by Неизвестный
“Are you all right?” she asks them.
“Seven,” says the girl on the left.
“Cry seven tears at high tide and a selkie will cry with you,” explains the girl on the right.
“Seven,” Sister Rosetta says, “is God’s number.”
“Why?”
Sister Rosetta nudges her glasses higher onto her nose again. “Because on the seventh wave, what God has taken He gives back.”
“Our mother was swept away on the seventh wave. It was very strange—”
“—she being a near-champion swimmer.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that,” says Sister Rosetta, blinking fiercely behind her glasses.
“Well, you know it now,” says the girl on the left, her jaw thrust out.
The girl on the right: nose red and snuffling, chin all atremble. It’s going to be a job, Sister Rosetta knows, but the girls turn sweet, leading her by the hand up, up, up the winding stairs, throwing open the door to each room so that she can see for herself: the storage room, kitchen, sleeping quarters and bathroom, library, and, at the very top, the service room. Sister Rosetta doesn’t know about the green-tinted safety goggles and looks directly into the heart of the light, into brilliance so fierce it’s like looking at God in glory, a light meant to guide but that viewed too closely would certainly blind.
Days pass, each one a crow-shaped stain falling from the shore pines. The wind kicks up, breaks brittle days into halves, throws Erlen’s nose out of kilter. The lighthouse smells of metal, of wet pennies. It was his wife’s smell: pure and elemental, edged and biting like salt. One afternoon Erlen leaves the lantern room, his nose roving in all directions, tracking the scent of skin and wet fur. His nose leads him to the library, where the wind has snapped a windowpane. Sister Rosetta is there, a flurry of pages from the primer swirling around her. She stands on tiptoe reaching for the paper that curls out and away from her. She looks like a figurine in a snow globe. The sight of her, not at all a bad-looking woman, provokes his heart to skip. At that precise moment Erlen becomes a religious man, thanking God for this wind, for stirring things up.
The wind, Sister Rosetta, too, is thankful for. It howls through the lighthouse, inside her ears. But then Sister Rosetta, textbooks and papers in hand, stumbles. Her veil, cowl, and wimple fall, baring her shaved head. Where are her feet? she wonders, as the floor rises to meet her. And then Erlen is there, catching her. It’s a surprise, the sureness of his grip. For even she doesn’t quite remember where her elbows or knees are beneath the voluminous folds of the wool habit, and yet he knows exactly how to right her: an arm hooked around her rib, another anchoring her elbow.
Don’t ever let go. That’s what Sister Rosetta is thinking. What she says instead: “Is there something you were wanting?” She is trying so hard to sound utterly unflappable, though she can feel herself blushing, yes, down to the roots of her shorn hair.
Erlen retrieves her glasses, hands over her limp headpiece. He is careful with her vestments, averts his gaze even as he helps her with the veil, the hem of which has come unraveled. But his nose can’t quit. Erlen’s arms go stiff, his elbows lock. He considers Sister Rosetta, points his nose at her neck. She’s not the source of that scent he’s tracking, he realizes.
“Give the girls a bath,” Erlen whispers, his nose twitching, “with extra soap.”
Sister Rosetta’s religious mystery novel is not going well. The hardest question—Does God really know what He is doing?—hasn’t provoked a quick answer. Not in her writing, not in her life. Equally uncooperative are the twins, who do not want to shave their legs and underarms, who do not want to bathe at all. The three of them sit on the rim of the enormous metal tub and look at the water.
“Skin replaces itself,” Astrid leads off.
“—cell by cell,” Clarinda adds.
“—every thirty days . . . ”
“—but hair replaces itself more slowly.”
“Besides, we like being hairy—”
“—the hair keeps us warmer at night.”
A smile starts on the left side of Astrid’s face and travels from girl to girl. Sister Rosetta shrugs. The truth is, underneath her habit she is a little hairy too.
“I’ll go first,” Sister Rosetta says, hanging her habit and veil on a hook. She soaps herself and shows them how to run a razor the length of a leg, around the tricky points of the ankle. Her flesh hangs from her body in doughy folds. Sister Rosetta wonders if they know how unmoored she feels inside her own skin, this awkward, transparent sleeve. Can they even guess how badly she wants to turn the razor and make a longitudinal incision, stem to stern, and step free of this body that weighs on her, shames her?
But the girls aren’t even watching her. Astrid bends to the tub, trails a finger in the water. “Our mother liked baths.”
“Took them on full moon nights like this one,” Clarinda adds, nodding at the window where the moon is a buoy in the dark sky.
“She’s coming back for us.” Astrid steps out of her pants. “She’s going to teach us how to swim.” The girls climb into the tub and no sooner have they settled in the water than they begin to bleed. Simultaneously, of course: two scarlet threads unspool from between their thighs. The girls are unnaturally calm, looking at Sister Rosetta with their wide eyes.
Sister Rosetta helps them out, towels them off, shows them what a strange contraption the belt and hook is, what good for girls becoming women such modern-day conveniences are. Afterward, Sister Rosetta carries the bathwater, pink and smelling of iron, in large pots down to the landing. Like carrying a comb to the sea, it’s a risky thing to do but Sister Rosetta pours the contents of the pots over the railing anyway.
That night as Sister Rosetta climbs into bed, she considers the lighthouse lens turning silently. She thinks about Erlen with his hand at the light, true and shining. In no time at all, she is asleep, awash in a dream where she stands knee-deep in the surf and unlocks a suitcase full of keyhole limpets, chitons, lightning whelks, and several specimens of spindled murex. How wide are heaven’s gates, how deep? Sister Rosetta wonders. She is stringing a rosary made of these musings, each question another chiton or whelk, the surfaces asymmetrical in pattern and design. Meanwhile, the good nuns at the abbey, uncostumed and unrestrained, turn their gazes to the expanse of Sister Rosetta’s borderless dreaming. They link arms and kick their heels together with glee as they rush for the water. Wearied of the rosaries worn down between their fingers and thumbs, they are only too glad to wade in deep, exchange their smooth beads for the sharp points of Sister Rosetta’s queries.
Sister Rosetta’s snoring keeps Astrid and Clarinda from sleep. Boredom and insomnia provoke their curiosity. Though the ground floor storage room is strictly off-limits, with Sister Rosetta asleep and their father up in the lantern room, there’s no one to stop them.
The storage room is black as tar. It’s an interesting proposition, such darkness held in the belly of the lighthouse. For fun they do not light matches or shine flashlights. Instead they drop to hands and knees and crawl across the floor, ending up in a far corner, where they find fur: one long strip and a smaller crescent-shaped patch. They tuck the scraps under their arms and race up to their room, where they survey the scraps atop the bedspread.
The fur is shiny silver like a seal’s. They know without speaking it aloud, the fur is from their mother’s coat. Instinctively, Astrid drapes the long swatch of fur over her shoulder, where it adheres to her skin, stretching from tip of shoulder to point of hip. Clarinda fastens the collar of fur around her neck and the girls know: there isn’t a shoehorn big enough, a crowbar strong enough, to pry these strips loose now.
Later that night the moon slips off its lead and a storm rolls in hard and fast. The wind whistles harsh lullabies that send the girls into unsettled sleep. Only their thin and flimsy human skin separates all that water outside from the water inside their bodies. They could drown—this has been the point of their father’s stories, they kn
ow. But Sister Rosetta has taught them fractions and they now understand that they are two-thirds water, maybe more. They will float like the fish that swallowed the moon. They will rise buoyant and swim. All their lives it seems they’ve been practicing—in dreams, of course.
They know Sister Rosetta understands this. They know this because that very night they wade into each other’s dreams: the girls into Sister Rosetta’s dreams and Sister Rosetta into the combined dreaming of the girls. In their dreams nobody wears clothes, and so they swim naked—Sister Rosetta and Astrid and Clarinda—their fears and their terrible longings and their many questions bobbing beside them. And they show each other what they never could during day: Astrid’s strip of fur that now girdles her waist and Clarinda’s collar of fur, which has already spread as a cape across her shoulders. The girls are sloughing their cracked and flimsy skins and Sister Rosetta runs her fingers over their beautiful patchwork bodies in utter amazement.
And then Sister Rosetta reveals her raw heart, ready for something more than wind and salt. Something more than the threads of her veil binding her up or her many lesson plans. And the girls, with their eyes grown so gray now they are nearly black, see Sister Rosetta’s heart and know exactly what they are seeing.
“You take care of him,” they implore in the singular and Sister Rosetta bolts upright in bed.
Midnight. The fur has spread, covering the girls from neck to knee. They turn their skins under and roll them down, as women do when stepping out of a pair of nylons. They tuck their skins under their arms and wind their way carefully down the stairs. Astrid trails a hand along the stone to steady them, while Clarinda bites her lip. With each step Clarinda thinks right, thinks left. Thinks down.
“Don’t—” Astrid whispers.
“—be afraid,” Clarinda replies. It’s what their mother said, the day she swan-dived from the rock for the water. Now they know, now they remember. How to swim? That will come. But it’s the land they must leave, once and for all, leave it for the water that will lift and carry them. Water, Clarinda thinks as she pushes the sky aside with her hands.
“C’mon,” Astrid urges. “Hurry now.” At the landing Clarinda hesitates. “Don’t—” Astrid says.
“—be afraid,” Clarinda replies.
Don’t be afraid.
When Astrid lifts her left foot over the ledge, Clarinda steps off with her right.
Erlen smells the girls. He leaps to his feet. Slap, slap, slap, down the stone steps. Above him the light turns behind the glass. You would think for all this light he might see something. But he doesn’t, can’t, the light shining miles and miles beyond him. By the time he gets to the landing, the girls are gone.
“Come back!” he shouts, knowing full well they can’t hear him, having slipped beneath the water with their slick and oily bodies. Two transparent skins drape over the railing; two unzipped, girlshaped casings drip the color of fog.
Erlen, beyond bewilderment, fingers the skins. Next to him is Sister Rosetta, her lips moving silently. Guide them, she prays. Her prayers stand tiptoe to press against the invisible beating heart of God. Guide us all. She understands, looking at Erlen, looking at the skins he folds into halves, into quarters, that none of them has ever been quite right for this world, casting about in skins they aren’t quite suited for.
Erlen turns to Sister Rosetta. “They’re not coming back, are they?”
Sister Rosetta peers out over the water. “No.” She is crying hot, oily tears. She will miss those girls with their luminous eyes and stories. But she is not really worried. It’s Erlen she’s thinking of now. No, it’s herself and Erlen—together—she’s thinking of. She rests her palms flat and hard against her heart, her heart so full she thinks it will burst from the pressure. Sister Rosetta smiles, can’t help thinking this is another mystery, this hurt wrecking her, this full measure of sky she’s swallowed, pressed and running over. So full in her lungs she might drown on it.
Is it love? she wonders, considering Erlen leaning at the railing. Is this how love finds us even when we’re sure it won’t, finds us anyway, splits us wide open? It’s an unforeseen plot complication and she’s not sure what to do but offer thanks: thank you, parable. Thank you, rhyme. Thank you, unanswerable questions.
Erlen presses his hips against the railing. His daughters are gone, he can feel it as certainly as he feels his heart tumbling. Gone but not lost, he feels that too. In the hills the dogs bark and bark, beyond reason, beyond logic, barking for the sheer joy of repetition. To see, perhaps, if the moon might wag its tail.
Erlen turns to Sister Rosetta. Her face glows beneath the moonlight. Her woolen habit is beneath Erlen’s hand. Sister Rosetta is beneath the habit. From rib to rib his heart is a melon falling rung by rung down a long ladder.
“Sister Rosetta—”
“Rose,” she says, slipping her hand in his. The wind whips her veil and cowl off her head. She doesn’t have time to think: Catch it. It tumbles past the breakers, caught now and carried beyond the surf, where it disappears into darkness.
STACEY RICHTER
The Doll Awakens
There had once been a time when to exist and to be cherished were one and the same thing. Miss Pretty had been adored almost from the moment she was manufactured—her hair had been silky and fresh-spun and her dress had been starched and clean, and she was trucked from the factory in her own pink box, wrapped in gold paper and slobbered over by Tina, all in a seamless roll of time. Then years passed and a litany of bad things happened until finally she was shoved into a box and left to rot, in a trailer without climate control, with several pieces of her original outfit gone AWOL, and no one cared. It was obvious after all these years that no one cared. Miss Pretty stared at the lid of the cardboard box for longer than it seemed possible to stare. She would have liked to sleep but sleep was impossible—the counterweights tugged on her eyelids but they wouldn’t slide shut, they were fused open, and so she gazed at the cardboard and at the occasional, disgusting silverfish carousing across its surface. Her destiny waited on the other side; she could feel it out there, but she couldn’t reach it. Sometimes she’d push on the box, or give it a gnaw, but she lacked the energy to go on and she’d lost the source of it.
And then, one day, when she had released the last strand of hope, when it seemed that she was destined to remain forever pickled in the juices of her own memories, she was picked up. She felt the buoyant lightness of being carried, that bouncing weightlessness. Dust streamed across her. Just like that, the lid of the box was whisked away. She was ready for the nightclub, the flashbulbs, the popping of champagne corks, but instead Miss Pretty found herself staring at a white snout made of paper. The snout was attached to a woman’s face. Above it were two dark and squinty eyes. It was not a young face, not a believer’s face. It wasn’t the kind of face she’d want to sing to.
“Do you have to save everything?” the face said, turning and shouting over a shoulder.
Miss Pretty stared; she had no choice. It wasn’t a snout, she realized. It was a woman wearing a dust mask.
“Hey,” a man’s voice echoed through space, “you never know what might come in handy.” The man lumbered into view. Of course she recognized him. All those pieces: the shirtless belly, the ponytail—no longer red, but gray and mostly gone on top—the face like putty arranged with a spatula. It was Gordon, her nemesis, an older, fatter, balder version.
“Why can’t I ever have a normal boyfriend? Normal people part with objects. They chuck out trash.”
“Come on, Beverly. She’s cute. Carol Ann’s kid used to drag her everywhere.”
“Oh. Now I see. Carol Ann.”
Gordon put his hands on her and lifted her from the box. A deep loathing passed across Miss Pretty’s surface. She felt a jolt whip along her hair plugs. The torpor lifted a little and she felt a small zip, though she still would have preferred to sleep.
They sat her on a high shelf. She gazed down upon a tableau that was strikingly simila
r to the déclassé scenes she’d witnessed before, in that other smelly house, in that other hot place. There was Gordon, looking more than ever like an engorged lawn leprechaun. Beside him was his new woman, Beverly, shrill and hectoring, breathing in labored gasps. Beverly had eventually taken off her mask but her face retained a bulbous, snouted appearance anyway. They were inside a tiny trailer with a kitchenette and fold-down benches. The walls were lined with shelves crammed full of glass beakers and bags of powder and glass vials that glowed red when the burner was turned on. The hum of a generator permeated the air. Below her, the two sifted powders into solutions, like sorcerers. Miss Pretty watched bubbles rising in test tubes, milky fluids poured through filters of cat litter, cakes being milled into powder in an old, hand-cranked ice crusher. It was the same world, over and over, that’s what she had been reborn into. There was no glamour, no compensation. They hardly paid any attention to her at all.
Only every now and then, Gordon would look up at her, briefly.
Then, a bit more often.
On the first day Miss Pretty was out of the box, the two continued with what they kept referring to as “a little chemistry action” for several hours. Gordon worked in a soiled T-shirt and plaid shorts, pointing out the ingenuity and grace of his methods to his companion, occasionally humming. One of his hands was knobby and deformed and had only two fingers on it, the thumb and ring finger. He held it slightly away from his body, as though it were unaffiliated with him. The woman assisted him, yawning when he expounded on his superior abilities as a chemist. She wore a yellow bikini. Or she wore a loose white shirt over the bikini. Or she wore a black sweater over the bikini. She was thin for the most part but blobby, muscle-less, and her rear end ballooned out from her narrow waist. Now and then she complained about the toxic fumes and put the mask back on, then said it was choking her and that it was Gordon’s responsibility to design a better ventilation system. Miss Pretty found her hideous.