After something like that, I was too tired to do anything, and so Rose came over and took care of me. She made me dried bean soup. I tried to reward her by hugging her, but she was awkward, stiff. So I lay back down, curled up in my sleeping bag. “Describe them,” she said.
I didn’t want to talk about it, but she persisted. “There are a couple of different kinds,” I said at last. “They’ve got a leader who’s taller than the others. He has a body like an insect or a praying mantis. He can make you think what he wants, feel what he wants. The others do what he says. There are smaller ones, much darker, and a woman who seems to pity me. Once she offered me a pair of precious stones. The children are very small, and hungry for some kind of human contact. They grow the fetuses in a laboratory.”
“Wow.”
Was she stupid? She must have been able to see the connection with my job. But she didn’t say anything about that. I lay on my futon, and she sat cross-legged on the floor beside me. She was stirring the soup and blowing on it. How would she have reacted if I had told her about another dream I had? Two of the doctors went into a consultation room. I slid off my bed and followed them in there, pulled the masks away. Rose was one of them, and Mr. Kang. He carried a stainless steel speculum—is it any wonder I was nervous around him? The next evening, just as my shift began, he took me away from the kitchen where I was making sautéed beans. He pretended to have a question about the delicate cycle, and he led me down the back corridor to the laundry room. “I don’t want to embarrass you,” he said. In the narrow space he told me he had left some paper currency on his bedside table. Terrified, I stared up at his hairless chin receding into his long neck. Was he offering me money? He had enormous slanted eyes. His tie was a narrow strip of plastic, and he had taken his jacket off. Then suddenly he grabbed hold of my shoulders and turned me to the wall so I’d be quiet. He was groping me, his hands under my shirt. I was too frightened to say anything, even when Emily came running down the hall to rescue me, I thought. Mr. Kang was accusing me of terrible things, and now he pushed me away and ducked into the laundry room where I had left my bag. He pulled out my apple, my sandwich wrapped in paper, my prescription bottle—there was nothing for him there to use against me. But then he rummaged through my coat, hanging where I’d left it, and he found nineteen dollars. Worse still, he found a pair of malachite and silver earrings from Hong Kong. It was cheap stuff, not valuable, but I started to cry. I saw Emily clutch at her own earlobes as I slumped down against the wall. The little girl was there. She was looking at me curiously until her mother pulled her away.
Here in this place, humiliating memories return to me. I sit with my book, waiting for my supper, listening to the murmur of the television in the lounge. My cell is rectangular, a toilet in the corner, the window too thick to break. My room is warm in winter, cool in summer—not true of my cabin in the woods. The fire had gone out, and I was lying in my sleeping bag when Rose brought me the termination notice from the bureau of assistance.
“Not good,” she said.
Dreams can be a clue, a fantasy of guilt. Of all the screens that divide us from ourselves, they are the easiest to penetrate. The last one I wrote down, they made me read it to the judge.
“There’s a complaint,” Rose said. “He says you threatened him. But he won’t press charges.”
I winced at the memory. “It’s a lie. He had to make something up.”
I meant I would have paid the money back. But it was hard to explain that to Rose. So I came up with a metaphor. “He had to get rid of me,” I said. “I was going to tell someone.”
I had to make her draw it out of me and so I waited. “What?” she said. “That he was always trying to feel you up?”
I almost laughed at the quaint phrase. “Worse than that. I don’t care about myself.”
She had to pull it out of me, what I suspected. She couldn’t stand to hear about a child suffering. She was a tenderhearted person deep inside.
“What about the mother?”
I shook my head. “She closes her eyes to it. Without him she’s got nothing.”
I remember all these words were like sharp pieces of metal in my mouth. I couldn’t wait to spit them out. But even now I chew and chew. We all have our humiliations, and Rose had hers—she was too smart to be taken in. I tell myself that now, sitting at the window when I can’t sleep, trying to get a look at the night sky. But there are floodlights in the parking lot. If Abraham Lincoln wanted to bring his ship in there, he’d have ample room.
I swear I missed that little girl so much. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. She was sort of clumsy, the way she walked. After Mr. Kang threw me out, I was too sick to get out of bed, and at first I didn’t realize why that was. I moped around the house, and in the mornings I’d write down my dreams. Once a week or so the men would come for me, and I’d be on the table, and dark-skinned nurses would steal away my baby. Awake, it sickened me to think of her being raised by a monster and a woman who couldn’t protect her. My own family was like that, and I know all about it.
“I’m afraid they are just going to send for him, and they’ll take her away, back to Hong Kong or someplace else, and I’ll never see her again. It breaks my heart. I think if she could just be with us, and we could take your truck and drive away somewhere.”
“Where would we go?” asked Rose. She meant because of the new laws. Already by that time, outside the settlement was smaller than the inside, and it was shrinking all the time. To go anywhere we’d have to cross the line, which was something Rose talked about. She’d acquired another gun.
But I felt so sad when I pictured that little girl, alone in her box of screens, I couldn’t think rationally. The closest I came was when I thought I could ransom her, hold her for ransom. Those executives have a lot of money, I thought, and Mr. Kang had robbed me of my benefits.
Sometimes I thought up plans that involved violence. Even so, it didn’t reassure me when Rose used to take out the new gun, a nickel-plated .22 caliber pistol she had bought on the black market. She used to carry it in the pocket of her old canvas coat when sometimes we would walk up to the settlement. Except for the first and last time, Opal wasn’t at the playground. But in October when the frost had come, Rose and I walked up to the shimmering line and she was there, swinging on the swings. Mr. Kang and Emily were there too, and they were having an argument. Mr. Kang grabbed hold of Emily’s wrist. He was furious, a tall man, much taller than she, with thin arms and legs. Though Rose had never met him, she recognized him at once, and shouted at him to leave his wife alone. He must have heard something, because he turned toward us. Rose had taken out her gun and was behaving very stupidly, I felt, gesturing and swaggering. Once she even twirled it on her finger. And Mr. Kang must have seen something, because he came up to the wall on the other side and stood close to us, just a few yards away. And Rose stepped out to meet him with the gun held in front of her. She also was tall and thin.
There was a mirrored wall between them, a wavy, shimmering disturbance in the air that kept us safe. But then maybe a bus or car pulled through the gate, or else the current was interrupted, and in a single moment the wall flickered and disappeared. Rose stood with the gun held out.
Now I sit by the window of my little cell inside the wall, looking out into the lighted parking lot. If there are northern lights above me, I can’t see them. The belly of the mother ship could drift above my head, and I’d be unaware. I’m making a joke, of course—I can tell what is reality and what is fantasy. The reality is what I wrote down later: I thought I could recognize the two doctors above me. I knew I wasn’t pregnant, but I didn’t say a word. I was listening to them argue, a professional disagreement, I could tell by the tone. But then I couldn’t pay attention, because I was looking at the child they had brought. The nurse had earrings that looked beautiful against her skin, and she was leading the child away from me. Above me the doctors were still arguing, and one of them reached over and cut the other on his shoulder so the bloo
d poured out. He screamed, and at that moment the restraints fell away from me, and I jumped through the door. The men were trying to close the door, but I jumped through. The doctors were still screaming when I grabbed hold of the child.
The Least Trumps
Elizabeth Hand
IN THE LONELY HOUSE there is a faded framed LIFE magazine article from almost half a century ago, featuring a color photograph of a beautiful woman with close-cropped blonde hair and rather sly gray eyes, wide crimson-lipsticked mouth, a red-and-white striped bateau-neck shirt. The woman is holding a large magnifying lens and examining a very large insect, a plastic scientific model of a common black ant, Formica componatus, posed atop a stack of children’s picture books. Each book displays the familiar blocky letters and illustrated image that has been encoded into the dreamtime DNA of generations of children: that of a puzzled-looking, goggle-eyed ant, its antenna slightly askew as though trying, vainly, to tune in to the signal from some oh-so-distant station.
Wise Aunt or Wise Ant? reads the caption beneath the photo. Blake E. Tun Examines a Friend.
The woman is the beloved children’s book author and illustrator, Blake Eleanor Tun, known to her friends as Blakie. The books are the six classic Wise Ant books, in American and English editions and numerous translations. Wise Ant, Brave Ant, Curious Ant; Formi Sage, Weise Ameise, Una Ormiga Visionaria. In the room behind Blakie, you can just make out the figure of a toddler, out of focus as she runs past. You can see the child’s short blonde hair cut in a pageboy, and a tiny hand that the camera records as a mothlike blur. The little girl with the Prince Valiant haircut, identified in the article as Miss Tun’s adopted niece, is actually Blakie’s illegitimate daughter, Ivy Tun. That’s me.
Here in her remote island hidey-hole, the article begins, Blake Eleanor Tun brings to life an imaginary world inhabited by millions.
People used to ask Blakie why she lived on Aranbega. Actually, just living on an island wasn’t enough for my mother. The Lonely House stood on an islet in Green Pond, so we lived on an island on an island.
“Why do I live here? Because enchantresses always live on islands,” she’d say, and laugh. If she fancied the questioner she might add, “Oh, you know. Circe, Calypso, the Lady in the Lake. …”
Then she’d give her, or very occasionally him, one of her mocking sideways smiles, lowering her head so that its fringe of yellow hair would fall across her face, hiding her eyes so that only the smile remained.
“The smile on the face of the tiger,” Katherine told me once when I was a teenager. “Whenever you saw that smile of hers, you’d know it was only a matter of time.”
“Time till what?” I asked.
But by then her attention had already turned back to my mother: the sun to Katherine’s gnomon, the impossibly beautiful bright thing that we all circled, endlessly.
Anyway, I knew what Blakie’s smile meant. Her affairs were notorious even on the island. For decades, however, they were carefully concealed from her readers, most of whom assumed (as they were meant to) that Blake E. Tun was a man—that LIFE magazine article caused quite a stir among those not already in the know. My mother was Blakie to me as to everyone else. When I was nine she announced that she was not my aunt but my mother, and produced a birth certificate from a Boston hospital to prove it.
“No point in lying. It would however be more convenient if you continued to call me Blakie.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her tennis shoe and tossed it over the railing into Green Pond. “But it’s no one’s business who you are. Or who I am in relation to you, for that matter.”
And that was that. My father was not a secret kept from me; he just didn’t matter that much, not in Blakie’s scheme of things. The only thing she ever told me about him was that he was very young.
“Just a boy. Not much older than you are now, Ivy,” which at the time was nineteen. “Just a kid.”
“Never knew what hit him,” agreed my mother’s partner, Katherine, as Blakie glared at her from across the room.
It never crossed my mind to doubt my mother, just as it never crossed my mind to hold her accountable for any sort of duplicity she might have practiced, then or later. The simple mad fact was that I adored Blakie. Everyone did. She was lovely and smart and willful and rich, a woman who believed in seduction, not argument; when seduction failed, which was rarely, she was not above abduction, of the genteel sort involving copious amounts of liquor and the assistance of one or two attractive friends.
The Wise Ant books she had written and illustrated when she was in her twenties. By her thirtieth birthday they had made her fortune. Blakie had a wise agent named Letitia Thorne and a very wise financial adviser named William Dunlap, both of whom took care that my mother would never have to work again unless she wanted to.
Blakie did not want to work. She wanted to seduce Dunlap’s daughter-in-law, a twenty-two-year-old Dallas socialite named Katherine Mae Moss. The two women eloped to Aranbega, a rocky spine of land some miles off the coast of Maine. There they built a fairy-tale cottage in the middle of a lake, on a tamarack- and fern-covered bump of rock not much bigger than the Bambi Airstream trailer they’d driven up from Texas. The cottage had two small bedrooms, a living room and dining nook and wraparound porch overlooking the still silvery surface of Green Pond. There was a beetle-black cast-iron Crawford woodstove for heat and cooking, kerosene lanterns and a small red hand pump in the slate kitchen sink. No electricity; no telephone. Drinking water was pumped up from the lake. Septic and gray water disposal was achieved through an ancient holding tank that was emptied once a year.
They named the cottage the Lonely House, after the tiny house where Wise Ant lived with her friends Grasshopper and Bee. Here they were visited by Blakie’s friends, artistic sorts from New York and Boston, several other writers from Maine, and by Katherine’s relatives, a noisy congeries of cattle heiresses, disaffected oilmen and Ivy league dropouts, first-wave hippies and draft dodgers, all of whom took turns babysitting me when Blakie took off for Crete or London or Taos in pursuit of some new amour. Eventually, of course, Katherine would find her and bring her home: as a child I imagined my mother engaged in some world-spanning game of hide-and-seek, where Katherine was always It. When the two of them returned to the Lonely House, there would always be a prize for me as well. A rainbow map of California, tie-dyed on a white bedsheet; lizard-skin drums from Angola; a meerschaum pipe carved in the likeness of Richard Nixon.
“You’ll never have to leave here to see the world, Ivy,” my mother said once, after presenting me with a Maori drawing on bark of a stylized honeybee. “It will all come to you, like it all came to me.”
My mother was thirty-seven when I was born, old to be having a baby, and paired in what was then known as a Boston marriage. She and Katherine are still together, two old ladies now living in a posh assisted-living community near Rockland, no longer scandalizing anyone. They’ve had their relationship highlighted on an episode of This American Life, and my mother is active in local liberal causes, doing benefit readings of The Vagina Monologues and signings of Wise Ant for the Rockland Domestic Abuse Shelter. Katherine reconciled with her family and inherited a ranch near Goliad, where they still go sometimes in the winter. The Wise Ant books are now discussed within the context of midcentury American lesbian literature, a fact which annoys my mother no end.
“I wrote those books for children,” she cries whenever the topic arises. “They are children’s books,” as though someone had confused the color of her mailbox, red rather than black. “For God’s sake.”
Of course Wise Ant will never be anything more than her antly self—wise, brave, curious, kind, noisy, helpful—just as Blakie at eighty-two remains beautiful, maddening, forgetful, curious, brave; though seldom, if ever, quiet. We had words when I converted the Lonely House to solar power—
“You’re spoiling it. It was never intended to have electricity—”
Blakie and Katherine were by then well est
ablished in their elegant cottage at Penobscot Fields. I looked at the room around me—Blakie’s study, small but beautifully appointed, with a Gustav Stickley lamp that she’d had rewired by a curator at the Farnsworth, her laptop screen glowing atop a quartersawn oak desk; Bose speakers and miniature CD console.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll just move in here with you.”
“That’s not the—”
“Blakie. I need electricity to work. The generator’s too noisy, my customers don’t like it. And expensive. I have to work for a living—”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to work for a living.” I paused, trying to calm myself. “Look, it’ll be fun—doing the wiring and stuff. I got all these photovoltaic cells, when it’s all set up, you’ll see. It’ll be great.”
And it was. The cottage is south facing: two rows of cells on the roof, a few extra batteries boxed in under the porch, a few days spent wiring, and I was set. I left the bookshelves in the living room, mostly my books now, and a few valuable first editions that I’d talked Blakie into leaving. Eliot’s Four Quartets and some Theodore Roethke; Gormenghast; a Leonard Baskin volume signed For Blakie. One bedroom I kept as my own, with a wide handcrafted oak cupboard bed, cleverly designed to hold clothes beneath and more books all around. At the head of the bed were those I loved best, a set of all six Wise Ant books and the five volumes of Walter Burden Fox’s unfinished Five Windows One Door sequence.
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