trolley at six in the morning, carrying a badly burnt potted hydrangea in my cleaning bucket and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a not-altogether-sober lachrymose clown, that I let Gwendolyn gather her papers and depart the house before I think to ask her who Faye is.
Once the front door closes behind her, I sit by the window, massaging my aching temples, round and round and round, until I realize that the movements of my fingers have fallen in rhythm with the thin girlish voices I hear chanting some nonsensical rhyme outside, Melissa’s three daughters, Meg, Mary, and Myrtle, playing in the yard, choosing “it” for their game of tag. As I prod my temples, I listen absently to the winding words that reach me through the cracked window.
A garden with no flowers,
A summer with no sun,
A forest with no birdies,
A marriage with no fun.
You. Are. Out!
A garden with no flowers,
A summer with no sun,
A forest with no birdies . . .
I straighten, listen more intently, my heart taking a sudden flight—and before the next girl is out, I leap to my feet and rush from the room, from the house, down the sidewalk that skirts the neighborhood park, shouting, “Wait, Gwendolyn, w
ait!” after the pinstriped figure in men’s brogues that is even now striding briskly toward a gray Packard automobile I see parked across the road.
She looks back at last, allows me to catch up, to recover from a stitch in my side, before asking whether I have made up my mind already.
“It’s not about that,” I pant—and stop.
It seems preposterous to bring up the stormy crossroads, the threats, the curse, when faced with this smartly dressed, businesslike person holding a briefcase of dyed alligator skin and considering me with poorly concealed impatience in the prosaic white light of a clear December day, and I feel a fleeting yet vertiginous doubt, almost as though I imagined that black-and-red night—dreamed it up wholesale to disguise the uncertainty, the terror, of my first divorce consultation with Miss Gwendolyn McKee, Esquire. I inhale and press on. “That time, at the crossroads, when . . . when you wanted to take what you called my life’s spark from me, you . . . well, you didn’t. And later, in your house, you said you wouldn’t have taken it, ‘not even if’—but you didn’t finish your sentence. What were you going to say?”
“Nothing of any practical use to you. And it might upset you.”
“Please. I’m not a little girl. Tell me. Please.”
I feel like a little girl standing empty-handed on the sidewalk, begging her for a crumb of some revelation. She sighs, probes me with an even gray gaze.
“I suppose you have the right to know,” she says at last. “I wouldn’t have taken your spark even if you had it. The thing is, you didn’t. You had no spark. No passion. No joy. There was nothing to take.”
I stare at her, stunned.
“A garden with no flowers,” I whisper.
“Yes, but you used to have it. I could feel the hollow in your chest where it had been once. Someone had taken it from you already. Scooped it clean out.”