Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (16 page)

By this time I’d been at Mrs. Oblatt’s for more than a decade. I felt that I’d lived a long time. A life of breathing in. I needed to breathe out—to create—but I didn’t know how. For now, life itself and each word I read were an inhale, building the pressure chamber within. I followed the court case of Giuseppe Zangara, who, after being sentenced to death for killing the mayor of Chicago while taking aim at Roosevelt, said, “You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair!” And when Zangara was strapped in, he shouted, “Pusha da butt. Pusha da butt,” meaning throw the switch and kill me already. I understood his fearlessness, on one hand. I wasn’t afraid of dying—my body barely existed—and if I had relegated myself to living this life mostly in my mind, at least for the first time it was my own life. Mine.

When former tenants visited Mrs. Oblatt’s boarding house with children in tow, I imagined what I must have looked like. Over the baby’s plumped face and pulsing skull, my own face—the ugly dollop of madness—bobbed and swung like a gaudy flower as I tried to smile and coo. I’d watch the baby’s eyes—merry-go-sorry-go-terrified. And I wondered,
What must I smell like to them? Fear and loss and ruin, like caked talcum when it takes on a foul stench?
My own womb was hot and bright and hollow as a Dutch oven. Deep down, I doubted that I would ever deserve to have a child. Raised a moron, my genius a waste, my insanity festering while I lived with my mother until it swelled so vividly that I had to be institutionalized, I thought of myself as lowly, a scourge, and there was no one now—not Funk or Brumus or Eppitt or my mother or Wolff—to disagree with me.

It seemed to me that each portion of my life had been cordoned off from the others. I left Eppitt and never saw him again. He never found me as he’d promised he would. My mother died, and I was gone. I wouldn’t ever return to Dr. Wolff, years from now, to tell him about my wonderful life.

I didn’t know if I would ever wake up from this deathly sleep.

W
hen I open my eyes I feel a little groggy. I’m met by the dogs, gazing at me expectantly. Last night, I took a sleeping pill, which I usually reserve for the insomnia that follows cocktail parties, awards ceremonies, and departmental potlucks. I hate these events. I hate the faculty. Of course, I’d expected the cliché—raised on media images of haughty and vain professorial types, insufferable droning bores with underlying insecurities that led the males of the species, in particular, to prey on female students. I was surprised to find it to be so very sadly true. (In fact, I was prey. Now married to the predator.)

There are exceptions, of course. Researchers who’ve devoted their lives to cancer, suicide, environmental hazards, et cetera, tend to be steadier than those who work on things that have no foreseeable effect on human beings—painfully close readings of
Middlemarch
or Harriet Wolf, for example. Literature professors must constantly prove their worth to society. Bombast is a natural by-product. Those who work on things that could actually affect the world are steadier because they’re too busy to be petty. Their appearances are spotty at parties, dinners, potlucks—like the rare species that some of them study and protect. They pick over the cheese plate, have a drink, and leave. It’s a survival strategy—of the fittest.

Ron always wants to come late, making an entrance, and then stay to the bitter end. Past the bitter end, in fact—until long after the waitstaff commences glaring. I would love to let him attend the parties alone, but he drinks, and then flirts openly, and I have to admit I get jealous. Even if Ron and I do split up, I assume he’ll always carry some sway over my heart. Sometimes, if goaded, he sings—and he’s easily goaded. We’ve developed a signal for
You’ve gone too far.
I look at him and smooth my eyebrow with my index finger. Once he spots me doing it, his face goes soft and fleshy—momentary gratitude. It’s not his intention to make an ass of himself, after all. The problem for me isn’t that he does this stuff, but the deeper insecurity that it reveals—he needs the adulation, craves it.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried to discover which of the faculty were second- or third- generation academics, for whom this is the family business. They have insights into the breed. They know who’ll last, who’s secretly on the market, who’s backstabbing whom and why. They don’t make conversation so much as they quip. I’ve gotten good at reading quips for deeper meaning. Mainly, I want to learn what they’ve mastered: how to disengage, float above it, and take what amusement they can.

Still, when I get home from these events, I invariably return to the evening—doomed to relive each moment: the foreign-destination-dropping (a semester in London, a fellowship in Indonesia), the Foucault-inspired readings of pop culture, Jung applied to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and postcolonialism sicced on
The Simpsons,
50 Cent disambiguated under their brilliant gazes, and their new areas of research like “Reclaiming the Female Anus through Postmodern Literature of the Late Nineteen Nineties.” Oh, the punishing detail.

One word comes to me:
sin.

I wasn’t raised religiously. Eleanor was too cheap to hand over money to a collection plate and had no communal instincts. She sent me to Vacation Bible School one summer because it was free. I made a Shrinky Dinks of the Madonna and child and sat on carpet remnant squares singing, “I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart,” in English and then in Spanish—
“Dónde?”
It’s a catchy tune. I find myself singing it sometimes.
“Dónde?”

But even I knew that academe is a sin—brilliant minds with nowhere important to go. Nothing important to do. I read that crowded-together dogs become neurotic and aggressive, biting their own paws. These professors are crowded-together lapdogs with a seemingly endless supply of small angry turds—the ammo of their discontent. They waddle around (the men, at least) with their jiggling peckers, nosing each and every passing ass, the frantic hunt and aimless hump of unknown shins. The worst offenders among the predatory profs are those who obviously didn’t get any action in high school. Ron included. Paybacks. The weakest gain some power and turn the tables on the unjust world of their youth.

I rub the dogs’ heads and wonder what Ron would be like if I could go back in time and get him a high-school sweetheart. A cheerleader isn’t necessary. Just a clarinetist—third chair. Someone to come up with a pet name for him, jerk him off in the parking lot reserved for seniors who make the honor roll. He’d have been a better person, maybe. Just a little.

This is what I was really getting my PhD in: Contemporary American Professorial Assholes. Didn’t Eleanor get a PhD equivalent in Assholes through her marriage to George Tarkington? Maybe I’m second-generation, in my own way.

As the dogs start to whine for me to take them out, I remember my offer to Tilton from last night: that I would take her to meet George. Why did I do that? I was a little tipsy.

What if I take Tilton on a day trip to meet George and I find out that he is, in fact, a bona fide asshole? I’d have to give up on the hope I’ve always harbored that George Tarkington loves me, misses me, regrets his marriage to Eleanor but never his girls.

And Tilton? Would she break down?

I consider taking another sleeping pill and dozing the day away. I love how sure-handed the drug is. At first, nothing, but then a little tug on the brain. Starting at the top of the skull, it pulls down something thick, almost woolen, that settles over one lobe and then another. I sense the woolliness until I no longer sense it, and when I no longer sense it, I’m asleep. I sleep hard. Best of all, there are no dreams. No Freudian dilemma to start the day. Maybe a tingling limb, but even this feels good, a little kneading of the needling flesh and the reality of my life taking shape around me, gently.

This morning, there’s faint light from the windows. I rub my right arm, which is lightly numbed from the elbow down. The Pomeranians are curled on either side of me. I pat them. I own dogs. I’m a dog owner.

I am in the home I once ran away from. Mrs. Gottleib is going to collect my mother at the hospital and bring her home. My mother doesn’t want me here and yet here I am. I might be divorcing my husband, my
second.

It’s just after 10 a.m. I’m supposed to tidy before Mrs.
Gott
leib delivers my mother. But my mother should have invited me back, should have tidied the house in eager anticipation. “Leave if you want, but don’t expect me to welcome you back! I’m not going to slaughter a lamb for an ingrate!” A good mother would regret that, would call and say she’s sorry. That apology never happened, and I’ll be damned if I’ll tidy for that woman.

Before me sits the row of boxes. Tilton’s childhood, beloved, and my own box—small, crumpled. It feels like the calcified remains of my mother’s love.

I think of Daisy Brooks, who would throw the box onto the lawn. She was beautiful and scandalous and doomed, or so it seemed. Tragically honest and jaded, she uttered the most breathtaking things. She loved Weldon Fells, the leading man—crazy, yes, but also magical.

Oddly enough, Wee-ette’s novels weren’t on display in this house when I lived here. Copies existed, surely, in boxes, closets, and attics. But I refused to look for them even when, in my teens, my curiosity kicked in. I refused to give my mother or Wee-ette the satisfaction of my attention—in any way. Instead I read the books in my high-school library, housed in the school’s musty basement. I didn’t want to risk the paper trail of checking them out. I sat in a back carrel during my free periods and read.

For a time during my junior year, I practiced Daisy’s verbal tic of compressing words. I would say “bread,” mixing “brain” and “head,” and then feign embarrassment and correct myself.

Once, a boy who played sax in the marching band called me on it at a party. “I know that thing. It’s Daisy Brooks’s thing in the Wolf books.” One of the sophomore English teachers put her first book on the summer reading list, and because it was only 185 pages, it was a popular choice.

I blushed and said, “I know. I’m the granddaughter of Harriet Wolf.” Later that night, the boy kissed me. We were stoned and sitting on a balcony overlooking an aboveground pool.

This is what the family never talks about—Harriet Wolf’s books are beautiful. They’re famous for a reason. They’re full of grace and wisdom and mystery, and when I read them in that carrel in the high-school library basement, I sometimes cried.

I will always remember the moment when Daisy and Weldon are in the canoe and she says, “Love—it’s how we’re bloomed!”

And Weldon looks at her and says, “Bloomed?”

“Did I say ‘bloomed’?” Daisy says. “I meant ‘doomed’ and ‘blessed.’”

I shut the book then. I lay my cheek on the cover and whispered, “My God.” This was in me somehow. This blooming. This unspeakable blooming.

Maybe this is why I hate Ron. He talks about my grandmother’s work with detachment. He’s never once told me what it felt like to read about Weldon and Daisy for the first time. But I’ve never talked to him about it either; it would be a confession of weakness. For him, literature isn’t meant to be felt, but dissected and given context. I wonder if Ron and I would have a different marriage altogether if we could share confessions like this. Perhaps. But only because that would make us different people.

I remember, with a sick knot of regret in my stomach, that I asked Tilton about the seventh book. I told her it would be worth a lot of money—in the millions. I don’t really care about the money, though the money would be nice, wouldn’t it? I said it to shake Tilton up, to make her realize she has something of value, possibly, to offer the world.

Here’s the truth: I want the seventh book for myself. I want it badly. I haven’t been able to fully and completely admit that until now. It’s part of why I’m here—not just my dying mother, not just to save Tilton. A chunk of my soul is here to find the seventh book, but not for its auction value or its scholarly worth. Honestly, I want to know what happens, in the end, to Daisy and Weldon. I want the rest of the story.

Ron’s instincts might be right after all. It could be here. The thought energizes me. I rise from the bed at last and kneel in front of one of Tilton’s boxes. I rummage through the typical things: drawings, paper masks, spelling words, cross sections of the heart, long division, reports—on birds, mostly. As I work my way down the row, Tilton grows up—geometry; an essay on Irish history and Yeats; physics; evolution; a photography folder, all of the pictures taken in the house and yard, close-ups of Eleanor sleeping, the fine lines of her face, and lots of birds. The dogs sniff the boxes, sniff me, sniff each other.

Finally, my box is left. “Ruthie—Random.” I crawl to it and lay my hands on the dusty cardboard, but I can’t open it. My mother would never hide anything of importance in this box. It contains the measly remains of a childhood, remnants and artifacts of a child who wasn’t liked, much less loved. I fear finding that I wasn’t a daughter, but a stranger here.

A car pulls into the driveway. I walk to the window. It’s Mrs. Gottleib’s station wagon. I see my mother’s shoulder, just her rigid austere shoulder, and hate even that.

I look at the row of disturbed boxes. There’s nothing for me here. What was I expecting? I’m going to see my mother for the first time in fourteen years.

I check my cell phone. There are two voice messages from Ron.

In the first, he simply says, “Call if you want to talk.” And in the next, he says, “Justin and I might visit Towson U. It’s eighth tier, I know. We’ll be nearby. We could stop in! Let me know. Talk to you later.”

Ron and Justin at my mother’s house? I call him back immediately. The phone rings and goes to voice mail. “Hey,” I say, trying to sound calm. “Don’t come. Please.” I immediately worry that this will only make him think I’ve found a Wolf artifact, maybe the manuscript itself. He’ll claim he missed the message and show up at the house. He’ll blame his provider. So I add quickly, “She’s dying.” And then I wrap it up as if someone’s calling me. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”

Ron hates death. When his step-grandfather died, the only grandfather he’d ever known, he refused to go to the ceremony: “They don’t need a bunch of gawkers.” When I sent a card to his mimi, he said, “I hope you didn’t mention Pop’s death!”

I said, “I think that’s the point of a condolence card.”

“I think it’s better to be positive,” he countered. “Life is for the living and all of that.” Death. He’d avoid it at any cost.

Should I feel guilty for lying about my mother’s impending death? One day she will die. I think it was Harriet’s books that drove this home for me, and in an instant I remember the scene in which Weldon is picking out carpet samples on what seems like an ordinary day until he finds an old woman dying in one of the aisles. Her heart stutters, crimps, then gives out. Later, he imagines her soul like a boat whose engine has been suddenly cut, and how the little vessel would continue to glide across the pond, eventually spinning out into slow circles. He wants to return her body—the way he wanted to return the bodies of all the soldiers who died next to him in the trenches—to swaybacked grasslands. That night, as they’re driving to a party, he asks Daisy, “Will you be my gravedigger?” And Daisy imagines Weldon’s buried body becoming one with the soil that enriches the poisonous wax-coated milkweed puff. She imagines herself rotting too, lying beside Weldon and holding her purse just as she’s holding it in the car, and how one day a prairie dog might burrow into its fine leather hide—as if nesting in a stiffened womb.

The dogs’ nails click on the hardwoods. I have to take them out. I get dressed quickly, head for the door, but then turn back, grabbing my pocketbook and sunglasses.

That’s when I see it—the small looped string. I recognize it immediately. A pact. Its masking tape tag is written in my own clunky childhood scrawl: “R. T. and T. T. 1986. Return & Save.” A pang of guilt hits me. I pick up the small loop, delicately, and think of my hand and my sister’s pressed together, held by the string. I lift it to my nose and smell the perfume—my mother’s. Tilton sprayed it on the string so that it would smell good forever.