Nor do I suppose that what I saw when I looked inside should come as a surprise: the Dukketeatre, carefully positioned so that its proscenium arch was right behind the open door, facing out. EI BLOT TIL LYST. The red velvet curtains drawn aside, revealing a small cutout figure on an otherwise empty stage. Impossible, I thought. Helle had died ten years ago last April. I stood there waiting, strangely annoyed, strangely exhilarated; I suppose I was half expecting to be confronted by the sound of her voice, by the rasping, smoky sound I thought I’d heard for the last time that day in Alma. I stood there waiting, but all I could hear was Christmas music, announcements of arrivals and departures, a pair of young lovers murmuring sad goodbyes, a man yelling to his wife to remember that he took his coffee light. “Get a load of this!” said a girl, probably about seven or eight, to a small boy, probably her younger brother. They had crept up silently and now were pressing in on either side of me, the girl jumping up and down, a flurry of short, anxious little leaps, while her brother whined that he couldn’t see. “Is that yours?” the girl asked, and I told her I guessed it was. What did I mean guessed? the girl asked. She was stocky and pragmatic, dressed in a pink parka, a large elflike ski cap, also pink, with a white pompom, pulled down low on her forehead. A blonde, I thought, even though her hair was hidden by her cap; a stocky little blonde with dry and wide-set blue eyes. Shut up! she said to the boy, who had started to wail. It’s all right, I told him. See? I grabbed him by the waist, lifting him, startled by how thin he was, how there didn’t seem to be anything intervening between his skeleton and the brown shell of his parka except for a hopelessly inadequate layer of synthetic insulation. Is it a play? he asked, and I said no, not really. That woman, I said, pointing to the cutout figure, was a famous composer, even if you couldn’t tell it to look at her. It was an opera, I said, only you couldn’t hear the music. But you could tell the woman was supposed to be singing because her mouth was open.
Then why does she look so mad? asked the girl. I craned my neck to peer around the delicate wedge of the boy’s head: the tiny paper Helle peered back. Mad? I said. Well, maybe. More like aggrieved. In pain. I recognized the figure as Flo’s handiwork, her girlhood style of applying color thickly with colored pencils, blurring the edges with a finger, suggesting detail with a deeply incised dark line here, a smear of white there. Helle in her white nightgown. A black backdrop. If she’s mad, I said, it’s because she never planned to break my heart. Carefully I put the boy back down on the black and white squares of the terminal floor. If she’s mad it’s because she didn’t want to die, I said, slamming the locker door shut and turning my attention to the girl. Listen, I said to her, you should be nicer to your little brother. Really, I said, sibylline, magnificent in my red winter coat, you should be nicer to him, or else.
Kathryn Davis is the author of seven other novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road. She has received the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.
The text of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is set in Cloister Old Style, a revival of the Venetian types of Nicolas Jenson, designed by Morris Benton for American Type Founders in 1897. Book design by Peter A. Anderson. Composition by Crane Typesetting Service, West Barnstable, Massachusetts. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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