by Suzy Vitello
I had indeed witnessed Papa kissing someone other than Mummi. Once, at Possi, he’d left the dancing during a party, and I went to search for him. He’d promised we could play music together, and I had my tambourine ready. I wandered through the parlor, the library, the music room—no Papa. Finally, in the breakfast pantry, there he was, on the baker’s table, on top of one of the neighbor girls. The one who brought the milk to our house in the early morning.
When I returned home I conveyed the occasion to Baroness Wilhelmine, and she told me, “Your father cannot help his charms, Elisabeth. It is up to the women to refuse him.”
I thought this over and asked, “Then a lady might initiate such a thing?”
She replied, “Only a tart or a queen may do so.”
I had not yet decided which one to become, but I figured one couldn’t practice too much. And one also needed inspiration. Gackl and his latest retinue might prove just the ticket. I set my things aside and rose from my enforced paralysis. The discarded attempts at communication with my beloved clotted my path, so I kicked them out of my way. “Gackl,” I said, “deal me in.”
“But Sisi, you’re not to play with us,” my brother argued, citing Baroness Wilhelmine, her last words before retiring with one of her autointoxication episodes.
“Nonsense,” I scolded, kicking against Gackl’s small behind with my toe. I reached down and thwacked his suspender for good measure. I squatted in between two of the older boys, and they parted to make room. I eased myself down on the lump of blood-catching cloth affixed to my underthings. “We’re going to vary the game,” I said. “Whoever gets the queen of hearts must kiss me full on the lips.”
The blackamoors had no idea what I was saying and remained in their postures, imitating Gackl as he covered first his mouth and then his ears.
“For goodness sakes,” I said, grabbing the deck, slapping down card after card until there she was, regal, elegant and red, even though she was now smudged with my inky prints. I turned to the boy next to me, placed my hands upon his shoulders, and set my lips against his. Karl, I thought. Karl. Karl. My lips tasted of salt when I pulled them off the boy. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and spit on the nursery floor.
My brother leapt to his feet. “Sisi, are you mad?”
The red queen stared back at me from atop the deck of cards. If she could speak, she would have scolded. Perhaps I was mad? Perhaps love made one mad? The boys huddled together, cringing as they watched Gackl pull me away from their game.
Clearly, I still existed in a middle space. Not a child. Not a lady. I felt a new feeling, like a heavy weight, pulling from inside of me, and a powerful sorrow like a swollen stream ready to burst its banks. Shame. Regret. Confusion. If this was the path of my future, I wanted none of it.
Chapter Eleven
In the morning, the three of us file into the sedan, which is the least broken down of all the Volvos. We have a full day in town planned. My appointment with Dr. Greta, lunch at Spice—one of my favorite Pearl restaurants—and following that, we’re going to pick up Cory from the train station.
I’ve managed to hide the deep scratches I made in my skin; they ache and burn under my flannel shirt and jeans. Freshly dosed on my anti-OCD cocktail, I feel heavy, thick. I hold the ingestion log tight against my chest. My iPod buds are crammed firmly into my ears.
The agony of the day before lingered in me like the last marks of pencil that you can’t erase, but a good night’s sleep helped. As soon as my eyes fluttered open, I made resolutions. I would improve, engage, be better in every way over this next six months. I resolved to toe the line with the cognitive behavioral therapy. I would try—no, embrace—Dr. Greta’s desensitization exercises. In the backseat of the Volvo I listen to the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra, while in front Dad and Willow chat about goat and chicken supplies. Through the concerto, even over the puttering car engine, I can hear their words ever so faintly.
Willow: Let’s pick up some of that dandelion cleanse formula.
Dad: That stuff gives me the runs.
Willow: That’s the point.
Dad: No, thanks.
This is just like at Providence, where the girls went on at length about their colonic regimes. Only for some reason, toxic cleanses in the world of adults weren’t deemed nutso. I lick my dry lips. Try not to picture my father’s bowel movements. We are almost at Tenth and Taylor. I check my cell phone. Nothing. No texts from Mom. No voicemails.
“You can let me off here,” I call to the front seat as they began the next topic, Vietnamese gluten.
The car sputters to the curb and I hop out, my food diary in hand, Bach’s Concerto No. 3 in G Major at the part where the violins lift you off the ground. I fly the two blocks to Dr. Greta’s office building, where lion statues grace either side of a staircase, holding up paws, their claws separated with grime. I take the stairs two at a time and use the cuff of my sleeve to open the door by its long, brass handle. Inside the lobby, surfaces are cold and hard and gleaming—the air, turpentinish, like the studio where Mom and I once took an oil painting class together, but in this building nobody is making art. Everything about the place points to old, old, old, old, except that the elevator is surprisingly fast. It shocks me every time that before I can count to seven, I’m on the fourth floor, the tinny ding of a bell sounds, and then the doors yawn to reveal gummy carpet, tobacco walls and, occasionally, the whir of a dentist’s drill.
Dr. Greta’s door is at the end of a long hall, and the sign on the outside reads simply HELLO in bright red block letters. In my darker, meaner moments, I want to pry the “O” off.
Inside is a small room with four bright green vinyl chairs, and a low, square table piled with issues of Good Housekeeping, Highlights for Children, and Scientific American. There’s another table, a small one in a corner, where waiting patients can choose a bag of herbal tea and fill a paper cup with hot water from a plugged-in carafe. A divot in the carpet remains where there used to be an aquarium.
Dr. Greta’s actual office is on the other side of a deep plum-colored door next to the former aquarium. If the door is open a crack, that’s the signal to come right in. If it’s closed, as it is this particular day, I sit on a chair until summoned. I open a magazine with a tear in the front cover. Somebody, at some point, needed to get rid of gum.
The cover shot of the magazine is a woman who had a bunch of kids. Multiples. And there she is, a toddler under each arm like twin footballs, baring her tummy, a silver hoop in her navel even. A bright pink headline screams Sexy isn’t just for singles anymore! The show-off mommy has been airbrushed, I’m sure, but she looks not much older than me. I thwack the magazine back on the table, and on cue, the door to Dr. Greta creaks open.
“Lizbeth,” she says. “Enter.”
I do as she commands and sit down in my usual wingback chair, facing her and her curio cabinet of messily stacked books. She’s dressed in her usual uniform of Birkenstocks and rolled-up canvas pants. Since my last visit, she’s trimmed and blow-dried her white hair; the pageboy cut barely covers the tops of her ears.
“So?” she begins, her voice a sound like cutting through stiff brown bread with a nail file. I take the buds out of my ears. Press the pause button on my iPod. “You survived the first week at the farm, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve spent some time with your father’s lady friend, then?”
“I have.”
“And have you heard from your mother?”
I instinctively move my hand to the little rectangle of a phone in my pocket. “Nope. Not a word. But you know, she’s in the middle of the ocean.”
“True,” she says, eyeing the book in my lap. “I see you brought the ingestion log?”
“Yes.”
“Good. May I see?”
“I, uh, didn’t record food in it …” I start.
Dr. Greta is poker-faced, but her hands twitch her disappointment. I lick my lips. My e
yes wander to the cabinet of ancient books. “But you did write something there?”
The ancient books in the cabinet, a couple of them have gold lettering on their spines. German. “German,” I say.
“Pardon?” she says.
“That empress you told me about? The German one? With the eating disorder?”
“Empress Elisabeth?” Dr. Greta asks.
“Was she, um, cured?”
Dr. Greta straightens in her chair. “Cured?” she says. “No. She coped, but she was not cured. You see, those were different times.”
“Yes, but,” I say, my throat drying up around the words that were trying to push out, “did it kill her? The disorder?”
Dr. Greta’s face opens up like an accordion folder, the way a face does when peeking into a blanketed bundle of a new baby: wonder, amazement, fear. I am engaging, and she likes this, but maybe she is also sort of scared of it. “Sisi has a long, complicated story, I’m afraid.”
“Sisi had a sister,” I say. “I looked it up. A beautiful sister?”
“Nené. Yes. Sisi and Nené were very different,” Dr. Greta continues. “This interests you, yes?”
The words Count Sebastian must die sit in my lap beneath the fancy etched cover. Should I ask her? I look toward the little diary in the cabinet. “In that journal, did she say anything about death? I have this book from school about her called Death by Fame.”
“Ah,” she says. “The Sinclair book. I know it. He focused on her assassination in Geneva and how her celebrity led to her death. I don’t buy it really. She was simply a victim of a crazy man.”
A crazy man? Should a therapist use that word? My scratched-up hands and arms pulse and sting. There’s no sun streaming in the window behind Dr. Greta. Her smooth hair bothers me.
“Lizbeth, what you need to know now is that we are the makers of our own destiny. You can choose to be swallowed up by circumstance, or you can choose to take that great brain of yours, that deep sensitivity, and work your way through this difficult time. I deeply believe that you, Liz, have something very special to offer. But first, you need to eat. Yes?”
My nose begins to itch, then my scalp. My shins. Thoughts are coming fast and furious. I try to hold them in. Where is my music? Schubert’s adagio in E Flat, with its piano and violin softly arguing and then making up, would help right now, but I’d made my iPod mute. A weird battle starts between my head and my mouth and before I can stop them, they explode out of me, words, words, words: “I hate it there. It’s exactly as I expected. It sucks. It’s dirty. And Willow—that’s her name, Willow—is a terrible housekeeper and she drinks tea and she’s a stupid gluten-free nut, and now she’s invited her brother—”
I went further than I intended. Dr. Greta practically levitated off of her chair. I can almost see lightning bolts from my mouth to her ears.
“Her brother?”
“Yeah, Coriander. Cory, they call him. He’s some sort of delinquent.”
Dr. Greta nods, which is what she does when another type of therapist would be writing a note. Today, like many days, her notebook stays closed.
“I think maybe my medication should be switched or upped or something.”
Dr. Greta does a quick full-body glance. “How is your appetite?”
“They’re spraying poison on the field today? So probably I won’t be eating for, like, a week. It’s unappetizing, all those toxins.”
“Have you written anything in the log?”
Count Sebastian must die.
I shake my head.
“Let me see your hands,” she barks then, employing her seldom-used Nazi-doctor voice.
I thrust them toward her, scratched and raw, and she rises, taking them in her hands and rubbing her thumb all over the knuckles. She sighs out loud. Which is weird, her showing emotion.
I feel my lungs close down. It’s hard to breathe. I want to ask about the writing in the diary, but instead all that comes out is, “Why do you have those stupid magazines in your waiting room?” I gulp air. “Isn’t it a little hypocritical? Body image-wise, I mean?”
She sighs once more. “Lizbeth, we need to focus on you. Your health. Your progress. Your accountability. I’m quite sure you’ve lost more weight. And you’ve been washing the hands more frequently.”
“I had an accident,” I tell her. “She made me do something with a needle and I stabbed myself.”
We sit in silence. Dr. Greta tries to keep her face neutral, but I can tell she’s gritting her teeth. Clenching her jaw. I wash my hands with the air, rubbing them together over an invisible bar of soap. The only sound is the ticking clock. But then, on the street below, a siren starts up with a high-pitched whoo-whoo-whoop!
All at once, out her mouth rush other words. Words I hadn’t expected at all: “Next month, I will be retiring.”
This is a day of surprises. I should be happy, really, but my stomach does that weird thing it did when I noticed the missing aquarium.
“I won’t pretend that I’m not sad, Lizbeth, to see this backward step from you. I had really hoped we were making progress, you and I. I’ll be referring you on, of course, but we must improve this month. Or …”
She winces. Not sure what to say. I hate that she thinks I’ve gone backward. We sit facing each other for another couple of minutes, and then she uncrosses her legs and stands. She paces back and forth in front of me. I watch her the way I used to watch the metronome above my piano, back in our old house, back when there was money for lessons.
I feel my forehead wrinkle.
“Get up, please,” she whispers, and she reaches into the pocket of her therapist pants and pulls out her tiny key.
I stand.
She fits the little key into a lock in her curio cabinet. She opens the glass door. “The Empress Sisi diary. Take it.”
I don’t move.
Dr. Greta says, “Lift it off the shelf, Lizbeth.”
Really?
I walk over to the cabinet. I pull a Kleenex from the pocket of my jeans and pry the little booklet off the shelf. The cover is stiff and old and smelly. Once it may have been a deep red, but now it’s the color of a stain—some combination of black and brown and gray.
“It won’t bite,” says Dr. Greta, eyeing the tentative way I hold the fragile little book.
“Is this really her diary?” I ask.
“Open it up.”
I hear the door out in the waiting room open and close. The next victim. Our time is nearly over. I lift the delicate front cover, and underneath is yellowed paper smeared with black ink, written in foreign cursive. “I can’t read German.”
“She was quite fond of drawing: another thing you and she have in common. You’ll enjoy, perhaps, her whimsical sketches?”
The book smells of mouse droppings. “You want me to take this home? Isn’t it, like, valuable?”
Dr. Greta shakes her head. “No, the book stays here. But look through it now, and we can discuss her childhood next week. There are more things I can tell you about this girl. Useful things to you, I believe.” Then, crashing sounds from the waiting room, and Dr. Greta tries her best not to look alarmed. “I’ll be back in a minute, Lizbeth.”
Once she leaves the room, I turn the stiff pages. So yellow and fragile, they remind me of an antique doll I used to have, its lacey pinafore and bleached-out painted face. The doll was tossed when we moved. Along with the sum total of my childhood. Boxes and boxes taken to Goodwill. The piano, sold on Craigslist.
Sisi’s small book feels inconsequential, miniature. Like the ribcage of a sparrow. It seems crushable and breakable. One page has a funny sketch—a horse with a lady’s bonnet on its head. Squiggles coming from its backside, the way someone would show farting. Really? Someone famous and royal would draw this?
There are sections of verse, too. Poems in German.
Ich bin I recognize as I am. Krone is crown. Maybe Sisi also wrote sarcastic limericks about people sh
e didn’t like. I page further. There’s a sketch of a short black child swinging from a trapeze. Mohr written beside it. And Kuss. I turn the page but too quickly, and some pages rip off in my hand. Clumsy me. Showing, once again, my utter lack of grace and poise. I hear murmuring outside, Dr. Greta’s voice coming closer. I grab my diary and shove the ancient pages inside of it.
When Dr. Greta comes back in she’s visibly distressed. “I apologize,” she says. “There is a young woman in crisis out there, and it’s best that we conclude.”
She’s completely preoccupied, I can see, and I when I hand the old journal to her, she sloppily shoves it back in the cabinet, turning the key with a thoughtless twist before showing me the door.
“See you next week, then,” I say.
“Next veek,” she murmurs.
And I stride past the next patient, out of the waiting room, leaving whatever the crisis was behind me, original diary pages from a famous empress sealed between the covers of my food diary.
Chapter Twelve
Gackl was so furious with me for embarrassing him that he committed the ultimate sin and betrayed me to Baroness Wilhelmine. Luckily our long-suffering governess had such a bad case of intestinal autointoxication that she’d taken to her bed until her bowels let loose their poisons. Nevertheless, Papa was persuaded to house the blackamoor boys in another part of the palace, and my kissing practice ceased.
With Nené preoccupied and Gackl in a snit and Mummi at odds with the world and the governess indisposed and angry mobs all over Munich causing the palace staff much extra work, I had a reprieve. For the first time in several weeks, no one was lecturing me about lessons and bleeding. But I had yet to write a full letter to Archduke Karl requiting his deep interest in me. What was missing, I realized, was a sense of wonder. Perhaps declarations of love for someone who lived so far away needed a push. Something to spark their origin. And nothing sparked my feelings of love more than an invigorating ride through the English Garden. A ride on horseback would loosen my throttled spirit, I was certain. I always brought my journal with me, tucked in the saddlebag, for riding brought out the poetess in me. Unlike in the bedchambers, verse sprung unbidden from the trees and the sky and the wind. My pony’s snort, its canter through a field at dusk—I’d yearned for this.