The Glass Ocean (23 page)

•   •   •

My mother is a stubborn woman. Even after the advent of the hellebore and juniper leaf tea, she refuses to call a truce. Instead, as soon as she is well enough to leave the house again, she purchases, from the chemist Jim Watt, a small, red tin containing “Widow Welch’s Female Pills: A certain remedy for removing the obstructions to which Young Women are so frequently subject.”

And when those don’t work she also tries, in quick succession, Hooper’s Female Pills
,
then Trowbridge’s Golden Pills of Life and Beauty,
both
without result.

None of these attractively packaged products lives up to its advertised claim to
resolve issues of female irregularity and obstruction.

My mother’s issues remain unresolved. She is still obstructed.

It is around this time, perhaps, that she begins to realize she is stuck with me—really stuck with me—or rather, that I am really stuck to her, that I have attached myself, that her heart is my heart, her lungs my lungs, her stomach my stomach, her liver my liver. We are, for all intents and purposes, one creature. She cannot shake or squeeze or press me out; she cannot poison me. The only way to get rid of me will be to get rid of herself. And my mother is much too conceited for that. A world without Clotilde is an inconceivable world.

•   •   •

She’ll never be really, truly alone again. This will be her new torment and despair, also her new conceit and her new joy.

She is pursued. She must run. But not yet.

•   •   •

Her surrender, when at last it comes, is quick and complete.

Two more months have passed.

Tighter, Mary! Pull the laces tighter!

La! I canna do it, madam—it’s impossible! You’ve grown too fat!

There is inexpressible weariness in my mother’s reply.

Very well, Mary. Very well.

Clotilde relaxes her grip on the bedpost. Mary relaxes hers on the corset laces.

The servant is confused. She has never seen my mother give up—on this, or, for that matter, on anything. Except on Thomas Argument.

She had no choice but to give up on him. That was entirely beyond her control.

Does madam want to try again?

No, Mary. You can go.

Clotilde sinks down onto the bed. Beneath her thigh she can feel, through the thinness of the mattress, the sharp edge of her traveling trunk, half packed with dresses and corsets and camisoles and stockings and new cambric hankies.

•   •   •

This is it: it’s the end. My mother has to accept, at last, the undeniable thickening of her waist, the engorgement of her breasts, their soreness, the darkening of the aureoles, the increased prominence of the nipples. The gorge that rises in her throat every morning, whether she’s eaten breakfast or not. She knows what it all means:

I exist. I am coming. Whether or not I am a monster, I am coming. I am budding crazily now. I have a head. Limbs. Two cells rubbed together to form four, then sixteen, then two hundred and fifty six, and suddenly I have a brain, sparking, percolating with electricity, creating
thoughts
. All at once I have ideas of my own. Some of which are very definite ideas, about being born. I do not know there is a world, but I intend to enter it. I have begun to write something new, the limited letters of my little alphabet, CGD’O.LD’O.CGD’O.LD’O, twining together to form something new, the essence of me, the core of what will be my self. CD’O.CD’O.CD’O . . .

She can’t stop me now.

•   •   •

Even as she accepts her fate, my mother won’t give up, not entirely. She doesn’t know where she’s going, or when, but she knows she’ll go somewhere, sometime, and she’s got to be prepared. The coins keep disappearing from my father’s pay packet.

As for him, he notices the coins going, but he doesn’t notice that my mother has stopped wearing her corset. He hasn’t noticed the bruises either, or all that jumping off chairs. He’s been home so little, he’s unaware that Thomas Argument no longer visits. It’s true he hasn’t seen any new presents from Argument around the house. But then, that’s been the case, regardless, for quite a while. All the presents have been disappearing, along with those mysterious missing coins, into the traveling trunk my father is too much a gentleman to open.

What does he think is going to jump out at him if he does? A Persian
div,
perhaps? A Persian
div
with a face like an Argument?

•   •   •

In fact he has no fixed ideas on that question. He has simply averted his eyes. As long as he doesn’t look, the trunk is empty. It’s a metaphysical proposition.

He doesn’t know that what is in that trunk is:

Me.

Because I’m bearing down on his life, too. Not just hers. Bearing down like a steam engine. And I’m going to arrive, whether he opens his eyes or not.

•   •   •

At the moment, all my father really thinks about is glass. His thoughts are crystalline structures, chemical compositions, elastic solids, melting points. He thinks that he is thinking about my mother, too—and he does think about her, in a way, in a very specific way. He thinks not about my flesh-and-blood mother (who is throwing up, and throwing herself off chairs, and bouncing off beds, and tumbling desperately down staircases, and drinking toxic herb teas, all outside his notice), but rather about a Clotilde-in-his-head, she who exists in a vitreous rather than a fleshly state; malleable, it is true, if sufficiently heated, but mostly static, her molecules silent, slowed, suspended—glittering, like stars. Like a star she is distant, shiny, beautiful. Her movement is infinite yet indiscernible. As the flesh-and-blood Clotilde prepares to leave him for Thomas Argument, this other is drawing closer, one gleaming molecule at a time.

He does not see her yet. She is veiled still, just out of sight, a spark, balanced at the knife-edge of his perception.

Thomas Argument woos my real mother (so my father thinks), creating, with his magic lantern, spectacles writ large: Vesuvius. Pompeii. The Great Fire. While Leopold my father remakes her, suspends her in glass. His is a spectacle of the infinitely small, stopped in time: her initials entwined forever in the bud of a glass sea anemone. The rosy, pink tips of the tentacles, delicate as fingers. The engorged fronds of a nudibranch. Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, lavender freckled, tapering, thin as a coin at its thickest extremity, its underside a creamy, opalescent rainbow. Glass made flesh.

This is what my father is thinking about.

My mother, my real mother, hardly even impinges, though he thinks he is doing it all for her sake.

Honestly, he has no idea what he is doing.

Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, instead of my darling Clotilde.

•   •   •

During the months she has been simultaneously feeding me and fighting me with the very marrow of her bones, he has been gestating something of his own, too, wasting William Cloverdale’s glass, but succeeding, at last, with these three models, the anemone, the nudibranch, and the Darling Solenette. There are flaws, certainly. Despite his efforts they still do not, for example,
look wet
.

He has made other things, too, instinctively, without knowing why, small, smooth objects of ambiguous design, which do not please him but which he cannot bear to throw away.

He averts his eyes from these. They are the secret he keeps from himself.

He has labored over his creation. The miscarriages now lie in the bottom drawer, left, in the cabinet behind the master glassmaker’s workbench. My father does not melt down this carnage—cannot sever the umbilicus—he remains attached to his creatures, no matter how deformed, long enough attached, at least, to place them in this hiding place, his equivalent (although he does not think of it that way), of my mother’s trunk. This Pandora’s box, like the other, he also, very successfully, avoids. It is the lack, the gap, the missing piece, the lacunae in my father’s attention. Although intending to study his mistakes, he never thinks about what is in this cabinet once he has placed it there, as if to look would actually cause him pain.

The wound exposed.

He has always been this way. An obsessive and a perfectionist, he dislikes looking at his own failures and secrets, even though he cannot let them go.

As if letting go would be admitting to something. Freeing it into the world.

But the successes—the successes are ready to be sent to Harry Owen, in London.

Really, Leo doesn’t want to let his successes go either . . . he’d like to keep them all close, so that he can look at them again, rest his eye upon the good parts, pick with his thumbnail at the bad, contemplate further improvements, think about how he can make the next set of models better. He has already, it is true, kept his few, whole creatures longer than he should have—given that Harry Owen waits for them—given that Harry Owen has paid for them. My father has kept them in the drawer alongside their unsuccessful and ambiguous counterparts, perhaps for purposes of comparison, so that they rest together, side by side: a perfect solenette and a solenette without a head, another that curls peculiarly in upon itself as if somebody has tried to fry it in a pan, another with malformed fins, and so forth, an evolution, in glass, of Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette.

My father only looks at his successes. That is what he is doing, at dawn, after another long night at Cloverdale’s. It is a last look: he has decided that today he will send what he has made. And then he will wait—for Harry Owen’s verdict. He will make no more until he has heard whether or not these will suit, whether they are sufficiently accurate for Harry Owen’s purpose.

•   •   •

Very methodically, he wraps his creatures, watches them disappear beneath layers of tape and wadding, then into the box addressed to Owen at the British Museum.

He is exhausted. He has been up all night making glass eyes, trying to atone for a sin of theft that William Cloverdale doesn’t even know he has committed. There lie, in his drawer, the failures on which he has wasted Cloverdale’s glass. From these he must avert his eyes.

He will spend more time with my mother, now that he is done—while he waits for the verdict from London. He has, though, it seems, no feeling about this, no wondering, neither hope nor fear nor anger. It is as if the lack of sleep has left him hollow, lightened, emptied of content. He feels more about sending his models to Harry Owen than he does about my mother.

As he tucks the package under his arm and departs Cloverdale’s shop, passing the still-dark premises of Argument’s Glasswares with its posters touting Vesuvius plastered over the windows, he experiences: a feeling of accomplishment, as if he has completed something, at last, of which he may be proud.

•   •   •

As he approaches the post office at Old Market Place, having arrived much too early and finding it not yet open: impatience, as if this delay will last forever; anger, as if the postmaster has thwarted him on purpose.

•   •   •

Wandering down Harbour Road to kill the time, standing and looking out over the Scaur and the harbor, at the fishing boats scudding out between the protective arms of the breakwater into the open sea: a sense of how little he has done, how inadequate his efforts, how intimidating the immensity of this ocean, of the infinity of worlds beneath its surface, unknowable, ungraspable, and mysterious. How puny his skills in attempting to represent even a tiny fraction of this blue vastness.

•   •   •

When at last the post office has opened and he has handed his parcel across the counter and paid its fare to London: loss, a sense that something has been taken from him that he cannot replace. He fails, in the moment that the parcel disappears into the bin behind the counter, to connect this feeling with the loss of his sister, even though he looks for her every day, unconsciously now, though previously on purpose, fruitlessly, at the turning of every corner, in every shop, along the length and breadth of every street.

Nor does he think about my mother, she who recedes from him, molecule by gleaming molecule. He averts his eyes and thoughts from both my real mother, and from the other, she who has taken form, glitteringly, in his mind.

•   •   •

All the way back to Cloverdale’s he is dogged by a sense of loss, a sense that haunts him all the more because he cannot quite place its point of origin, a place that seems to shift between several dimly perceived objects, none of which he really wants to think about.

At the twistings and turnings of the streets he sees the sea, blue emerging between and beyond the whitewashed walls, the black iron gates, the red-tiled roofs.

It is early still. The shopkeepers have just begun to open their shutters. Mostly he has the sidewalk to himself, the clamor of his heels on the cobblestones another kind of loss. Occasionally he passes an industrious enshawled housewife, or a servant all in black, clutching a basket, a loaf of bread, a chicken.

•   •   •

At Cloverdale’s the shutters are up, morning light refracting uneasily through the bubbles, warps, and imperfections of a hundred glassy surfaces. The large man himself is in the back, a shape vague but vast, hunched over the master glassmaker’s bench, humming. With a tweezer he retrieves glass eyes from the crucible, lays them carefully on the surface of the bench. My father paddles toward him through a multicolored shifting of light and shadow.

Mister Dell’oro
. Cloverdale speaks softly, pleasantly.
Mister Dell’oro, there you are.

Yes,
says my father,
I’m here.

Up all night again, Mister Dell’oro?

Yes. All night.

You work very hard, Mister Dell’oro.

Yes.

Then my father sees. He pauses. Cloverdale sees that he has seen.

What is this, Mister Dell’oro? What is this?

The bottom drawer on the left-hand side of the cabinet behind the workbench is open, and spread out on the bench itself, all of my father’s abortions in glass. Cloverdale has found them, has laid them out carefully, tenderly even: a workbench of gently nurtured monstrosities. Of corpses.