The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  I exist. I am coming. Whether or not I am a monster, I am coming. I am budding crazily now. I have a head. Limbs. Two cells rubbed together to form four, then sixteen, then two hundred and fifty six, and suddenly I have a brain, sparking, percolating with electricity, creating thoughts. All at once I have ideas of my own. Some of which are very definite ideas, about being born. I do not know there is a world, but I intend to enter it. I have begun to write something new, the limited letters of my little alphabet, CGD’O.LD’O.CGD’O.LD’O, twining together to form something new, the essence of me, the core of what will be my self. CD’O.CD’O.CD’O …

  She can’t stop me now.

  • • •

  Even as she accepts her fate, my mother won’t give up, not entirely. She doesn’t know where she’s going, or when, but she knows she’ll go somewhere, sometime, and she’s got to be prepared. The coins keep disappearing from my father’s pay packet.

  As for him, he notices the coins going, but he doesn’t notice that my mother has stopped wearing her corset. He hasn’t noticed the bruises either, or all that jumping off chairs. He’s been home so little, he’s unaware that Thomas Argument no longer visits. It’s true he hasn’t seen any new presents from Argument around the house. But then, that’s been the case, regardless, for quite a while. All the presents have been disappearing, along with those mysterious missing coins, into the traveling trunk my father is too much a gentleman to open.

  What does he think is going to jump out at him if he does? A Persian div, perhaps? A Persian div with a face like an Argument?

  • • •

  In fact he has no fixed ideas on that question. He has simply averted his eyes. As long as he doesn’t look, the trunk is empty. It’s a metaphysical proposition.

  He doesn’t know that what is in that trunk is:

  Me.

  Because I’m bearing down on his life, too. Not just hers. Bearing down like a steam engine. And I’m going to arrive, whether he opens his eyes or not.

  • • •

  At the moment, all my father really thinks about is glass. His thoughts are crystalline structures, chemical compositions, elastic solids, melting points. He thinks that he is thinking about my mother, too—and he does think about her, in a way, in a very specific way. He thinks not about my flesh-and-blood mother (who is throwing up, and throwing herself off chairs, and bouncing off beds, and tumbling desperately down staircases, and drinking toxic herb teas, all outside his notice), but rather about a Clotilde-in-his-head, she who exists in a vitreous rather than a fleshly state; malleable, it is true, if sufficiently heated, but mostly static, her molecules silent, slowed, suspended—glittering, like stars. Like a star she is distant, shiny, beautiful. Her movement is infinite yet indiscernible. As the flesh-and-blood Clotilde prepares to leave him for Thomas Argument, this other is drawing closer, one gleaming molecule at a time.

  He does not see her yet. She is veiled still, just out of sight, a spark, balanced at the knife-edge of his perception.

  Thomas Argument woos my real mother (so my father thinks), creating, with his magic lantern, spectacles writ large: Vesuvius. Pompeii. The Great Fire. While Leopold my father remakes her, suspends her in glass. His is a spectacle of the infinitely small, stopped in time: her initials entwined forever in the bud of a glass sea anemone. The rosy, pink tips of the tentacles, delicate as fingers. The engorged fronds of a nudibranch. Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, lavender freckled, tapering, thin as a coin at its thickest extremity, its underside a creamy, opalescent rainbow. Glass made flesh.

  This is what my father is thinking about.

  My mother, my real mother, hardly even impinges, though he thinks he is doing it all for her sake.

  Honestly, he has no idea what he is doing.

  Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, instead of my darling Clotilde.

  • • •

  During the months she has been simultaneously feeding me and fighting me with the very marrow of her bones, he has been gestating something of his own, too, wasting William Cloverdale’s glass, but succeeding, at last, with these three models, the anemone, the nudibranch, and the Darling Solenette. There are flaws, certainly. Despite his efforts they still do not, for example, look wet.

  He has made other things, too, instinctively, without knowing why, small, smooth objects of ambiguous design, which do not please him but which he cannot bear to throw away.

  He averts his eyes from these. They are the secret he keeps from himself.

  He has labored over his creation. The miscarriages now lie in the bottom drawer, left, in the cabinet behind the master glassmaker’s workbench. My father does not melt down this carnage—cannot sever the umbilicus—he remains attached to his creatures, no matter how deformed, long enough attached, at least, to place them in this hiding place, his equivalent (although he does not think of it that way), of my mother’s trunk. This Pandora’s box, like the other, he also, very successfully, avoids. It is the lack, the gap, the missing piece, the lacunae in my father’s attention. Although intending to study his mistakes, he never thinks about what is in this cabinet once he has placed it there, as if to look would actually cause him pain.

  The wound exposed.

  He has always been this way. An obsessive and a perfectionist, he dislikes looking at his own failures and secrets, even though he cannot let them go.

  As if letting go would be admitting to something. Freeing it into the world.

  But the successes—the successes are ready to be sent to Harry Owen, in London.

  Really, Leo doesn’t want to let his successes go either … he’d like to keep them all close, so that he can look at them again, rest his eye upon the good parts, pick with his thumbnail at the bad, contemplate further improvements, think about how he can make the next set of models better. He has already, it is true, kept his few, whole creatures longer than he should have—given that Harry Owen waits for them—given that Harry Owen has paid for them. My father has kept them in the drawer alongside their unsuccessful and ambiguous counterparts, perhaps for purposes of comparison, so that they rest together, side by side: a perfect solenette and a solenette without a head, another that curls peculiarly in upon itself as if somebody has tried to fry it in a pan, another with malformed fins, and so forth, an evolution, in glass, of Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette.

  My father only looks at his successes. That is what he is doing, at dawn, after another long night at Cloverdale’s. It is a last look: he has decided that today he will send what he has made. And then he will wait—for Harry Owen’s verdict. He will make no more until he has heard whether or not these will suit, whether they are sufficiently accurate for Harry Owen’s purpose.

  • • •

  Very methodically, he wraps his creatures, watches them disappear beneath layers of tape and wadding, then into the box addressed to Owen at the British Museum.

  He is exhausted. He has been up all night making glass eyes, trying to atone for a sin of theft that William Cloverdale doesn’t even know he has committed. There lie, in his drawer, the failures on which he has wasted Cloverdale’s glass. From these he must avert his eyes.

  He will spend more time with my mother, now that he is done—while he waits for the verdict from London. He has, though, it seems, no feeling about this, no wondering, neither hope nor fear nor anger. It is as if the lack of sleep has left him hollow, lightened, emptied of content. He feels more about sending his models to Harry Owen than he does about my mother.

  As he tucks the package under his arm and departs Cloverdale’s shop, passing the still-dark premises of Argument’s Glasswares with its posters touting Vesuvius plastered over the windows, he experiences: a feeling of accomplishment, as if he has completed something, at last, of which he may be proud.

  • • •

  As he approaches the post office at Old Market Place, having arrived much too early and finding it not yet open: impatience, as if this delay will last forever; anger, as if the postmaster has th
warted him on purpose.

  • • •

  Wandering down Harbour Road to kill the time, standing and looking out over the Scaur and the harbor, at the fishing boats scudding out between the protective arms of the breakwater into the open sea: a sense of how little he has done, how inadequate his efforts, how intimidating the immensity of this ocean, of the infinity of worlds beneath its surface, unknowable, ungraspable, and mysterious. How puny his skills in attempting to represent even a tiny fraction of this blue vastness.

  • • •

  When at last the post office has opened and he has handed his parcel across the counter and paid its fare to London: loss, a sense that something has been taken from him that he cannot replace. He fails, in the moment that the parcel disappears into the bin behind the counter, to connect this feeling with the loss of his sister, even though he looks for her every day, unconsciously now, though previously on purpose, fruitlessly, at the turning of every corner, in every shop, along the length and breadth of every street.

  Nor does he think about my mother, she who recedes from him, molecule by gleaming molecule. He averts his eyes and thoughts from both my real mother, and from the other, she who has taken form, glitteringly, in his mind.

  • • •

  All the way back to Cloverdale’s he is dogged by a sense of loss, a sense that haunts him all the more because he cannot quite place its point of origin, a place that seems to shift between several dimly perceived objects, none of which he really wants to think about.

  At the twistings and turnings of the streets he sees the sea, blue emerging between and beyond the whitewashed walls, the black iron gates, the red-tiled roofs.

  It is early still. The shopkeepers have just begun to open their shutters. Mostly he has the sidewalk to himself, the clamor of his heels on the cobblestones another kind of loss. Occasionally he passes an industrious enshawled housewife, or a servant all in black, clutching a basket, a loaf of bread, a chicken.

  • • •

  At Cloverdale’s the shutters are up, morning light refracting uneasily through the bubbles, warps, and imperfections of a hundred glassy surfaces. The large man himself is in the back, a shape vague but vast, hunched over the master glassmaker’s bench, humming. With a tweezer he retrieves glass eyes from the crucible, lays them carefully on the surface of the bench. My father paddles toward him through a multicolored shifting of light and shadow.

  Mister Dell’oro. Cloverdale speaks softly, pleasantly. Mister Dell’oro, there you are.

  Yes, says my father, I’m here.

  Up all night again, Mister Dell’oro?

  Yes. All night.

  You work very hard, Mister Dell’oro.

  Yes.

  Then my father sees. He pauses. Cloverdale sees that he has seen.

  What is this, Mister Dell’oro? What is this?

  The bottom drawer on the left-hand side of the cabinet behind the workbench is open, and spread out on the bench itself, all of my father’s abortions in glass. Cloverdale has found them, has laid them out carefully, tenderly even: a workbench of gently nurtured monstrosities. Of corpses.

  Did you make these, Mister Dell’oro?

  Cloverdale holds up, at the tip of a tweezer, something small, fleshlike, unnameable.

  My father says nothing, nods; somehow the vibration of the nod is carried on the thickness of the air to William Cloverdale, who is not looking up, who looks down, rather, heavy lidded, terse lipped, at the mess upon the bench.

  Using my stuff?

  Yes.

  And my tools?

  Yes.

  What are they, Mister Dell’oro?

  My father cannot answer this question, not entirely. Silence the only solution.

  So Cloverdale says, still pleasant: It is disgraceful, Mister Dell’oro. I ought to have known. Crazy furriner.

  He looks at my father now. Or rather, he looks up, smiling, but his gaze is focused somewhere above and behind my father’s head.

  My father’s response is inadequate.

  I-I-I—

  He cannot, of course, justify what he has done.

  When Cloverdale finally speaks, he speaks calmly.

  That’s all right, Mister Dell’Oro. You can go now. I won’t be needing you again.

  The big man’s disappointed gaze shifts back down into the crucible. He begins fishing around in it again, with the tweezer. There are no glass eyes left; he has already removed them all; but he fishes.

  My father is dismissed. It takes him a minute to know it.

  • • •

  It is only when Cloverdale persists in refusing to look at him that he knows.

  • • •

  Dear Harry, said the letter my father placed in his package, here are a few first efforts, inadequate I am sure, but I think promising …

  • • •

  Returning home unexpectedly he finds the house in disarray, my mother in tears: she has found Felix Girard’s last remaining hummingbird, missing for days, between the cushions on the sofa, holds it, now, cupped, like a sun, in the palm of her hand.

  III.

  THE GLASS OCEAN

  I write these things in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore.

  I write as if I know that they are true.

  For example: In Whitby it is summer. At the twistings and turnings of the streets the sea may be seen: blue emerging behind and between whitewashed walls, black iron gates, roofs of tin or of red tile on which nets are spread. Rough fibers swollen with brine, set out to dry in the sun, which is high at this time of year; high, but sparse, brittle. There is a brittleness about everything, even the roses, of red, yellow, lavender, and white, which climb the walls of stucco and granite, pulling themselves, hand over hand, like jetties, up the trellises, the cornices, and the gutters; addressing, with their leaves and their thorns, the warped windows of the Birdcage. Gently they tap, lovingly, with their thorns, on the thick, bubbled glass, high above the River Esk.

  • • •

  I do not exist yet in this world, the old world, even though, in the new, I am addressed with various forms of desire. Over here, Red. Walk my way, girlie! Oh, you’re a biggun, ain’t you? Come over here, Big Red!

  I am desired, therefore I exist. But also I do not.

  In the old world, everything is about to begin.

  • • •

  My father, Leo Dell’oro, unyoked once again, spends his days watching his wife, Clotilde, expand. Despite the season, he does not confuse her burgeoning belly with the sun. He has not the imagination for that.

  My mother lies naked in the heat. Her body, in past hidden scrupulously even from herself, has become a thing of opulent display: breasts, belly, thighs, glistening—tempting, untouchable fruit, openly on offer in the middle of the afternoon. She lies on the sofa, fans herself, turns immodestly from side to side, each revolution an eclipse as she tries, unself-consciously and without success, to balance her discomfort on the worn cushions.

  She need not be modest. Modesty is no longer required. There is nobody to see her. Even the girl-of-all-work, she who was nobody and who saw nothing, is gone now.

  Everyone is gone.

  For the first time, Leo and Clotilde are truly alone. Or rather, we are alone, the three of us. Because of course I am there, too; though I do not yet exist, I am a determining presence. I turn with my mother, revolve with her. We wax and wane together, she and I, on the worn-out cushions of the sofa. We seek a point of compromise. Seek and do not find.

  • • •

  Around us all is disorder, disarray bordering on squalor. With Mary gone there is nobody but my mother to do the cleaning up, and Clotilde does not clean. And so, everywhere: piles of books; old newspapers; my father’s sketches, pencils, paints; boxes, half unpacked, with half-eaten plates of herring balanced on their lids; discarded stockings; half-darned pillowcases with the needle and thread still in them; a hairbrush knotted with tangles of blond hair; a comb likewise, knotted with dark; sta
ined shirt collars, stained shirt cuffs; scissors; opened envelopes; sealed envelopes; cold toast; and bills. Bills from the grocer, the butcher, the fishmonger, the coal merchant, the surgeon, the chemist, the tailor …

  Leo and Clotilde survive on credit. On good will. On air. Mostly.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, roaches dine languidly on weeks-old bacon grease and drippings.

  It’s not my problem, of course. We are together, we three, but their struggles are not my struggles. I am safe and well fed, turning silently on my tether, leeching off my mother, tethering her to me, opposing from within: rotating left when she turns right, then right when she turns left, migrating down when she stands up, and up when she lies down …

  In this I mean no harm. It’s just my nature, something I can’t help. Despite this, how she complains about me:

  Oh, Leo, it’s so awful … this thing … this awful thing … it’s so heavy … I can’t put it anywhere … I turn here and it kicks there … turn there and it kicks here … I hate it, the little monster, and it hates me … look at the size of my ankles! Bring me a pillow, will you? A lemonade? My Papa’s book? … Oh, it’s so dreadfully hot in here, Leo …

  In the green light cast by the vines of the climbing roses, my father regards his wife, the beautiful smooth globe of the belly, the mystery of what lies within. What am I? He doesn’t know. I am an unknown substance. She doesn’t know me either, though she has her suspicions.

  Such an awful thing … I wish I could get rid of it.

  She still makes these bitter remarks, but without the old conviction—her physical assaults upon me are a thing of the past. Though she tosses and turns, rages, complains, calls me this thing … this awful thing … this terrible thing … the little monster … the beast within … she has fully acquiesced, in her way, to my presence: all the self-inflicted bruises have healed, her body ripens unimpeded, expands, blushes, softens, even seems to emanate a radiant light—

  Thanks to me she has become even more lovely than she was before. Not that she is grateful. There’s no gratitude in her. She will go on, calling me names, even after I am born. It’s true: on the day after my birth day, she’ll hold me to her warm, soft, milk-scented breast, dangle her lovely blond curls in my face, stare speculatively, and say: What an awful, ugly thing … it don’t favor me a bit, does it, Leo? It’s biting me something awful, the beast.