Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (5 page)

As expected, the boys were rough. But the girls of Stump Cottage punched one another too, when the staff was absent, and resorted to stealthy pinches when the staff was present. My arms were splotched purple.

It’s impossible to be named Harriet Wolf and not be called a hairy wolf. I got it so often it became essential. A child trapped in a harsh childhood should be so lucky to have a nickname as vicious and strong as a hairy wolf. Worse things. When cornered, I growled.

The staff was overworked, harsh-tongued, even Mrs. Funk, and didn’t spare the rod, but I won’t detail the beatings or the vermin. There were always infestations. I feared things crawling into my mouth and my girl parts at night.

With fifty beds to a dormitory room, it was hard to sleep. The sickly wheezed, the traumatized screeched, and all of the patients were either sickly or traumatized or both. At their quietest, the halls echoed with labored breathing, coughing, gagging. One cry would lead to another and another and finally to a system of buzzers, wired throughout the building, to call the beleaguered staff.

The rise of panic from cries to buzzers to footsteps terrified me. My breath pinched in my throat; I feared that my nose would bleed—so much so that it usually did, and when I felt the first wet, warm tear of blood from my nostril, I was thankful. The pillow became damp as the red circle spread out around my head. If the lights flicked on, I was pulled from bed, my head yanked back, nose pinched tightly by a night warden—sometimes Mrs. Funk, sometimes another. I was marched to the bathroom to bleed over the rusted sink drain.

If undiscovered, I bled quietly, a surrender, the secret relief of it a pleasure. It must have been the same for children who pissed their rubber sheets—warm and predictable. Eventually, the bleeding stopped, and I slept in the wet comfort of my pillow. Maybe it recalled for me, in a
deeply subconscious way, my first bloody sheets—my mother’s—where I was born or died, depending on when you heard the story.

But one morning I was sitting on the edge of my cot tying my shoes when I looked up to find Mrs. Funk’s face poised over mine—a lit bulb of a face, glowing with joy. I blinked into the light of that face.

She made the sign of the cross. “Oh, small Jesus!” she said. “Little Girl Jesus of the Dreaming Wounds!”

“What is it?” I said, trapped by Mrs. Funk’s adoring gaze.

She had me stand up. “A wreath of blood. Look.”

And there, on my pillow, was a halo dried stiff and brown like a crown of thorns above the smudged outline of my face.

“Little Girl Jesus!” she whispered again as the other children circled around. “Of the Dreaming Wounds!”

I wasn’t even really human so how could I understand this thin sliver of divinity? (We are all human and divine.)

She whispered, “This is from God, Harriet Wolf. You are from God.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said quietly, afraid to disagree with her.

She stripped the linens. “But a good Catholic needs no proof. Wash it away.” She shoved the sheets at me and sent me to the laundry in the Custodial Building for Girls.

Once in the open air, I felt foggy and smaller than I’d ever felt—small as a pinprick in a piece of paper.

I was a small girl Jesus. I was from God. This was my conception.

And then I stepped into the laundry and, for the first time, I saw Eppitt Clapp, amid sheets and shirts, starches billowing like the dust of willows. He was pink and shining in the gusts of hot air, the stink of lye. He was alone amid the frail wicker and canvas laundry baskets, the abandoned, rickety ironing boards, and he was cranking the wringer, a hefty machine that stood in the middle of the room like a large bony horse. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the tough knot of his small biceps. It had been raining, so the sheets and small dresses, pants, and shirts hung from indoor lines. The air was damp and hot. His shirt was pasted to his back, and he was aglow. We were the only ones there.

I coughed loudly; he lifted his head. “What do you want?” he asked.

This was the first time I’d ever wanted anything, though I had no name for the feeling. He looked at me across the large fogged room and I was made real—incarnate. It was as if I was being seen for the first time; this was my birth and I was silent, as I had been for my mother. Eppitt walked over and took the bloody sheets. “Are you the one from Stump Cottage?”

I nodded.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Never seen a boy in the laundry?” His eyelids fluttered with the hesitations in his speech, as if the words were hung up for a moment and his lids could force them down and out of his mouth.

“I’m not looking at you,” I said, looking at him.

“I got here not long ago and Doc Brumus put me here. Steam’s good for me. I have wungs.”

“Wings?” I asked, and I thought of him in flight.

“Wings?” He looked confused. “Did I say ‘wings’?”

“You said ‘wungs.’”

“I meant lungs, weak lungs.” Then he muttered, “I get nervous and put words together.”

“Oh. Wungs. Weak lungs. Are you nervous?”

He didn’t answer. “You could work for us. You know that?”

“But I sew.”

“They’re switching people around and we need help here. You could scrub these bloody sheets yourself.” He looked at me, his head cocked, his face sweet and damp. “The Bleeder of Stump Cottage. I like you.”

“Why?” I asked. No one had ever stated that they liked me.

“I don’t usually like people, but when I do, it sticks.”

And this was how the miracle worked. Now I was born. We scrubbed laundry together on washboards in large metal tubs, held by a cloud of steam.

L
ying on my side in bed, I stare at the gauze curtains so brightly lit that it almost seems like there should be snow on the ground outside reflecting sun. I used to like winter when I was a kid. One time, Tilton and I built a small igloo in the backyard, though it didn’t last. I was the kind of child always making houses, as if my own house didn’t quite count. My husband, Ron, walks out of the bathroom and picks out a tie from a rack attached to the closet door.

“I was always making houses when I was little,” I say aloud. “Igloos, forts out of sofa cushions, nests out of pillows. I once lived under the dining room table for two whole weeks. It had a white tablecloth with little yellow embroidered flowers that went all the way to the ground. It was my tent. I wonder why some kids do that.”

“It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure that one out,” he says.

I think of Tilton—a sharp ache. Why now? Because I’m fairly sure that I’m losing Ron. New losses dig up past losses, as if one needs the other to remember how it’s done. Before we married, Ron portrayed his ex-wife, Corinne, as high-strung, cloying, and humorless. But the last time I saw her, at their son Justin’s high-school graduation, she was dating a housepainter and made two bawdy jokes. How would Ron describe me one day? He could say, “She married me because she wanted a shot at normalcy. Can you believe how banal it was to live with her?” In a sense, it’s true. Though I wouldn’t meet Ron until my midtwenties, I ran away from home when I was sixteen because I wanted to make a new home, one where I would be deemed normal.

“Did you take the dogs out?” I ask.

“They’ve had their morning constitutionals, and yapped at the Doberman next door, in a perfunctory way. They’re going through the motions, Pomeranian-wise.”

“You’re projecting.” My husband is going through the motions these days, marriage-wise.

“Well, what’s worse? Projecting or trying to fix a failing marriage by adopting twin Pompoms?”

Though it galls me to admit, he’s right. I adopted the dogs, impulsively, a couple of months ago. I was introduced to them by a friend who rescues dogs, and at first I thought I was just overwhelmed by their cuteness, but as soon as I walked them into the house, I knew it was about our marriage. Ron and I have been married for only three years and together for five, a second marriage for both of us. It seems a little early to lose momentum. Already, I imagine the relationship as a beach, and I’m an old man wearing black socks and sandals, waving a metal detector over the sand, hoping for beeps so I can dig for a watch, anything that seems like it could have a heartbeat.

And then he adds, “It would be better for Justin if we stayed together. You know that.”

Ron has two children from his first marriage: Colette, who’s twenty-five, and Justin, who’s twenty. Justin is a sweet kid, always sipping from water bottles to compensate for his dry mouth, the result of his antidepressants. He’s been given a lot of labels over the years: light Asperger’s, depression/anxiety, ADHD. He’s tried a lot of therapies: occupational, behavioral, pharmaceutical…Sometimes I wonder what he and Tilton might have in common, though I doubt she’s had any official diagnoses. Who’s better off?

“It’s hardly a matter of staying married for the sake of the kids,” I say. I have a daughter too—Hailey. She lives with her dad in Tucson—her vehement choice when she turned nine, two years ago, after a year of living with me and Ron, who wasn’t as interested in the realities of raising another child as he’d thought he’d be. Ron and I live outside Chicago, where he accepted an endowed chair at a liberal arts college not long after we met, and we have Hailey for winter holidays and two weeks in the summer after back-to-back camps. I’ll see Hailey in two months, in early August. I shut my eyes. The bright sun is a dark blot on my vision. I haven’t spoken to her in two weeks, even though she has her own cell phone now. I bought it for her so she could call me anytime. She uses it to call her friends. Hailey is my greatest joy and my greatest sorrow. It works that way sometimes. My grandmother, the famed Harriet Wolf, was the one who taught me this—not in person, not the way your average grandmother might impart wisdom to her granddaughter, but the way any of her readers might learn it: through her books. In
The Curator of Our Earthly Needs,
Daisy holds twin sparklers on a sloping lawn and thinks, “As if joy needs sorrow to understand itself. And sorrow, without joy, has no bearings.” My response is a breath:
Hailey.

As if sensing that my mood has shifted, Ron walks over and sits on the edge of the bed. In the bright sun, he looks old. He
is
old, I remind myself—nineteen years older than I am. But he’s handsome, especially by academic standards. (I appreciate the low academic standards for beauty—by which I’m pretty, which is one of the reasons I like academe in general.) Ron is even a little rugged-looking, and he has young hair, which he tends to with expensive haircuts and products.

He brushes a stray wisp from my cheek, tucks it behind my ear. “Take away the expectations,” he says, “and we could be happy.”

For people on the verge of divorce, we talk about our marriage in unsettlingly calm tones. Ron wants to stay married—to keep the money intact. He was torn asunder by his first marriage. And by “take away the expectations” he means we should stay married but as housemates, maybe date each other and other people. The expectations are monogamy and fidelity. (He doesn’t mention Melody Roth, the grad student he flirts with.) Due to residual sexual theories popular in the seventies—which stained Ron’s indoctrination—he thinks that we’re intellectual enough to separate sex from love. Or maybe he’s trying to hold on to me any way he can. He claims to love me.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.

This isn’t the first time he’s made the suggestion. Another woman—one who knows herself better?—would slap him. But I’ve realized this: the reason we should get divorced—the apathy, the inertia—is the same reason we haven’t. Can a casual marriage end in a casual divorce? Can human beings be that cavalier?

Perhaps some can, but not me. The divorce would be painful. Maybe I’d be happier, but I’d still have to mourn this loss. I’ve been through this before, and divorce can start as an idea but it becomes visceral. Ideas in this marriage, however, are cut off from emotions. Ideas are glittery conversational doodads to be collected and doled out as banter. In my current circle, banter has a bloated status. Emotions, on the other hand, are primitive.

“Hey, if we don’t stay together, we’d have to decide custody of the Pompoms. It’ll get messy.” He’s trying to lighten the mood.

“I think whoever can tell them apart should have to take them,” I say flatly.

“Better yet,” he says, “let’s not get divorced at all!”

I try to pivot away from the dissolution of our marriage. “How is Justin doing? Have you talked to him recently?” The last I heard, he wanted to transfer colleges for the third time.

“He seems to think Towson has the best website. Students are consumers. I guess I’m just some product.” I ignore the self-pity, and as the cue for me to reassure him expires, he fills the silence. “Are you coming to the wedding?”

Colette’s wedding is only a week away, in New York City. Three days after it’s over, the Harriet Wolf Society’s convention meets in DC—the one-hundredth anniversary of my grandmother’s birth. Ron is one of the rare male board members of the society, a reviewer for academic papers on Wolf. I’m purely decorative.

“Would Colette want me there? Really?”

Colette, a lesbian in college and for a few years afterward, is now marrying a man named Phil. Full of righteous indignation, she’d hated me for marrying her father, for all the obvious, personal reasons, but also because she had pegged my motive for doing it on my weakness within the strictures of a patriarchal society. Glaring at Ron and me at an upscale Thai restaurant, she said, “I don’t know which of you is more fucking pathetic. Wait! Yes I do. You!” She pointed at me. “Your father abandoned you so you’re marrying my daddy? That, my friend, is some fucked-up heterosexuality!” It was a moment I’ve never forgotten.

“Of course she wants you there,” Ron says. “Anyway, she’d only misread your absence as an attempt to garner attention.” This is so true. “What about the HWS convention? Are you going to leave me to wander it alone?”

The last and only time I’ve gone, Ron introduced me as Harriet’s granddaughter. People drilled me with arcane questions about my grandmother’s texts, complained about my mother’s hostility to Wolf scholars, asked me to sign something commemorative, and openly pitied me—I was no Harriet Wolf, after all. What a shame! “I don’t know,” I say to Ron.

“You have no other obligations,” he says, which is coded. He wanted me to take on summer teaching, and the subtext of his tone is that I’m spoiled. “Have you seen my cell?” he asks, and leaves the bedroom in search of his phone, which is in a perpetual cycle of being lost and then found and then lost again.

His scolding lingers, though. Ron used to make me feel adolescent in a good way. He knew so much more than I did when we met. He called me
mercurial;
I had to look it up. Now he reminds me of my tragic teen years, when I was so self-conscious that I didn’t know what to do with my hands, how to stand, when to roll my eyes or laugh, or how loudly. My mother showed up for school functions wearing panty hose long after the other mothers had abandoned this formality. She didn’t smile or chitchat. She held Tilton’s hand even though Tilton was nine by this point. Worse, Tilton accepted it or perhaps barely noticed. It’s hard for me to think of Tilton, especially after I was no longer there to protect her. Even the night I climbed out the window and ran off, I knew she could be locked away in that house with our mother forever. When I was studying psych as an undergrad, I diagnosed myself with survivor’s guilt. I dropped the major, opting for ceramics, which I also then abandoned.

Because I didn’t commit to psych long enough to figure out a conventional treatment plan, I came up with my own. I willed myself not to think deeply about the past. I’ve learned not to dwell on my failed roles—granddaughter and daughter, sister, wife, and mother. I don’t know how to be a mother. I watched my mother be a mother to Tilton, but to me? Tilton and Hailey pain me the most. They’re so linked I imagine that if I could save one of those relationships, I would save both.

To fail as a mother is to fail utterly, proof that I don’t understand love in its most basic form, that I’m unworthy of the blind and unconditional love granted by simple biology. If I don’t deserve this kind of love, what love could I possibly deserve? Hailey stated her choice to live with her dad in a letter written on strawberry-scented stationery. I keep it folded in my wallet. A good mother would have fought for her, but I know why she chose Jim. He teaches her Spanish by taping words to stuff in the house and paints rocks with her. I’m too much like my mother, awkward and clunky at love—too much or too little, like driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brakes, sometimes hitting both at the same time.

Ron loved me when I needed love. There’s a lot to be said for that. He didn’t judge me on my motherhood. And he gave me normalcy—better yet, high-ranking normalcy. I went from grad student to faculty wife. From student loan debt to stipends for summer travel. Plus, I could abandon my dissertation—not right away, but after a few years of my degree being ABD, it mercifully melted away. I’d never have to go on the job market dressed as a midlevel Russian bureaucrat or get rejected by academe or do all the shit I never wanted to in the first place. Is this antifeminist? Or just abject fear and desperation and laziness?

Colette was right. I married a daddy, which is some fucked-up heterosexuality.

But Dr. Ron Everly, PhD, did not marry an adolescent, not even just a grad student of his. It was worse. He fell in love with and married a relic from his area of expertise, twentieth-century modernism: a descendant of Harriet Wolf. But then the relic turned out to be just me.

I’ve heard Ron talk about my grandmother’s rendering of adolescence—the loss of the magical for the darkly surreal, slipping into apocalyptic dystopia. “Once childhood is obliterated,” I’ve heard him lecture, “the apocalypse is endured while the adult world imposes its corrupt rules of oppression.” This lecture—sometimes given in an impromptu way at a social event surrounded by grad students, as if he’s just coming up with it all at that very moment—eventually touches on my grandmother’s treatment of middle age with absurdist postmodernism. But can he see how she would render us, if she’d had the chance? Wouldn’t the two of us and our flimsy marriage be corrupt and postapocalyptic and absurdist and postmodern and therefore a form of undeniable realism? That’s how I see it.

After Ron confessed six months ago to a serious flirtation with Melody Roth, it dawned on me that I needed family. They know you from the beginning—a version that’s elemental. So I rekindled my relationship with Tilton, at least by phone, and we’ve talked several times now.

I pick up the receiver of the phone on the bedside table and dial my mother’s home phone number, the same all these years later. It crosses my mind that once I hear Tilton’s voice, I might hang up. I just started a dog-training class earlier this week. The teacher—a handsome man in his late thirties with doggy treats in his pockets and no wedding ring—said that you shouldn’t chase the dog if you want it to come back. You’ve got to get the dog to chase you. This is also advice on men that I’ve never been able to follow. It wouldn’t work on Ron. He’s too stubborn. As a child, he once got in a breath-holding competition and held his breath until he passed out. He has a scar on his chin from the fall. It’s hard to tell whether I really want Ron fully back in my life or simply want him to want me madly. I wouldn’t have the heart to hang up on Tilton. But the line rings and rings. Eleanor’s too cheap to spring for an answering machine.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind being chased. I could have tried to get my father to chase me. A couple of months after I ran away from home, I ended up at a shelter and a counselor tracked him down. They called Eleanor too, but George had already agreed to take me in. I never spoke to my mother about it. What did she think of me back with my father after all those years?