It was a Friday afternoon, and Halloween. Our jack-o’-lanterns had been carved and set on the porch steps, awaiting darkness and their candles. I was going to be a fairy princess again for trick or treat, and Violet, who lived a few streets away, was going to be the Headless Horseman. She had designed the costume herself, and executed it with the help of the Steinhorns’ maid, Mattie. It was composed of a folded oak-tag frame that sat across the top of her head, and would serve as a pair of broad shoulders when one of her father’s jackets was hung on it. Mattie had sketched in a black hole with Magic Marker, where the head should have been, and Violet drew a shirt collar and tie on the front of the oak tag, punching out airholes and eyeholes with a pair of Mattie’s sewing scissors. She intended to tip her father’s gray fedora to her invisible head when we went door-to-door that evening.
My mother had gently urged me to try something different and more creative this year, like Violet, but I stuck to the role I loved best, although I knew it was babyish and unoriginal. And I’d requested, and received, a particular store-bought costume that was so puffy and stiff and sparkly, it seemed to transform me. When I came home from school that afternoon and tried it on, complete with tiara and star-tipped wand, I shed glitter everywhere, like fairy dust.
Faye was doing the laundry in the basement and my mother was out shopping for trick-or-treat candy. My father had just returned from performing several hours of surgery at the hospital. He was relaxing in his study the way he loved best, reclining in his brown leather chair in a dressing gown, and listening to a Beethoven symphony on the stereo system. I had taken my social studies book home with me, and I went upstairs and sat at my desk, with some discomfort, in my princess outfit, reading about the destruction of slave families, about children being sold off separately from their parents, and husbands and wives torn from each others’ arms.
After a few minutes I became hungry and I went downstairs again, carrying my wand, to look for a snack. The door to Faye’s room was wide open. There was a book on her bed—the Bible, I saw with disappointment, as I got closer. From that angle in the doorway I could see her night table, too, with its blue china lamp and a small picture frame. I wondered if it held a photograph of me, like the ones on my mother’s dressing table and on my father’s desk in his consultation room at Mount Sinai. I crossed the threshold of Faye’s room; it took only two or three baby steps before I was inside. The framed photo on her night table was of a skinny black boy about my own age, squinting into the sun in front of a bright green, shingled house. I had never seen the boy or that house before.
I looked down and there was telltale glitter at my feet on the braided bedside rug. I tried to pick some of it up between my close-bitten fingernails but only managed to disseminate more of the stuff onto the rug and the bed. I knew I’d be in trouble with my mother if she saw it, and I was about to go and ask Faye for help when she came to the doorway with a stack of folded towels in her arms. “What are you doing in there, Alice?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Hey, I’m your fairy godmother,” I added, waving my wand at her.
“You’re my fairy messmaker, you mean. Set that thing down now.”
I lay the wand on her night table and picked up the boy’s photograph. “Who’s this?”
“That’s Roger,” Faye said. “That’s my baby.” She took the photograph from me and gazed at it with the melted expression I had always associated with myself, with a time when she still bathed me, and I’d enter a kind of trance as the warm washrag sloshed across my shivery shoulders and down my spine.
“What do you mean?” I asked in alarm.
“He’s a lot bigger than that now,” Faye said, “but that’s my son.” She replaced the photo on the night table and swiped at the glass with the corner of one of the towels she still held. “Now I’ve got to clean up in here, and you’ve got to get that dress off.”
“It scratches,” I whined, in a pathetic bid for sympathy, and then I said, “But where does he live?”
“Roger? In Beaufort, with my mother.”
“But . . . but . . . ,” I stammered. I had so many questions I couldn’t formulate any of them. I knew that Faye had a family in North Carolina. Letters and phone calls came periodically for her from them, and every summer, during the two weeks my father joined my mother and me at the rented house in Chilmark, she went down south for her vacation, and to “see everyone.” I had envisioned those reunions as a kind of pastoral mob scene, with cousin-friends and aunts and uncles, everyone hugging and smiling, but no one especially close or important to Faye.
This was the most stunning news I’d ever heard. It slid into place in my chest so decisively, I knew it could never be removed. Even more extraordinary was the sight of Faye herself right then, casually arranging towels on the rack in her adjoining, pink-tiled bathroom.
I grabbed my wand and ran out of the room, through the kitchen, and down the hallway into my father’s study. The symphony had just reached a crescendo and I had to really shout over it to be heard. “How could you! How could you!” I cried. And I stamped my feet as hard as I could on the Oriental rug beneath them.
His eyes were closed and he didn’t respond for a few moments, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping by the way his pale, beautifully tapered fingers kept time with the music on the armrests of his leather chair. Then his eyes opened and he said, irritably, “What is it, Alice?”
“It’s you, Daddy!” I yelled. “You’re a mean, terrible slaveholder!”
“What!” The music continued relentlessly over our heads.
“You sit here listening to your precious stupid music while your poor slave works her fingers to the bone,” I said, shaking my wand at him until fairy dust was scattered across his paisley dressing gown like dandruff. But my father refused to disappear.
He hoisted himself up with effort from the depths of his chair, and brushed his hands ineffectually at the clinging silvery glitter. “What in hell are you talking about?”
“You know perfectly well. Faye! Faye! Who you brought here in chains and she can’t see her own child! You slaveholder, you! Oh!” And I burst into furious tears.
“Alice,” my father said through his teeth. “Go to your room. Right this minute!” I watched the changing patterns of rose and white bloom on his angry face. “Do you hear me?” All of Riverdale could hear him. I stood my ground for a second or two and then I flung the wand at him and fled.
Up in my room, the room that had once been featured in House & Garden, I flounced around in helpless rage for a while before I went next door to my playroom and with great deliberation took a couple of Erlenmeyer flasks from the science corner and threw them against the wall. I didn’t know what to do with myself after that, so I tossed a couple of Bulgarian dolls after the flasks, which had satisfactorily shattered. Then I marched back to my bedroom, plopped down at the desk, and scrolled a sheet of paper into my Olivetti. “Far from my native state,” I rapidly typed, as if I were plunking out an exercise on the piano, “I’ve come across this land / to find my poor slave fate, at a cruel, cruel master’s hand.” There.
As soon as I finished typing, my mother opened my door, without knocking—didn’t my privacy count?—and strode into the room. “Alice,” she said. “What can you have been thinking?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, evasively.
My mother sank onto my bed. “Sweetheart,” she said. “You have deeply hurt your father’s feelings.”
“Well, he deserves it,” I said, although everything that had happened was a little muddled in my head now.
“Oh, you don’t mean that. Daddy is a wonderful man. And Faye is certainly not a slave. Where did you ever get such an idea?”
I shrugged.
“Your father pays her a handsome salary,” my mother said. “And we both care about her very, very much.”
“But she doesn’t live with her little boy!” I cried.
“That’s true,” my mother agreed. “But that isn’t D
addy’s fault.” She paused. “There are many difficult things in this world,” she said, “and nobody to blame for them.”
“I broke my flasks,” I said, needing to claim responsibility for something.
“You did? Let me see.”
We went into the playroom together, and all my mother said when she saw the costumed dolls lying among the shards of glass, like the victims of a Balkan war, was “Please don’t walk barefoot in here, Alice.” Then she crouched to pick up the larger pieces of glass. “Oh!” she cried out a moment later. She had cut her finger, and I marveled at the crimson brilliance of the blood that welled up, like the blood on the cambric the queen gives her daughter in “The Goose Girl.”
It’s established in the first paragraph of the story that the king is dead, and that the widowed queen has sent her beautiful daughter out on horse-back, accompanied by a waiting-woman, to meet the prince to whom she’s betrothed. But soon after they start out on their journey, the waiting-woman forces the princess to exchange places with her. This was one of my favorite parts, because it meant that we aren’t bound forever by what we appear to be. But it was terribly sad, too. I could almost hear the blood drops on the cambric intone, “Alas queen’s daughter, if thy mother knew thy fate . . .” and the blood inside my head thudded in response. What if, in some unrecoverable instant, I had managed to coerce Faye, an African queen’s daughter, a true princess, to switch places with me, and become my indentured servant?
After my mother put a Band-Aid on her finger, she told me that my father had petitioned her for leniency toward me, which I doubted; it was probably the other way around. She said that I had to go downstairs and apologize to him for my rudeness, after which I would be allowed to have supper at Violet’s, as planned, and then go out trick-or-treating, with Mattie as our escort.
We went downstairs to my father’s study. The music was off now and he was back in his chair, sipping a Gibson. Sometimes he would offer me the little pickled onion. I approached him slowly, propelled by soft nudges from my mother, right behind me. Then I stood there, not saying anything.
“Alice wants to say she’s sorry,” my mother said.
“Oh? And are you her ventriloquist, Helen?” my father asked. But he sounded amused, and his face was all one neutral shade again.
I stepped a little closer to him, on my own now. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I murmured.
“For what?” he prompted.
“You know. For saying mean things, for being rude.”
“I see,” he said. “Not exactly royal behavior, was it?” He reached out and straightened my tiara, which must have slipped during all the excitement. I could smell the soap on his hands and the gin on his breath. When he finally proffered the onion, I snapped it up, the way a dog takes a treat.
I was lying on my bed later when Faye stuck her head in. “You sleeping?” she asked. I shook my head, and she came all the way in, dragging the Hoover behind her. She went past me into the playroom and vacuumed up the remaining splinters of glass. They made satisfying little popping sounds, like firecrackers. Faye came back through my room on her way out. “Do you want some tomato juice, girl?” she asked, and I shook my head again. I didn’t look directly at her, but I could still see her neatly plaited hair, her bosom rising and falling under the flowered field of her housedress.
As soon as she left, I went to my desk and tore the poem I’d written about her into pieces almost as small as the splinters of glass. How had I ever thought I could squeeze her large and complicated life into my narrow, sentimental rhyming scheme? Her life was a story, a story that I immediately began to compose inside my head. “Fayella Henrietta Brown was born in Charleston, South Carolina . . .”
Mattie told Violet she absolutely couldn’t wear her Headless Horseman costume during supper, which we were going to eat in the Steinhorns’ kitchen. She was not even allowed to drink her milk through a straw pushed into one of the airholes in the oak tag. Violet said that she hated Mattie, right to her face, and Mattie said, “I hate you, too.” Then she served us her special baked macaroni and cheese and buttered green beans.
By nightfall our decorous Riverdale neighborhood had undergone a metamorphosis. Jack-o’-lanterns leered from windows and doorsteps, like ill-behaved children of the moon that followed us faithfully from behind the trees. The more creative families on Morning Glory Drive had fashioned fluttering ghosts from bedsheets wrapped around lampposts, and the people at the house that was always so overdecorated at Christmas had installed sound effects for this holiday: owls hooting, chains clanking, and maniacal laughter.
On Magnolia Way, our class mother at Chapin came to the door dressed as a witch, and she cackled unconvincingly as she dropped Milky Ways and Mounds bars into our trick-or-treat sacks. Violet’s costume was as big a hit as I’d feared it would be, and she tipped her father’s hat over and over at every stop, to repeated acclaim and Mattie’s and my disgust.
At home my mother emptied my sack onto the kitchen table and carefully examined my loot, on the lookout for razor blades embedded in caramel apples, or ant poison stirred into homemade treats. “What is this world coming to?” she said sadly to my father, who was helping himself to some M&M’s in passing.
Faye was in her bedroom with the door shut. I could see the yellow light under it, flashing blue, and hear the murmur of her television set, interrupted by bursts of canned laughter. I can swear that time lurched forward at that moment, like a train that had been stalled between stations. But of course I couldn’t have known then that someday I would keep a series of my own slaves, with exotic names like Grazyna and Olympia and Lupe and Esmeralda.
That Halloween night, my mother allowed me to have only one piece of candy, from a known source, before bedtime. I made my final choice after agonizing consideration—a hard, red, bite-sized square—and I sucked on it slowly, letting its sweetness last as long as I could.
7
On June 12, the day before my scheduled mammogram, I was awakened by the telephone. It was Marsha, the receptionist at the radiologist’s office, calling to remind me that I was expected there at noon the following day. As if I could forget. She instructed me, as she does every year in that militant manner of hers, to be on time and not to use any deodorant or talcum powder. I listened to her groggily. I had been dreaming about work, about my old job at G&F. There were piles of manuscripts on my desk and I couldn’t find my pencils. It was only a variation on the old examination dream, where I’m either late or unprepared, that I’ve had on and off since high school.
A few weeks after Everett and I got married, I had what I realized was the wedding version of the same dream: I’d forgotten to buy a bridal gown, my flowers were wilting and they were the wrong color, a truly violent purple. As I told Violet later, none of that made any sense, because we had eloped, and a formal dress and flowers were never even a consideration.
She immediately began to pontificate about purple as a symbol of mourning and that the wilted flowers might signify my fear of the marriage’s failure, its death—maybe just in the sexual department.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, to cover the little ripple of panic she’d elicited. “And maybe it’s just a dream about flowers and dresses. Didn’t Freud himself say that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?”
Violet gave me a pained look. “Our dreams are not merely transparent comments on our lives,” she said sternly, “or we wouldn’t bother having them.”
Now I glanced at the bedside clock. It was only ten of eight—why did they have to round up their patients a day ahead of time, and at the crack of dawn? I could sense, without looking, that Ev was no longer beside me in the bed. I listened for the shower or for noises from the kitchen, but the apartment was silent. Of course; he’d told me the night before that he had to be at the plant in Hoboken first thing in the morning. “Yes, thanks, Marsha,” I said into the phone, cranking my voice up from its usual low morning register, so she wouldn’t think I was a late riser with nothing important to
do. Then I was stuck with the day, a whole long day before my mammogram.
I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t worry, at least a little, about her breasts. It starts in early adolescence, when you think you’ll never get them, or, as in Violet’s case, that the ones you’ve gotten are too sudden and disgustingly big. Sometimes they grow, as mine did, modestly, but at independent rates, like a pair of fraternal twins. My friends and I were spared some embarrassment by going to an all-girls school, although we were pretty critical of one another and of ourselves. And on an intramural outing in the park with some boys from Collegiate, we were wearing our regulation shorts and gym shirts with our names embroidered over the breast pocket, and a keyed-up fat boy yelled, “Hey, A. Brill! What’s the name of the other one?”
I guess I was lucky. The first words most girls ever hear about their breasts are vulgar—tits, jugs, boobs, hooters—creating further humiliation in the bearer of such conspicuous accessories. But then men fall in love with them, and babies are nourished at them, and they sag a little or a lot from years of service, and you mourn the beauty you were late to recognize, and you start to think of cancer. Well, I did, anyway. There was history at work—my grandmother, my mother—putting me at high risk. So I’d always been meticulous about self-examinations and checkups.
Sitting in one of those little airless changing cubicles in a paper gown, waiting my turn at fate, I would pretend to read the withered, dated News-week in my hand, but all I could think of were the scary odds, and how much I needed deodorant or talcum powder. Once the exam was over, though, and I was given the all-clear, my relief was profound, as if the governor had just called the warden to grant me a one-year reprieve.
Later on the morning of the twelfth, I buried my concerns in work, first on my socialite’s memoir, with all its thrilling gossip and fractured sentences, and then on the riveting issues of stem-cell research and euthanasia in the bioethics manuscript, which was slowly growing and becoming more accessible. Finally, I got to Michael’s novel. I was always hungry for new pages from him, even when they were flawed, and I imagined how eagerly Dickens’s readers must have looked forward to each installment of his serialized novels. Michael had developed a similar skill for finishing nearly every chapter on a note of emotional or narrative suspense that pulled you right into the next one.
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