Cat in Glass (12 page)

The following Saturday, Fairfax and I collect cardboard cartons from supermarket trash bins and pack our belongings in them. She fills six boxes; I fill fifteen, even after I have thrown away everything I can bear to part with. I wish possessions were not so important to me. Sometimes I suspect myself of trying to build a past with them, article by article.

Fairfax sits on the floor, tossing items from my “must keep” pile into the open cartons, stopping now and then to examine something that catches her interest. She tries on a sequined black glove, crooks her little finger as if she were drinking tea, and laughs.

“Where’s the mate to this?” she asks.

“As far as I know, it’s never had one,” I reply.

She opens an old cigar box and holds up one of the many sand dollars she finds inside it. “I remember the day we gathered these!” she says. “On that beach up north where Sister Michael and Sister Mary Rose used to take us camping.” She half smiles and tilts her head. “We were just little girls. You’ve saved them all these years?”

I smile and nod. Though I’ll never really know, I imagine that Fairfax and I are a lot like blood relatives.

Tony DiMarini has offered to help us move. I’ve been thinking about him off and on, in a cranky and distrustful way. I imagine him as a handsome young professor in his thirties, neatly attired in an Oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up just so, like the men in aftershave ads. Someone suave and unscrupulous who is probably after the body of every pretty redhead on campus.

It is late afternoon when he taps on our open door. He clears his throat, says, “Hi, is this the right place?” and trips over something invisible as he walks into our room. While Fairfax and I help him up, my rakish image of him dissolves into one of herons, mostly their legs, knobby and impossibly fragile. He has frizzy blond hair, and there are holes in the seat of his jeans, through which I catch a glimpse of plaid boxer shorts. The collar of his rumpled shirt is buttoned, and his Adam’s apple jumps up and down above it like a skinny, hairless mouse every time he speaks. I like him almost immediately, perhaps because he is not at all what I expected. If he is attracted to Fairfax, he will have to work hard to get her.

Tony’s car is a convertible with a dangling front bumper and an engine that sounds like a freight train. “Nineteen sixty-four Bonneville. They don’t make them like this anymore,” he says, proudly tapping the hood. The car is so huge that all twenty-one of our cartons fit easily into the backseat and the trunk. There is plenty of room for the three of us, and Fairfax’s cello, on the bench seat in front.

When we reach the new house, Lavinia Desmond, tiny, platinum-haired, and dressed in summer woolens, greets us at the door.

“Roddy. Roddy!” she calls, as she leads us through the vestibule. “Mary Fairfax and her friend have arrived.”

Roddy pokes his head around a corner, plucks a briar pipe from his purplish lips, and waves it gleefully. “Hello, Mary.” He gazes in my direction and lifts a bushy eyebrow. “And you must be …?” he says.

“Electra Thorpe.”

“Of course. Lovely, lovely,” he cries, clasping my hand in his.

“I’ve already listed the house rules for Mary, my dear,” says Lavinia as she leads us up the polished hardwood stairs. “But for your benefit I’ll mention them again. No parakeets. I can’t stand cleaning the little doo-dahs off the walls. Try to keep the noise to a minimum after two in the morning. And no group baths.”

“Lavinia, my dear, you’re so priggish,” says Roddy.

Lavinia rambles on, unperturbed. “Clean sheets and towels once a week, meals included, $250 a month, cash please, and we’ll probably ask you to do a few things around the kitchen and the garden.”

We have reached the third floor. We stand in a narrow hallway with two doors on the right and two on the left. It is a warm day, but even this close to the roof the house is cool. Through a small, round window at the far end of the hall, I can see the branches of the willow tree shifting in the afternoon air, dappling the walls with green shadows.

“Bathroom is the last door on the right,” says Roddy. “This is Tony’s room.” He raps his knuckles on the first door to our left, grins at Fairfax and me, winks broadly at Tony.

Lavinia clucks, rolls her eyes, and says, “Men.”

She points out the remaining two rooms, one on either side of the hall. “These are yours, my dears, though you’ll have to decide for yourselves who gets which.”

She holds up identical keys, the old-fashioned kind with a hollow handle and a wide, intricate prong at the bottom. “House keys,” she says, and hands one to each of us. Then she presses her index finger to her cheek. “Let me see. What have I forgotten?”

Tony smiles. There are prominent dimples in his pale cheeks. “The list of hours, maybe?” he says.

“Ah yes. Breakfast at seven, supper at eight. You’re on your own for lunch. But there’s tea in Roddy’s study every day at five. You’re invited, of course.”

Then she plucks at Roddy’s shirt sleeve. “Come along now. I need you in the kitchen to open some jars for me.”

“Lovely, lovely,” he says, waving as she tugs him toward the stairs. “So nice to have you here.” His voice bounces off the hardwood as he disappears. The sound of it fills me with the same kind of pleasant warmth I used to feel at the orphanage when Sister Mary Rose rocked me after bad dreams.

Tony and Fairfax and I stand grinning at each other in the dusky hallway. Maybe everything will be all right.

I choose the room next to the bathroom, which is just as high and bright as I imagined. The walls are pale green, and
the ceiling is slanted. The window is made of small, square panes of beveled glass and has a wide wooden seat beneath it. If the room has any disadvantage at all, it is a view of the sea. In past years, I would have liked nothing better. But since the dreams began, the ocean makes me uneasy at times. I would rather take the other room, the one next to Tony’s, which faces the street. But I’m afraid that if the nightmare comes again, I’ll disturb Tony, and I would rather he never found out about it.

At first, I live on edge, waiting for the first bad night, anticipating it every time I turn out the lights. But days flow past, and the dream does not return. I begin to relax in spite of myself. We help Roddy patch the roof. I laugh and hammer shingles. I stand square-shouldered and look down on Las Piedras, feeling like the queen of the mountain.

As August turns to September, we help Lavinia pick pomegranates. We crush half the berries in sterilized stone crocks, and Lavinia adds yeast and sugar to start them fermenting into wine. “The finest ritual of the year,” she says. We stand in a row at the sink, all of us spattered with crimson juice, tapping feet, knives, and wooden spoons to the beat of rock music from Lavinia’s portable tape deck. Tony grins wickedly as he reaches over to dab my nose with his dripping red finger. The kitchen is filled with delicious steam and the smell of boiling stoneware.

The fall semester begins at school. I embark on predicate calculus and non-Euclidean geometry, once again eager and excited by the elegance of mathematics. Time softens the edges of my recollections. Perhaps the nightmare has
gone forever; perhaps it wasn’t really so bad after all. Only once in all this time does a faint echo of the old terror rise up. One afternoon as I walk home from classes, I notice street names impressed in the concrete curb at the corner just before the house. I’m surprised to discover that the name on the Melville curb does not say Melville. It says
Loma de Viento
. I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t know what the words mean. Yet as I stand looking down at them, a tingle runs over my scalp. I shake myself and walk home quickly, feeling foolish.

On a chilly evening in mid-October, Tony and Fairfax and I don sweaters and drag wicker chairs from the porch to the front lawn. Warming our fingers around mugs of hot chocolate, we watch an eclipse of the moon. Through shoals of broken clouds, the moon shifts slowly from silver egg to red fingernail, and Tony talks. In a low, drowsy voice, he tells about his work at the physics lab, where they are experimenting with niobium balls, trying to prove the existence of free quarks. We argue, smiling, about whether physics is a field of mathematics, or mathematics is a field of physics. Fairfax asserts that music is the essence of them both.

I keep waiting for him to move closer to her, put his arm around her, idly play with her hair the way men do in paperback romances. But it never happens. In fact, he seems so intent on our discussion of physics and mathematics that he hardly notices anything else. Matters of the heart seem mysterious to me. I am nearly twenty-one years old and still a virgin. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed at Our
Lady of the Harbor and joined the Little Sisters of Saint Camillus. Joining a religious order has never been very far from my thoughts. Often, I perceive it as the only right and natural course. It is always Fairfax who convinces me that I should wait a little longer before deciding.

Later, alone in my room, I fall asleep thinking of Tony, his face animated in the glow of the stars and the red moon, the smell of cocoa on his breath, like a little boy. And as hour moves into hour, the nightmare comes again.

This time, the order of the dream events is subtly different from before. I huddle in the black chapel on the deck of the pitching ship. But now one wall of the chapel is a chain-link fence like the one on the orphanage playground. Beyond it stands a man, familiar somehow, clinging to the fence. I can’t see his face, but I think it is Tony, bearded, hunched in a sailor’s peacoat.

“Electra!” he cries. And he chants the words. “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind.” Suddenly, I remember such a man from my childhood. It’s not Tony. Not Tony at all.

Coming from his lips and not mine, the words have no effect. The wind laughs at him, howls at him. A
bargain is a bargain
. And something else, something new.
Almost of age. Almost mine now
. And it grabs me and spins me around till I scream.

I fancy I can hear the echo of that scream as I awaken. My window stands open, drifting slowly back and forth on its hinges. Under my nightgown, rivulets of sweat run down
my ribs. That man. All these years he has lain buried in the clutter of other events, other people. How could I have forgotten about him?

Someone flings open the door. “Electra!” Tony stumbles into the pale rectangle of the doorway. “Jesus …” The word comes out of him in a long whisper. “Jesus!”

The horror in his voice makes me look around. Nothing is where it used to be. Pictures have been blown off the walls. Books and papers are strewn everywhere. My bed is upended and lies, frame and mattresses separate, on the floor behind me. My bedclothes stretch in a twisted rope from one corner of the room to the other. Feathers from my pillow fall through the air in lazy eddies.

“What’s going on?” Fairfax appears behind Tony, hastily tying the belt of her robe.

I hear urgent footsteps on the stairway and Roddy’s voice. “Put that thing away, Lavinia! You’ll kill us all.” Someone flips the light on. Lavinia lurches into the room, breathless, waving a dusty pistol, and Roddy grabs it from her. Then everyone stands in shocked silence, staring at the wreck of my room.

Fairfax is the first to move. She runs to the window, sticks her head out, looks up and down the backyard. “I don’t see anybody,” she says. “We must have scared him away” She turns and helps me to my feet.

My head is still spinning from the dream. “It was nobody,” I say. “Just the wind. The wind did it.” I watch the color leach out of Fairfax’s cheeks, and I start to shake. My teeth chatter. It is cold in the room. Without speaking,
Fairfax untwists my blanket and drapes it around my shoulders. I feel her trembling; her hands are moist and chilly.

Tony, dressed in pajamas with tiny, faded fleur-de-lis all over them, scrubs his knuckles across his hair. “The wind? How could the wind do this? It’s not even blowing.”

Fairfax snaps at him. “Can’t you see she’s half asleep and scared out of her wits? Of course it wasn’t the wind. It was something else.”

But Lavinia picks her way across the room and shuts the window. With great authority she says, “Well, it’s possible. We do get freak winds up here on the hill sometimes. They used to call this street Loma de Viento, you know, before they decided everything in the neighborhood should have a literary name. So silly.”

My scalp prickles again, just as it did when I saw the words in the curb. “Loma de Viento. What does that mean?” I ask in a voice thin and quavery.

Roddy snorts. “It was a bad day indeed when they discontinued the Latin requirement.” He emphasizes his words with the barrel of the pistol.

“For heaven’s sake, watch where you point that thing,” says Lavinia. She turns to me. “Loosely translated, it means Windy Hill, my dear.”

In a daze, I watch them put my bed back together. Everyone agrees the question of how it happened is better left for the morning. When Tony and the Desmonds have gone back to their own rooms, Fairfax takes me by the shoulders. “It was the dream, wasn’t it?”

I nod.

“Have you ever thought … you know, there are people who can move things with their minds. I don’t even know what they call it. Psycho-something.” She leans toward me. There are fine lines of tension in her forehead. “Electra, I’m afraid for you. You’ve got to do something about this. Talk to somebody.
Please
.”

I struggle to keep my balance on the wire between laughter and tears. “Who can I talk to? Just tell me. Who knows how to stop the wind?”

“I’m trying to tell you it’s not the wind! It’s something inside you.”

“And I’m trying to tell you it is the wind. Crazy as it sounds,
it is the wind
.”

She lets go of my shoulders and heaves a sigh, one I have heard often before, the one that says,
all right for now, but this isn’t settled yet
. “The least you can do is let me stay with you,” she says. “I don’t think you should be alone tonight.”

So we climb into bed together, as we often did when we were little girls. With my head next to hers, I float on the surface of exhausted sleep, thinking about our address. Loma de Viento. 713 Windy Hill. The rational part of me assures the irrational part that it’s just a coincidence, that predetermination is an outmoded notion, that nothing from my dark, unknown past has manipulated me into moving to a part of town where there are “freak winds.”