The Glass Ocean (28 page)

This is what love has made of him. A creature part flesh, part fire, he’s been winnowed down, has winnowed himself to just lamp and hands, a face partially occluded by goggles (eyes invisible, shielded), neck a thin, pale stalk beneath the untrimmed mane of his curly black hair, he’s bent earnestly in my memory, bent forever, there in the dark semidark, a supplicant before the flame.

•   •   •

Meanwhile the letters from Harry Owen pile up unanswered, slip down between the dining table and the wall, lie forgotten on the Turkish carpet, among the crumbs. Are trod upon at mealtimes. Beneath her sharp heel, my ill-fitting shoe, his boot with the worn-down sole.
Can’t you, Leo, for God’s sake, send more glass? Hornsby is keener than ever—

•   •   •

But my father is too busy. He is rearranging small, gemlike shards of glass in a glass chamber, a small, tightly lidded capsule, of Thomas Argument’s making; dissatisfied, opens it, adds other shards, other brilliants, of other shapes, other colors; then he turns his attention to the mirrors, gently alters their angles inside the wooden tube of the kaleidoscope. It was my mother’s first gift from Thomas Argument—that which began all. The object that piqued my father’s interest in glass. Without it, perhaps, he would never have made glass. Had he never lifted it, looked inside, and, being a Dell’oro, seen the possibilities. Now at last it is laid bare, disarticulated, exposed. With a sharp knife he cuts a convex curve, delicate as a sliver of new moon, from the narrow far end of each of the three rectangular mirrors. Three new moons fall onto the bench, onto the floor, reflect narrow scimitars of light, scintillating blue scythes of sky. Carefully he replaces the mirrors in the tube, the chamber at its apex, the clear lens into the viewing end. Applies his eye to the viewer. Rotates. Sees what he has made, multiplied two, four, sixteen, a hundred, a thousand times. And is lost there, in precise, brilliant geometries of glass.

•   •   •

His work, his real work, has begun at last.

•   •   •

Carefully he removes the chamber again, once again opens it, and with a tweezer, begins removing small, brilliantly colored fragments. Like gems they glitter in the uncertain light at pincer’s end.

He is dissatisfied: always dissatisfied.

•   •   •

My mother, for her part, hasn’t noticed the loss of these, Thomas Argument’s purely
sentimental
gifts. It is the missing pearl earrings she pursues, down on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor. They, after all, are germane to a secret project of her own. As for the others . . .

•   •   •

They don’t matter to her. But I believe she feels their loss. She just doesn’t know it. Instead, what she feels is a reduction in her self. Something’s gone. But she doesn’t know what’s missing. She’s groping for it without knowing what she’s groping for. Finding a pearl earring. Yet feeling, still, the gap, the lack, the fissure. The missing piece.

•   •   •

As for me, I’m growing up in the gap between their two secret, separate worlds—at the juncture of their mutually averted eyes. For all the childish length and breadth of me, I’ve managed to slip between them, unnoticed by either. Nobody bothers to look for me where I’ve been dropped. And so I remain, shining, quietly, in the dark, increasingly mysterious to myself, as, too, I am sure, to them. I lie in my trundle bed—the little bed that has become, over time, too small, my self (that mystery) projecting, feet and ankles, over the low drawer that supposedly contains me—lying there, hearing, while it is still dark, the first noises of the morning—the single, cawping gull, then the many; rumble of early cart wheels, clatter of hoofbeats; footsteps on the cobbles; shutters opening, a quarrel starting up early in the house next door; my parents turning, beside and above me, so near and yet so distant, my mother’s soft, inscrutable, warm murmurings in sleep; and I, the eavesdropper, aware, always, of the growing mystery, my self, under the rough sheet, the blanket, atop the prickling straw mattress; everything a mystery—swelling breast buds a mystery, my skin a mystery with its unexpected pink blushes, the sudden scrawny, startling growth of red bush at my pubes and the twin tendrils, smaller, in my armpits, all this a mystery to me, all new; I feel myself growing, being built, as it were, piece by piece, expansion of blood, bone, sinew, and also of mind, there beneath the roof of the Birdcage, which it seems sometimes will hardly hold me, so quickly am I growing, and so large—

My mother disliking the duty, as I grow it is I who am sent to the market. There I am a spectacle in all weathers with my mother’s basket on my arm, judging, along with the housewives of Whitby, the spoiltness of mutton, the freshness of oysters, the relative percentage of spiderwebs to dough in the bread, whether the butcher’s scale is weighted fairly, whether the potboy charges fairly for the ales. The ocean sighing beneath, shifting its broad, grey back under the sodden, louring tent of sky. Voices hiss behind me:

Poor barne!

Well! She’s a red’un, ain’t she?

Yais, terrible red.

Big for her age.

Verra big.

She don’t favor her mother at all.

No. Nor the father, neither.

Which father, dear?

Hush. Hush now. She’ll hear.

They go quiet as I approach, then resume behind my turned back. There’s a joke that I don’t understand. The word
argument
is meaningless to me, in the sense that they intend it. What does it matter? I am spectacular here. I am a youthful, ginger giantess, a startling and incongruous figure, possessing the broad back and large feet of my grandfather, Felix Girard; spectacular, in Market Street with my basket, my child’s breath rising on the frosty air as I jostle earnestly in and among the housewives. While my mother remains at home. Tending to other matters. Or none.

It’s quite a misfortune, ain’t it? About the hair an’ all.

Yais. And them feet. On a girl. Pity.

Yais. Such a pity.

•   •   •

But there are other attentions, too, which contradict the first. Old Leng at the fish stall, who reaches across his display of bulbous, gape-eyed, put-upon herrings, his prawns and smelts and winkles, to grasp with grubby fingers a curling tendril of my hair. Elizabeth Hendley in the dry goods, a kind woman usually but in my presence suddenly uneasy, broad rump shifting nervously behind a counter thick with buttons and spools, needles, handkerchiefs, bits of lace. I have come to buy my mother a spool of thread.
Here’s trouble coming. You can see it in them blue eyes, a’right. Give it a year or two. It’s coming sure eno’.
Her own eyes small, black, evasive. Then the carriage that one day follows me home in the rain, all the way up Bridge Street, until finally at the gate I turn to look—only then, the driver spurring the horses on, does it rush past, the blurred ghost of movement at a drowning curtained window the sole hint of the interest within. The maids who pluck and pull at me in the market, saying,
Aww, it ain’t real, is it? She’s like a doll or sumpin’—I’d like to take her home wi’ me—

From which I come to know about other species of desire than the sort that I, as a child, feel—to bite sharply through the fibrous, exotic caul of an orange so as to receive upon my tongue the tangy, shocking gush of pulp; or to hold in my own hands the warm, frantically pulsing body of the pullet newly beheaded by the butcher’s remorseless blade.

These are my desires.

•   •   •

Hey, Red. Walk my way, why don’cha?

•   •   •

From which it may be seen that there are continuities, old world to new.

•   •   •

Among my admirers it is the boy who is the most persistent. The others leave off, lose interest, after a time. But not him.

•   •   •

To understand this is to understand that in the absence of my parents’ attention, in the gap that they have created, I am swept out into the streets—into Whitby’s damp, convoluted alleys and passages and tunnels, its secret staircases made of stone, winding down toward the sea. I am in the company of other children who likewise swarm there, some as lost as I am; no, not that, it’s untrue what I have said, in fact very few are lost; most are the subject of someone’s urgent though temporarily distracted attention—I imagine anxious mothers of six, with husbands, lost or not, at sea. Except of course for the boy, he seems as orphaned as I am—I, orphaned by anticipation; he, by fate; this interpreted by both of us as freedom, while being, really, something else, something we’d rather not think about, not yet, at least; no, not yet. We are too young for that, still.

I notice him first one morning by the fishmonger’s stall. It is raining again—always raining in that place; and cold—the sky aslant with coruscation of sleet. I have just settled a damp sleeve of plump, deeply pink langoustines into my—my mother’s—my housewife’s—basket when I see him, though without seeing, hunched at the corner of the stall. It is the son, I think, if I think anything, of the man who pulled my hair; but really I think nothing. I am moving on, moving on, barely noticing. Then, though, I see him again, in the afternoon, as I emerge from the bakery with three small lemon cakes wrapped in a towel for tea. Then and most disconcertingly in Sandgate Street as I lean in close to the window of Cariole’s toy shop to get a better look, forehead touching glass, angel of breath appearing under nostrils, I am so intent upon what is there—a mechanical duck that, when fully wound, quacks, preens, then shits a pellet of dark green wood—there he is, reflected in the glass beside me, this boy, his reflection alongside, on top of, practically merging with, my own—

It is only then, I think, it strikes me that I have seen him before.

He is ubiquitous enough to be invisible, almost. Like other Whitby boys, he has sandy, indistinct hair, pale blue, nearly colorless eyes, translucent white skin, sharply raised cheekbones across which meander a few noncommittal pinkish-beige freckles; and a malicious ferret’s grin, absent one or two teeth. He wears a grimy, formerly white, untucked shirt, trailing in the back, open at the neck to reveal a painfully concave hint of breastbone, and nubbly, hand-me-down knickerbockers a size too large. There is, in other words, nothing to distinguish him from many others, all approximately of my age, none achieving my height or anything near to it, whom I encounter in the course of my daily errands, or in the street wanderings, eclectic as they are, that follow.

I turn around, and he’s gone.

Just like that.

He always did have the knack of disappearing like smoke. Hip, that is. Hippolyte.

What kind of name is that?
say I, on hearing.

What kind of name is Carlotta,
says he. Ferret’s sneer so quick it does not occur to me to ask how he knows my name, since certainly I have never told him it.

But we have advanced by then, Hip and me. I am ahead of myself now.

•   •   •

It is, I suppose, not quite credible that I should have an admirer: I, a child, a ginger, a giantess. Unsubtle of foot. Nonetheless, it is true.

Though not immediately. I must chase him first, through all the passages and tunnels, vast and various, that constitute the underneath of Whitby. There is great pleasure in the play of giantess’s legs, hot in pursuit of that-which-must-be-pursued; and the boy is always ahead of me, a grey figure in a grey ground of Whitby winter: up, over a wall, into somebody’s yard, scattering buckets and nets and tarps and ladders, startling chickens, setting the dogs to barking; up over another wall, up an alley, past a shut-up, still-stinking latrine, a smallboat wintering in a mummy’s wrap of canvas, a garbage tip heaped with bones, it’s death here, all death. We are mocked all the while by the icy, tinkling chatter of frozen laundry hung out on a line, a man’s voice shouting
Stop that din or I’ll whang ye, I will!
—the angry gestures (shaken fists, upraised elbows, pointed fingers, others) of housewives surprised in the act of smoking bedbugs out of mattresses—we create our messes, he and I—wheelbarrows thumped, pots tipped, spilled milk mingling with spilled bitter, night soils unceremoniously scattered; and all the time, just ahead of me, the tantalizing tail of the boy’s grimy shirt as he rockets over another wall, around another corner, over another cesspit—and then finally, inevitably, one day, at the corner of Grope Street and Lantern Lane, down, into the passages.

I’ve heard about those. Pirates are said to have inhabited the passages once. Now there is just the cold, strangely stilled air, smelling deeply of brine; the echoing drip, coming from somewhere, of water; and endless, deep sighings of the sea. Then, too, growing farther away with every moment’s hesitation, the galling patter of footsteps in the dark, the single laugh, high, clear, contemptuous, carried up from below. It’s because of this that I finally make the leap.

Then it is footfalls pinging in the dark, mine and his, his and mine, spiraling down through the dark, dank, sea-spattered brickwork, grey harbor glimpsed in chinks and gaps, until at last I emerge, alone, huffing, into the tarpaulin-shrouded boatyard with its towering piles of timber, raw mast and spar and decking, giant spools of canvas, rigging, the boats themselves up on blocks, waiting for spring. Skeletal creak and twang, clank of winch, soughing of wave, that is all; not even a laugh: he has evaded me, again.

Such a long walk it is, back up the hill, to the remains of my shopping, which I’ve dumped in my pursuit: the salmon stiff with cold, egg yolks stuck to the cobblestones, onions muddied but salvageable. Lurking then around the door of my father’s shed I hear at last the hot, reassuring breath of the bellows; he is working again, on his rightful work, that is what I think, creating his glass. His glass ocean. I do not try to enter. I am distracted anyway, with puzzles of my own.

•   •   •

What a peculiar thing it is, this admiring and being admired. For me especially. After all, I’m an anomaly. Not like other girls my age. Though I don’t know it.