Instead of Three Wishes

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Edwina made a point of reading for a few minutes in the early afternoon when John took his breaks. He told her that John Muir’s books weren’t in the library. They’d been banned for many years because of their subversive content. Edwina didn’t think they were subversive at all, and she read one of them aloud during John’s breaks, to prove it. It took a week, partly because John interrupted over and over again to ask questions about the trees and animals that Muir described.

  “Holy Cow,” said Edwina when he asked her to describe a squirrel, “how can you not know what a squirrel looks like? Haven’t you seen any animals at all? Next you’ll tell me that there aren’t any pigeons, and I won’t believe you because I don’t believe anything but nuclear war would get rid of pigeons.”

  “Pigeons?”

  “They’re a kind of bird.”

  “We have birds. Big black and gray things that leave white streaks on the statues.”

  “Those are pigeons,” said Edwina, a little relieved to find something familiar left in the world.

  “But we don’t call them pigeons.”

  “What do you call them, then?”

  “Just birds, there’s only one kind.”

  So Edwina did her best to describe all the different birds that she saw around her every day. There were sparrows and finches and doves. There were two different kinds of woodpeckers and a couple of titmice. There might be an owl living out in the woods. They thought they heard one from time to time, but they’d never seen it. Once she’d mentioned the woods, she had to describe those, too. They surrounded the house on all sides. Some parts were overgrown with brambles, and other parts, where the oldest trees grew, had a thick carpet of leaves on the ground and nothing else but the trunks of oaks and maples and the occasional evergreen. Edwina brought samples of different leaves to show John. Once she pulled the curtain away from the window and read him a poem about a man in a forest, and John strained his eyes to see the green trees outside, but he couldn’t. All he saw was sunlight.

  In return, John found books in the library that she had heard of but never read. She asked for poetry by a woman named Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He read the poetry aloud and she copied it down. They both enjoyed the Dickinson, but didn’t think much of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  “She has such a lovely name, though, doesn’t she?” said Edwina.

  “Have there been other people that you could see?” John asked one day.

  “Other ghosts, you mean?” Edwina persisted in thinking of the people of John’s world as ghosts. “After all, I feel solid to me,” she had pointed out. “You’re the ones who are all misty.”

  Yes, there were other ghosts. Edwina saw them from time to time as they floated through her attic room. John was not the only one who favored the alcove formed by crossing I beams as a lunch spot. Occasionally ghosts did appear in other places.

  “But remember, the rest of the house is below the roof of your factory but above the floor. Mother sees ghosts in the cellar whenever she goes down. And out in the meadow they appear three times a day, right on schedule. Hundreds of them sitting on benches and eating invisible food.”

  “Did any of them talk to you?”

  “There was a man who talked to me quite a lot. He read me poetry, but he wouldn’t read me any of Edna St. Vincent Millay. He said it wasn’t worth the effort of carrying it up the ladder. I think he was right.”

  John was surprised by faint stirrings of jealousy. “What did he read instead?”

  “I still have it all,” said Edwina. “Wait while I get it.” She rummaged through shadowy furniture, her arms disappearing to the elbow sometimes, and returned with a rumpled pile of papers. She read aloud poets and titles and snatches of poetry. Alexander Pope, John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Anne Bradstreet…

  John asked what had happened to the provider of the poetry. Edwina told him that the man had been promoted after a few years to work on a different crane.

  “He came back to visit several times, but then he said he was getting too busy, and I didn’t see him again. I missed him when he was gone, or maybe I just missed his poetry. It was nice to have something new in the world, but I think it bothered him that he was growing older and I wasn’t. He must have decided to spend his time with people in his own world.”

  John went down to the library the next day. He ignored the poetry section but selected carefully from a shelf of old detective novels.

  They were highly successful. He read aloud from them over the next several weeks. Edwina’s only complaint was that these were books that should be read while gorging on little chocolates filled with caramel, or maybe slightly sticky candy bars.

  “Too bad,” she said, “we haven’t any chocolate at all. Not even to cook with.”

  “It’s too bad mysteries are so much harder to copy down than poetry. I will miss them when you’re gone.”

  “When I’m gone?” John hadn’t thought about leaving, about being promoted or even transferred to another factory. He felt suddenly wretched and wished for the first time that he lived in a world like Edwina’s where nothing ever changed.

  “Edwina, how did you get the way you are? Did your mother really poison you?”

  “Well. It was more than poison. I think she knew even during the trial that things wouldn’t work out. She started collecting all kinds of food, and she did peculiar things. She poured flour and salt along the walls of the estate, and she painted every tree with paste. There was a terrific amount of work that had to be done. And she worried about Angela. She had a cold, and Mother said she couldn’t guess which would be worse, to be a two-year-old with a cold forever or to live with a two-year-old with a cold forever. So she did everything she could to delay until Angela was better.”

  “Did you know?”

  “You mean, during the last bit? No. We just ate dinner together and went to bed. Everyone else slept through it but me. I woke up with a terrible headache and wobbled around until I fell out the window.”

  “You what?”

  “Fell out the window. That one over there.” She gestured to the curtain behind her. “I broke my back. My spine is all wobbly now, but it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Will you really never change?”

  “Never, never, never. You will get older and go away and forget all about me, and I will still be here. Lonely, with no one my own age to talk to and no chocolates.” She pulled a sad face, and John laughed, even as he realized that he couldn’t stand to grow older and be promoted and leave the high crane and Edwina forever.

  “I will bring you chocolates,” he said.

  Edwina talked to her mother. Her mother climbed the stairs to Edwina’s attic and talked to John for a long time. Just the two of them. Then John began collecting library books. He overcharged his card and anyone else’s card he could borrow. He hid the books in secret places along the catwalk. He used his entire salary buying chocolates and obscure spices. And one day, during his lunch break, he drank his coffee laced with cyanide and lay down on the catwalk and listened to Edwina reading aloud a poem written in Greece more than two thousand years before John was born. It was really just the remaining pieces of a longer work, but Edwina had arranged the fragments to her liking and read them as if they were all part of a single poem.

  stop traveler and rest

  here in the shade of the trees

  away from the dust of the road

  near a graceful pavilion

  Listen to the wind in the long leaves

  the birds in the bushes

  the water in the fountain

  Sleep

  as the shadows creep

  as the sun

  turns in the sky

  Wake in the cool evening

  when swallows seek their rest

  Refreshed

  as the moon rises.

  At the end of John’s breaktime, there was no sign of life in the high crane. The foreman climbed up.

  The books were returned to
the library. No one knew what to do with the boxes of chocolate and the cinnamon. The day-shift foreman took them home.

  Several months later, the new crane operator pulled the foreman aside to tell him what he’d seen as he rolled by in his crane: two people, a young man and a woman, sitting on invisible furniture with their feet up, reading books and eating chocolates.

  Aunt Charlotte and the NGA Portraits

  I remember standing on the front steps of my great-aunt Charlotte’s house. We were waiting for a cab, and my feet were cold. It was November, and I was wearing the kind of nice shoes that girls wore then with their best dresses. I thought that my feet would be too frozen to bend by the time the taxicab arrived, and I was considering clumping down the stairs like Frankenstein’s monster, but I wasn’t sure how Aunt Charlotte would take it. I’d been staying with her in her town house in Washington, D.C., for four gloomy days while my parents were away. My mother had said her aunt Charlotte was very reserved, but she was sure that I would like her once we got to know each other. I wondered how long that would take. Aunt Charlotte averaged twenty-five words a day, and ten of those were “Would you like some breakfast?” and “Would you like some lunch?” After four days, I didn’t know her any better than I had when she’d come to meet my train at Union Station. I had tried to fill in the silences and create a one-way conversation without much success. I wasn’t sure that she had even noticed. It was only that morning that we had had our first real dialogue. She had invited me to join her that day for a trip to the National Gallery of Art. My mother had told me that Aunt Charlotte went to the NGA once a month without fail, and if I was invited, I should go, too. I wasn’t much interested in paintings, but I said yes, I’d like to go, and went back upstairs to put on my best clothes.

  When the cab finally arrived, I followed my aunt down the front steps with no Frankenstein imitations and climbed into the backseat beside her. It was an old cab. It smelled like cigarette smoke, and the vinyl on the seat was patched with squares of gray tape. The cabdriver wore a knit hat over his bushy hair. When he turned his head to ask where we wanted to go, all we could see were his hat and his hair and his nose. Aunt Charlotte said that we wanted to go to the National Gallery, and the cab pulled away from the curb with a lurch.

  Aunt Charlotte looked over at me and folded her hands carefully in her lap. She said, “Well, Marguerite, you’ve told me a great deal about yourself in the last four days. I thought I’d tell you a little about myself and then we’d go see some friends of mine. How does that sound?”

  I said that I thought it sounded fine, and after a moment of lacing and unlacing her fingers, my aunt began her story.

  I was just about your age the year that we went to Ocracoke for Thanksgiving. My only brother was away at college, so it was just my father, my mother, and myself. Ocracoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina. We had a beach house there. It’s very beautiful in the summer but doesn’t have much to recommend it in November. Still, my father wanted to go, so we did. My mother was not pleased. She liked to go out in the afternoon and visit her friends and drink tea and eat little cakes and talk. None of her friends would be on Ocracoke in November. They were all in Washington, planning their next trips to London and Paris.

  Unlike Mother, I was very pleased. Mother always took me visiting with her in the afternoons, and I hated it. I hated the tea and the little cakes and all the boring talk. I dreamed of someday being old enough to stay home.

  My aunt paused, but then continued.

  Home was not really much better. My brother was so much older than I was that I rarely saw him. I had a governess to teach me, so I didn’t go to school and I didn’t have any friends. I had never had friends, and I didn’t know that I was missing them. In fact, I’d have to say I was something of a lump. I had a great many toys I never played with and a number of books I never read. Just about the only thing that I had any interest in was fitting together jigsaw puzzles….

  When we went to Ocracoke, we took the train to Swan Quarter and the ferry from there to the island. I was surprised by how desolate it was in winter, with its skies gray and the bright colors of the tourists’ umbrellas gone. Our beach house had to be opened up. It was damp and chilled until the furnance was lit and the sea air dried out. The other beach homes and the large resort hotel remained shuttered and closed. The streets were empty. The few winter visitors gathered for companionship at the smaller resort hotel. The men sat in the bar. The women spent their afternoons sharing tea and a limited supply of conversation.

  After a week, my mother declared herself wrung dry of gossip and went back to Washington. I stayed with my father. Once Mother was gone, I knew I would be attending no more afternoon teas. I would have my days to myself. Mother left me her gold watch with instructions to see that my father ate lunch at twelve and dinner at six, and except for those meals I was entirely on my own.

  I spent my days ruining the polish on my boots as I scuffed along the sand beaches looking for seashells. There was a hollow in the sand dunes, out of the wind, where I would sit for hours, choosing the best of the shells I had gathered. I was sitting there when I first met Olga Weathers. It was a cloudy day, like most November days. It was two-fifteen. At two-thirty I intended to return to the house and ask my father for a dime for ice cream. Every day I had asked, and every day he had shuffled through his coat pocket until he had found the single dime waiting there. There was, of course, nowhere to buy ice cream on Ocracoke in November. The ice-cream stand was firmly boarded up. Every night when he took off his suit coat, I replaced the dime in its pocket, and asked for it again the next day.

  Aunt Charlotte broke off again and looked at me. The cab had stopped in traffic at a red light. “You may someday find that there is a certain contentment to be found in ritual, Marguerite.” She went on with the story.

  I was about to pile my chosen shells into my pockets and walk back into town when I saw a figure coming up the beach.

  It was Olga Weathers. Never in my life, before or since, have I seen anyone like her. She was an enormous woman, probably six feet tall and as stout as the brawniest of the island’s shrimpcatchers. She was wrapped in a man’s overcoat that was unbuttoned down the front. Underneath, she had on a heavy brown dress that swept the sand as she waded through it. Gray streaks of hair streamed out of the bun on the top of her head. She lifted a hand to brush the hair out of her face, and as she did so, our eyes met. I smiled politely and then wished I’d been rude and looked away. She took my smile as an invitation and altered course to arrive beside me in my hollow. She settled next to me.

  There is something awkward about adults who try to join children in their activities, but Olga was different. When she sank into the sand, it was as if she had taken possession of the whole beach and I was the one out of place.

  “You are the little girl who’s come to stay in the bungalow on Ocean Avenue?” she said.

  I admitted that I was.

  She introduced herself. “My house is near yours. I watched you putting a jigsaw puzzle together on your porch yesterday. You worked very quickly.”

  “It’s an old puzzle,” I explained. “I’ve put it together before.”

  “Is that fun? Putting together the same puzzle again?”

  I shrugged. “It’s something to do.”

  “You like puzzles.”

  I shrugged again. “They’re something to do.”

  The woman was quiet for a moment. I checked my watch.

  “You have somewhere to go?”

  Surprised at myself, I explained about the imaginary ice-cream cone and the circadian dime. “It has been nine days. I want to keep asking every day until we go home. I bet myself that he won’t notice.”

  “He sounds preoccupied,” said Olga.

  I shrugged.

  Olga said, “Go ask for your dime. Then come and see me at my house.” She heaved herself out of the sand. “I live in the gray house with the pink trim. I have some puzzles that you might l
ike.” She swayed down the beach and disappeared between two sand dunes.

  I collected the dime, then considered Olga Weathers’s invitation. Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it to my head with a four-inch hatpin. I wore the hat because I knew that my mother never went visiting without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency. I crossed the street and knocked at the door of the house with the shell pink trim. When the door opened, I stepped into a living room at the bottom of the ocean. Heavy lace curtains admitted light that wavered back and forth across the greenish gray walls. The wood floors were polished to a light sand color, and on every flat surface were piled seashells of all descriptions. Somewhere someone was singing, or it might have been a radio playing. There was no one in the room besides myself. I looked around for Olga.

  There was a hallway in front of me, and I followed it to the back of the house, where I found her on a sunporch that looked out over the salt marsh and the sand dunes. To my surprise, it was she who was singing as she pulled a comb through her hair. The bun was gone from the top of her head. Instead, her hair fell in waves of brown and gray down her back. With one motion, the comb swept from her forehead to her hair’s distant ends.

  I was captivated. My own hair was easily as long as Olga’s, but it frizzed and knotted at every opportunity. When it was combed, it didn’t float in perfect fans down to my shoulders.

  When she saw me, out of the corner of her eye, Olga stopped singing. She wrapped her hair around one hand and pinned it up with a few deft movements. When it was back in its conservative wrapper, she turned to me.

  “I thought you weren’t coming. I had just about given up.”

  I smiled. “I had to get my hat.”

  Olga had a jigsaw puzzle that was a painting of waves. She and I spent that afternoon on her living room floor putting it together. While we pieced the edge together, we talked. I didn’t read books, and I didn’t know many people, and I hadn’t learned anything of any interest from my governess, so I had not much to say, but Olga seemed happy to talk about jigsaw puzzles. She agreed that finishing wasn’t the important part. It was the contentment that came with the placement of each individual piece. She asked me if I thought that this was true of different kinds of puzzles as well.