We both felt better the day she came home from work with a blood stain on the seat of her dungarees that she was unaware of. When she got undressed, she screamed and said Paul was trying to murder her. She ran around with blood dribbling down her thighs and on her hands, Paul had to clean it off her then placate her in bed with sweet songs and kisses.
She told Paul she could no longer do it the common way with him, because she didn’t want to have a You-Know-What. Paul and I decided we would have to make her pregnant whether she liked it or not. One evening, Paul put one of Stuart’s old Tchaikovsky records on, a rather nice waltz, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear when he went up behind her, grabbed her neck, and pushed her onto her bedroom floor, forcing himself inside her. After, he held her feet and made her do a headstand so all the stuff he put inside her would trickle deep down inside her like golden syrup.
I told him to do it twice, just in case. He hit her until she was unconscious and did it a third time while I packed up the things we needed. He put a blanket over her head in case she woke up and saw us leaving. We put Waxy in a carpetbag, and floppy hats on our heads, and crept down the stairs of the house like ants carrying crumbs. We walked in no particular direction, avoiding the bright and flashing Exam signs, Men smoking and arguing underneath them, crumpled notepaper between their fists.
As it became colder, we went into an alley, took Waxy out of the carpetbag, and put the little thing under Paul’s coat. We longed to stop for a coffee somewhere, but we were too afraid. Paul and I put socks on our hands to keep them warm, since we didn’t own mittens. They made us look fingerless, like Paul’s homemade dolls. He started to go on again about the cracker tin, which was tied to his back with string since it didn’t fit in his suitcase. My knapsack sagged with homemade nappies, tins of fruit, and extra jumpers.
“We just need to find a safe place to put it down so we can live in it,” Paul repeated every few minutes.
“I told you before, Paul, it’s too small.”
“You never know what may happen,” he said in a very grand, serious voice, and I was too tired to contradict him anymore. I could smell Waxy underneath his coat, like a rancid molar in the back of one’s mouth.
We walked and walked, and as the sun came out, the regular time I went to work, I knew I would never paint the word NIGHTINGALE again. So I said it out loud again and again until things felt calm, nice, and sure.
“Night-in-gale, Night-in-gale, Night-in-gale.”
THE DOLL’S ALPHABET
The Doll’s Alphabet has eleven letters:
A B C D I L M N O P U
THE MERMAID
She wasn’t like known mermaids, divided in two, fish bottom, a lady on top. The fish and the human were blended together like tea with milk. She had greyish skin, pale blonde hair, fish mouth and eyes—the eyes behind round ship window glasses, the stooped look of a jumping dolphin, and hardly any chin at all. She often wore a blue wool coat, a string of pearls, and green galoshes without any shoes underneath.
The village was only two miles from the sea, the air was salty, once a seal wandered into town. The mermaid must have done the same.
The mermaid loved silver things, Evelyn saw her take a piece of tinfoil out of a rubbish bin, roll it into a ball, and stick it in her purse. My brother might fancy a mermaid, thought Evelyn. Vyvyan didn’t have any interests or activities—a mermaid just might be the thing.
Evelyn owned a shop called Old Time Things that had belonged to their father. It was on the first floor of a Tudor house and sold clocks, books, furniture, jewelry, mirrors, dolls, crockery, even coins and witch bottles he found on the beach.
Evelyn washed the window and filled it with silver things, teapots, earrings, chains, boxes, candlesticks, urns, forks, knives. It drew the mermaid in. He hid behind a grandfather clock, holding a green rug. As she reached for a silver fork, he jumped out, wrapped her up, and took her upstairs. His brother lived on the third floor, he was too tall for the attic. Evelyn and his wife Emmeline used the attic as their bedroom.
“What have you there?” said Emmeline, looking up from her Homer. She read on the stairs, using a stained glass lamp on a long brown cord. It gave her a ghoulish blue and green look.
“A thing for Vyvyan,” said Evelyn.
Every day, Evelyn brought his brother a pot of very dark tea and a fish sandwich with the head and tail sticking out. He wouldn’t eat anything else. He did not have a bed, he wouldn’t sleep in one, but sometimes suffered a blanket on his knees in winter.
Their father was as tall as Vyvyan, but brilliant in mind, and had opened the shop. There was a hole in the shop ceiling so he could stand comfortably, now covered with a cloth. When he died the funeral parlor wanted to charge them for two coffins, and the cemetery for two grave plots, so Evelyn sold his body to a scientist in London, asking if they could just keep one piece to bury—a finger—which the scientist obliged them. The finger was so long they buried it in a child’s coffin using the money from the scientist.
Evelyn was five feet tall, he wore nice suits and shoes with a little heel on them to make him appear five feet something.
When he reached the third floor, Evelyn unfurled the carpet and the mermaid rolled out. Her glasses had fallen off. She put them back on, dusted herself off and stood up. Vyvyan ignored her. As well as being tall, he was very large-boned but thin, so his brow, wrists, chin, nose, and shoulders all looked very prominent. He wore a suit, the same top hat since the age of seven, and had a unibrow. Once Evelyn tried to trim it because Emmeline had read somewhere that unibrows were evil, and Vyvyan had hit him so hard Evelyn flew across the room.
Evelyn left the room, locking the door behind him.
When he went to check on them later, the mermaid was standing in a dark corner, holding her purse in front of her. Vyvyan was still looking out of the window, his hands on his knees.
The next morning, along with Vyvyan’s meal, he brought the mermaid a cup of tea, a tin of seaweed, and a jar of salt.
That evening, looking up from their dinner of pork and brussels sprouts, Evelyn and Emmeline saw the mermaid standing in the kitchen door, smiling weakly, and wringing her hands, her purse swinging on her arms.
“I suppose we can give her some pork,” said Evelyn, “though I don’t like that she’s left my brother alone.”
After eating, the mermaid licked her silver knife and fork, she would have eaten them if Emmeline hadn’t taken them away.
Emmeline, who wore clear plastic cat-eye glasses, didn’t like other women who also wore glasses. While Evelyn served them tea and vanilla pudding for dessert, Emmeline opened a book by Thomas Carlyle and read, clearing her throat now and then.
Emmeline was raised by her father, and was the only person in town smart enough to go to university. Since she was young, she admired Evelyn from afar. He was dainty and wise looking. When she was brave enough, and had extra money, she would go into the shop, as it was the only place in town that sold books, very old ones mostly, but that was what Emmeline was interested in.
Often, in her schoolgirl days, she would sit in the bakery across from Old Time Things and watch Evelyn with a pair of brass binoculars while eating iced buns. The window of Old Time Things was so dusty it was hard to see in, but every now and then Evelyn stepped out of the shop to have a cigarette, he followed his father’s rule of no smoking in the shop.
She wrote him a love note:
We are the only two people in town who wear glasses.
But it wasn’t true. In their town, there was a twelve-year-old boy who wore glasses and an old woman with red frames, and a middle-aged man with a pince-nez. There was even a store that sold glasses.
She threw the note into the sea. When she was accepted into the most prestigious university in the country, she decided to tell Evelyn she loved him. She tucked her university acceptance letter into her bosom under her cardigan and went into Old Time Things.
If he said no, she would get on the train north and go to th
e university to study Ancient Greek for the rest of her life. She sat down on a footstool and said to Evelyn “Will you be my sweetheart? I want to live here.”
Instead of going to university, she married Evelyn. He wasn’t the promiscuous Ares she had imagined him to be. She didn’t help out in the shop, and took no interest in Vyvyan. She spent all her time reading on the stairs between the first and second floors.
She hadn’t had a baby yet; an ear-like thing once came out of her, and she put it in a box to keep in case more bits came out and she had to assemble them. She would name the child Priam or Zeus, though she didn’t think she would have time to take care of it.
That night, when she and Evelyn were kissing in bed, their glasses on the nightstand, Emmeline saw the fuzzy outline of the mermaid standing in their bedroom door, her hands clasped together.
“Go back downstairs,” Emmeline growled, and the mermaid did.
Though Evelyn locked Vyvyan’s door whenever he left the mermaid inside, she was always found somewhere else in the house: standing in the bathtub, sitting behind Emmeline on the stairs, licking silver plates in the shop, putting kitchen spoons and tin can lids in her purse.
“No more,” said Emmeline.
They took the mermaid on a train to a beach town twenty minutes away, luring her with a silver rattle.
The mermaid wandered down the beach, her eye caught something silver and glistening, and she leaned down to pick it up. Out of her view, Evelyn and Emmeline ran back to the train station, their hands against their faces, holding their glasses in place.
AGATA’S MACHINE
Agata and I were both eleven years old when she first introduced me to her machine. We were in all the same classes. She was sallow and thin, with enormous hands and feet. She wore her dark brown hair in a short bob, held back from her face with a plain, plastic barrette. Her eyebrows weren’t thick, but they were long, stretching to her temples. Her mouth was wide, but her lips were thin, with an expressiveness that reminded me of worms.
She wasn’t tormented by our schoolmates and teachers, as I was. The only student they treated worse than me was Large Barbara, who was so fat she walked with a cane, had one lazy eyeball and a wart on her chin so long and thin it mocked the rest of her body. Agata wasn’t teased or tormented because she was a genius. She excelled in the sciences and maths, and could write beautiful, complex poems, though she only did so when it was a school assignment. She often yawned and shook one of her legs in class; she finished her work before everyone else. Some teachers let her read her own books, imported ones in foreign languages, full of complicated diagrams just as mysterious to the rest of us as the words.
Though she wasn’t bullied, she also didn’t have any friends. She seemed above such trivialities. No one invited her to parties—it was impossible to imagine her at them. She spent her lunch break reading. She didn’t play or gossip. She saw the other students as a nuisance, like flies or fleas. Some tried to pay her to do their homework, but she responded with, “You think I don’t have better things to do?” in a tone of voice that was arrogant, and delighted in its own arrogance, her worm mouth wiggling.
Agata’s parents were poor because they had so many children, but they still bought her whatever she needed or desired so she could focus on her schoolwork: books, expensive pens, cigarettes. Agata was the eldest and the most promising of her siblings. The rest were snively, slow readers who wore second-hand clothes that had seen too many threadbare childhoods. Because their clothes were so old, so outdated, their hair so sparse, their limbs so rickety, and their foreheads so large, they looked like little old men, even the girls. Agata didn’t care about clothes. I was sure her parents would buy her nice outfits, if she asked.
She wore cheap-looking floral dresses, meant for an older housewife, and large men’s shoes—hand-me-downs from her father. When it was wet outside, she wore black rubber galoshes over her shoes, making her feet look even larger. In class she wore slippers of fuzzy grey wool.
I was vain and wore the same thin, white, feminine shoes all year round, even though the soles suffered under the pressure of my weight, and the material let water soak through, my toes and heels stained from the dye in my stockings. In class, I discreetly took my shoes off under my desk to let my feet dry, blue and black imprints on the inner lining of my shoes. These stains horrified and embarrassed me, as if the dye had come out of my body instead of my stockings.
One morning it was so wet outside that dyed water dripped from my feet onto the classroom floor. Agata, who was sitting behind me, whispered, “Your foot is crying.”
She didn’t say it loud enough for anyone else to hear, but I blushed.
Swiftly, she moved her own foot under my desk, and within a second the small puddle was gone.
She did it again and again, whenever a puddle formed, until my stockings, dry enough near the end of the day, ceased to drip.
Leaving class after school, she put her large hand on my arm and whispered in my ear. “Come home with me, there’s something I want to show you.”
I was filled with dread, as if a few more hours of class had been added to my day. What was she going to show me? Maths textbooks, a home laboratory kit? I was too afraid to say no, in case she would tell the rest of our class about my “crying foot,” in case she would yell, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Your foot cries!”
I was unsure whether I was embarrassed walking home with her or not. I didn’t like the disgusting sound of her galoshes, the smell of her cigarettes, but she walked with such ease and confidence, with such disdain for everyone we passed by in our village. She wore fingerless gloves, a canvas knapsack so full it sagged down her legs, and a ragged blue military coat with flaking gold buttons.
Agata’s family lived on the main floor of a five-floor building. The landlord allowed Agata to use the attic as a study. In exchange, Agata’s father cleaned and maintained the foyer and the halls of the building, though he already had a full-time job as a clerk at a small glassware factory that specialized in vases.
Her mother, with all her other children, was too busy to clean the halls herself, said Agata. We briefly stopped in the family apartment before heading to her attic. There were children everywhere, and no sign of the life Agata lived; no books, only tacky lithographic prints of historic buildings, dark Madonna and Child icons dotting the walls like speckles on a crow’s egg. I wondered if Agata had to share a bedroom with her siblings.
Her mother was thin and going bald. Her pregnant stomach was ridiculous and reminded me of a hard-boiled egg, a food no one at school would eat without shame because of its terrible smell and uncanny, wobbly movements once the shell was removed. She wore a cheap metal necklace, childish rings, and a dress just like Agata’s. When introduced to her, I suppressed a giggle.
Agata didn’t greet any of her younger siblings, but grabbed two bread rolls off the table.
“Bring us coffee in a bit,” she said to her mother, and pulled me out and upwards to her attic.
She unlocked the door with a key kept in one of her coat pockets, and took off her galoshes and shoes. She put on a pair of crusty-looking slippers from a ragged mat in the hall. I also took off my shoes, but the floor of her attic was dirty, covered with peeling linoleum, carpet and patches of wood, a repulsive mixture that reminded me of bandages that needed to be changed and the flaky, scabby skin underneath.
The walls of Agata’s attic were half-covered in maps and diagrams, a large poster of the periodic table, a map of the world. There were books everywhere, telescopes, glass vials, and microscopes. A green metal desk with a ragged, greasy armchair in front of it. A glass vase full of brown water and cigarette butts. Socks, papers, teacups and mousetraps—one with a flattened and dried mouse under its metal bar. I had assumed she would be meticulous and clean.
In the middle of the attic was something large and awkwardly shaped covered with a wool blanket. In one corner there was a headless garment dummy, its canvas torso covered in wri
ting, too smudged to read. Agata took off her coat and hung it on the dummy. She lit a cigarette, and started to eat one of the rolls. She threw the other one to me. It was rock hard. I nibbled at it, but was used to finer things: my parents were grocers and I took pleasure in eating. For Agata, eating seemed like a distracting chore. She ate the bread roll with such indifference it could have been a raw potato or a marrow bone, she wouldn’t have noticed.
After she finished it, and her cigarette, she rubbed her large, bony hands together and tore the blanket off the object in the center of the attic.
A gigantic black insect. It was a sewing machine, an old malicious one, black and gold, attached to its own desk with a treadle underneath, wrought metal like the grates over fire stoves and sewers. I was dumbfounded. Was she going to show me something both intricate and hideous that she had made? I knew from home economics class that she was a good sewer. If we finished a project before class was over, our teacher would make us mend her husband’s socks, shirts, trousers, and underwear. Agata was the only one who didn’t mind doing it; she was so indifferent to whatever cloth she was feeding the machine, and it was against her nature to sew deliberately slowly like the rest of us. So she pumped out, with spiritless speed, flat doppelgängers of the teacher’s husband, the yellow pads of her tobacco-stained fingertips waltzing across the often unclean fabric which smelled like meat, soup, fruity liquors, and that fried-onions-and-mushroom scent which oozes from the bodies of grown men, as if they were nothing but sacks of unwanted leftovers. Our home economics teacher was sour-looking and had a moustache. Some of us believed her husband was imaginary, that she’d bring the newly sewn pieces home, fill them with slops and potatoes so they’d gain life-like proportions, and lie in bed with her creation, kissing it until the seams ripped, then bringing the pieces, ripped and stained with exaggeration, back to school with domestic pride, as if her husband was too large, too important, too filthy, too manly for her alone to manage.
The Doll’s Alphabet Page 5