The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  But before this, the girl will find herself in the restroom of the Wrist Institute surrounded by female Wrist Scholars who are washing their hands and fixing their hair and tucking white shirts into uniform skirts. She will find herself standing in the restroom looking in the mirror set low for her and she will be using her tongue to manipulate her now five loose teeth, when suddenly a horror she could only ever have imagined will unfold. She will watch her tongue push too hard and one of her teeth will fall into the valley between her gum and her lip. She will pull the tooth from its place and look at the jagged end, a part of her mouth now sitting in the palm of her hand. She will finger the place where the tooth left and then, with her tongue, she’ll explore the void.

  And so, before she becomes an ice sculptor and before she proves to her father that the wrist exists, she will come to the realization that she is not whole; that parts of her body fall out and off and will not reattach. She will learn that she is not a single being, but a network of linked catastrophes waiting to transpire.

  In a revised introduction to the third edition of his Wrist Discourse: Toward a Union of Hand and Arm, her father the Wrist Scholar writes:

  My critics have called this book a personal attempt to understand my daughter’s death, portrayed this volume not as a work of theory nor a case study, nor even a tale, but rather a confession. In light of such accusations, I have returned the book to the third person point of view, in an attempt to calcify the events precipitating her end such that I do not forget that children are not objects of study but manuscript drafts to be revised with great care.

  In one of her last exhibits, the final line of the Ice Scupltor’s ars glacerium reads:

  Imagine a room full of daughters. How is it different than a room full of girls?

  THE GIRL WAITS IN her bed the tenth night of her fifth year, uses the bright light against the white wall as a stage for her shadows. She is thinking of her father’s claim that a daughter is held inside a mother and trying to determine what this means. Does the daughter stand upright and grow along with the mother until the mother layer is shed to reveal the daughter underneath? Does the daughter split the mother like a flesh shell, then leave the mother behind, an abandoned suit? Perhaps every daughter was once a mother, but shed that past life. When she tries to make a shadow within another shadow, as the daughter is held inside the mother, she cannot make the logic work—she is left with only flat black on the pebbled tan of the Institute walls. But the question that loiters at the back of her mind, in the place where her hair meets her neck, is this: What is the role of the father in all this?

  She is tracing the wall with her finger, outlining where she wants the shadow to live, when he knocks. It is 1 a.m. She slips back into bed and the door opens. His tie is loose and the buttons of his vest are undone such that the girl can see the suspenders that usually hide beneath his overcoat. He sits down on her bed and leans into her face, where his daughter meets him for a nose rub.

  Good morning, he says. Good morning, my love. Good morning, good morning, my child. He looks at her for an unusually long time before she breaks his stare. It has been a long day. For you, too?

  She nods her head. He has asked her this before, and she always agrees, though then she never meant it. Strange how the day can seem longer when in fact it contains always the same number of hours. He looks at her meager shelf of books, all of which concern her work with shadows: Playing with the Dark, On Shadow Puppetry, Light and Image, The Art of the Shadow, Drawing on the Wall: A Sanctioning. All the books contain photos of shaped shadow and light to mimic a variety of objects, a phenomenon she has been fascinated with since before she could speak.

  In her Attics and Wing Theory: Understanding Descent, the woman the girl never called mother writes:

  From a Room Studies perspective, the Allegory of the Womb allows us to see the relationship between the parlor and the foyer. That the former is an introduction to a larger structure and the latter is merely a walkway suggests that the notion of home is harbored not in centers, but in the arteries that act as channels from room to room. We have also to consider the role of attics, as the narrative’s obsession with flight contributes to a rethinking of high rooms and their function within the larger structure. Stairs, then, become the method by which one ascends or descends, but not always—the implied reading swells beneath the surface, where stairs are not the only method of down. This dark truth is supported by statistics on both fatal attic falls and corpses found in upstairs rooms—these bodies are typically found either in beds or tubs, the two edifices that most easily invite relaxation during horizontal positioning.

  The irony, of course, is that while most contemporary houses contain a room for living, we are careful to avoid acknowledging that some rooms are for death.

  The girl’s father does not think of his wife’s words as he proceeds.

  I do this for you, my love. And the girl nods, though she does not understand what he does. It is the right of everyone to know that the wrist is a myth. I do this so that you might live in a world where the truth is revealed and the word wrist is never uttered. This is a world I work to make real for you.

  The girl nods again, keeping her lips closed so as not to reveal the dark secret in her mouth: that her teeth—like the girls in his story—have left their place of origin. She has collected them in a jar that lives under her bed, the safest place she knows. She knows this because the one time she asked her father where her mother was, he said below, in the shade of underneath, and so she knows that anything that possesses the quality of under, such as her bed, or the dining hall tables, the trees with low-hanging branches in the Institute quad, is something to respect. In the jar are two of her teeth. Her jaw contains two empty plots and, she fears, more are to come, for four others are unstable. At the cafeteria, she chooses only liquids or pastes. She cannot risk hard food, for it may exacerbate the grave event unfolding in her mouth.

  She knows crying cannot help and so resists, but when she wakes in the morning, her pillow is wet. She is starting to think that the force behind this cataclysm might not be language, and this thought she fears the most, for if speech is not the source, she cannot begin to imagine what might be.

  But enough about work, the Wrist Scholar says, breaking his daughter’s thought. Rather, let’s get back to the story. Tonight we’ll share the narrative of The Barber and his Alice.

  Years later, when the Ice Sculptor is interviewed by an important art journal, she will be quoted as saying:

  He thought that by stripping the world of a word, it would be saved. But he hadn’t considered that language lives, and when it dies, it haunts. When he said classify, I heard calcify. This is why I have not changed.

  THE BARBER AND HIS ALICE

  A DAUGHTER SEEMS A simple thing. She bears purpose and potential, like a key or a road.

  The Barber’s Alice was drawn to fairy tales, and his favorite to retell dealt with that mysterious waving mass that burgeons from the skull. Women stuck in towers where hair became the rope that led them to their forest deaths; men who gained all power from their locks, who failed to protect these tresses from cunning women.

  His daughter wore braids, thick braids that fell down her back and collected in the trench where her spine depressed. She spent her time outside in the fields, collecting—feathers and bones, weeds and rocks. Once she happened upon a pile of shells, the source of a story, since they made their home hundreds of miles from any body of water. She left the field early that evening, spent a full afternoon cleaning them gently with a soft brush. When her father returned, she had organized them in neat rows on her bed and was taking careful notes on each. He stood in the door for a while, watching her place a pencil behind her ear and finger the bumpy skin. Her braids met tidily at the center of her back. Later his wife would tell him their daughter called it inventory, the same way he noted and archived the state of his razor blades.

  Because she spent all her time in the fields, her mother i
nsisted they crop her hair in a short bob to help manage the matted mess. But the girl objected. So every night after her bath, her father would braid her curls and bind them with small metal clips.

  At the barbershop, he carefully lathered necks, raked the minor rug of fur that coated men’s cheeks and throats. His clients spoke of hard things: numbers, liquor, private wars. When he was done he would spin them slowly around to face the mirror. They would turn their heads slightly to one side, then the next, inspecting the work, while his gaze slid to the perimeter of the looking glass, where a photo of his daughter was snugly tucked.

  The morning she went missing, while she was ushered to a dark elsewhere, his shears slipped and he accidently cut a man’s neck. For an instant, he thought he’d not broken the skin, but then the blood surfaced along the oblong stretch that curved at the top and swung dramatically toward the place where the man’s neck bent. He watched the event absently, failing to apologize until the man raised his palm to the nape and brought his hand to his face to witness the mess of hair-grit and blood.

  On her bed lay her severed braids. The only thing missing other than her was the canning jar of shells. She was a smart girl, read her fairy tales as cautionary, not mere entertainment. After his shifts, he would roll five cigarettes and light them one after another, walk the ugliest streets of town, head down, hope raised, searching for her dropped shells.

  He keeps the braids in his apron at work. This is how he traverses his days, grounded by the two healthy cords of woven hair that live in the deepest cove of his apron.

  He removed the photo of his daughter from the corner of his mirror—too many folks knew and looked at it forlornly or didn’t know and asked about her. The photo is retired to the same drawer where he keeps the blades. In his pockets live the braids, and throughout the day he dips his hands in and thumbs the bristles at the cropped end, daring to admire the careful, even cut.

  FOR THE LATTER PART of the first month of her fifth year, the girl does not speak. She will not speak again until her sixth birthday, but she does not know this yet. The fear that her secret will be revealed permeates her every move, and she looks under the stalls in the Institute restroom before she parks herself in front of her tiny, low mirror to inspect the places where the teeth used to be.

  It is a curse, she decides, but surely one she deserves. She has done something ghastly, irreparable, though she is unsure what. And so she stops speaking, both so no one notices the gaping absence in her mouth and so she saves herself from saying something that might inaugurate more loss—her ears or her fingers, her hair or her nails.

  But a being, particularly one who has crested the precipice of age five, cannot successfully manage the lot of life alone. Too much loneliness, particularly at that age, can mean a condition settling in. And so the girl crafts the presence of others in her mind. First they are just abstract thoughts: three of them, like an ellipsis—uniform and united, pointing onward to denote a something else. But as her fifth year progresses and more of her teeth abandon her, the abstractions take shape on her wall and soon start to look distinctive: one a form that echoes a crushed hope; another an illformed idea; the final a memory, abandoned. In this way, the shapes she crafts become her cohort, and she releases the guilt and longing locked tight in her chest to her trifold shadow forms.

  Meanwhile, her father continues his telling. And in the telling, the girl becomes further acquainted with the darkest logic of the world: that if something is begun—a meal or a journey, a story or a girl—it must always end.

  Years later, after the girl who becomes an Ice Sculptor has left and is gone herself, the Multiversity of the Mid-North will name a room after her, and eventually a writer will want to tell her whole story because it strikes her as gothic. The Writer will sift through the Ice Sculptor’s bookshelves and notes—the print catalog of the girl’s life. The Writer will get a travel grant to conduct research on the Ice Sculptor’s papers. On her visits to the Multiversity of the Mid-North, The Writer will end each evening with a shot of whiskey at a local bar because, while she knows that childhood is, essentially, a complicated system of ongoing discovered disappointments, she also knows that few lives can point to a single moment and deem it The Beginning of Childhood’s End. The Writer will sip the whiskey tentatively from the miniscule glass and she will think that all the Ice Sculptor’s sorrow gestures back toward the telling of a tale. The Writer will think briefly that her work as a writer is less about sharing a story and more about parsing together the loose strands of an unraveling fabric through which the character of the Ice Sculptor is threaded. The Writer will think she is less a writer and more an archivist. Then she will finish her shot.

  THE BUTCHER AND HIS DOROTHY

  THE BUTCHER WOULD COME home late, apron stained red and pink. His daughter would welcome him at the door. She would study the spatters while he carefully untied his boots in the mudroom. She would help him disrobe, and he taught her to safely roll the apron for storage before the next day’s wash. They would then head to the sink and wash their hands together, she in front of him, standing on the stepstool he built for her, and he behind, his massive frame hovering over her so that he could smell the sweet and sweaty girl-ness in her hair. The Butcher would wrap his arms around her bony figure and they would share the water, passing the cake of soap back and forth, scrubbing their four palms and wrists, their nineteen fingers together in a tangle of nail and knuckle to confirm their cleanliness. Then they would dry their hands on fresh towels and he would carry her to bed.

  He had lost his left ring finger in a botched chop during his first year at the slaughterhouse. This was before his daughter’s birth, which meant she never knew that finger, understood it only as a gaping void in the grandeur of his hairy, calloused hand. She would ask him where the finger now lived and he would offer a series of conflicting stories: in a vast field of ice up north; riding waves in the warm ocean currents in the west; in a zeppelin ever-hovering over islands no one knew were there; in the eye of a storm that twisted and coiled far above them but never touched the earth.

  After her death, he was ashamed to say he found great solace in the dark layers of meat at the slaughterhouse. The way that inside there exists a standardized order, one that follows the laws of windblown grain or cream in coffee, those swirling rows of tendon, the delicate layers of muscle curling and curving, the way music might look if we could see it. In a world where everything changed, he was comforted to know, when he broke open the body of a steer, the patterns of the beast persisted unadulterated. The night they found her, she was carried away before he could see the pile of gore that was his girl. Still, he lets himself think that had the someone who took her broke his daughter open the way he splits a steer, she would follow these same patterns, where an invisible code offers guide for the meat of all beasts. He is comforted to know that when he admires those muscles’ delicate waves, he is not so far from her.

  WHEN SHE IS NO longer a girl but an Ice Sculptor, she will do everything she can to resist remembering her fifth year, until one day it surfaces during a work session that proves fundamental to the development of her Cold Art Methodology. She will be wrapped in a sweatshirt that boasts Multiversity of the Mid-North, nose running and hands redraw, working the ice with her file, and she will file harder because the ice is her past and then she will let the angle dip too much and she’ll hear the crack in the center. She’ll stand back and hear it growing, then use the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe away the dust of shaved ice. She will watch the crack slither south, jutting in several directions and sometimes resting, only to resume its arduous path. And as she watches the work become ruined by her hard hand, she will think of her father, how he was always so cold, how his hands would be cold, his feet, how he was always layered. What warms a father up? she will wonder, and watch her breath escape her mouth in clouds.

  In an interview with The Frozen Frieze after she wins the prestigious Glacier Award for ice work, she will be asked about her m
ethodology. In response, she’ll say she carves the ice with steam, which allows manipulation without rupturing the work. It is a skill she’ll say she learned from her father.

  THE MILLER AND HIS DOROTHY

  THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER WAS a girl of promise. She often wandered through the streets all day to conjure playful tales. At night, she would relay them to her father and he would listen, in awe of her gift for telling, always wondering from where, in the forms of her mother and himself, the source of the gift derived. The Miller’s daughter told him these tales from her bed as he sat on a chair in the corner in the dark, a position he took because she insisted. When he had been closer, where she could see his face, it somehow influenced her telling, changing the trajectory of the tales as they escaped her. And so the father sat alone in the corner, his face kept hidden from his daughter, whose narratives filled the room.

  One night, she told him the beginning of a tale so haunting that it shook him to the core. And just as he was finding himself unable to stop his body from shaking, right there in the middle, his daughter told him that she would be concluding the narrative for the night, leaving her audience hovering above the end. The father asked—in a voice that lingered on the edge of pleading—if she would finish the tale, please finish the tale tonight, for he could not survive the suspense for even one day. The daughter giggled, then said she was sorry, that she could not tell him the end because of a very simple fact: she did not yet know it. When The Miller asked in a whisper if she could invent it, please, my darling, just this once and for tonight, the daughter smiled. Dear father, she told him, do you not know the first rule of story? Endings are not invented; they are discovered.