The Lace Reader (11 page)

“Who?” I ask, thinking she means Anya, or maybe Irene.

“Eva,” she says.

I don’t say anything, don’t know what the correct response would be. She peels the lace, looks at it. “Do you read?” she asks, meaning the lace.

“No.”

“How come?”

I shrug.

“She told me how good you were.”

“I guess I don’t find lace reading very accurate.”

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“Really,” she says, half question, half declaration. She’s not buying it.

“For one thing,” I say, not knowing why I feel the need to prove anything but unable to stop, “Eva told me I was going to have a daughter.”

“And you’re not?”

“Not a chance in hell,” I say. I was only trying to throw her off the track. I had wanted to avoid talking about Lyndley, but now there is an edge to my voice.

Ann clearly doesn’t know what to say. “Eva taught a group of us to read the lace,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m much better at reading heads.”

She squints her eyes at the lace, then gives up, folding it. “ ‘Well, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ ”

I look at her strangely.

“It’s a quote”—she looks at me—“from
Little Big Man.
”

“I know what it’s from,” I say, hearing the edge sharpen further.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything I just said.”

“My bad,” she says. “I’m nosy by nature.”

We both smile. She hands the lace to me. “She was my friend, you know,” she said. “Long before it was fashionable to be my friend.”

She’s extending her hand, still holding the lace.

“Why don’t you keep it?” I say, not taking it.

She looks doubtful.

“I’m sure she’d want you to have it,” I assure her.

“Thanks,” she says, and starts back to the parlor, stopping at the door.

Another woman comes in then, a Realtor, I think. Someone that Jay-Jay introduced me to earlier. She looks around the kitchen. I can tell she was hoping to catch me alone, since she seems a little disappointed. She decides to take her best shot.

“Quite a discussion they’re having out there,” she says to me. 86 Brunonia

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Ann turns back to her dishes.

The Realtor pulls out her card, hands it to me. “I was wondering if you’d thought about what you were going to do with the house.”

“The house?” I ask stupidly.

“I mean, I know it’s premature, but I didn’t know if your family had thought about selling.”

“Selling the house.”

“Yes.”

I can feel Ann’s energy shift. She doesn’t like this woman. I clearly don’t have an answer.

“Maybe I’m a bit premature,” the Realtor says.

Ann has turned around now. She stands there facing us, holding the dish towel. “You think?” Her tone is sarcastic.

“I’m sorry,” the woman says, fumbling in her purse, pulling out another business card, forgetting she has already handed me the first one. “I’ll call you later,” she says. Then, seeing Ann’s look, “Or you call me.”

She leaves the room.

“Lovely,” Ann says.

Ann makes us a cup of tea. We sit at the kitchen table. She can tell I’m too weirded out to talk about it, so she just sits with me, refilling my cup, wiping down the table with the dish towel, polishing it, just to have something to do. Finally one of the other witches pokes her head in. “You ready?” the girl says. Ann motions for her to wait outside.

“I have to go,” she says. “I’m their ride.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“You’ll be okay,” she says to me. “Just take it slow.”

I nod.

“Call me if you need anything,” she says. “I’m in the book.”

“Thanks,” I say again.

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I finish cleaning up the kitchen. She hasn’t left much to do, but I straighten up a little. I realize how tired I am then, realize also that the back steps are blocked with boxes and that I have to go through the front hall to go up the stairs. I push through the door, gathering strength.

The party is still going strong. They’re back to Eva’s clichés, oneupping each other.

“The truth will out,” Jay-Jay says.

“It’ll all come out in the wash,” from Beezer.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” again from Jay-Jay.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Beezer’s.

“A high tide floats your boat,” Jay-Jay misquotes. Beezer laughs. “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

“Water, water everywhere . . .” Jay-Jay.

“He’s not operating with both oars in the water,” Beezer says, using Eva’s cliché but gesturing toward Jay-Jay.

“He’s not playing with a full deck,” Jay-Jay volleys back at him.

“He’s crazy as a loon.” Anya.

“Two bricks shy of a load.” Jay-Jay.

“Not the sharpest tool in the shed.” Anya again.

“Two bricks shy of a load,” Beezer says, and they’re hysterical again, both of them. They’re also starting to have trouble talking.

“You said that one already,” Jay-Jay says. “Dumber than a box of rocks.”

“Are you just quoting, or do you mean me?” Beezer turns to him in mock agitation.

“If the shoe fits,” Jay-Jay says, and falls down laughing.

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” Irene says.

“That’s not Eva, that’s Johnnie Cochran,” Beezer says.

“None of them is Eva.” Anya comes to Irene’s defense. “If you want to get technical about it.”

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“They’re not?” Beezer says in mock horror. “Don’t tell me that. Don’t destroy my childhood illusions.” Anya is drinking the Armagnac now, pouring it into her little glass.

“There’s another one,” I hear Beezer say from the other room.

“One she used to say all the time. I can’t remember it.”

“What one?” Jay-Jay likes this game.

“You know the one,” Beezer says to me, trying to pull me in.

“I’m going to bed,” I say, picking up one of the boxes of pictures, taking it with me.

“That’s not it,” Beezer says.

“Party pooper.” Irene’s getting bolder.

“She definitely didn’t say ‘party pooper,’ ” Jay-Jay says, and makes a buzzing sound like a game-show blooper.

“I didn’t mean Eva, I meant Towner,” Irene says, cracking herself up. She doesn’t know me well enough for this.

“I’ve got it,” Beezer says, popping up. “It’s something about sewing.”

“Sewing?” Jay-Jay is laughing. “I don’t remember her saying anything about sewing.”

“Sewing,” Beezer says. “Something about needles.”

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle . . .” Anya starts.

“A stitch in time,” I interrupt. I’m halfway up the stairs now, and my voice echoes down the spiral, a message from above.

“Right! A stitch in time! A stitch in time!” Beezer is delighted.

“Yeah, I remember,” Jay-Jay says. “There was more to it, though.”

“No there wasn’t,” Beezer says, and they’re at it again.

“A stitch in time . . . does something,” Jay-Jay says.

“Towner?” Beezer’s calling for a tiebreaker.

“ ’Night,” I say, not wanting to get into it.

“Saves nine,” says Irene.

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“What?” Beezer looks at her.

“Saves nine,” she says. “That’s the phrase. A stitch in time saves nine.”

“Nine what?”

“Nine stitches, I guess.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I didn’t make it up.”

“I think she’s right,” Anya says.

“Why nine stitches? Why not eight? Or thirty-two?” Beezer’s not sure.

“It’s nine.” Anya’s very sure.

“You’re Norwegian,” Beezer says doubtfully.

“What? I’m Norwegian, so it doesn’t count?”

“It rhymes,” Jay-Jay suggests.

“If anything, I should get extra points for being Norwegian,” she says.

“What points? We’re not playing for points,” Beezer says, and shakes his head.

“We will sell no rhyme before its time,” Jay-Jay says in his best Orson Welles.

“You’re shut off,” Irene says to Jay-Jay.

“You’re both shut off,” says Beezer.

When I reach the third floor, they’re all heading for the door. Anya, doubting Beezer totally now, wants to see the statue of Roger Conant for herself, and Beezer has agreed to show it to her. Jay-Jay wants to be there when Anya “gets the whole picture.” And Irene is going along just to keep an eye on Jay-Jay.

All I want is to get to the bed and lie down. But things are distant again, and though the bed is only a few feet from the door, it seems like miles. Sounds distort, echo. Every step takes forever. I’m walking through water.

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I feel suddenly as if I can’t breathe. I’m afraid if I go under, I’ll never surface again. I need air.

I make my way up to the surface, up the ladder to the widow’s walk. I can sense the air above me, in the tiny glassed-in room leading to the outside. I push the ceiling hatch, but it’s stuck, much heavier than it was the day I was searching for Eva. My stitches pull. I shove my shoulder against it, standing on the ladder, expelling my last breath with the effort. The hatch bursts open, displacing a huge gull, lifting her into a hover above the widow’s walk. Her wingspan is expansive, probably six feet across. The wind from her ascent comes back at me, warm and fetid. She must have been nesting here, laying her eggs; it is the season. She hangs in the air above me, blacking out the stars, and for an instant we’re together in time and space. There is a moment of understanding between us, this huge creature and myself, but then, before I can define that moment, it is over. She lifts up and she’s gone with it, leaving me behind with the nest and the guano and the stink. I stand there stupidly, able to breathe finally, but unable to sit down the way I usually would, unable to settle here. Instead I lean on the railing and look out over the town, taking in everything for the first time since I’ve been here,
knowing
it somehow. I see Anya and Beezer across the common, walking around the statue of Roger Conant, trying to spot the offending gesture. Jay-Jay stays on the sidelines coaching them, giving directions. Their laughter stands out, echoing from the quiet streets below. Beyond land’s end the black water stretches past Peach’s Point in Marblehead to Yellow Dog Island. I can see the light on in May’s bedroom. Two lights, actually. That’s new. The brighter light, the kerosene lamp, has always been visible from here, and that is the main reason Eva gave me these rooms so long ago, so that I could check on May’s light, so I’d know that she was all right, that she was alive out there and hadn’t slipped on the rocks and hurt herself or frozen to death over the winter. Eva told me I could climb up here The Lace Reader 91

and check on May anytime I wanted to. I used to check that light every night, more than once a night. I checked it so often, in fact, that the checking is still part of my sleep ritual, in my mind’s eye at least, something I must do each night before I can drift off. Even three thousand miles away in California, as far as I can get from this place without falling off the edge of the earth, I can still see May’s light. This is comforting, actually, because I realize that’s what drove me up here tonight. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t breathe as that I needed to see that light, not in memory but for real, before I could sleep. That’s all it was.

But the reality is different from the memory. Tonight there is not just one light, there are two. I wonder how long May has had that new light, and I think it’s odd in a way, that the two images don’t match. It’s just as odd that they don’t make sense. Like Eva, May is frugal. Burning two lamps would be a luxury she wouldn’t permit herself.

And then I remember the Stelazine they gave me at the hospital and how after I took it for a while I had double vision. I didn’t get the twitching thing some people get (the dead giveaway, my doctor called it), but I remember I had trouble swallowing (which has never entirely disappeared). I also remember seeing two of everything. I remember coming up here then, when I got home, and it looked as if May had two lamps burning, but that was all an illusion.

“Two if by sea,”
a voice says, and I can’t tell if it’s Eva’s voice or my own, but I’m thinking that it’s good I am alone, because talking to myself or talking back to my voices is not something I can afford to do in public. It’s more of a dead giveaway than twitching, if you ask me.

Still, things have changed a lot since the hospital, and, for the most part, time and common sense have taught me to tell reality from illusion. I know that the lights I’m seeing tonight are real even if the voices in my head are not. I think of the phrase “two if by sea,”

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trying to find a deeper, more symbolic meaning, but then my mind wanders off on this Paul Revere thing. He’s hanging the lamp in the church in Lexington or Concord or wherever the hell it was, and I’m wondering where this movie reel came from, some old summertime history lesson from the red schoolhouse probably, when it was still our school, before they closed it down for good and made Beezer and me move to town and live with Eva.

From below I can hear the sound of my brother laughing. And I start to cry. I cry for Eva, and for Lyndley, and for everyone who has died, and for me for having to come back to this place, and even for Beezer and Anya and their belief in their future. Because what were their odds, really, when you thought about it? What were Beezer’s odds of succeeding in marriage? Anyone’s odds were pretty bad these days, but ours were a lot worse than most. I cry for a few minutes for everybody. I’m set to cry all night, I’m settled in for it, but after a while the tears stop coming. I’m too dried out from the plane and from the surgery and from grief itself to cry any more tears. I’m too dried out for tears to even form.

Their voices echo from below. They’re all laughing now, Jay-Jay and Beezer watching as Anya gets the right angle on the statue and finally sees old Roger Conant doing his thing. They are racked with laughter, with the absurdity of the sculptor’s mistake. It occurs to me that this is Beezer’s bachelor party, since he and Anya are leaving for Norway tomorrow. They probably had something else planned. His colleagues from MIT would have taken him out, probably, at least to some bar in Cambridge or maybe even to Route 1 to the Golden Banana or something (though that is hard to picture, all those geeky professors at a place like that). Anyway, it never happened. Instead they’re all in the park tonight: Beezer and Anya, Jay-Jay and Irene. Tonight the floor show stars old Roger Conant, he’s taking the place of the Golden Banana, and I find myself thinking that Ann Chase was probably right, that Eva really
is
having fun with us tonight.
When George Washington came to Ipswich, it was not for
any political purpose but because Martha fancied some black
lace for a shawl she was having made. It was a phenomenon.
This industry created and run by women was thriving like
none before.

—T H E L AC E R E A D E R’ S G U I D E

u

Chapter 10

I keep a Stelazine pill in my pocket. It’s old and expired, and it might kill me if I took it. More likely it would do nothing at all. Still, it is my insurance policy, my lifeline to sanity. In case of emergency, pop pill. I find myself checking my pocket on the way out to Yellow Dog Island. Just to make sure the pill is still there. We are going out today for the reading of Eva’s will. Our island was originally named Yellow Island, for the fever. It was the spot where the Salem vessels dropped off sick sailors on their way back to port. At the time they still believed that yellow fever was contagious, and many sailors died on the island, some as a result of the fever but even more from exposure.

The island didn’t become Yellow Dog Island until much later, when someone dropped off two golden retrievers from the mainland. Whoever it was dumped them into the channel between our island and the Miseries, probably expecting them to drown, but the 94 Brunonia

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wind and tides were right for once, and the dogs swam in. Because there were wild rabbits all over the island, as well as water rats and thousands of gulls, the dogs thrived and became great hunters. Like the coyotes in L.A., the dogs seldom come near people. Except for my mother. The dogs go tame for May—they lie down and roll over and stick their feet in the air when she approaches, as if they’re waiting for her to scratch their bellies, which she almost never does. It would have been more convenient (and more logical) to read the will in town, at Eva’s attorney’s office or even at her house, but May, of course, would not go to town.

No one is happy to be here. Beezer, Anya, and I took the Whaler. It was calm inside the harbor, but once we passed Peach’s Point, the wind picked up and the swells were as high as six feet in some places.

“I don’t know why we need to be here,” Anya says to Beezer. “We already know she’s going to leave everything to Emma.”

Beezer doesn’t answer but lands the boat perfectly at the float like the island boy he is. If Anya isn’t impressed, she should be. The lawyer comes out with Dr. Ward. We are at the top of the dock when we see the water taxi slowing to make the turn into the channel. Beezer goes back down to meet it.

“I miss Eva,” Anya says, standing there looking toward town.

“Me, too,” I say. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. Especially since I never came to visit. Not once. From Anya’s point of view, we’re all no good. May didn’t come to the funeral. And I never came to see Eva. She doesn’t understand any of us. She thinks we didn’t love Eva. She’s wrong about that. I loved Eva more than anything. And even The Lace Reader 95

though I’m mad at May for not going to the funeral, I know she loved Eva, too.

We walk toward the house in silence.

From the rise by the tower, I can see the red schoolhouse and the lace makers working. There are about twenty women, chairs in a circle, with the reader in the middle. Several children sit off to the side in a smaller circle. It looks as if one of the women is leading them in daily lessons.

The laws have changed. Homeschooling is legal now. I find myself wondering what would have been different if Beezer and I had been allowed to stay here for our lessons. If we hadn’t had to go to town that fall to live with Eva.

Anya stops short. She is trying to say something to me, but the wind blots out all sound. She is pointing to the rocks. The dogs appear from everywhere, coming out from their caves to see what is going on. It’s like the puzzles they used to have when we were kids.
How many hidden dogs can you find in this picture. Five?

Ten? . . . More?
I see them all around us, their eyes tracking each step the lawyer takes. I can tell that Beezer sees them, too, but he keeps on walking, pointing out areas of local significance, leading everyone’s eyes away from the cliffs. Eventually the dogs lose interest and head back to their caves.

By the time we get to May’s house, the four of us are walking together. The wild dogs have gotten bored with us, but two of May’s favorites, the ones she allows near the house, are sunning themselves on the porch. They are posed on either side of the steps, their manes fluffed, front paws stretching out in front of them, like a matching set of stone lions.

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but he meets the attorney’s eyes. The attorney thinks the dog is being friendly and is about to reach down to pat him when May steps between them and shoos the two dogs off the porch. The first goes easily, but the one who was staring doesn’t move.