Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  Eleanor is so willful, she may choose not to read this. Hello, Eleanor, if you’re here. For so long I didn’t speak of your father. To know the truth now may be useless. I was too heartbroken to explain my own loss. I opted for fictions. I’m sorry. I wasn’t capable of anything else. And I know that my choices took a toll on you. When George first came along, you grabbed hold of him like someone spurned. Did I spurn you? As for your father, you should know that you were no more spurned by your father than I was by my mother. You need to understand that. I hope I can make it clear. With your George long gone, I watch you push on. You’re doing it more admirably than I ever could and with greater strength than I ever had.

  Still, I can’t write the truth through the lens of your perception. I held up some other version of myself for so long, thinking I was doing you a favor. Forgive me if it’s hard to change that now. I’ll have to pretend you’re not here.

  As for my readers, I’ll pretend you’re not here too. I know that you really want Daisy and Weldon. The books changed on you as they went, but Weldon and Daisy were constant—wanting, wanting, wanting. A love story. I didn’t know it until the end. All stories worth telling are love stories.

  I haven’t forgotten you, my readers. You were young when you read my first book; I got in early and created a wild terrarium. Remember the family of sparrows, how Daisy and Weldon helped them burrow to the underground? Daisy’s mother, a woman made of moths? How you wanted the monkey king to save you—yes, you—from your quarreling drunken parents? You wrote me letters about those parents, the cruel teachers, your sick pills. (The sickly often have the best imaginations.) One of you had a brain dysfunction. In a fit, you’d bitten off most of your tongue, but you wrote to me about the talking tree, filled with tongues. Could I get you one?

  The tree wasn’t make-believe, I told you. But at some point you probably didn’t believe me and ripped the letter up.

  You became splintered versions of myself, ones I wanted to mend and paste together to re-create myself, as if I, the writer, were only an accumulation of pieces of you, as if you’d written me. Maybe this is impossible to understand.

  And after the first book, the second, the third, I started to fear that the terrarium was aired, bleached by a proper education, more metal filing cabinet than terrarium. You grew up, so did I, and there was Weldon in his loafers and adman suit. He felt like a pet lion wearing a strap-on bowler, belted into the motorcycle sidecar at a boardwalk amusement. For Daisy, in a library, dizzy as motes in shifting sun. Insanity was realism. I offered sex and death—you dog-eared the racy passages and passed them around.

  You grew up. Your lisps dried out until they were as shrewd as purse strings. You learned to knot neckties and jostle into nylons. I missed the children, but I loved you too. I imagined you as you studied my work in college while hypersexual, forever pining. You sent me diatribes on love, violence, war, and symbolism, and I didn’t have the heart to tell you that I never wrote a symbol in my life. If you gaze at any text long enough, it disconnects from meaning, from inkiness, and becomes a symbol of something. Stare at your floor for half an hour and you’ll be able to found a new religion. Your papers were all wrong except in what they revealed about your own gazing and subconscious, a beautiful thing.

  Your young faces became weighted by budding jowls. You’ve gone from doughy to taut to doughy again. We grew old together. You are bankers with fattened knuckles, pallbearers, librarians—like Daisy was—dithering through the stacks as if overseeing your own ward of loons. Some of you are dead. By the time you read this, I will be too. We’ll share that as well.

  I went through a phase of reading the professors who dissected my books. I was a feminist, absurdist, magical realist, modernist, postmodernist. They gave me psychological, sociopolitical, religious, feminist contexts in terms of Foucault, Freud, and Jung, and diagnosed my anxiety of influence. What brains! What effort! And yet, in the end, it was like having a deaf psychoanalyst. Not that I wanted to talk—not then.

  Sometimes I worry that the scholars spent much too much time on me. I imagine their children painting faces on their knees, portraits of pretend parents while the real ones toiled away.

  Deep inside each of you—reader, scholar, critic—a molecule of the terrarium still exists. If you still exist, that is. Why else does the word “tiger lily” make you think of a flower with petals growling open to show rows of large teeth—as Daisy imagined it? Why sometimes are you struck by someone else’s full humanity, their rich imagined inner life, a version of a true self that can’t be expressed, and in that moment you feel your own inexpressible inner life?

  Or how, in your dreams, you can conjure the entire ocean?

  Each molecule of story is a universe—grotesque and stunning, all sunlit steam and engines laboring in the chests of trains and creatures with small pink hands and horns and, yes, a tree with tongues; it returned after all in book six just as childhood reappears in old age.

  I write this in my old age—as agog as a lamppost.

  I hope, my dear readers, that your hearts haven’t stiffened, rind-tough, or gone dowdy with flab—poor neglected hearts, a tragic crime. May you keep yourselves trimmed—hair, nails, suit jackets—but untamed within. (Be curious.)

  Maybe after I die, you will all have grown weary of me.

  But one lonesome biographer might soldier on to tell a quiet, falsified, feminist life—my blissful childhood, my daughter born out of wedlock without apology, and my reclusive end. Pale biographer, I want to comb the snarls from your hair and send you out to put your face in the sun.

  To go on, I must ignore you all—by God, you’re a glorious distraction. I must especially ignore the beautiful faces of my own progeny. Know I love you, that this is a feeble attempt to show that love before it’s too late.

  LITTLE GIRL JESUS OF THE

  DREAMING WOUNDS, AND CAT

  Mrs. Funk made an appointment with Dr. Brumus and told him there was God in me. Candid about her faith, she probably called me “Little Girl Jesus of the Dreaming Wounds” and described the bloody crown of thorns wreathing my pillowcase, the divine imprint of my face.

  It wouldn’t have impressed Brumus, who wasn’t a religious man. But it must have stirred the old debate between him and my father. Someone saw some glimmer in me. Maybe my father should have handed me over to my mother after all, instead of this deceit. He sent his monthly checks but still had never laid eyes on me.

  Brumus told Mrs. Funk he would look into the matter. I was called in and Brumus said the words I’ll never forget: “There may be something to you, Harriet. Perhaps we can prove it.” He was a detective now. If there was something, he would find it!

  There was often a new secretary outside Dr. Brumus’s office. This one was young and pudgy, with a crimped chin and dimples. Dr. Brumus charged her with teaching me to read. This wasn’t normally done at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children—it was considered a waste or, worse, a cruelty. The school was designed to shush the criminal element in our souls, nothing else.

  The new secretary taught me letters in Dr. Brumus’s office when Brumus was out. More than once, Brumus interrupted these lessons and took the secretary to a small room next door with a cot where he rested if too weary to head home at night. While he was in there with the secretary, I heard the sound of an owl. I wondered if it was caged. Was it a pet or part of some medical testing that would one day help the feeble-minded? A child who hadn’t had such a stunted life might have understood the more logical reality, but I was a child trying to piece together how the world worked; my assumptions were sometimes illogical. I listened closely. The calls started as soft cooing and then rose louder and faster until they were clear hoots. I worried about the owl. What tests made it hoot like that? Did the secretary and Brumus have to hold the owl down while it struggled? When they came back into the room, they were always quite flushed, as if from exertion.

  I asked them about the owl, and the secretary said, “You have to
start acknowledging the difference between real and imagined.” Her eyes jiggled between Brumus and me.

  Once, alone, I peeked into the empty room with its lonesome cot and humid warmth. No owl. No empty cage that had once held an owl.

  When the secretary taught me the letter O, phonetically in all of its variations, I heard the owl in her own throat. She was the owl. What had made her call out like that? Was Brumus holding her down? Poor, poor owl. In my head, I named her the Owl.

  Somehow I never put together the secretary’s hooting with what began to happen between Eppitt and me beneath the Duck Porch. There was too much of a divide between my own life—as a moron—and the mysterious lives of normal adults who came and went of their own free will. Plus, though young Eppitt and I foraged mightily for each other, we never had sex.

  Things started up between us a few weeks after we met. I was standing next to the Duck Porch, which I had assumed had something to do with ducks, and the sickly children stared out at the world as if they were looking at something far off on the horizon. Ducks, I imagined. And so, whenever I could, I’d stop by the Duck Porch and try to see what they saw. The porch sat on low wooden stilts, with a crawl space below.

  One day I heard a “Psst, psst” from under the porch.

  I got down on my hands and knees and looked underneath to find the face of Eppitt Clapp. It was one to grow into. His nose, his lips, and his eyes crowded his face, so there wasn’t much face left. The slightest emotion caused a lot of action. His pouts made his face look rubbery. His “Excuse me?” looked like shock. His worry looked like a sudden affliction. None of this sounds beautiful, but it was. I loved the drama of his face.

  He was lying on his stomach, propped on his elbows, holding up that face, which seemed heavy with its oversized parts. “I knew it was you because of your shockings.”

  Shoes and stockings. That’s what he meant. He was nervous again. “What about them?” All of our shoes and stockings were identical.

  “Your shoes are in-footed and your stockings sag at the knees. One’s got a hole and there’s blue skin under.”

  My sharp shinbones collected bruises. With Eppitt, I was seen—in great detail. “What are you doing under there?” I asked him.

  “This is my house. I live here.”

  “You live in King’s Cottage.”

  “Yeah, but here too. Come in before somebody sees you.”

  I looked around—Parson, a guard of King’s Cottage, swatted the wide rump of Miss Wingrit, who taught weaving. Wingrit squealed and smiled, wagging a finger at him. Rules about boys and girls mixing were strict, but not for our keepers. They liked to gather and smoke, huddling away from us whenever they had the chance. We were their unwanted children.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should go under or not. There was God in me. Would God scurry under a Duck Porch? I didn’t know the answer.

  I scurried under.

  We dug our elbows into the soft dirt. It was summer but the dirt was cool, holding on to some memory of winter. From this spot, we could see over the hills.

  “It’s not a real house,” I said.

  “I know it’s not.”

  “Did you used to have a real house?”

  “Sure.”

  I’d been born in one but I didn’t remember it. “I’ve never visited a real house.”

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, surprised, I think, because he was now better than I was. “I lived on Sparrows Point.”

  “Is it full of sparrows?” I asked.

  “Nope. Just people in little houses and red dust because there’s steel mills. Red dust on everything, even this bowl of hard candies that the neighbor woman used to set out, all stuck together.”

  Later I’d know Sparrows Point myself. Sitting on the industrial tip of Baltimore, bitterly cold in winter and oppressively hot in summer, it was a grid of lettered streets, a company town. Row upon row of tiny houses were dwarfed by thick electric wires, conveyors on long metal legs, hulking warehouses. Oily, greasy, smoky, the red dust—just as Eppitt remembered—coating gutters, fence posts, even your own skin. The natural humidity of what was once low-​lying marshland combined with the billowing steam from the boiler chimneys made the dust damp and pasty. Steeped in fumes and exhaust, the Clapp house surely suffered the noises of Sparrows Point: the rattling gusto of the Red Rocket streetcar, which took extra hands in and out of downtown; the blast of tugboats hauling barges; the constant bleating of trains.

  Eppitt told me how on his way to school—where the boys learned machinery, gears, and small motors, and the girls learned sewing and tucking hospital corners on beds—he walked past seven giant caged fans, connected to the mills. “I thought if they were set to full blast at the same time, they could make a tornado and blow the whole place away.”

  “You wanted that?”

  “It’s better here. Gillup tells stories at night. There’s food. I have my own bed. And I can’t be kicked out because I already got kicked out.”

  “But what about your family?” I asked. “You didn’t want them blown away.”

  “Not my sister, Meg. But the rest? It would be okay. I love Meg, though.”

  Eppitt’s parents had seven children, all pale and slack with fatigue, a slouching crew, phlegmy and phlegmatic, often fevered. He was the worst off of the bunch. In the family photograph—he had only one—they hunched together by a puny tree. Eppitt was the only one to fix his eyes on the camera, to puff his chest proudly, as out of place as a parakeet. They ignored him, except Meg, who was three years older. “Meg is the only one worth anything.”

  The last in a long line, he was named Eppitt, after an uncle, although the Clapps already had a cat by that name. They didn’t choose to have cats. The cats simply slunk in, and Eppitt’s mother, accustomed to feeding hungry mouths, would offer scraps and, eventually, a name.

  She stayed in bed as long as she could after Eppitt’s birth. The previous births had been mired in complications—breeches, noosed umbilical cords, excessive swelling and bleeding. Eppitt, on the other hand, had slipped out like a greased pig. Recovery was her only time to be treated gently. She took her due.

  One time she barked from bed, “Eppitt needs milk.”

  “And my father,” Eppitt told me, “all bent up from years of work, reached down to put fresh milk in the cat’s bowl, but it was full so he shouted at her. And my mother said, ‘No, no, the baby needs milk. Don’t you hear it crying?’ And so they started calling me Baby so they could tell me apart from the cat. It became a family joke, and they didn’t even like jokes.” He looked at me squarely and said, “Why couldn’t they have just called the cat Cat?”

  “No one calls you Baby here, though,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “I like Cat. I can call you Cat.”

  And he leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  “Why did you do that?” I said.

  “Meow.”

  I started to scramble out from under the Duck Porch, but he grabbed my ankle. “You should live with me in my house.” It was like this for Daisy and Weldon in the underground burrow they built for the talking sparrows. He wanted her to stay with him there forever.

  “It’s only got dirt floors,” I said.

  “And a cat named Cat. Meow.”

  “Eppitt Clapp,” I said, but I didn’t say it like I was scolding him or even like I was about to ask him something. I said it like I was thinking about how important those two words were in my mouth. Eppitt Clapp—those two words changed everything. “There’s God in me,” I said. “Mrs. Funk told me so.”

  “I could have told you that, Harriet. There’s God in all of us.”

  The floorboards creaked overhead. The first sickly child was being wheeled back inside. I was half out from under the Duck Porch as the nurse pivoted the cane wheelchair and the kid restrained within it saw me. I couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl. The child had puffed red cheeks, mumps-like, and looked at me, and I stared back. And I s
aw God, just like that.

  “Eppitt Clapp,” I said again, barely a whisper.

  And once more, from under the Duck Porch, he said, “Meow.”

  THE FIRST PACT OF HARRIET WOLF

  Young love is a consumption. It drills into your bones, burrows into your brain. It lives in your breath and your blood—forever. Because it’s the first love to arrive, the train car is empty and airy, and love swells to fill the entire space.

  Eppitt and I worked doubly fast among the girls in the laundry, scrubbing stains with wire brushes, soaking the urine-drenched sheets in scalding tubs, pinning clothes in the sun. We didn’t talk in front of the other girls—boisterous with kettle-whistle voices echoing against the high ceiling.

  I loved Eppitt’s decrepit lungs because they kept him in the laundry—freshly steamed lungs were better than lungs packed with quarry dust.

  Under the Duck Porch, Eppitt and I built a home. “This is the kitchen. This is the dining room…” We listed tables, chairs, chests of drawers, curtains, and plates with blue-flowered edging. “One day, we’ll find it for real,” he promised. According to Eppitt, we had a destiny to catch up to. He would lie back, hands behind his head, in the bedroom under the Duck Porch, and I would put my head on his chest. “Our sheaven.”

  “Shared heaven,” I’d translate aloud with my head on his chest.

  He convinced me we would have this, and we would, in a way, years and years later, but not how we thought. Sheaven.

  We took turns lying on each other, kissing—always fully dressed. We were touch-hungry, neglected, both of us, but me more so. I hadn’t known a breast, a fist of hair, a warm neck, an ear to a chest, a heartbeat other than my own. My childhood was a starvation. I’d have died of it, if not for Eppitt. At first, my body felt needled, but once my skin came alive, I couldn’t get enough.

  Eppitt said, “Will you marry me?”

  I said, “Yes, Cat. I will.” Sometimes I called him Cat.