The Empress Chronicles (7 page)

Engage
, Dr. Greta instructed, and I obeyed. Even though my hands didn’t touch the goat’s milk sac, I made myself stay in that pen until Dad was done with the vile chore. Now, as we walk to the barn together, I let my hands engage in the air, gloveless. My wrapped finger still stings, though maybe that’s all in my head. I have to be careful this time of day, when my pills wear off. What’s true and what’s in my imagination wiggle together. Fears and bad memories and anxiety push against the inside of my head, push it up, so I’m no longer connected to my feet the right way. Dad pulls a wagonload of covered milk containers, and I concentrate on the rhythm they make on the gravel path; I can sense my father is nervous.

“Things okay, Princess?” Dad asks.

I shrug.

“I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah,” I say. I stop short of the obligatory “me too.”

“This Cory?” Dad says. “I guess you should know, I’m not thrilled with the timing. I met him a couple of weeks ago down in Eugene. Kid’s a handful.”

The wagon is rusty and loud, like everything on the farm, and behind us it jerks, squeaking and bouncing over the uneven ground. I set words to the rhythm of the clunky wagon:
Count Sebastian. Must die. Count Sebastian. Must die.

I wonder about this count. This supposed crush of the young empress-to-be. Could the scribbling be some sort of connection? Maybe I was just obsessing. Mom had warned me about my tendency to add drama to things when there wasn’t a reason.

Mom.

Out of my mouth comes, “I sort of miss Mom right now.”

Dad blurts, “Christ, she’s been gone less than a week!”

I know he feels bad about saying that as soon as the words leave his lips. He stops in his tracks, turns to me and, with his free hand, gives me a one-armed hug. My father is an excellent hugger; even with one arm, it’s warmer than Mom’s full-on embraces. I squeeze him back. “I just wish there was cell coverage up here, you know? In case she calls?”

Dad sighs. “When we go into town tomorrow, I’m sure you’ll have bunches of voicemails and texts.”

I force a smile. Even though I brought it up, it wasn’t very likely that Mom would have gotten in touch from her ship in the middle of the ocean. She already told me not to expect a call until they docked at Gibraltar—still several days from now. “I guess you two have a lot to do,” I say, pointing in the distance to The Girlfriend, who’s now carrying a camping mat toward the house. “Should I be helping with anything?”

“Nah,” Dad says. “You’ve already injured yourself once today. Why don’t you go for a walk? The fields are so nice, all that crimson. Look, I’m sorry about what I said. I’m sure you do miss your mother.”

I nod, say, “It’s okay.”

“So,” Dad says, giving me another of his famous warm hugs. “Let me clear my head, get out of this grouchy mood.”

Dad has this way of being pissed off one second and overcompensating the next. Plus, I’m pretty sure he wants me to scram so he can light up his pipe, take in a little weed. “Clear his head” is his euphemism for smoking pot.

“Okay, but holler if you need anything,” I say.

I watch Dad and the rusty wagon squeak away, and then I walk in the other direction. Away from the house. Away from the barn.

The outbuildings are surrounded by a bloody fringe of field. Crimson clover, Dad explained. It looks like Mars or something. A reddish-brown planet with alien vehicles crawling over it. Tomorrow, the behemoth tractors that are now parked in various places in the clover will be spraying. That is a bad thing, apparently. But Dad has no control, because his girlfriend leases the house and barns from a farmer who leases the property to other farmers. Non-organic farmers.

A cycle of death, she’d mentioned earlier. She made a little circle in the air, painting the space between us with her fingertip and punctuating the stops along the way to death. “Poisons kill the weeds, seep into the well, and mutate our DNA.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I asked, innocently enough I thought, “but isn’t clover a weed? If they’re spraying weed killers, why would the clover not die?”

“Selective herbicide,” she said. “The goat milk could be tainted. It’s all a big conspiracy by Monsanto to keep organic farmers on the margin.”

I knew this was only the beginning of my education on the evils of Monsanto and other big corporations, so I begged off the rest of the lecture. If today were the last day before the red fields turned toxic, I’d do my exploring sooner rather than later.

My own food phobias are less tied to chemicals and more to dirt and bacteria and bugs. The way I see it, killing microscopic vermin is preferable to finding a slug on a lettuce leaf. Hippies and naturalists begged to differ with me, and this, I knew, would unfold as a huge problem on a farm called Willow Creek.

I walk along a little spit of grass between the goats and one of the crimson fields and practice saying my father’s girlfriend’s name out loud. Will-oh. Wheel-oh. Willow. It’s hard. Really hard. Harder, I know, than it should be.

I wonder if Willow is her real name. Probably it is, especially with a brother named Coriander. But it could be a nickname. She certainly is pretty and willowy enough for it to be a nickname.

I have a nickname. And it isn’t the princess one that only Dad calls me. Even thinking about that day well over a year ago, the day the kids started calling me
that name
, makes my heart beat fast, and if I’m not careful, sweat beads will start forming on my palms. I practice the breathing Dr. Greta told me to do. I grab a long stick from a patch of grass and move it from hand to hand, whacking at the edge of the clover. The clover is Becket Mitchell. The clover is Jewellee King.
Whack
. The clover is Toni Goldstein. Kevin Heath. Gray Parker. My eighth-grade tormenters.

The beginning of the year before last, back in Alexander Hamilton Alternative Middle School (otherwise known as AHA!), my hair was long and curly, but in the rain it frizzed up, sometimes coiling out to the sides like a clown wig. It was Kevin, I think, who started it. “Hi, Frizz—I mean, Liz!” he taunted. It caught on. Frizz became my unasked-for nickname, and I hated it. I hated it so much I convinced Mom to pay the $250 it took for permanent straightening. I thought that when I got to school, the Monday after the straightening job, everything would change. Frizz would seem idiotic, given my silky new hair.

In Math Concepts, we sat two to a desk. A rectangle of scarred wood with a metal cubbyhole that smelled of eraser dust. Jewellee King sat next to me, and as we passed our homework forward, she leaned in next to my ear, too close to it, and whispered, “Nice fright wig, Frizz.”

Whack!
I whip off another bunch of clover. I touch the stubble on my head that used to be hair. I can still see Jewellee’s pointy little chin. Her emerald eyes under all that heavy Amy Winehouse makeup. Her hand holding Becket’s hand as they marched down the hall, stopping here and there to double over in laughter inspired by their stupid jokes.

That day, the day Jewellee called my hair a fright wig, I just glued my eyes to the big full moon of a clock on the front wall in Math Concepts. Language Arts was still 42 minutes away. 39 minutes. 26 minutes. Ten minutes until Language Arts, where Ms. Wanda didn’t put up with the likes of Jewellee and her posse. There were sensitivity posters in her class: a photograph of a sad-looking girl, for instance, beneath the headline:
Think about who you could be hurting next time you call someone a retard
.

In Math Concepts, the bell rang and we all rushed out the door to our lockers. The shard of mirror pasted to the inside of my locker confirmed it. My hair did look like a wig. A plastic version of hair. But a fright wig?
Really
?

Jewellee and Becket followed me down the hall from my locker to Language Arts, and they were doing the loud, snide whispering thing, which wasn’t whispering at all. “Could she look any dorkier?” and, “Maybe she borrowed the grease from her dad’s hands to slick her hair down with.”

My face heated up, and a flash of fire went right down past my collarbone. I felt like I might vomit. Just five more doors, just four more doors, just three more doors.

My desk in Language Arts was in the front row. Jewellee and Becket sat in back. Ms. Wanda had art stuff waiting for us on top of our desks: a stack of colored cardstock, rubber cement with the little brush inside the lid. Safety scissors—which, even if I did love Ms. Wanda, I had to admit were stupid and ineffective. As I sat down, the tips of my ears still burned under my expensively straight hair. I imagined my head a candle, dripping wax down my scalp. Wax that was drying my hair into a stiff Barbie shape. The frizz, frizz, frizz I heard behind me was a swarm of bees. Wax, bees, frizz. Buzz. It was all closing in. But were they really taunting me here? In the classroom of political correctness? Was I imagining the wax? The taunts? I turned around and Jewellee was just sitting there, her raccoon eyes two slits of pissed off.

“Today,” Ms. Wanda said, “is favorite author day.” We were supposed to construct something. The paper, the glue, the scissors. A book we liked. An author. But I wasn’t really hearing anything but that buzz behind me. I imagined Jewellee’s painted-up eyes firing stingers out. Becket laughed. He had a nice laugh. Too nice, really. It didn’t match his bullying ways. I shook my head and my waxy hair scraped against my shoulders. I shook harder as I dabbed rubber cement on my cardstock. Emily Dickinson. I would make a tribute to Emily Dickinson poster.
Hey, Frizz
, I heard behind me,
are you going to do your project on Bozo the Clown
?

I turned around, startled, and the bottle of rubber cement toppled into my lap, spilling the sticky, viscous fluid all over. I jumped up, screamed, “No!”

“Liz, what happened?” Ms. Wanda came rushing over.

I stood up. It was all over me, the stuff. Sticky, viscous, disgusting. And laughter erupting out of snickers.

“Hey,” Becket said in a fake cough into his hand. “Liz. Frizz. Jizz.”

Then, it seemed like everyone started fake coughing. Jizz. Jizz. Jizz.

“I have to leave,” I squeaked as Ms. Wanda dabbed me with paper towels.

I ran to the girls’ room down the hall and cranked on the spigot, wetting myself down, turning the rubber cement into a sticky sludge all down the front of me. It seemed as if the stuff was coming out of me, like nectar from an overripe fig. I screamed a bunch, probably longer than I thought, because next thing I knew, the vice principal was there, leading me out of the bathroom, to the office, where my mother had just arrived to cart me—with my now sticky and ruined expensive hairdo—home to a penthouse loft, far from the taunts of Jewellee.

But now, a year and a half and a psych ward incarceration later, the memory of that day still feels like a knife in my gut. Even after both Ms. Wanda and the school counselor told me that I misheard. Nobody called me a name, they said. Nobody laughed.

My finger throbs, and thinking about nicknames and a pricked finger makes me think about my least favorite Grimm’s fairy tale,
Sleeping Beauty
, where yet another curse is put on yet another beautiful princess. Upon her sixteenth birthday, the story goes, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep for a hundred years until a handsome prince woke her up. Why, always, the handsome prince? Why not an average-looking dude—a smart man who wants her for her skill set? Her creativity and way with words? Her wit and her charm, when she’s not preoccupied with germs and misalignment? Why can’t the princess be gifted and sensitive and have an IQ of 150?

Maybe I
am
the new cursed princess. There’s even a weaving loom in my room, for chrissake. And with all that weird German writing in my food journal, the cryptic reference to death, maybe I’m starring in my very own fairy tale.

When I look up, I realize I’ve walked quite a ways from the farmhouse. It’s the size of a Monopoly hotel from where I now stand. But a dilapidated version. Everything seems so foreign. My hands start to sweat. My head itches. Unwelcome thoughts arrive: ticks jumping out of the clover and burrowing under my skin. I feel the urge to vomit, and then a horse gallops through my brain. A knight on horseback with a jousting stick.
Count Sebastian must die
.

Tomorrow I will go back into town. I just have to get through today so I can get to Dr. Greta and tell her that engaging isn’t working. I will be swallowed up out here. She has to make Mom come back home. I need to be back in the Pearl, in a clean, sterile box. I need order. I need more Luvox. A higher dose, maybe. My hands on my legs now, on my belly, my fingers digging, digging. The gauze bandage I’ve tossed off into the weedy clover, my nails into my flesh, scratching, clawing, gouging. I won’t be cursed. I won’t fall asleep for a hundred years. I’m alive. My blood proves it.

My circus antics did not go over well with my parents, and much to my disappointment, wretched Baroness Wilhelmine was back early from her annual holiday. She’d been persuaded by Mummi, who had begged, “The children miss you so. There is not a better governess in all of Munich. You must return today. And besides, Sisi so needs your guidance, for as strong-willed as she is, I worry that she will never be tamed without your strict supervision at all times.”

Baroness, at last, agreed to cut her holiday short. Providing she would have control over the bringing in, she said, of a suitable English tutor, a piano instructor and, because Nené was destined for Vienna, a virtuoso of the waltz.

“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Mummi. “All of that. Of course.”

Our Herzog nursery was vast. Occupying much of the second floor of the west wing, we children were assigned an entire apartment, complete with private bedrooms, an indoor garden, breakfast chamber, music room, aviary, and a lengthy play area stuffed with chests for the dolls and the toys and the blocks. From the age of five, we were expected to go from morning meal straight to the lesson room, where governesses, under-governesses and tutors filed in at appointed hours to drill us with facts. A row of desks, varied in size, took up much of the floor. Shelves of dusty books loomed over us, threatening to fall inward, burying us in worthless maps, soliloquies and rules of law, should we stamp a foot too hard.

Shortly after our arrival home from Possi, my sister announced she was leaving the nursery. She would join my eldest brother, Louis, in the east wing, far from these childish concerns. “Sisi,” she informed me while directing the maid to either pack or discard her various garments, “you are now the eldest child of the nursery. Do try and set a good example. Try to keep off the chandeliers and out of the mud.”

Whenever I addressed Nené, I now curtseyed. Once an official engagement had been announced, I would also have to kiss her hand—which was now eternally cloaked in a silk glove.

I turned away from her so she could not see my brows arranging themselves in a long, angry vee. What had become of my sister? Once, we were coconspirators, throwing snowballs against Louis and Papa, our laughter filling the halls of this cumbersome house. On the Day of Fools, we would let the canaries loose in our governess’s apartment before dawn so they might light on her snoring nose and soil her bedclothes. Together, we had climbed the apple trees that graced the English Garden, perched up there until the bell tower called us in for prayers. It seemed so sudden, her vault into adulthood. I stormed out of her room and ran into my own, flinging myself upon my lace covers, burying my sobbing face into my pillow.

And even as my tears soaked my bedding, I knew I was behaving far too much like a child. The world of pranks and misbehavior was past. Soon, I would be slathering on the beauty potions, quenching my hair in oils, and saving my smiles for what my governess called “appropriate occasions for mirth”—a funny part in an opera. The antics of a young child. So, with resolve and determination, I pushed away from my pillows and wiped my eyes with a handkerchief, the embroidered “W” now dampened with my silly sorrow.

What I needed was a project of my own. Maybe I would write another poem. Perhaps, like Papa, an entire play. I ran over to my dressing table where, under a stack of cloths, next to my souvenir fox brush, I’d hidden my journal. I leafed through the pages. Such stupid verse. I’d felt so sorry for myself after the circus fiasco and the ensuing punishment. There it was. Evidence of my childishness:

Oh swallows, thy swift pinions lend me

And be my guide to lands afar

Happy to break the toils that bind me

And shatter every prison bar.

Upon rereading, it seemed clear that I was lamenting my lost girlhood too profusely. Ever since the summer trip to Tegernsee, my sister’s daydreams were filled with the next thing. Becoming empress. I tried to imagine a love interest of my own. A knight, or a dashing soldier. What might he look like? I began to sketch the possibility in my journal. Deep, dark eyes. Strong chin. Would he be taller than me? If so, the possibilities were limited, as now I was as tall as Mummi.

Instead of swallows, perhaps salvation lay in a baron, or a count? I closed my eyes and imagined riding on the back of a large gray stallion. A steed. My arms enveloping my beloved, some king, or prince or duke. Oddly, the faceless man remained a mystery, but the horse. Oh, the horse! Could love for a man ever approach that grand feeling of flying through the air on the back of a powerful mount? Perhaps it could indeed. Perhaps, loving a man and soaring over hedge and dale would occupy the very same chamber of my heart.

And then, just as I imagined clearing the biggest hedge in stride, my mind’s eye shifted and up rose the face of Lola Montez, her large blue eyes, porcelain skin, black hair. I became she, and she me—the two of us merging into one glorious sprite of a woman, the man we gripped, a faceless warrior. A Greek god. A man so powerful and strong just being in his presence, feeling his muscled body against my own, would take me to another world.

I dipped my nib into the ink and began to scratch a figure on the page. But it was of no use. My daydream rearranged itself with every line of ink. The man or Lola or both of them would evaporate, leaving me riding alone. Galloping over meadows, jumping the small streams surrounding my dear Possi. In my journal, I defaced the sketch of the half-fancied Greek god. I crossed out his eyes and drew his beard into parts: the tail of a devil, the claw of a raven.

In the end, I hurled my fountain pen to the window, where it plinked against the pane. My head throbbed from the crying. Why was I so confused? And now, just below my petticoat, there was a deep and twisted cramping. I fled to my bed and pulled out the chamber pot from underneath. I lifted my skirts and settled down, not even taking the time to move the pot behind the screen at the far end of the room.

There, as I pulled down my undergarments, was proof of the wretch I’d become. I was dying between my legs. A river of blood came from me and had clotted into a small pool all the way through to my stockings. Finally, my behavior had reached its natural endpoint. The devil himself had come to claim me.

When next my eyes sprang open, no fire, no devil, and once I got my bearings, I was glad of the fact that I had not died after all. The pit of hell, as it turned out, was not awaiting me. But close enough, because the smelling salts, the stinging slap, the rough absorption of the blood were all attended to by none other than Baroness Wilhelmine.

Her eyes, like two millet seeds, pried into me. The mole on her cheek had sprung hair since last I’d laid eyes on her. She barked, “What were you thinking, spread out like that?”

My head still swam, and through a haze I looked down to the mess beneath me. On the floor beside me lay wadded rags and a pail of pink water. I smelled lye and roses and tallow. There was a burning on my legs and my personal body. The baroness held a dripping candle—the harsh sort as used in stables, rather than the pleasantly fragrant beeswax of the house candles. She held this odiferous candle over my undergarments, allowing splashes of smelly stable wax to dot them. She reached for a folded cloth and pressed it against the hot waxy spots.

“Spread out?” I asked.

“Your Grace,” she muttered between grit teeth, “did you not know your woman’s time was at hand?”

I had no idea to what she referred. My stomach clenched, as though being housed in a young child’s corset.

Baroness Wilhelmine handed me my undergarments, which were now padded with the roll of cloth she’d melted onto them. I took the undergarments and appraised the bulk. The ridiculous lump of cloth. Had she confused me with the baby Sophie?

The baroness pointed to garments and my personal body. “You had better put those on with haste, Duchess, lest you ruin more petticoats.”

I wished the homely old goat would give me some privacy.

“What is wrong with you? You act befuddled. As if you have never before seen woman’s blood?”

“Your forgiveness, Baroness,” I said, clinging to an inkling of modesty while wiggling into the padded horror garment.

She stammered, “Has your nurse not prepared you? This cannot be your first time, Your Grace.”

“You mean this will happen again? This injury to my person? But why?”

Baroness crossed herself and raised her eyes to the ceiling as if summoning strength for heavy lifting. She said, “Wait here, Duchess. I shall fetch your mother.” Then, she gathered the leftover rags and water, blew out the tallow candle, and left the room. Before she was out of earshot, she muttered, “These Wittelsbachs, they live in a cave of their own creation.”

Now that I had privacy, I peeled back my garments to reveal the “woman’s blood,” which had already soiled the lumpy rag that pushed against the most unsightly part of me. I’d been fearful of the hair that had begun to sprout there, thinking that it might spread to my face and, like my governess, furry moles would pop out of my cheeks and chin. The tallow smell mixed with another odor, one I’d smelled occasionally on Mummi and her ladies-in-waiting. As a lady, there seemed no end to the cruel futures that awaited.

I gathered myself and smoothed the creases from my skirts, and lo and behold, discovered my little velvet-covered journal splayed open nearby. Had Baroness Wilhelmine seen this too? No amount of embarrassment would befall me then, for there were several disgracing entries plastered among those pages. I grabbed the incriminating diary, scooping it up and cramming it in my sash, vowing to be more careful with its placement, when Mummi arrived at the door, her spaniels in tow.

She was kneading some sort of cream into her hands, and in her eyes was alarm mixed with regret. She looked consumed with guilt. “Dear Lisi,” she crooned. She’d not called me by that pet name since I’d reached below her breastbone. She offered both her fragrant hands, and I took them, unsure whether this was an invitation to kiss them or simply allow her to hold mine. “I am remiss as a mother, I’m afraid,” she said, her eyes focused on my middle region. “So consumed with affairs of state, your father’s antics, my brother’s folly, that I have neglected my prime duty.”

Mummi’s hand cream smelled of lavender and the same lard and slug juice Nené had plastered on her face earlier in the day. The greasy, soft skin of my mother’s palms slipped around my own, like a newborn pup before the bitch licks it clean. She walked me to the dressing table, and we two sat side by each, like sisters, as she began to enumerate the long list of events, remedies and consequences that lay ahead.

Not only might I look forward to issuing blood from my personal body each cycle of the moon, but now I would need to clean myself
inside
. And each day I must take a vial of calf’s blood with my midday meal. And rub a tincture of sticky jelly onto my hips. And, worst of all, sit still and do nothing for three days around this time of the blood. No riding. No running. No wandering. No playing. No swimming. And absolutely no circus tricks with Papa or anyone else. At all. Ever. I must be escorted by an older male member of the family on walks to the English Garden. I must veil my face or hide behind an Oriental fan. No longer could I laugh in public. At the balls now, I would be amongst the young ladies, not the children. And worse still, I must learn to play the piano.

Mummi continued to tick off the do’s and the do not’s, and the spaniels leapt up into her lap, weaving figure eights around one another before settling, finally, into her ample skirts. My stomach cramps continued, and Mummi registered the pain in my face and reached the dressing table bell, giving the five-peal ring for the governess to return.

“Your Graciousness,” said Baroness Wilhelmine once she reached us.

“The hot water bottle and more hygiene garments,” Mummi said. “And perhaps a compress of chamomile and hemlock.”

Baroness nodded. “The nurse is gathering these things now.” And then she smiled before saying, “Perhaps this would be a good time for the duchess to reengage with her needlepoint lessons?”

Needlepoint. If there was one thing more insufferable than piano, it was stitching little chickadees and bluebells onto handkerchiefs and pillowcases. If I were to be stuck in a room for three days, I would read Shakespeare. I would read Homer. I would write sonnets. No way would I deign to stick a pointy whalebone through cloth over and over again.

Baroness Wilhelmine turned to leave, but as an afterthought she spun round again, and from her black lace-covered pouch she extracted a missive and offered it to Mummi. The ink was full of flourishes, but even so, I could make out my name on the envelope. Mummi held it up to the sunlight and I could tell that the paper inside was very fine linen stationery. The Habsburg seal, it seemed.

“This must be a mistake,” said Mummi. “I am sure this was meant for your sister. It’s from Vienna.”

There was no mistaking the carefully crafted Elisabeth. Not even a blind man could calculate the misspelling of Helene to such a distortion. I tried to snatch it from Mummi’s hand and one of the dogs snapped my fingers. “Ouch.”