by Kyra Wilder
I asked the girl, who had of course followed me, to show me the eiderdowns. She pulled one down and unzipped it from its white cloth case and inside I saw what I had been looking for. I’ll take it, I said, wanting to get out of the store now. Wanting to get it home, back to my room in the apartment. When shopping is done for me, it’s done.
She tried to tell me a bit about the eider ducks, whose feathers were sewn into the duvet I had just purchased. She tried to tell me about the men and women in Iceland who collect their feathers, the feathers the eider ducks have used to line their nests. But I didn’t want to hear her talk about it. I was here for my own purposes.
How could she know really anything important about the ducks, about me, about the sheets? How could she know, really know anything about the feathers that were sewn, hand-sewn by old Danish men in wool caps, into the feather-cloud pockets of the eiderdown. She didn’t know that they weren’t just any feathers wrenched off any old eider duck. She didn’t know that the feathers I was purchasing were the feathers that the eider duck mothers make their nests with, only those. She was much too young to understand that the mother eider duck rips her warmest, her softest feathers from her own breast in order to make nests with them, the feathers, for her eggs. The girl was much too young to understand that these feathers were the only thing warm enough, soft enough, right enough to keep a mother eider duck’s eggs alive in the freezing dead nothing northern winds of Iceland. The only thing. I wanted to laugh when I saw the eiderdowns stacked up in the room in the back of the shop because what comfort in this world is not made from the bodies of mothers. Their actual bodies.
After the babies hatch though, after they can fly, they have no more use for the nests. They leave and they leave the nests abandoned. As they should! As nature demands them to! After they leave, the feathers are left behind of course and rightly like garbage, like juice boxes, like yogurt tubs, like any other kind of trash.
More and More and More and More and Always February
Oh you clean here too? Not just up in the rooms? But isn’t it the middle of the night? It’s so hard to keep track of time when, well, when I’m down here. There aren’t any windows down here. But of course you can see that. I’m just going to go back to sleep now, if that’s all right with you. It’s just that, well, these treatments make me so tired. It’s the drugs maybe. I didn’t know that. That you cleaned down here. I’m sorry, I think I threw up somewhere. I’m sorry about that.
Do you know she didn’t come back? The woman with the ugly daughter? She never came back from the dentist. And I’ve been asking where she is. I’ve been asking and asking and asking but no one is hearing me. No one is hearing me at all.
Could you tell one of the guards to bring me some water? Sometimes they will. I’m so thirsty.
14
I stopped for a coffee inside one of the department stores on the Rue de Rive. I piled my bags up on the chair opposite me as if they were someone I could talk to. Quack, I could have whispered to my bags if I hadn’t been in such a fancy place. I watched a woman with short ice-blonde hair slicked back from her face eat oysters at the bar. The man with her had poured her a glass of champagne but she wasn’t touching it. She wasn’t touching him either. Just the oysters. She slipped them one by one down her throat. Once or twice she checked the time on a rose-gold watch barnacled all over with diamonds that peeked out from the arm of her smart blue blazer.
I thought then, watching her, of something funny and smart to say about her and I wanted to tell M the thing that I had thought of. I wanted him to see her too, and I wanted him to see me. Me here and her. The woman with the gold watch and man she wasn’t touching. Of course M wasn’t there though and I had only my bags to talk to. Tant pis, I could have said, just then, and halfway I could have meant it.
We used to go to a particular restaurant, M and me, for celebrations, which at the time was another way to say Friday night. We only had enough money for two drinks per celebration. So we only got one each, one drink. The trick was to make the one drink last long enough for both of us to eat our fill of the free snacks, peanuts and olives and some kind of spicy cracker, so we wouldn’t be starving in the morning. The trick was to do this but to be not obvious about it.
These little things got lost so easily when there was no one to snatch them up with. The lady with the oysters for example, would be lost, was being lost right now, as I watched her. I can be funny and I can be a good time I told the bags in front of me, but quietly and with my mouth mostly hidden by my coffee cup so I wouldn’t be seen talking to my shopping.
A woman with a little dog under her arm hit the back of my chair with her purse and I slurped my coffee. One big gulp down the hatch. I looked up then across the street, and saw Nell, walking arm in arm with the man I had seen in the park. It was just the two of them. Couples have a certain way of walking, when they have children but their children aren’t with them. Well they do, and they were walking like that. In that way. She was laughing with her head tilted back, open-mouthed. Just as I watched, she almost stepped in something. I couldn’t see what, and he picked her up, actually picked her all the way up in the air and lifted her away from it, whatever it was. Saving, maybe, maybe probably, her shoes from something terrible and awful and unmentionable on the street.
She looked at me. For the second that she was up in the air, her eyes flew across the street, across the tops of the heads of all the people, through the glass windows of the cafe, past the woman with ice-blonde hair who was still not touching the man she was with, all the way to me. Zip. A little spark. We knew who we were.
I grabbed the bags and ran out of the cafe after her. I can’t explain it. She wasn’t asking me to follow her. I bumped into a couple as I ran out. It seemed for a moment that everyone was intertwined and between all the linked arms and hands holding on to one another that I would never be able to get away. Smiles usually work in those sorts of situations though and I took out one of my best and apologized to the man for knocking the hat out of his hand with all the bags in mine and I was free.
I arrived out on the street shaking, heaving under all my bags, looking for her. I was like a bride. I had that many yards of white fabric piled up around me. I thought I had lost her, that I hadn’t been quick enough and I really thought of screaming. I stamped my foot a little and the pigeons ruffled and fussed but then I saw her, heading towards the lake, and I ran off in a burst and flurry.
She didn’t want me to follow her. I could see that. She looked over her shoulder once, and saw me chasing after her and she frowned but I kept following. I can’t say what I meant to do. She was wearing a dress that should have showed her shoulders but she had a heavy scarf draped over them, one you couldn’t see through even if you tried. He had an arm around her waist. I couldn’t seem to catch up to them even though I was almost running. Almost but not quite.
They were hard to keep track of. Crowds of strollers kept swarming over them and spitting them back out in improbable places. One minute they would be walking past one of the lakeside bars and the next they would be kissing under a tree in the Jardin Anglais. It was one of those days when everyone was kissing so even then they were hard to pick out. Only her dark wool scarf gave them away.
More and more people kept pouring down the promenades towards the lake. The benches were filled with tanned legs all tangled up together. Aurelie’s legs maybe, touching M’s. Eating oysters one after the other. Neither one of them would have checked their watch. Oh, she would have said, and she would have tossed her hair and been absolutely transfixing doing it, saying only oh and slurping oysters. All this was possible and possibly true. I slammed my bags hard into the side of a small but intricately decorated fountain and the water reared up and splashed me and I looked down at my side for E to blame it on, Look! I could yell. It’s a game, this business of banging and splashing! But of course she wasn’t there, E wasn’t, and everything was real and awful and I looked all soft and round and spilling.
/> I was going to apologize to the people sitting at the foot of the fountain, the people, hundreds and hundreds of them, or maybe only two, who had been kissing and who were now staring at me, drenched. But then I caught sight of Nell and I laughed, Ha! All sharp and purposeful, because I had someone to run after, somewhere to go.
Aurelie’s legs though, they had been so long, so thin and long, like she was one long line drawn flippantly and gorgeously all at once and here I was so pulpy, so hot and scribbled and stumbling.
People lounged closer and closer to one another at the cafe tables as I passed them, chasing Nell now through the park. Fingers pressed other fingers, the sides of tanned feet touched the sides of other tanned feet. It was summer and lips drank from the same bottles. Shades of lipstick piled up on top of each other on the sides of glasses. Red and pink and red again. Men over-tipped and women finished each other’s drinks. The swans in the lake gobbled up the bread that was thrown to them, gorging on soggy crusts, on the occasional croissant. Men dropped their hands lower down the backs of women. Women ran their fingers over their collarbones and touched the corners of their eyes. The day was so warm, warm all the way through and everyone knew it. Knew that on an afternoon like this one, hands were free to wander where they liked.
I spotted Nell heading for the taxi-boat dock and ran after her. We waited in line, me two steps behind her pretending like this was all possibly a coincidence. Her tucking her shoulder into the man a bit. Her pretending that I wasn’t there. Well and wasn’t this just so explainable? Weren’t we just neighbours heading home after a stroll in the park? Didn’t we both have to cross back over the lake? How could any of this really have been otherwise? Nell could have glanced at me there so close behind her but she didn’t. Oh, hi, she could have said, I know you from the park. Her hair looked dull, I could see this now, looking at her from behind. She was smiling up at the man above her but her hair looked like it was some dead thing hanging down her back.
We were the first ones on the boat when it pulled up. Nell and the man headed for the prow, taking the seats where the spray from the lake would touch their faces. I took a seat inside with my bags. More people began filling up the boat behind me. We were all heading across the water towards another garden. The one with the reflecting pools and the stone mansion with the blue shutters that was always mobbed with people and yet looked always also, so all by itself.
Someone made their way past me. A woman in a green dress, a dress that was impossibly just exactly like the dress I had so recently seen wrapped around Aurelie. Wrapped around Aurelie when she was wrapped in M’s arms. I shut my eyes blink, and cut her out, but she was still there when I opened them again. I pinched my arms too but she didn’t go away. Another women in a green dress passed me, her hem just skirting my knees as she made her way towards the prow. A woman in a green dress sat down next to me. I angled my knees slightly away from her. A woman in a green dress sat down on my other side. The boat was filling up with women in green dresses.
I grabbed up my shopping bags and clutched them on my lap like children. There was the scent of almonds in the air. I smelled it when the women moved, as if their dresses were lined with almonds, or they all had almonds tucked behind their ears, or folded up behind their knees. The captain blew the whistle and the boat pushed off into the lake. The women in the green dresses ignored me but when I breathed in, they leaned towards me and when I breathed out they leaned away. I couldn’t see Nell behind all the fluttering green silk, behind all the crossed ankles and needle black heels. I couldn’t see her. I wasn’t even sure anymore whether she was really there. I can be so much fun at parties, I wanted to shout to the women, but I held on to my shopping bags and shut my eyes and pretended I had a headache, as if the sun were too bright then, to me, where I was sitting.
One of the women, the woman to my right, who wore a green dress that ended just above her ankles, reached down into one of my shopping bags and touched the top of one of my tissue-wrapped parcels with her green painted fingernails. She didn’t look at me. She never looked at me once.
When the boat docked I leapt up and began pushing past the women, past all their slippery silk-covered knees. I held my bags close to me so they wouldn’t tangle in all the long hair that poured in wavy locks down from the tops of their heads. I bent this way and that to avoid all the long fingers and manicured nails. I almost couldn’t breathe for the smell of almonds. They watched me. They smiled pretty smiles. They exhaled their pretty almond breath. Perhaps I was faster than they were. Perhaps I was fast enough. The captain held out a hand to help me off the boat but I didn’t have one to give. I was all tangled up in my bags. Instead, I heaved myself back on solid ground and ran for home.
The garden where the boat had docked, the Jardin de Mon Repos, was filling with more and more women in green dresses. They poured in like locusts, the kind that strip whole villages down to their posts and their bones. Shoulder to shoulder, they jostled for space on the walking paths, they overflowed the benches. In the Musée d’Histoire des Sciences, I could see them peering out of each one of the windows, some held tiny pairs of binoculars up to their eyes.
They ate ice cream from glass dishes at the vine-covered tables of the restaurant La Perle du Lac. They licked their spoons. They scraped the bottoms of the dishes. Waiters in green dresses weaved in among the tables carrying trays of espresso and pastis. One of the waiters dropped her tray and the women at the surrounding tables pounced on her like jackals, putting her tray back together or ripping her apart.
At the Jardin Botanique women in green dresses filled the glass greenhouses. They steamed up the panelling with their almond breath. Some women in green dresses were planting flowers and more women in green dresses hung high up in the trees like unripe fruit, motionless, except for some that checked their phones.
The reflecting pools were clogged with women in green dresses floating mildly on their backs and other women in green dresses stood at the sides of the pools holding long-handled nets, trying to fish them out. At the Place des Nations, women in green dresses ran back and forth in the fountain, laughing as the shooting jets of water rained down on them, plastering their backs with dark green silk. Women in green dresses climbed the statues and sat sunning themselves demurely on the concrete benches, their hands resting beautifully just beneath their throats.
I ran out to the street, which is to say I ran almost into it, right as the number fifteen tram pulled up to the stop. The driver bleated his horn at me and I fell back onto the platform gasping. I turned back to the fountains but found them empty, the women in green dresses had vanished or become leaves, hanging so lush and green and glinting from all the cernuous trees. My breath was ragged and a man asked me if I was all right and I had the urge to, really suddenly found I almost couldn’t not, spit at him, my mouth pooled with drool and murk, but I only smiled and nodded and wiped savagely at the corners of my lips. I grabbed up all my bags and hurried away from the park almost running for the station where I could catch a tram that would take me back to the apartment.
A couple of women in green dresses hid sulkily behind the dingy apartment windows overlooking the street. Further down, toward the lake a woman in a green dress pushed a cleaning trolley in front of her but no one seemed to notice. It seemed possible that my eyes had specks in them or were haunted.
I ran through the train station when I got there, following carefully the raised track in the centre of the floor that is laid down in order to get blind people from one place to another. The track that is only wide enough for a single foot. A man stepped across the track in front of me and I almost reached out and pushed him. He saw my face, the way I was pulling it, or maybe the way I jerked suddenly towards him, and I knew that if he had fallen then, I would have thrown myself on top of him and eaten him up. That I would have scratched at his smooth skin until there was blood beneath my nails.
What I’m trying to say is that I was suddenly boiling, that it was almost like the gr
ound might split and melt beneath my feet. A woman in a green dress crept out of the corner of my eye and I thought, Got you! But it was only nothing and there was no one there and I thought of that fine gold chain winding around Aurelie, winding around M. I thought about her, Aurelie, who was the type of woman who could leave her house with only such a delicate purse and all my shopping bags turned to so much cumbersome ash in my swollen hands. There was something in that chain, in the fineness of it, in its dainty winking effervescence, that I could never buy or pretend to have for even just an afternoon.
I got to the end of the little path and left the train station and found my place at the tram stop and thought, There, I’m through it. I waited in line and bought my ticket, counting out the change just right and feeding the coins into the machine one by one. I was proceeding calmly, putting in the coins and collecting my ticket and standing with the other people who were waiting for the tram.
The tram came and I got on it, and other people got on with me, just pouring onto it like water or krill or like garbage. There was a single woman in a green dress on the tram, and she stepped backwards towards me, dripping her long hair down inside and all across my delicately wrapped eiderdown and I reached out and pulled her hair hard, hard enough to yank back her long neck. The woman screamed and put her hand up to her hair and I admit that shocked me but I waited and nobody had seen who had done it. We were so many arms you see, in the crowd. I buried my hands in all my shopping and cast around, with all the other passengers, my most innocent looks. The woman started to cry, reaching around and holding the back of her head, almost cradling it, but she didn’t turn to see me.
