* * * *
On her third week back Ophelia sat in a red armchair in a low-lit room in a brick research park outside of the city. A Persian rug separated her from the pink-shirted man who rocked gently back and forth and peered at her with wide, moist eyes. In his left hand, he held up an eight by ten photo. When he spoke, his large ears moved slightly away from his head as if they were waving at her. Ophelia had to lean her head out over her knees to hear what he was saying. She had just come from her re-education class where she sat in a folding chair and watched old episodes of Cheers and Friends in order to learn the customs of the world in which she now lived. There were so many rules. What to wear, who to date, and how to decorate apartments. Rules, which when broken, incited laughter, tears, and even rage in a seemingly random relationship of cause and unlikely event. These rules, her teacher swore, were essential to her successful re-acclimation. As far as Ophelia was concerned, she did not care to re-acclimate. Therapy, her teacher said, would change her mind.
"Tell me what you see,” the psychoanalyst whispered, looking down her drooping shirt at her china-white skin.
Ophelia studied the picture. Two black ovals, one on top of the other, filled most of the page. Hairy lines radiated out from their pulsing, hot centers.
"Is this a trick question?” Ophelia asked.
The psychoanalyst shook his beard.
Ophelia bit her lip. Why would he show her something so obvious and then act like he didn't know what it was? Nothing in the real world made sense to her. “That's a gremzky,” she said. “That might even be my gremzky. I used to have one. Lance gave it to me. It was over four hundred years old.” Lance was the name given to the magician in the real world. People squirmed when she called him the other names she had for him, Magic Monkey, Professor Pants-On Pants-Off, Mr. Wand. She agreed to Lance, but that was all. Tears spilled as Ophelia examined the picture, remembering the tussled hair of her pet. Her gremzky! Who was milking her gremzky? It could explode if it went more than three days unmilked!
The psychoanalyst nodded approvingly. “It's alright to cry. This is a safe space. You can do all the crying you want right here."
Everyone in the real word was sad and they wanted Ophelia to be saddest of all. When Ophelia commented on this, soft hands patted her shoulders and head. No one would explain this addiction to sadness.
"Tell me a story,” she said, shutting her eyes.
"Once upon time,” Stan the psychoanalyst began. His soft, low voice reminded her of her gremzky's breath noise. Ophelia began to hum. In all their time together, her gremzky never stopped humming.
* * * *
On Thursdays, the magician had brought her comics and gourmet cheeses. On Saturdays, he conjured crystal balls for her to chase and rabbits for her to jump over. For Christmas he brought her a radio and a quilt with a patchwork of all the cats in the cat kingdoms. The magician made sure to vary the weather, so that sometimes the rain poured down upon her sheets and sometimes the wind blew gusty and ripe through her closet door. The magician visited her everyday, sometimes twice a day, and they made love. They made love in the usual places, on the rubber desk and in the closet that went on and on, and they made love in strange places, bouncing in the springy cobweb near the ceiling where her gremzky lived and smashed tightly together in the musty chamber behind the revolving bookcase. Once they made love in the Mets beanbag chair he got her for her birthday.
When she came out of Stan's office, her mother put her hand on Ophelia's cheek and said for the hundredth time, “I can't believe you're really here. This is really happening."
"Neither can I,” Ophelia said.
Her mother smiled. “It sounded like you had a productive session."
"I want to go home,” Ophelia said. “I mean it."
Her mother pulled her in tight and held her to her chest. This made Ophelia nervous. What would the mother do next?
* * * *
The magician went to jail, but it was Ophelia that the press made a big deal of. The paper said she had Stockholm Syndrome. She wasn't supposed to love her prince, her Humpty Dumpty, her magic man. She was supposed to love her parents. But why, Ophelia wondered. The two people who wept and wept when they saw her and took her to parks to tell her boring stories of things she did as a child, like how she only ate white foods for a whole year or the time she wouldn't answer to her name, Sarah, and would only answer to the symbol, the symbol of a finger held up to a forehead like a unicorn. Ophelia didn't remember these stories or these people. Her name was Ophelia, not Sarah, she didn't believe in unicorns any more than she believed in horses or cows, and she had no parents. She wasn't even sure she was human.
Everyone and their stupid hushed tones!
* * * *
Far away in the city jail's isolation chamber, the magician slammed his fist into the wall of his cell. He had wanted a girlfriend he didn't have to worry about. He didn't want to think about what might happen when she went out, and other people, other men, could see her, could buy her elixirs and maybe even charm her. And now she was out. Ophelia was alone in the world, and there was nothing he could do. Who would bite her nipples when she felt sad? Who would brush her long silver hair?
Everyone, that's who!
The magician winced. His ribs ached and his headache would not go away. Everywhere he looked lights blinked on and off in rapid succession. A dark red mass pulsed at the left corner of his vision, even when he closed his right eye, the one that was not already swollen shut.
The magician had been burnt in the past. The lesson he learned was that people are not to be trusted. If you want respect, you have to eliminate the possibility of disrespect. If a woman disrespects you, eliminate her and try again. The magician squared his shoulders. He was forty-four years old and no one had ever called him a quitter.
* * * *
Ophelia's parents told her she didn't have to go back to school or get a job until she felt good and ready. As far as they were concerned, Ophelia could lie on the couch all day and watch TV and drink smoothies. “We can't make up for eight years of missed opportunity in a few weeks,” they said. “We have to be patient."
"Me too,” said Ophelia. Someday her prince would come and they would take a vacation, maybe to Switzerland, maybe to a nude beach.
In the meantime, there was a great show on channel 49 where people brought in old furniture they thought might be valuable. Sometimes it was worth lots and sometimes it was worth nothing. Quite often the thing they'd bring in would be magic and nobody would notice. It happened once with a haunted chessboard. The man in the hat said it wasn't even worth ten dollars, but the board had been pulsing violet! These people couldn't tell a haint from a haunt if it smacked them in the face.
During the commercial Ophelia changed channels. On channel 19 she found her magician, his mustache overgrown, the circles around his eyes a deep purple. The camera was shaking and out of focus. His right eye kept slipping off the screen.
"Ophelia,” he said.
"Baby!” Ophelia gasped.
"You naughty girl. Where did you go?"
"You're hurt! What happened to your face?” Ophelia got off the couch and crawled towards the TV, getting so close that the hair on her eyebrows rose and touched the glass. The static made her sneeze.
"You shouldn't have left me,” the magician snarled. “I'll get you for this."
"I never meant to leave. I'm in a place called home. I hate it. I want to go back."
"Likely story."
"I hate it here!” Ophelia explained, but the magician had vanished. In his place two women were standing side-by-side, each one pouring bleach over identical, grass-stained polo shirts.
"Witches,” Ophelia muttered. She climbed back on the couch and flipped back to her program.
Ophelia's mother heard her moving about and hopped up from the kitchen table where she had been sitting with her head in her hands for over an hour. As quick as she could she blended a mango and lime smoothie for her daugh
ter. She rested a paper umbrella on the rim and then took it out and replaced it with a spiraling straw. Ophelia didn't even look up when her mother handed it to her. She drank it all at once and put the empty glass on the floor beneath the end table. After this was the cartoon about the pelican space colony that orbited the dying star and after that was the special on the history of the washing machine.
* * * *
When Ophelia first came back to the real world, so many people wanted to see her. The press had questions. The extended family had dinner parties. A doctor checked her insides to see if she was pregnant or had had any children. (She wasn't. She hadn't.) A man even invited her to his very late TV show, but her mother had said no. Now, nobody except for Stan called to check on Ophelia.
Her hair changed from silver to brown.
When she walked down the street hardly anyone recognized her.
Ophelia could feel herself evolving. She was brimming with new questions. What all those people wanted to say to her back when she first entered their world? Why had they welcomed her like that? And why did they stop caring so soon? Were they jealous? Had they never been in love before? Never had someone build them a nest of peach-skins and suck their toes? Or read them palindrome love poems from the lost Torah? When Ophelia tried to describe what was different about her, all she could think of was her gremzky, and what it would be like for him if he scrambled up to his corner one afternoon only to find his web no longer there, his home demolished. And not only that, what if he discovered there were no spiders left in the underworld to build him a new one? Because Ophelia had never felt lonely before, she didn't know there was a word for how she felt.
* * * *
"Tell me about your gremzky.” Stan stroked his thick beard and puffed his pipe. The smoke curled up into a dragon before dissipating around him. “When did you get him? How did you care for him? Was there training involved?"
For weeks her psychoanalyst had been trying to convince Ophelia that her gremzky did not exist. Now he wanted to know everything about it.
"Don't you watch TV?” Ophelia asked. “I saw a documentary on them last week. Get it from the library."
"A documentary on gremzkies?” Stan wrote something down on his pad. “Tell me about your gremzky. For starters, what was its name?"
Ophelia sighed. Counseling sessions were like teaching math to a baby. Nothing took. “Gremzkies don't share their names with anyone. They learn their name before they are born and forget it until right before they die. When they remember it, they know the end is near."
Stan leaned back in his chair. His hair brushed the red tomes lined up on the dark bookshelf behind him. “Don't they go by some sort of nickname? Sounds confusing."
"Not for gremzkies it's not. They're not like you people. They don't herd. They find their familiar and they stick by its side. A gremzky may go its whole life without seeing another one."
Ophelia giggled. She couldn't help herself. Stan's unspoken thoughts were so loud she practically couldn't hear herself talk. She was wearing an orange dress that buttoned down the side. It stopped right below her knees. The way her white legs jutted out from beneath her skirt and curved in at her ankles reminded Stan of a certain kind of Japanese radish. He kept imagining sinking his teeth into her calf, the warm skin giving way. He shook his head and made himself think of something else. Baby feet. Plump, like hard-boiled eggs. It was cute how hard he tried to remain professional.
"Suppose a human didn't see a human for its whole life,” Stan asked, “how would that human feel?"
"I already told you,” Ophelia said. “I don't want to talk about myself.” She twirled a lock of her brown hair around her pinky and licked her slippery white teeth. “Tell me about you. What sports do you play? Do you like desserts or are you more of a salty food person? When you go to restaurants, do you eat the garnish?"
The baby feet in Stan's imagination broke open to reveal miniature Ophelias dancing slowly in orange dresses. One by one the buttons fell away.
In his jail cell beneath the city the magician listened to Ophelia. He didn't want to listen, but he couldn't hear anything else. She was young when he found her and she had grown more perfect and round than he had dared hope. She had been in his math class in high school. She cheated on a geometry test. She could not calculate the volume of a cube to save her life. He had asked her out outside of the principal's office and she had said yes. What choice did she have? He was the math teacher.
The magician could hear Ophelia getting sassy. And flirting. He punched the wall and tugged at his chains but nothing gave. He could not turn her off. In this world, he was a monster. A human monster. None of his magic worked and everyone hated him. The magician's tears fell onto orange jumpsuit. “I'll come for you, my pet,” he whispered. “Soon. Soon. I'll get you back."
The guard outside his door put his hand on his gun. The magician grew quiet. Ophelia wouldn't hear him. She had never been a very good listener. He splashed his feet in the mud beneath him. The hair on his legs grew dark with filth.
* * * *
On Thursday Ophelia went to a juice bar. It was her first trip out alone. They were screening the movie The Witches on the side of the building. Ophelia was nuts for documentaries. Around the corner on the screened-in porch at the back of their house her mother knit a baby blanket furiously. She kept flipping open the phone that sat beside her on the table. She scrunched her nose and prayed beneath her breath. “Of course she'll come back,” she muttered. “She loves us. She just doesn't know it yet.” She didn't say her other thought out loud, her secret thought, that life might have been easier before.
At the bar, Ophelia ordered parsley juice and sat down on the brown grass in front of the screen. All around her people had dogs or children to play with. Ophelia picked at the edge of her skirt where the hem was unraveling. She pulled out a long thread and wrapped it around her thumb so that her skin bulged between the tight loops. Fireflies flashed at the edge of the lawn where the forest began, and Ophelia ached for her old room. In the spring there had been phosphorescent rainstorms that fell up instead of down, but that sort of thing never happened here. When the movie got to the part where the witches put a little girl inside a painting and every day she appears in a different place inside the frame, Ophelia whimpered out loud. What a gift. Her magician used to take off her clothes and tie her up in teal silk. In ice storms he would snap icicles off the underside of her bed frame where they formed and run them down her back, starting where her hairline ended and ending at the bottom of her bottom. She would shiver and laugh and the silk would pull tight against her stomach.
When the film was over, Ophelia strolled down the empty streets and sang a song her mother had taught her. It was a song sung from the perspective of a teapot. In the graying night the real world wasn't so bad. Shapes bled into other shapes and even if the pines didn't turn into elephants in the distance, at least she could pretend that they did. When she turned the corner she almost ran directly into Stan. Though it wasn't raining, he held an umbrella above his head. A young woman clung to his arm.
"Ophelia!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? Are you out alone?"
"Is this—” the young woman began to ask, but Stan gave her a mean, squinty-eyed look and she stopped talking.
"This is Lynn,” Stan said. “My girlfriend.” He frowned.
Ophelia ignored Stan and looked at Lynn. She liked the way Lynn's voice sounded, nasal and high pitched, like a whistling teakettle. “I'm the girl who lived in a hole for eight years. My name is Ophelia. I have Stockholms.” She stuck out her hand. It was a gesture she'd seen people make on TV, but one she had never tried herself.
"I have peanuts,” Lynn said. “You want some? We're walking to get ice cream. You hungry? Stan says I eat too much."
At the ice cream parlor, Ophelia and Lynn ordered pistachio. Stan ordered vanilla.
"I always wonder why pistachio ice cream is green,” Lynn mused. The three of them were seated on a benc
h outside the ice cream parlor. Lynn sat in the middle. Stan sat on the edge, farthest from Ophelia. He was trying to maintain a professional distance.
"Pistachios aren't green,” Lynn said.
"The magician used to turn green for me.” Ophelia bit the bottom of her cone and sucked the cold cream out of the broken spout between words. The sticky melt dripped onto her chin. “For no reason at all except to entertain me. Below ground it's hard to find green. It was a novelty to see him like that. It took so much out of him.” She looked at the trees in the park across the street. A dog was peeing in a grove of pine trees. A man picked a half-eaten hamburger out of a trashcan and pulled back the paper to take a bite. Ophelia coughed into her napkin.
"How'd he do it?"
Ophelia shook her head. “There are so many questions I wish I'd asked."
Lynn nodded sympathetically. “I dated a man like that once. A man who did tricks just to make me laugh. He used to put his overalls on upside down, with the leg hole on his arms and the buckles strapped over his crotch, and he'd walk around the kitchen on his hands. Every time he did it, I almost died laughing so hard."
The stars above the trio twinkled loudly and Ophelia let her arm drop down so that her skin slipped against the arm of the woman beside her, a woman who almost died of laughter. Ophelia closed her eyes. If her gremzky were there it would have been singing Pavarotti.
* * * *
Ophelia and Lynn began meeting for ice cream regularly. They met in secret because Stan did not approve of their friendship. He said it undermined his analytical authority. Lynn didn't care and neither did Ophelia. Lynn told Ophelia that she didn't really love Stan, she just didn't have it in her heart to leave him. Ophelia told Lynn about the magician. That he wasn't always wonderful. That sometimes she got bored in her magical bedroom and that he never listened to her when she complained about the weather.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 24 Page 10