Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  His scolding lingers, though. Ron used to make me feel adolescent in a good way. He knew so much more than I did when we met. He called me mercurial; I had to look it up. Now he reminds me of my tragic teen years, when I was so self-conscious that I didn’t know what to do with my hands, how to stand, when to roll my eyes or laugh, or how loudly. My mother showed up for school functions wearing panty hose long after the other mothers had abandoned this formality. She didn’t smile or chitchat. She held Tilton’s hand even though Tilton was nine by this point. Worse, Tilton accepted it or perhaps barely noticed. It’s hard for me to think of Tilton, especially after I was no longer there to protect her. Even the night I climbed out the window and ran off, I knew she could be locked away in that house with our mother forever. When I was studying psych as an undergrad, I diagnosed myself with survivor’s guilt. I dropped the major, opting for ceramics, which I also then abandoned.

  Because I didn’t commit to psych long enough to figure out a conventional treatment plan, I came up with my own. I willed myself not to think deeply about the past. I’ve learned not to dwell on my failed roles—granddaughter and daughter, sister, wife, and mother. I don’t know how to be a mother. I watched my mother be a mother to Tilton, but to me? Tilton and Hailey pain me the most. They’re so linked I imagine that if I could save one of those relationships, I would save both.

  To fail as a mother is to fail utterly, proof that I don’t understand love in its most basic form, that I’m unworthy of the blind and unconditional love granted by simple biology. If I don’t deserve this kind of love, what love could I possibly deserve? Hailey stated her choice to live with her dad in a letter written on strawberry-scented stationery. I keep it folded in my wallet. A good mother would have fought for her, but I know why she chose Jim. He teaches her Spanish by taping words to stuff in the house and paints rocks with her. I’m too much like my mother, awkward and clunky at love—too much or too little, like driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brakes, sometimes hitting both at the same time.

  Ron loved me when I needed love. There’s a lot to be said for that. He didn’t judge me on my motherhood. And he gave me normalcy—better yet, high-ranking normalcy. I went from grad student to faculty wife. From student loan debt to stipends for summer travel. Plus, I could abandon my dissertation—not right away, but after a few years of my degree being ABD, it mercifully melted away. I’d never have to go on the job market dressed as a midlevel Russian bureaucrat or get rejected by academe or do all the shit I never wanted to in the first place. Is this antifeminist? Or just abject fear and desperation and laziness?

  Colette was right. I married a daddy, which is some fucked-up heterosexuality.

  But Dr. Ron Everly, PhD, did not marry an adolescent, not even just a grad student of his. It was worse. He fell in love with and married a relic from his area of expertise, twentieth-century modernism: a descendant of Harriet Wolf. But then the relic turned out to be just me.

  I’ve heard Ron talk about my grandmother’s rendering of adolescence—the loss of the magical for the darkly surreal, slipping into apocalyptic dystopia. “Once childhood is obliterated,” I’ve heard him lecture, “the apocalypse is endured while the adult world imposes its corrupt rules of oppression.” This lecture—sometimes given in an impromptu way at a social event surrounded by grad students, as if he’s just coming up with it all at that very moment—eventually touches on my grandmother’s treatment of middle age with absurdist postmodernism. But can he see how she would render us, if she’d had the chance? Wouldn’t the two of us and our flimsy marriage be corrupt and postapocalyptic and absurdist and postmodern and therefore a form of undeniable realism? That’s how I see it.

  After Ron confessed six months ago to a serious flirtation with Melody Roth, it dawned on me that I needed family. They know you from the beginning—a version that’s elemental. So I rekindled my relationship with Tilton, at least by phone, and we’ve talked several times now.

  I pick up the receiver of the phone on the bedside table and dial my mother’s home phone number, the same all these years later. It crosses my mind that once I hear Tilton’s voice, I might hang up. I just started a dog-training class earlier this week. The teacher—a handsome man in his late thirties with doggy treats in his pockets and no wedding ring—said that you shouldn’t chase the dog if you want it to come back. You’ve got to get the dog to chase you. This is also advice on men that I’ve never been able to follow. It wouldn’t work on Ron. He’s too stubborn. As a child, he once got in a breath-holding competition and held his breath until he passed out. He has a scar on his chin from the fall. It’s hard to tell whether I really want Ron fully back in my life or simply want him to want me madly. I wouldn’t have the heart to hang up on Tilton. But the line rings and rings. Eleanor’s too cheap to spring for an answering machine.

  Of course, I wouldn’t mind being chased. I could have tried to get my father to chase me. A couple of months after I ran away from home, I ended up at a shelter and a counselor tracked him down. They called Eleanor too, but George had already agreed to take me in. I never spoke to my mother about it. What did she think of me back with my father after all those years?

  But, in reality, my father didn’t take me in. We only had lunch at a Steak ’n Shake. He was broad-shouldered, as brutish-looking as Eleanor had made him out to be in the bedtime story she shoved down my throat as a child, as if trying hard to raise victims. But he didn’t chomp a cigar or yell and curse. He was a fast-talker, slightly marble-mouthed—nervous, tired, a little drunk? He still had a thick head of coarse hair, taut skin, a fresh tan.

  He told me he had spoken too soon offering to take me in. His home life was tricky. “Things are delicate.”

  I’d hoped that my father had married the widow, Marie Cultry. I could blame his leaving us on true love, like Johnny Cash leaving his first wife to marry June Carter. But I was too afraid to ask. I didn’t want to have to take the rejection personally. But I was so crushed that he didn’t want to take me in that I told him I had a place to stay. By then I was dating Jim, who would become my first husband, Hailey’s dad. Plan B was pushing Jim to let me move in, which was what happened. He was eighteen and a housepainter, working his way through college part-time.

  My father asked if I was eating well, if I liked reading or movies or sports. He was probably trying to ferret out if I was doing drugs. (I was doing some drugs.) Eventually, he laid out his plan. “Why don’t you let me get you an apartment? You get your GED, take community college classes. I’ll foot the bill.”

  I took down my father’s address and phone number. When I needed tuition a few years later, I called and he delivered, true to his word. But we had no relationship. I didn’t invite him to graduation and didn’t tell him about grad school. That would have felt like milking it.

  The ringing is endless. I hang up.

  One of the dogs trots in. I can’t tell which one. Who gets custody of the dogs if neither of us can tell them apart? The dog stares at me, head cocked, reminding me of hosting foreign exchange students who were sometimes frustrated by an insurmountable language barrier.

  Ron walks through the room then, into the bathroom, where he starts moussing his hair. “Found my cell!” he says. “It almost took a spin in the washer.”

  A rare memory of my father pops into my mind. “My dad got us a Lab from the pound. It ate its own poops after they’d been left in the yard to harden.” He fed the dog fat rinds from the table, which Eleanor took as a comment on her cooking. The dog would be flatulent for the rest of the night.

  “Eating your own poop—that’s the height of vanity, if you ask me,” he says, which is hard to take from a man who is moussing his hair. Ron’s hair shifts unnaturally in wind, as if it’s a single unit.

  I hit redial and hope that Tilton picks up. She has a birdlike voice. She’s a chirper. Not surprising, as she’s spent more time listening to birds in the garden than to actual human beings—aside from our mother. Still
no answer. I hang up again.

  “Who do you keep calling?” Ron asks from the bathroom.

  “Tilty.” My Tilt-a-Whirl! How many times did I say those words as a kid?

  “Just leave a goddamn message,” he says. He’s always been slightly jealous of Tilton even though he’s never met her. He wanted to visit the house—home of Harriet Wolf—and pouted when I refused to reach out beyond the wedding invitation. I’ve admitted to myself that perhaps I’ve started calling Tilton, as my marriage is crumbling, out of a desire to reunite with my family, but the prospect scares me as much as it draws me in. I want to flirt with it, perhaps—the way one might flirt with, say, Melody Roth, if one were, say, on her PhD committee. “Why do people hate leaving messages nowadays?” Ron says.

  “Eleanor Tarkington is stuck in 1974,” I say. “There’s no answering machine. I wonder if the phone is the color of avocado and has one of those ringlet cords.”

  “I’m making a pot of coffee before I leave. Do you want a cup?” He doesn’t usually make the coffee. He struggles to negotiate the heaping-spoonful-to-cup-of-water ratio. His smile says, “I’m trying! Look at me trying!” He still thinks he might get his way—an open marriage that includes dating Melody Roth. I’d get his benefits, his pension, house privileges? It’s very retro of him, vaguely prostitution.

  But I do want coffee. “Yes, I’ll take a cup.”

  As he jogs downstairs, I call home again, and this time Tilton answers. “Ruthie? Is this you?”

  “Why haven’t you been answering? Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.” With this phrase, I’m reminded of how stunted Tilton is. At what age do you stop saying “Sure I’m sure”? “I didn’t answer because I was watching TV. I watched TV all night.”

  “You did what?” Eleanor Tarkington despises television. When I was a teenager, she blamed television for my insubordination as well as the general collapse of society.

  “I watched large women in bras and underwear wearing huge wide wings walk down this flat ramp over and over. And a man poured blue liquid into a pad. This morning there were people on couches, drinking coffee, trying on wigs. They had guests and a studio audience.”

  “Eleanor let you watch TV?”

  “It’s okay. I won’t get the big call. The house tried to eat her. Then she had a heart attack. There was an ambulance. She peed her pantsuit. I touched her face. I took a bath in my nightgown, which had blood on it.”

  “Slow down! Wait,” I say. The Pomeranians have started yapping downstairs. I can’t be sure I’ve heard Tilton correctly. “Did Eleanor have a heart attack?”

  “Yes,” Tilton says. “Mrs. Gottleib is taking me to the hospital to see her.”

  “To see Eleanor because of her heart attack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eleanor is in the hospital.” I can’t imagine my mother with a head cold, much less in a hospital. Nor could I make sense of the rest of it. My mother was eaten by a house? What on earth did that mean? “Why was there blood on your nightgown?”

  “I hurt my thumb trying to open a window.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Mom wants you going to see her in a hospital?” This would expose Tilton to germs.

  “I’m sure she doesn’t. But Mrs. Gottleib is taking me there anyway. I want to see her. I’m both agoraphobic and claustrophobic so maybe they’ll cancel each other out.”

  “You’re not either of those things. How many times do I have to say it? You’re fine, Tilton. You’re better than fine. I mean, my God, you’ve been through a trauma and you’re okay!” I am no good at crises myself. It’s one of the reasons I let my ex get custody of Hailey. I was afraid something might go wrong on my watch. “Was it a mild heart attack?” I ask in a soothing voice.

  “Do they come in mild?”

  “Have you talked to a doctor? Will there be surgery?”

  “Maybe Mrs. Gottleib talked to the doctor.” Then Tilton’s voice shifts a little deeper. “Have we come to an impasse?” It’s Eleanor’s voice.

  “Don’t say things like that,” I say.

  “Like what?”

  “Eleanor things in an Eleanor voice!”

  “But have we?”

  “I’m sure Eleanor’s made an emergency plan. A what-to-do in case of X, Y, and Z.”

  “She keeps that kind of thing in her head. But don’t worry. She won’t die,” Tilton says. “Not in a hospital.”

  “Of course,” I say, trying to be positive. “That’s right.”

  “I have to get ready to go,” Tilton says.

  “It’s going to be okay. You know that.”

  “I know!” she says brightly. “Because you’re coming home!”

  “I am?”

  “You are!” she says, and then she hangs up.

  My first thought is illogical: Someone should call my father. He should know. Of course it’s none of his business. I do know how to reach him, though. Six months earlier, I found myself at the university library, doing a quick search for my father in their computer lab. It revealed that he didn’t get far. His real estate practice is in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Within seconds, I had an office number, a fax number, and a home number.

  I haven’t called. I know what it’s like to be the one who left.

  My mother forced Tilton and me to make a pact as kids. “Never look for your father,” she said. “It will only stroke his ego. He doesn’t deserve us!” Our family was big on pacts. I remember the feeling of string winding around my hand pressed to my mother’s and Tilton’s, the too-tight weave, and afterward the red indentations from the string. I rub my hand as if the string is still there.

  Ron reappears with a mug of coffee for me, but I don’t reach for it.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Eleanor’s had a heart attack. She’s in the hospital. Tilton keeps saying she’s not going to die, which makes me think she’s going to die.”

  He sets the mug down on the bedside table. “Are you going to see her?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.” I think of Tilton—a child in my mind’s eye, blonde hair, round cheeks, a little bow of mouth. She’s in her nightgown, now bloody. “I abandoned her, you know,” I say.

  “I’m sure your mother never saw it that way. She’s very independent.”

  “No,” I say. “Tilton!”

  “Oh.”

  “Did I ever tell you that in middle school she cut my hair once when I was sleeping? My mother never even yelled at her about it.”

  “Maybe this is the time for all three of you to set things right,” he says. “You should go. It’ll put you on the East Coast, in driving distance to Colette’s wedding and the HWS convention.”

  But his concern, I know, is false. He wants me to inch closer to my family merely so he can inch closer to Harriet Wolf. “Colette doesn’t want me at her wedding,” I finally say.

  “Look, if you don’t come, people will wonder why. I don’t want to tell people at my daughter’s wedding that you’re divorcing me. It’s bad form.”

  What if I did go home and reunite with Tilton and even Eleanor? Wouldn’t they want to meet Hailey? Wouldn’t Hailey want to meet them? And if Hailey met Eleanor and Tilton, wouldn’t she have more sympathy for me?

  “Come to the wedding. Just show up.” Ron pauses a moment and then whispers, “Pretend you like me.” It’s what Weldon says to Daisy when the photographer has them sit for their wedding photograph.

  “I do like you.” And it’s true. I’m not quite sure why, but the feeling persists—even when I hate him.

  “I like you too,” he says, and then he adds, “Wow, so the gatekeeper’s really in the hospital.”

  The gatekeeper—I hate the term although I’ve employed it myself and used to dole out memories of Harriet and Eleanor to Ron and other members of the Harriet Wolf Society. When I ran out, I made some up. I’ve never told Ron that my gran
dmother burned the pages of the seventh book every day after she wrote them. In fact, I hinted that she shipped them to another writer—the identity of whom I said I could never quite figure out. Perhaps a lover? Perhaps a female lover, I intimated once, just to make it more interesting. The real confession is that I loved my grandmother’s books—not in a scholarly way, but in a heartfelt way that I’d be embarrassed to talk to Ron about. “Don’t call her the gatekeeper. She’s my mother right now, okay?”

  “But your mother could well have kept it locked up all this time. If someone unearths the final installment, I tell you, it’ll be big news. The publishing event of the year, if not the decade! The feminists alone—they’ve canonized her for being a single mother. It’ll be a feeding frenzy.”

  I’m trying to imagine my mother in a hospital. “The idea of Eleanor dying is surreal,” I say. “She’s always been so, I don’t know, vivante!”

  He starts pacing. “Maybe this is what our marriage needed. This—helping you through this—would give me purpose,” he says, as if I give a shit about his purpose. And then he realizes this or reads my disgust enough to amend. “It could bring us together.” He stands there, hands on his hips, waiting.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What would happen if you needed someone? Really needed someone? And what if that person was me?”

  “I’m going without you. I needed somewhere to go, and now I have it.”

  Chapter Six

  The Reader’s Brazen Heart

  Harriet

  I’m not naive. If Tilton pulls these pages from their hiding place, they will likely move out into the world. Will Tilton read them herself? It doesn’t matter, Tilton. We know each other as constants, deeper than any details. Ruthie will read these pages, if given the chance. She may be a grown woman with her own vexations, but she won’t outgrow her curiosity, that beautiful suspicious gaze, and her deep need to be understood. No one can know someone else, I want to tell her. We can’t even know ourselves. (Are you here, Ruthie?) She’s taken George’s absence the hardest. It’s burrowed deep down and dwells.