The Empress Chronicles (5 page)

I stretch out long on the futon, its rumply fabric bunching beneath me. As earlier, my head feels twice its usual size, my body shrinking beneath it. I separate my fingers and scan my hands for dirt.
Don’t count don’t count don’t count don’t count.
Dr. Greta’s voice bursts through the rhythm in my head: “Lizbeth, when you feel the urge,
engage
!”

I open the diary. A sketch is in order, so I turn to what I think is a blank page and, voila, it’s not a blank page but a page full of sharp foreign script. Vowels with dots on top. Squiggles that looked like capital
B
. German scribble. Dr. Greta, no doubt, mindlessly infesting my food diary with shrink notes in her mother tongue.

I run my fingertips over the blotchy ink. The next page has more notes and something written in English as well:
Count Sebastian must die
, it says. No explanation. Just
Count Sebastian must die
.

I slap the journal closed. It feels like an omen. Some sort of prophesy. Crazy, out of control. I reach for my pills—the only thing, in this moment, that seems familiar.

The summer months passed quickly. In short order, we were to return to our winter home in Munich. Munich, where polish and stiff shoes and curtseying punctuated all hours.

As my family prepared for our trip back to the city, a cold, damp veil of doom lingered in the halls and rooms of Possi. Mummi walked with her head down, her spaniels following her a pace behind, their snorty noses pointed to the floor like the little copycats they were. The maids and Cook ceased their chatter, working quietly, efficiently, to put the house in order. My brothers and sisters scattered, hiding in the vast far reaches of our summer castle, many absorbed in books, and those who could not yet read were off in corners with dolls and toys. Summer was lifting, moving south, and in its place was a sunken cloud that cast dew upon the landscape. Papa was off on another adventure, this time in Cairo, and Mummi shook her head whenever I inquired as to his return.

Meanwhile, I felt I’d inhabited the body of another.

When I passed by the great gilt mirror in the hall, I had to touch my reflection to make sure the body I saw was mine. I’d grown taller yet this summer and my dress grazed my calf, revealing two sticks from boot tops to hem. I wasn’t a homely girl, exactly. In fact, but for my teeth, I should think myself quite comely. But when I looked closer, there they were, as the archduchess had pointed out: the defects that would keep me from ever being a queen or an empress. Teeth stained the color of cider. Pewter eyes like slanted almonds in my hopelessly round peasant face. Dresses torn at the sleeves and frayed at the cuff. The woman I was destined to become was now pushing against my skin from the inside. When I jumped, I could feel the tiny swellings on my chest as separate things. My body was not as straight up and down as I was accustomed to, and from the side, a gentle sway could be seen settling into my back.

In front of the mirror I hopped, just to decide whether I liked or loathed the bouncy, swollen lumps on my chest. Both liking and loathing were true, and this pained me. The archduchess had criticized my teeth, and my little brother, Gackl, treated me more as a playmate than an elder sister, and these truths, too, gave pause. Would I ever grow to be as beautiful as Lola Montez? Surely, she had been a girl once, thin and angled, before her bosom had swelled quite so grandly under her layers of jewels. Jewels, Mummi said, that should rightly belong to Uncle Ludwig’s wife.

I longed for my diary, which was already packed in a crate with my pantalettes and most likely stacked in the back of the coach. Once I got back to Munich, I would write of this conundrum. This issue of being too old and too young all at once. If I could not disappear into the woods and have my adventures and ride with Papa to the beer gardens pretending to be a gypsy, what then? Not fine enough for court. Too grown up for play. What was open to me?

Mummi, every day, still sobbed out loud for reasons I found pitiful. She lamented Papa’s exotic journeys. She cried over having too many wild, uncontrollable children. And most of all, she worried about reentry once we were back at the Herzog in Munich. With Uncle Ludwig’s mind scrambled over Lola Montez, the scandal of it all, the Wittelsbach family was in peril. Nobody was quite sure at this moment who, indeed, was king. Was it my Uncle Ludwig, crazy as he was, or his boring son, Maximilian? I longed to scream at her, “Who cares about Munich? Why can we not simply stay up in the country?”

All I knew was that we were returning to Munich after months away. The uprising caused by my uncle’s affair had us happily banished to Possi, where we’d had three glorious seasons and had even celebrated my very favorite holiday, Christmas.

Christmas at Possi had been beyond delightful. Each of us children had our very own tree, and the pine logs hissed in the great ceramic fireplaces—and the sweets! Cook boiled chocolate for our breakfast and whipped up fresh cream. Papa and Mummi danced together, and when they weren’t dancing, Papa played the zither. We had invited all of our neighbors to come over to take part in our splendor. Peasants and farmers and even some of Papa’s troupe were all dancing, red-faced, joyous. Newly born Sophie passed from arm to arm. Never was there a happier time. My birthday, Christmas Eve, was celebrated with a roasted hog, smoked lamb, boiled hare, and three-day chicken stew. Cook even made spaetzle and sauerkraut, my very favorite foods.

Now, I looked out the window to the lane that meandered toward me from the wood. Nine months earlier, we’d arrived on that very lane, while snow had fallen like glistening sugar from the molasses sky. Stars mixing with snow, all of it twinkling, a magical spill of glitter. The evening of arrival, Psyche and Cupid had been harnessed to the sleigh, bells on their leathers charming the night. As we’d approached Possi, the large windows had glowed with candles, the glass smeared with a warm fog, where frost had melted. But where I now stood, candles had long burned down and waxy puddles marked the sills. Trails of pine needles and bark chips carpeted the rooms. Christmas was long over.

“Elisabeth.”

I jumped.

“Stop daydreaming and get your canaries and parrots to the portico.”

“Nené, I didn’t hear you come in. You frightened me.”

“By whose name are you calling me?”

“Helene. Your forgiveness.”

My sister looked lovelier than ever, though a new severity had crept about her mouth. Only seventeen, she looked twenty-five. Not a hair out of place.

“
Duchess
Helene.”

“Your forgiveness.” I bowed. Then curtsied.

“Duchess Elisabeth, you need to brush your hair,” she said, then twirled off.

We did not leave Possi by sleigh, of course. Our large carriage was weighted with trunks, children and cages full of animals. Psyche and Cupid were too small to drive our entire family and possessions back to Munich, so they followed, pulling the servants’ carriage. Our team, a pair of elderly drafts, farted and groaned with the load as we ambled through the woods and out onto the main passage.

Mummi held baby Sophie loosely on her lap. Our little sister was curious and stretched her hand out to try and reach the shiny carriage bell. Mummi scowled. I took the baby from her, as little Sophie was becoming more and more my comfort. She played with my hair and touched my eyelids, moving her chubby finger down my face.

As we rumbled through the villages and then into the city I could feel a tightness constricting me, invisible bars closing in.

My elder sister was working extra hard at sitting upright, as though she were being viewed and appraised by the bustling masses.

I addressed her. “Are you practicing, the Duchess Helene?”

She looked at me stiffly. “Just Duchess without the ‘the.’ Simply, ‘Duchess Helene.’”

“What do you think it will be like living in Vienna, Duchess Helene?”

Nené took in a deep breath, and then, a miracle. She actually smiled. I could tell that inside her carefully tended head she had visions of grandness. “When I am empress of Austria,” she began, “I imagine that I will attend many affairs, dressed in gowns of epiglé velvet. And when I wed Emperor Franz Joseph, I shall wear a veil of point d’Angleterre and a rich diadem sparkling with diamonds. Perhaps, also, I’ll have rosebuds woven into my hair.”

I looked at her simple brown morning dress. It did, at least, have pearl buttons. “But what about your heart?” I wanted to know. “Will you be in love?”

Mummi burst in before my sister could answer. “Love, my daughters, is not the point.”

Love, not the point?
Why?
I begged to differ with Mummi.
If not love, what then?
It seemed to me that love was the point of everything. Love of freedom. Love of pastries. Love of Cupid and Psyche. Of the tokens that bespoke adventure, such as my dried-up little fox brush. I recalled Count S. as he’d shot his firearm and butchered the fox. He’d been full of love, even in that act. Just to be in the world and feel sun against one’s cheeks. Was that not love? But I held my tongue. I could see Mummi was in no mood for an argument.

We were almost home. Up ahead lay the English Garden that adjoined our palace. The shrubbery and flowers were trimmed and plucked, the walkways swept clear of the early dying leaves. The city was clearly different from Possi. Everything so straight, hard, cold. Baby Sophie felt heavy in my lap.

Our carriage came to a halt in front of our Munich home, the Herzog Palace. The tall windows were all in lines, three rows high, the roof, an angry red. Mud-colored blocks of stone wedged together hid courtyards that I knew had not changed since last I’d seen them. Herzog looked the same in any season, like a strict instructor hovering over me with his stick; the large building cast its long shadow.

We waited for the footman, and as we sat, my heart lightened. For there, from the corner of my eye, I spied my father’s bay gelding, Phantasius. Papa had come home.

All week, amid the clutter, filth and cats, I work on being a good daughter. I make eye contact with The Girlfriend when she speaks to me. I marvel at her nut butters, goat cheeses, and handcrafted laundry detergent made from herbs and borax. I even sit down on the back porch with her and let her show me how to turn wool into felt, while she discusses my knitting Dad a beret for Father’s Day. Little white iPod wires dangle over my shoulders, at the ready, but I try my best to be polite and not stick them in my ears.

Our back-and-forth goes:

The Girlfriend: He’s getting a little thin on top, don’t you think?

Me: Um. Yeah. A little.

The Girlfriend: Maybe we can surprise him with a matching scarf.

Me: I don’t knit.

The Girlfriend: What a shame! I’m a Waldorf girl, you know. Learned to finger knit first. Want me to show you?

Me: Um.

The Girlfriend: You know, my brother isn’t much of a fan of the handwork either, but boy, can he whittle!

Me: Your brother? The one who’s coming up here?

The Girlfriend: You’ll like him. He’s a gifted athlete. The only kid from Oregon invited to play on an elite European soccer team.

Great. I picture a weird kid wearing a hand-knit beret, wielding a pocketknife, carving a gnome from a piece of bark while juggling a soccer ball.

The Girlfriend: You’re doing a great job with that felting needle, but maybe you could lose the gloves?

Me: *sticks earbuds in ears*

We are felting in order to make something called acorn babies for one of Willow’s sisters, who just spawned a child named Indigo. Crafts are problematic for me; they seem pointless. At Providence there was all this therapy involving macaroni, glue, pipe cleaners. Harmless supplies that you couldn’t poke a hole in your jugular with. My self-portraits always ended up looking like a fifty-year-old man. Today, with the acorn babies project, I have on my disposable latex gloves. Schubert blasts in my earbuds. It’s my compromise when Dad restricts my hand washing to three times a day; I replace what I want to do—scour the germs off my hands—with a rousing B-flat trio.

After the felting, the next thing on the list is my very first adventure in the goat pen. Dad is hoping I’ll help him milk. I’m working up to that with this felt project, and I focus on shoving the needle through the wooly fluff, tuning out The Girlfriend’s constant talking with music. But all the while the cryptic message in the food diary intrudes:

Count Sebastian
must die
.

After seeing that note last night, I scanned
Death by Fame
but found nothing related to a count other than brief mention of a girlhood crush. Some unnamed dude, who was indeed a count. He was sent to war, then he died of some mysterious illness just before Sisi got engaged to Emperor Franz Joseph.

I thought up some possibilities. Maybe the food diary belonged first to another of Dr. Greta’s patients? I imagined a German
Fraulein
, a modern version of her little empress. A diamond-in-the-rough-type girl with long, thick hair.

The piano in my ears fades. A violin picks up. How fast would a violinist need to be swinging his bow across those strings to produce that crescendo? The sound of the violin is its own language. Insistent. Demanding.

TheCountMustDieTheCountMustDieTheCountMustDieTheCountMustDieCountSebastianMustDie
. I begin to follow what I hear with my own hand, stabbing and stabbing a needle through the wooly fluff. “Ow!” A drop of red oozes beneath the yellowish, somewhat see-through rubber of the gloves. I yank Schubert out of my ears, but his music continues to flood the space around us.

The Girlfriend reaches for and grasps my hand, holding it away from the felt as if she’s just caught a mouse about to eat her goat cheese. “Let’s get this off,” she cries. “So we can see how deep the puncture is.”

She pulls me and my bloody finger inside and to the bathroom, where a scummy sliver of handcrafted soap lies on the sink next to the faucet. Black drips of grime squiggle from under the soap toward the basin.

“I can take care of this myself,” I tell her, pushing her away with my unstabbed hand.

She tries to hide the look of rejection and tucks her not-quite bangs back into her bobby pins. Then, thankfully, she turns and walks out, leaving me alone in the bathroom.

I hook the little metal locking hardware into its eye—a minimal stab at privacy. I turn on the separate, old-fashioned faucets full force and move my hands back and forth between hot and cold. I watch pale red blood run down the drain, lighter and lighter until it’s just water. The hot water gradually gets hotter and the burn feels that familiar, painful good.

Under the sink, behind a curtain, I know there’s a natural bristle toothbrush, mineral oil, and a roll of brownish toilet paper. Doctor Somebody’s tooth powder, a book of matches, and a scented candle. With only one bathroom, it’s evidently necessary to offset the smell of bowel movements. I imagine Dad, The Girlfriend, this brother who is coming any day, all sitting on this toilet, fouling up the air.

Disgusting.

The hardest part about the psych ward was having to use the bathroom. A musical-note sticker on my chart announced bulimia. They thought themselves so clever with that one, but I figured it out right away. With the anorexics and bulimics, they wouldn’t let us use the bathroom unattended. When we had to go, we summoned a nurse, who unlocked the tiny water closet and stood outside of it while we sang the entire time so the nurse could be sure we weren’t vomiting. Sometimes, we could get away with humming, but since the frequent flyers were experienced in horking while humming, a savvy attendant would bang on the door unless she could really make out the song. “I can’t name that tune in six notes, missy,” the nurse might say. “Let’s hear it!”

Here in the tiny bathroom, my little zippered pouch of toiletries sits behind a crock that holds The Girlfriend’s menstrual sponges. I knew they sold these tampon alternatives, but I never imagined anyone actually used them.

I hold my hands under the hot water as long as I can stand it. Count to a hundred. The water is so hot it makes them go numb. When I reach the end, my hands are salmon-colored and my punctured finger stings. The pain of it all moves up my arm, up the back of my neck. My head tingles. Schubert’s trio winds down—the sad moan of a cello dribbling out the tiny eardrum speakers that hang like a skinny scarf around my neck.

“Do they bite?” I ask once I get to the goat pen, my finger bandaged in gauze and protected by a double glove.

Dad chuckles. “No, Princess, but they have been known to suck.”

I’m not sure if Dad is being funny. Like, funny ha-ha, or funny inappropriate, or what. Ever since hooking up with The Girlfriend, there has been a tinge of lust to everything that he says. It gives me the creeps.

“Dad, really,” I say, folding my arms tight as a goat with floppy ears ambles toward me and inches its fat, black lips up my stomach.

I back up all squeamish, grossed out, ready to bolt, and Dad pulls the goat off of me by its collar. “Settle, Shamrock,” he mumbles. He scratches it behind the ears, and the goat pushes against his hand; its eyes go all bliss. “Shamrock’s my favorite,” he says. “The best producer we have, but she’s a little feisty.”

I’m still backed away, my arms folded in tight. The animal odors pierce my brain. I try not to breathe. The last time I was around farm animals was a vacation with Dad to San Diego. The petting part of that zoo was carved into a hill and shaded by ginormous eucalyptus trees, sort of the way you’d imagine Heaven, if Heaven had a petting zoo. For two quarters you could buy a bag of cracked corn and when you walked around with it, it was like you were a rock star and all the sheep and goats were your adoring fans. Dad and I sprinkled the dusty kernel bits in little arcs around our feet, and lo and behold, adorable as Bambi, the creatures appeared, stilt-walking on their spindly legs, and touching us lightly with their velvet noses.

And when one of them crapped, discreet workers in white uniforms sidled up with stiff brooms and dustpans, and all was whisked away, practically before the little dung balls hit the dirt. It was a Disneyland sort of experience. But here, in the dilapidated goat shed made of warped, splintery boards, the animals were seasoned and smelly. Breadcrumbs of turds dotted the enclosure. The goats had swaybacks and big stomachs and udders, and their hip bones jutted out under stiff, stained fur.

I hold up my injured hand and shake my head when Dad says, “Want to milk her?”

The bag of milk under the goat is disturbing. It’s as if someone has blown up one of my rubber gloves and taped it to the goat’s underside. The ridiculous udder nearly reaches its knees, or whatever the knobby middle section of its legs is called.

“Where are the babies?” I want to know.

Dad smiles. “Well, Liz, that’s sort of the bummer about raising goats for cheese. You have to offload the kids pretty quick, keep the butterfat high. Babies stress the doe out.”

I pull my arms in tighter. “You mean they’re less stressed when the kids just disappear? Don’t they go nuts?”

“Oh, for a day or two. Then they sort of forget they ever had them.”

I imagine Mom, now on a cruise ship in the ocean, probably dancing up a storm with a handsome stranger. Mom, forgetting about me. A small prickle of a tear tries to form in the corner of my eye. I will not cry. Not again.

“We have the milking stanchions over on the side of the shed. It’s getting to be about that time. Want to watch?” Dad grabs Shamrock’s collar and starts hauling the doe toward a stockade-type device. It’s shaped like something from eighteenth-century Salem, where they burned women they thought had powers.

I’m itchy suddenly, as though poison oak has suddenly infested my body from the inside out. My throat, the backs of my hands, under the gloves. It’s taking all my concentration not to scratch.

Dad slams the goat’s head between two wooden slats, Marie Antoinette style. The goat bleats but then seems happy enough when Dad hangs a bucket of grain on a hook near her face. He assembles the goods: the pail, the gloves, a bottle of something with a skull-and-crossbones warning on it. Then, he turns to me. “I’m really proud of you, Liz,” he says, rubbing his stained mechanic’s hands on the hem of my T-shirt sleeve. My arms look even more sticklike next to my father’s sausage fingers, which are like an emery board on my skin, but still, I love feeling them there. “You’ve worked really hard, and your hair is growing in well, and you’ve gained a bit of weight. I think you’ll like it here once you settle in.”

I look down at my sneakers, embarrassed. He has no idea how hard it is, every day, just to do normal things without worrying about germs and feeling out of control. I hated disappointing my father the way I did this past year. The hospitalization, the ongoing sessions with Dr. Greta—I knew I was a drain. Even though Dad regularly comments on my level of flesh, smiling when I gain, frowning when I lose, it doesn’t change anything. I’m not like other anorexics—the girls on the fourth floor of Providence, for instance, who kept thinking they were fat even when they weighed eighty pounds. I know I’m freakazoid skinny. Really, if I had my way, I’d have boobs and hips and long, thick hair.

“Does it hurt?” I ask Dad as he pulls Shamrock’s two teats in an alternating fashion.

“She hasn’t complained,” he says, squeezing fishing lines of milk into the metal pail beneath.

Shamrock’s bag of milk shrinks. Pretty soon the whitish-blue liquid slows to a dribble. I turn away while Dad cleans up. Birds are fighting in a tree nearby; one crow has a squiggle of something hanging out its beak and the other crow wants it. There is squawking and flapping, black feathers soiling the small patch of sky between branches. Nature at its ugliest.

Behind the trees and the crows, a flash of movement comes toward us. The Girlfriend. She’s running toward us at a fast clip. A smile takes up her entire face. It’s so over-the-top she could be a model for Celexa in one of those glossy magazine spreads. I take hold of a post, getting some support from the strong part of the fence, steeling myself for whatever is making her that happy. I can’t help notice how pretty she looks when she smiles that big. Pale and freckled, not one bit of makeup but awesome cheekbones.

Dad lights up as she approaches the goat shed. “Well, hi there, darlin’,” he croons. “What’s got you all bubbly?”

Not only is she Ivory Soap pretty, but she has these mannerisms that make her seem shy and confident at the same time. Like now, when she gathers a hunk of her wheat hair and untucks it from where it caught under the collar of her top. “It’s confirmed,” she says through a smile. “My parents are sending Cory up tomorrow.”

My father, I can tell, is forcing himself to match her enthusiasm. He used to do that with Mom, too. Like when she had the big idea to start a branded calligraphy pen business. Or when she enrolled in chef school. But Mom didn’t have the sweet and wholesome affect. Mom was much more Veronica. The Girlfriend? Total Betty.

“That’s terrific,” says Dad.