Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  Once I was done, I rested my head. I waited for the blood to fill my nose. But it didn’t. Instead, I felt stickiness between my legs. I checked my underwear—there was a dark red stain.

  I fell into a restless sleep, bleeding like a girl making a red angel in snow.

  Chapter Seven

  The Gatekeeper Is Weary

  Eleanor

  The doctor is a rotund man who possesses the hardened fat of a taut belly and a broad, padded chest; my own fat is soft, but does that make his fat better than mine? You’re not a great model of heart-healthy living, I want to tell him, and shouldn’t be one to judge. Yet that is his job.

  He tells me I’m lucky, smiling at me with his shiny face, his polished-looking skin. And I think for a second that he’s talking about Opal Harper’s release from the hospital. The new patient on the other side of the curtain is very quiet, perhaps a mute. But he goes on to tell me that my heart attack could have been much worse, that I’ll have to change my ways with diet, exercise, and stress management. “You should take this as a warning.”

  I’ve lived my life obsessed with warnings and precautions. “I live a very careful life already,” I reply. “I have to. My youngest child is fragile. I’ve never been a drinker or a smoker. I keep a quiet house.”

  “Well, you’ve taken good care of your daughter, but it’s time to take good care of yourself.” He smiles, falsely, and I’m suspicious of him.

  I clutch the gaping V-neck of my hospital gown. “It’s chilly in here. When can I go home?”

  “A couple of days. We’re very pleased with everything we’re seeing.”

  “I want to get dressed and walk around,” I tell him. “I can’t lie here in a sickbed looking like an invalid. There’s such a thing as the power of positive thinking. If you act sick, you’ll only get sicker.” I don’t believe in the power of positive thinking, but I don’t like looking weak. By God, I want to button something. I want to feel the grip of a snug zipper. I want to lace up my tennis shoes.

  “That’s the spirit!” he says. “We do want you on your feet some.” He smiles at me once more, his chubby cheeks glowing like the face of Mrs. Gottleib’s jolly plastic Santa with the bulb that lights up its head. “Any other questions?”

  “No.” I stare straight ahead until he’s left the room.

  I’ll have to call Mrs. Gottleib and ask her to bring me a few sets of clothes. I hate the idea of her riffling through my closets and drawers. Not that I have anything to hide. At most she’d find a stray prayer card left over from the dozens I received upon my mother’s death. It’s just the idea that bothers me, a violation of my privacy.

  Nevertheless, I call her using the phone next to my bed.

  Mrs. Gottleib says hello in an angry tone as if she’s incredibly busy. Heaven knows she’s not.

  I say, “Hello, this is Eleanor Tarkington.” I want to maintain some formality. Mrs. Gottleib gets personal if you give her any leeway. Asking a favor might be all she needs to discuss bunions or her Albert, God rest his soul.

  “Eleanor! Well, this is a good sign. They’re letting you use the phone.”

  “Of course I can use the phone. I don’t need permission.”

  “Well, not everyone makes a fast recovery. You know, my sister Greta—”

  I have to cut her off because she has countless sisters—enough that they collectively cover all medical emergencies. “I’m calling to ask a small favor. I need you to bring me a few changes of clothes. I’d like to get dressed, for goodness’ sake.”

  “Okay. Okay, then,” Mrs. Gottleib says. “Let me get pen and paper.”

  “You know what a woman wears. You don’t need to take notes.”

  “Okay. I’ll bring you options.”

  “Don’t overdo.”

  “Listen, Eleanor. How about I bring Tilton along? I’m sure she’ll want to see you.”

  I breathe in so sharply that my chest bones spasm. I almost yell, but I stop myself and whisper, “Dear God, Judith! No.” Calling Mrs. Gottleib by her first name exposes my urgency.

  “What?” Mrs. Gottleib says. “You think she should just stay cooped up? What if you die in there, huh? She won’t have gotten to say good-bye.”

  “I’m not dying. Don’t be vulgar.”

  “People die, no matter whether they’re needed on earth or not.”

  This is a reference to Mrs. Gottleib’s dead husband, Albert, as well as an insinuation that I am keeping Tilton dependent on me so I can cheat death. “Absurd,” I say. “I know people die. I’m just not dying now.” I sigh. “I’m coming home in a few days.”

  “The doctor said so?”

  “Yes, the doctor said so! There’s no need to bring Tilton into this cesspool, you hear? You’d upset her delicate psyche in the process.”

  “Okay, okay, fine.”

  I offer a quick good-bye and hang up.

  And now I’m woozy. I press the button for the charge nurse. Maybe I’m having a physical reaction to the idea of Tilton being taken from the house. Or it’s the medications. By the time the nurse arrives, wearing her cartooned smock as if this were the children’s ward, I wave her off. “False alarm,” I say. “I’m fine.” I’m not good with people. I know this. I have to make an effort here, however, because I want the hospital staff to give me quality care. I stopped going to restaurants because I wasn’t charming enough for the waitstaff and feared they had spit in my food. Even if they hadn’t, they’d probably coughed into it, and it wasn’t ever prepared the way I wanted it no matter whose germs were tossed on it. I hear my mother’s voice suddenly: “Say what they will, but you know your own mind, Eleanor! That you do.” I didn’t like the expression “Say what they will.” Who were they and what were they saying, exactly?

  As the nurse checks my vitals, I ponder how, if I’d been nicer on the morning of the heart attack, I might have avoided this entire incident. But I was in a foul mood. For one thing, I told Tilton that Mrs. Devlin’s daughter wanted a poem for a wedding but I forgot that I’d already invented that assignment. Tilton seemed to catch on. Then, on my way to Goodwill to buy a toaster oven so that I could loosen its wires and give it to Tilton to fix for Mrs. Devlin as well—another invention—I’d picked up the newspaper at Mrs. Gottleib’s. She’d cut out the advertisements and taken the sales inserts.

  “How am I supposed to read this Swiss cheese?” I asked her, holding it up, holes and all.

  “Have it delivered to your own damn house,” she said.

  “You know I can’t do that! Tilton can’t be exposed to the world’s traumas.”

  “Tilton should get a sweetheart. Write a love poem of her own. Get out and live a little.”

  “You know she’s allergic to the sun, to insect bites, bee stings—you name it. She’s asthmatic, lactose intolerant, and perspires to the point of dehydration!” I folded the paper and shook my head. “I don’t appreciate this, Mrs. Gottleib. I really don’t. If you weren’t the girl’s godmother, I would end our friendship.”

  If you’d asked me then, I’d have said that these volleys of argumentation were good for both of our old hearts.

  The morning continued to take a toll as I paced the household items aisle of Goodwill with growing agitation. There were no toaster ovens. This day was bound to come. There sat three old microwaves. I wouldn’t have Tilton work on anything radioactive!

  I marched to the front desk. Jessica and Petie, the two teenage clerks, were on duty. They’re newish, but I’m a regular, and my reputation precedes me.

  Jessica said, “Can I help you, Mrs. Tarkington?”

  “There are no toaster ovens.”

  “You bought them all,” Petie said, smirking.

  “When do you expect more?” A rational question.

  “When someone old dies and their relatives clean out their house,” Jessica told me.

  “I don’t like that tone,” I said.

  Jessica rolled her eyes. I didn’t like that either.

  “There’s an
old TV that your daughter can fix,” Petie said.

  “I don’t want her watching television. She’s delicate!”

  “She doesn’t have to watch it,” he said. “She can just fix it. That’s what you do, right? Break things so she can fix them?”

  I stood there, exasperated. I was a mother doing right by my child who suffers what they now call “special needs.” This was one of my daughter’s special needs! Did they not recognize the urgency? You would think that employees of the Goodwill, with their emphasis on helping those with special needs, would understand. “I thought you were supposed to be retarded to work at Goodwill. Isn’t that the mission? Are you two retarded?” I couldn’t help it. There, I’d said it. All I could do was stand by it.

  Jessica looked startled and then like she might cry.

  Petie crossed his arms on his chest. “Sometimes there aren’t enough retarded people and they have to hire regular people,” he said defensively.

  “Which are you—retarded or regular?” I said.

  “That’s not really funny,” Jessica said.

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny.” I’m not afraid of the help at Goodwill. They can’t spit on my food or be lax about my medications.

  I picked out a television. Petie carried it, rabbit-ear antenna and all, to the register. Jessica rang it up. And then when I picked it up, I couldn’t possibly admit that it was too heavy. I had to stagger out of the store, homeward.

  There are two nurses now. One of them has a broad forehead.

  “You’re racing a little,” the broad-foreheaded nurse says. “We’d like to see you even out.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to be forced to calm down?” I say, more sharply than I mean to.

  “Take the news as a get-out-of-stress-free card,” the first nurse says. “You’re no longer allowed to get worked up about things! You’re off duty!”

  I close my eyes and try to smile, but it must come across as a grimace because one of them says, “Are you in pain, Mrs. Tarkington?”

  “Yes,” I say, though I can tell it’s anguish, really, which is distinct from pain.

  “We can tweak your meds.”

  “No,” I say, eyes still closed. “I’m fine, dear. I’m fine. Do you think I can get out of this place faster than a couple days?”

  “If you even out, the doctor might let you go in two or so. No promises, though.”

  “Two days.” Anything can happen to Tilton in two days!

  “Don’t suffer in silence. If you need something, let us know!” the broad-foreheaded nurse says. They walk off, wearing rubber clogs with air holes punched into them. What is the world coming to? As if a shoe were a bug jar with holes popped in the lid? Ruthie had a jar like that as a child. Lightning bugs. She fed them wet grass. They blinked in her darkened bedroom. Then they died—hard, crisp shells on the bottom of the jar. Ruthie cried. She was seven. I picked up the jar and dumped the dead bugs in the garden. I told Ruthie that the world would betray her if she trusted it too much. We all get abandoned at some point. You’ve got to be tough.

  Why did I treat Ruthie this way? I would never have let Tilton have a jar of bugs, for the very reason that they’d just die. I protected Tilton as best as I could, but I knew that Ruthie was going to leave me. I raised one daughter to hand over to the dangerous world, and the other to keep.

  Ruthie, seven years old and bawling over dead bugs—it’s so frighteningly vivid!

  The truth about my mother is that, while she loved me, she wanted something from me. She wanted a love that was bigger than I could ever be. She eventually needed me too, as her reclusive nature took hold, and this became a working definition of love. If you’re needed, you can trust that love will last.

  George didn’t need me. The love didn’t last. Tilton, on the other hand, has always needed me. The love lasts. Early on, I decided that Ruthie wouldn’t need me for long. Maybe I quit her before she could quit me.

  If Ruthie knows I’m sick, she’ll sense weakness. She’ll come. To make amends? Or like so many others do: for the seventh book? She might have convinced herself that I lied about its destruction.

  After my mother died, I tried to write it myself. I thought it would be easy money, not that I needed it. My sentences sounded propped up with toothpicks. I couldn’t think of what might happen next. I tried to repeat the tree of tongues from the first book and return the characters to the sighing river. I remembered how Daisy and Weldon, in their later years, had a house and set out a bowl of hardened candies that got dusted in red pollen from the giant poppies when Daisy left the windows open. Petals from apple trees wafted in, covering the rug, and she vacuumed petals. I opened the windows, hoping that would help, but who thinks up stuff like that?

  The problem was I didn’t love Weldon Fells and Daisy Brooks. Even once my mother was done writing the books, the two of them still felt like siblings of mine—ones my mother loved more, doted on, adored, her true creations. Once, she whispered to me, “I’m scared to love you too much. If I do, will you just be snatched away?” I thought she was worried that I’d be kidnapped, but when George was snatched away from me, I understood. I knew long before it happened that Ruthie would be snatched away. That’s what the world does. It snatches. But my mother’s characters could never be snatched away. They were always in her control.

  Tilton was the child Harriet had always wanted. There was one time that Harriet left the house after she’d been a recluse for decades. No longer a clipster, she still read newspapers compulsively. She’d seen a small advertisement in the Baltimore Sun for the Isley Wesler Museum of Antiquities. She wanted to take Tilton. She said, “I want to see it as I see it and I want to see it as she sees it.”

  “What about the way that I might see it?” I asked.

  “You’ll see it the way it wants to be seen,” she said. “I want the under and the over.”

  I barely understood my mother when she spoke this way, and I almost forbade her to take Tilton, but how could I refuse a shut-in who finally wanted to go out? I looked up the museum in a directory in the library. It didn’t seem to be much of a museum at all, just an old man’s country house. In the end I regretted not forbidding Tilton from going because, through a very confused course of Tilton’s logic, she ate one of the artifacts on display. The heart of a mongrel king. It was a pruned thing at the time—leathery and tough. Instead of being horrified, Harriet loved it that Tilton—only seven at the time—had done it. It threw the proprietor, Isley Wesler himself, into a conniption. Later, while I was administering castor oil, Harriet called the newspaper. Probably because she wanted a clipping of the incident—proof that it had happened.

  When I grilled Tilton about the event, she said she’d confused eating the mongrel king’s heart with her desire for a father. How?

  One thing was clear. If George hadn’t run off with Marie Cultry, Tilton wouldn’t have been confused and wouldn’t have eaten a mongrel king’s heart. Further, if George hadn’t run off, I wouldn’t have returned to my childhood home with my crazy mother. If she’d had a mother and father in a sweet small town like Newark, Delaware—ivy growing on doorways, a quaint Main Street, and a hallowed college campus—Tilton might have been more normal. Ruthie wouldn’t have run off either. Without George’s awful example, Ruthie wouldn’t have known how.

  Or maybe it was the lightning. If it hadn’t struck the plane that night and sent a hunk of burning engine to the road and hadn’t killed Marie Cultry’s brand-new husband, then George and I might have survived the aggression of daily living. We may have even sweetened on each other—returning to our courtship—once the kids were older.

  But why revisit that suffering?

  The phone rings. I forgot that there was a phone even though I spoke to Mrs. Gottleib on it a short while ago. People shouldn’t be able to reach you when you’re in a hospital. It’s like having a telephone in the bathroom. Indecent.

  Somehow I know it’s Ruthie calling. I know it the way I know the most basi
c things—a toothache, a thunderstorm.

  “Mom, are you okay?” I hear when I answer. It is Ruthie. I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m right, but I am.

  “I’m fine.” I haven’t heard Ruthie’s voice in so long that I’m also surprised that I recognize it. It’s like someone’s rung a bell and it matches the exact same sweet note that resides in my memory. But the sweetness is tinged with sadness. I want to muffle the damn bell.

  “I talked to Tilton. I didn’t get very good details. What has the doctor said?”

  The doctor isn’t to be trusted. “Minor,” is what I tell Ruthie. “It’s all minor.”

  “Really?” Ruthie says. Her voice doesn’t seem older at all. Her face appears in my mind but it hasn’t aged either. She’s just a teenager, yelling at me, breaking me. “A minor heart attack is still a heart attack, which is major.”

  “I know why you’re calling.” Ruthie always has an ulterior motive. I remind myself that I can’t trust her.

  “I wanted to feel you out on coming to help with Tilton. I thought—”

  “No. You want what we don’t have.”

  Ruthie pauses, as if she’s confused, but then says, “I gave up wanting something from you years ago. Group therapy.”

  “Group therapy,” I huff. You’d never catch me talking about my feelings with a group of strangers. “You want what they all want. The seventh book of Harriet Wolf.”

  She goes quiet and suddenly I’m afraid she’s going to hang up. I know that I have to be tough with her but I still want to hear her voice, just a few more notes. I’m about to apologize, but then she says, “I was in graduate school, English literature, at one point. Do you know what being Wee-ette’s granddaughter afforded me? A shitty marriage.”

  For years, I took control of the story like a gatekeeper, as they put it in that news article. Why didn’t I see how stupid that was, just as it was stupid of my mother to love her characters because she could control them, when she had a daughter who would have done anything for her—anything? I should have recognized that my Ruth was always going to do what she wanted to. That was her way. I hear her breathing, waiting. There’s nothing I can do. She’s coming. I can feel it. “Ruthie,” I whisper.