Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

It was much quieter without Ruthie. I was struck by a strange sense of relief, though that relief brought its wallops of guilt; what mother would be relieved that her daughter ran away? She’d filled the house with a whirlwind of chaos—loud music, lewd images on record covers and cassettes. She insisted that they watch the nightly news—and what could be more violent and upsetting? “This is the real world,” Ruthie would tell us. “We have to know these things if we’re ever going to have normal lives!” But as soon as Ruthie left, I gave the television away to the local nursing home, and I had the newspaper delivered to Mrs. Gottleib next door so that its graphic images wouldn’t find their way to each day’s breakfast table. I knew that my bedtime story was too graphic. This hypocrisy wasn’t lost on me. But Tilton had a right to her own history, to know her father.

  As horrifying as the images of the crash were, I always worried more about telling the second half of the bedtime story, which was bloodless, but more violent—a rupture of family. George, the deserter. My own father might have been a deserter too. My mother never gave me the details. And then she died, and all I had left were her ridiculous fables of Weldon and Daisy. I wouldn’t do that to my own kids. There were valuable lessons to be learned, and once Ruthie was gone I blamed myself for not having been more straightforward: this was a cautionary tale. Harriet Wolf was known for famously pooh-poohing stories laden with morals. “If I’d wanted to be a moralizer, I’d have done so,” she once wrote. “As novelist, my job is to make things up. As reader, yours is to sort morals out for yourself.” I, on the other hand, like my stories to have a point, thank you very much!

  So I became my own Greek chorus. “You can never tell what form danger will take, Tilton. It can look so sad, so in need of sympathy—like a woman who’s lost her husband in a plane crash—that you invite it into your own home.”

  When did Tilton truly understand that her father had an affair with the widow sent by the Red Cross to stay with us? When did she understand the word “affair”? Hard to say. She never questioned this part of the story—Marie Cultry and her love-lost air, her passionate, weeping impression collapsing around the house that chill December, how she seemed to carry heat wherever she went; Marie Cultry with her moist, exuberant wilting, her flushed, fevered cheeks, her wide-set eyes and quivering mouth; Marie Cultry, the thief.

  After all grisly identifications were attended to and she was emotionally stable enough to travel, I watched George through an upstairs window cup Marie Cultry’s elbow so she didn’t slip on the icy driveway. He guided her gently to the passenger seat and shut the door. He unlocked the trunk and heaved the suitcase in, roughly. After he slammed the trunk lid, he looked up at me in the window. I knew how I looked: one hand on my hip, the other pulling back the curtain. It was midmorning. Tilton was napping. Ruthie was building blocks and kicking them down.

  George waved, and I waved back to him.

  Did he know that he wasn’t coming back? Was he only 55 percent sure or was this the wave of a man without any doubts? Later, I took inventory of his things and realized that some of them—a few items of clothing, his toothbrush—had to have been hidden away in Marie Cultry’s suitcase. This was plotted.

  At the time, I was impatient for them to go. I urged George, mentally, willfully, to get into the car and deposit this woman far away. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he wouldn’t come home—not that day or the next; that he would become a check in the mail, sent monthly.

  And now I am in a hospital bed, next to Opal Harper, and Ruthie is a grown woman out in the world and Tilton never really grew up at all. Years passed at freight-train speed.

  It’s possible that over the last few days someone’s informed Ruthie that I’m in the hospital. A couple of months ago, Ruthie started calling Tilton almost daily—as if she could sense that something was coming—timing her calls for when she knew that I would most likely not be there. Over the years, Ruthie has only sent postcards, and there was a wedding invitation, on two occasions, that I declined. There was a birth announcement once as well. Hailey Ray. How old is that child now? In these calls, Ruthie has confessed to Tilton that she has the desire to know herself—an early midlife crisis? Something about a second marriage going down the drain?

  Tilton reported that Ruthie almost has her PhD in something, that her husband is a professor, that they recently bought matching dogs.

  “Good for her!” I told Tilton. “Good for her!” But I hoped that the flip side of this statement was apparent enough to Tilton. Good for us! That’s what I meant. Let her go and have her fun, her matching dogs. Who needs her? Then I trained Tilton not to answer the phone when I was out.

  I despise the idea that Ruthie find out about my weak heart.

  I can see Ruthie and George the way they were the night of the crash. She’s clinging to him in that field littered with the dead and the steaming engine on the road behind us. My memories have only gotten sharper as I’ve aged. Distant things are clear; it’s the foreground that’s growing blurry.

  The bedtime story has always ended the same way: “The family was torn apart and it couldn’t be put back together again. The end.”

  But now that Ruthie’s started calling, I can’t help but feel that my ending may be opening, like the seal of an envelope, moistened by steam. What if there’s a force drawing us all back together again? I am sure that this has applied added pressure to my heart.

  An alarm goes off at the nurses’ station and the squeak of the nurses’ shoes comes from the waxy floors in the hall, and when I open my eyes and glance at the door, their white uniforms scuttling by—all bustle and nerve—are like the kite all over again, the kite that was not a kite, like the rippling white shirts of Daisy and Weldon on a tippy canoe in the middle of a broad lake.

  I don’t want to think of my mother’s characters or of these images from her books, but they come unbidden. Those famous lines that Opal Harper was searching for—they ring in my head.

  Daisy said, “Love—it’s how we’re bloomed!”

  And Weldon looked at her and said, “Bloomed?”

  “Did I say ‘bloomed’? I meant ‘doomed’ and ‘blessed.’”

  Chapter Three

  And the House Tries to Devour the Mother

  Tilton

  My mother was stuck in the first-floor bay window, which was filled with hot, bright summery sun. The house tried to eat her. In the house’s defense, my mother shoved her way into its mouth. It cannot be blamed.

  If someone asks me, this is what I’ll say, and Ruthie will want to know. She doesn’t like our mother. When she talks about her, it seems like she’s talking about some other mother altogether. Ruthie will know that something is wrong and she will call. She’s supposed to be here with me, as she promised. We made a pact, now broken. It would be cruel to remind her of it. My mother says that I lack the genetic coding for cruelty. When Ruthie knew she was going to break her pact to never leave me, we made a new one. We stood in the attic, put our hands together again, and wound them in string as Wee-ette had taught me, until our hands turned red and puffy. Not a cocooning of our hands—no. We were creating a bond. Ruthie promised to return and save me. I was the one who pulled off the string, attached the small tape tab, and wrote “R. T. and T. T. 1986. Return & Save.”

  Return! This is what I want to say to Ruthie. But do I need saving? Does she?

  As Mrs. Gottleib told me, my mother had a heart attack while stuck in the house’s mouth. I think someone could say that the front door is the mouth, but for me that’s a dimple, and the bay windows are the wide grin. The windows upstairs are the eyes keeping watch over everything.

  Did her heart attack her? Did she attack her heart?

  Mrs. Gottleib said she didn’t have time for silly questions.

  I know the house has no mouths. But I’m in the house’s head. I’m a thought.

  I don’t know much about human hearts, but I do know about bird hearts. For example, heartbeat-per-minute rates: the domesticated chicken, 2
45; the crow, 345; the house sparrow, 460; the ruby-throated hummingbird, 615 beats per minute!

  Big, slow, unwinged humans? Only sixty to eighty beats per minute. I looked up the human heart just recently, in our set of encyclopedias that take up three full shelves in our wood-​paneled living room.

  Today I feel like a house sparrow: 460 beats per minute.

  Meanwhile, I am injured. Highly injured. I tried to open the window so the house would spit my mother out or swallow her whole—either way, really, because I was in the house’s head—and I gashed my thumb. There was blood.

  Wee-ette was there because she’s always with us even though she’s dead. Wee-ette is my mother’s mother. She died when I was ten, but I love her still. Wee-ette! This is what I sometimes whisper. Wee-ette! Like the call of a black-winged kite or a cardinal in the early morning. When I was little, I tried to say her name, Harriet, which is what my mother called her own mother. But in my child mouth, it came out Wee-ette. She had a desk and a buzzing, clacking typewriter. She let me play with scissors and glue. Wee-ette and I have secrets. We are bound. We have a like mind—that’s what she always told me. Except Wee-ette’s mind would know what to do now. And although she is with me, she doesn’t speak.

  I had been waiting for my mother to come home. I lock the doors and windows when she goes out. The winterized back porch is always locked, jammed with storage, things we don’t want but can’t get rid of. See, the world is vicious, dangerous, and full of suffering. Plus, I’m allergic to most everything out in it.

  But also I keep the house locked because of the seventh book. If I’m left alone with the doors open, a Wolf fan could show up and ask me many questions that are none of their beeswax. One of them once pulled a wisp of my grandmother’s hair straight from her head—ages ago, when she still ventured out. After Wee-ette died, there was a plaque on the house, but this made things worse. On one of the anniversaries of her death, a woman lit candles in our yard and knelt there until my mother told the police to take her away. Unopened boxes of fan mail fill the attic. Mice began to burrow so we burned the mail in the backyard one winter. My mother protects me from these people, but I glimpse them, begging at the door, calling on the phone, plus Mormons who ride bicycles and Jehovah’s Witnesses who do not. I prefer to have the windows open, screens in place, so I can hear the birdcalls better. But I know the rules when my mother is out.

  Why was my mother out? It’s Mrs. Devlin’s daughter’s fault.

  Toaster oven repairs can be dangerous. There can be problems with the electrical cord, main switch, thermal fuse, or solenoid. You may need to recalibrate the thermostat. I know these things because it’s good for a person to have a job and be of use.

  I also know about birds but I don’t know how that makes me of use. I can’t fix a bird’s wing, for example. People think they could fly like a bird if they could strap big enough wings to their bodies. Wrong. Birds’ bones are hollow and often can fill with air when the bird breathes. Birds don’t have diaphragms because their entire bodies act as bellows. You’d have to change your entire skeletal and respiratory systems to fly, in addition to getting feathers and wings.

  That morning, my mother told me Mrs. Devlin wanted me to fix a toaster oven and to write a poem for her daughter’s wedding. This is another way that I’m of use—poetry. I know how to write poems for all occasions. I come from writers and should take advantage of the gift that God has given to me or it’s rude to God.

  I asked my mother if Mrs. Devlin had two daughters.

  My mother said no. She was making me a glass of Tang and the spoon went clang, clang, clang, which rhymes with Tang, Tang, Tang.

  I asked her if Mrs. Devlin’s singular daughter was getting married again.

  My mother said Mrs. Devlin’s daughter is getting married again.

  My mother left to get Mrs. Devlin’s broken toaster oven, but she came home carrying a television down the street. I watched from the kitchen window. It was too heavy. She put it down and sat on top of it.

  We would own birds if that were possible. You cannot own a bird, even one in a cage. Not really. But when Wee-ette was dying, she told us about a room filled with caged birds. She was delirious. Her eyes milky. Her eyelids violet. Her lips like a small crack in a vase. My mother bought five cockatiels for her. Then Wee-ette died, and my mother set the cockatiels free because I wanted them freed. Later, I read that caged birds set free die because they don’t understand the wild. My mother says this is important to keep in mind. She says what you know is better than what you don’t. She regrets setting free the birds.

  Ruthie asks me how I can be trapped in this house with nothing to see or do. She doesn’t understand that there is so much to keep track of—the migratory birds, for example.

  I have never broken a pact. Ruthie has never kept one.

  But I remember when I was scared and climbed into her bed at night, and my blonde hair mixed with her dark hair like we were bound together by different kinds of silk strands.

  Why did my mother bring me a television? It was too heavy! We used to have a car. It was struck by another car in a parking lot while my mother was pushing a grocery cart with both hands a mere twenty-five feet away. The car was old and therefore totaled. She could have been in that car. That was the end of cars.

  My mother knocked on the door. She didn’t have her keys. I don’t know how to unlock the locks. My mother shouted at me through the closed kitchen window, telling me not to panic, but she was speaking in her panic voice—the kind you use when your daughter is crying while you’re trying to get the birds out of a damn cage but they are idiot birds! Idiot birds! Damn idiot birds! They won’t get out of the cages, and then, once forced out, they won’t fly away! They stayed in the backyard for so long. Wee-ette was dead, but she stayed behind windows like I do now. She told me that we have matching souls, like mittens that are connected with a string and clips. I don’t have to tell her things because she already knows!

  My mother patted her pockets like she was trying to put out a fire on her person. She opened her pocketbook and her hand was a trowel, digging. No keys!

  Tell me how to work the locks, I begged.

  She shouted, No. No. No. You can’t come out, Tilton! You’re agoraphobic—on top of everything else!

  I told her that in emergencies, like a fire, agoraphobics are supposed to go out through the bay window.

  My mother jogged to the bay window. She isn’t a jogger. Mrs. Frier and her husband, Joe Frier, of Frier, Wells, and Bender, are. The Eldermans’ youngest son, a year older than I am, is a jogger.

  I ran to the living room and to the other side of the bay window, trapped. I told my mother that I’m claustrophobic too sometimes.

  My mother said, Yes! Sometimes. But I’m coming!

  If you have claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time, it’s not good, not at all. Ruthie says that I’m not either, but she doesn’t know because she’s not here. Sometimes I feel she’s with me too. I feel a ghost of her, the way I feel the ghost of Wee-ette. They’re here and then I look and they’re gone. If I keep my eyes closed, they are both near.

  My mother, her face red and glistening with sweat, tried to open the bay window. It was locked. She shouted, Tilton, open the lock!

  The latch slipped, slicing my thumb. What was I supposed to do in case of injury?

  Just hold on, Tilton! I’m coming!

  There was a lot of blood rising from my thumb. I wiped it on my nightgown. There was blood on my gown.

  My mother shoved the window up. It got stuck, though. She was too big to fit in. We stared at each other.

  I said, I’ll slip out.

  No, no. Don’t touch the windows. There could be lead paint.

  We don’t have lead paint. You fixed that a long time ago!

  That’s beside the point! I’m coming for you! I can suck in my stomach.

  I doubted this was true. A sizable ring of fat pads her middle, which would help her buoyancy in a bod
y of water. Can you really suck it in? I asked her.

  Of course I can! I’m on Weight Watchers.

  This was true. My mother attended meetings with Mrs. Frier and, for many years, has had a shiny scale on which to weigh her portions.

  My mother heaved herself up and tried to wriggle her way in. A baby bird stuck in an egg would use its egg tooth. She held out her hands. I grabbed hold with my one unbloody hand and pulled. It didn’t help.

  My mother told me to call Mrs. Gottleib, and then said, No, don’t. Then, Go ahead and call her.

  I ran to the phone and dialed Mrs. Gottleib’s number on the paper taped to the wall. I said, My mother’s stuck in the window! Paralyzed! And I’m injured and bleeding—perhaps to death.

  Mrs. Gottleib was annoyed with me because she loves Jeopardy! and the show was on.

  My mother cried out, Wrap your thumb in a paper towel. Apply pressure!

  Mrs. Gottleib said she’d call the fire department and the ambulance and that I’d better be shit sure this is an emergency.

  I told her that I was shit sure and hung up. I pulled a dozen paper towels off the roll and bunched them around my thumb.

  I ran back to my mother in the bay window. Her face was even more darkly rubied and puffed. Her upper arms, which are big and wobbly but taper to small hands, thin fingers, neatly trimmed nails, were shiny with sweat. Her hair was standing out wildly around her head—like a male bird trying to appear larger than he is, fearing attack. There would be an attack—of my mother’s heart.

  I told her that Mrs. Gottleib was calling the fire department and the ambulance.

  My mother said, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!

  I applied pressure to my thumb and looked through the window. A few neighbors had gathered. Mrs. Frier, Mrs. Gott­leib and children on bikes, and the cleaning lady who comes Tuesdays for the accountant and his girlfriend. We live in the old house on the block, here before the new construction, the nearby ball field, the buzzing chorus of lawn mowers every evening. I could hear the neighbors murmuring—like birds, throats and wings thrumming.