The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  • • •

  But this is still in the future, as well as in the past. For the present moment we are still one creature, she and I. I still dance at the end of her umbilicus, though not for long now.

  Leo, my back hurts! Leo, will you rub my back? Oh, and my feet, too … will you rub my feet?

  In the green twilight he adjusts her pillow, rubs her back, rubs her feet, then brings her the book written by her Papa, which she does not read but holds idly, the pages wilting in the heat.

  That is what we’re all doing: wilting in the heat. Wilting and waiting. We seem to occupy a timeless space, he and she and I. Expectation hangs heavy above the River Esk. It hangs in all the five corners of the three pentagonal rooms of the Birdcage, fifteen corners in all.

  Here are neglected Turkish carpets eaten with mold. Butterflies crumbling on their pins. Unlabeled pupae that will never hatch. My mother averts her eyes from those.

  Only the river moves. It moves faster than ever—roaring and rushing, boiling over with the rotting offal of the entire city. It stinks to high heaven—stinks so badly even I can smell it, I who only provisionally can be said to have a nose.

  The river is what reminds us that time is truly passing.

  • • •

  Leo—are you going out? Where are you going, Leo?

  Pregnancy has heightened all my mother’s senses. She can hear my father upstairs in the bedroom, tying his shoes. She can practically hear him breathing, from any room in the house. She can sense, if it so happens, the acceleration of his heartbeat.

  He does not answer her, but then appears suddenly in the turning of the stairs, unbuttoned, black hair raised up at the crown of his head in a careless, unintentional crest. Poverty has ungroomed him.

  Just out to the shed.

  Can’t you stay and read to me? Please, Leo?

  If you like.

  He is mild, does not resist, sits with her on the sofa, her feet (the toes like little pink shells) resting in his lap. He will read aloud to her from her Papa’s book even though she does not really want to hear it, because he knows (and I know, too) that she is afraid.

  My mother doesn’t like to be left alone with me. Not since the day, a week ago Monday, when the midwife came and pressed on me, hard, with her bony, long-fingered hand.

  Any day now. She’s a’most ready. A big, strong barne. Healthy.

  She has prognosticated me. She a sinewy, grizzle-headed crone from among the cottages at the bottom of the cliff—not the same one who sold my mother the hellebore and juniper leaf, but one of that kind. Bony, adept hands. It is she who will yank me out when the time comes, when my mother gets tired of pushing. This is who will attend my birth instead of the surgeon. And there will be no chloroform. Leo and Clotilde cannot afford that.

  Leo will avoid most of the screaming by retreating into his shed.

  But this is not yet. Not yet. For now he holds my mother’s feet on his lap, the ankles swollen but the toes still small and pink as ever, the soles delicately lined, heels calloused and dirty because she has, of course, given up on shoes as well as on clothes and because there is nobody to wash the floors anymore. A thin, grim layer of grease coats everything now.

  Maybe it won’t come at all. Maybe it will stay in there forever.

  This is my mother dreaming. It is her waking dream of timelessness, here in the crooked house above the river, in the summer heat, with the windows lit green by the vines of climbing roses. And it nearly seems possible—nearly. That I will never be born. That she will hold me inside forever, will stop time, through sheer strength of will, because she is afraid to let me out.

  She is afraid, of course, that I, whom she wanted so badly to kill, will rip her to pieces in the process of being born.

  My father says, gently, It will come.

  He still loves her, you see. In spite of all.

  There is a silence between them then. His words are devastating, dream shattering, though this is not intended.

  Beneath them the river rushes, carrying clots of blubber and bone inevitably out to sea.

  Inevitability. That’s the thing. My father has recognized mine, and doesn’t flinch from it, while my mother strives to forget. To forget, and to remain suspended in timelessness.

  In this, though, her body betrays her. She is betrayed by her body, again. She ripens unwillingly. In the humidity her hair grows thicker and more curly, becomes a mane. Unbrushed, unwashed, it has a strong, musky, not unpleasant smell, such as might emanate from a healthy, fecund animal. This is what she is. What she does not want to be.

  Savage!

  From the strength of her savagery alone she hopes she may prevent me.

  • • •

  This is her waking dream. Her dreams in sleep are of a different order. Then she dreams of birthing monsters. Flippered things. Faceless. Footless. On awakening she can only remember vague, troubling shadows.

  Leo, you won’t go out today? You’ll stay with me today?

  This is how afraid she is. Her knuckles white against the cushions as she lifts herself slightly toward him. Her belly like the sun.

  • • •

  Even he cannot acquiesce all the time. The sense of inevitability from which she averts her eyes has gotten under his skin, eats at him from the inside out. He knows he must provide. Because I am coming. I am inevitable.

  I have no one to blame but myself, he thinks. I shouldn’t have stolen from William Cloverdale. It’s my own fault. I was careless.

  But he thinks it mainly out of politeness. Really, he blames me.

  Beast. Little monster.

  Now he works for Harry Owen only, for a pittance, out in the shed. This innovation, the arrival of the bench, and the lamp, and the oven, and the tools—the hooks and tweezers and calipers and brushes of my father’s trade—as well as the coal to fuel the furnace, is paid for by Harry Owen. In return, my father makes glass: scientific models, for which he is paid by the piece, if they pass muster.

  Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

  My mother is unhappy about this.

  It all belongs to him—the bench is his, the tools are his, the glass is his—what’s in it for us?

  He pays me. Defensively. Defiantly even. Black topknot of hair upright.

  He pays you pitifully!

  Enough to keep you in lace.

  She is silent at this. There is nothing she can say. Harry Owen’s money has bought no lace, and my father knows it. So where did the money come from? This he doesn’t know. Thomas Argument being out of the picture, as far as he can tell. But then, the lace has gone, too: a silent disappearance. My mother has different desires now, desires that must be provided for. Clotilde eats so much now! She feeds me with entire fowls, with roasts, with whole loaves of bread, platters of herring, anything she can get her hands on. She never seems to stop eating.

  And so he must make. That is his justification.

  Really, though, he loves the glass. The red-hot responsiveness of it. Its lightness contrasted with the cool, heavy iron of the tools. His desire for glass is a tactile desire, a longing lodged in the tendons of his fingers, his arms, it is a physical part of him now. And then there are his creatures. That desire is emotional. The work like a living thing.

  • • •

  Despite his need for money, he will avoid, as much as possible, that block of Church Street where are located the opposed and facing competitors, Argument and Cloverdale. Were he to go, he’d see that Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker is still up on Cloverdale’s sign, that Argument’s Vesuvius is as eruptive as ever, the lines of those hoping to see it as long, or longer.

  It mattered, once, that he was there. But it doesn’t matter that he’s gone. The relentless mill of their competition grinds on without him, he who was once the grist forgotten now.

  That world is his no longer.

  • • •

  I have to go out, Clotilde. I have to work.

  When she refuses to remo
ve her feet from his lap he lifts them himself, gently though (he is always so gentle), cupping the rough heels in his palms.

  Oh, Leo, must you—

  Yes. I really must. I’ll just be outside, in the shed.

  • • •

  He won’t go to Henrietta Street, seeking help, any more than he’ll go to Church Street. No matter what their level of desperation, he will never seek his father’s help. That’s what he thinks, as he stands at the corner, looking left, then right, dark eyed, the upright crest of hair giving him an appearance of false alertness. He is like a crow about to pounce on a crumb, except there is no crumb, either to the left or to the right. And below him: that is the river, rushing, boulders looming smooth and dark beneath the surface.

  • • •

  He will not work today. He has lied to my mother. Even he cannot acquiesce all the time.

  • • •

  Instead he is headed down the hill, toward the Scaur.

  It is a place Leo seldom visits now. He doesn’t know that my mother and I visited it often, a certain number of months ago, in our frantic efforts to be rid of each other.

  It’s difficult to say what he’s looking for there. A trace of his childhood self, perhaps, the mark of his own ancient bootheels on the uptilted, striated rock. But it’s impossible to leave a mark on the Scaur. It takes a million years to make a mark there. My father, traversing it again, will not find himself there, if it is his self that he is seeking.

  Whatever he is looking for, he descends determinedly toward it through the warren of streets, disappearing between the whitewashed walls, then reappearing where the bends of the road open out toward the sea. He marches, his back stiffly upright in the too-old, too-shiny, too-warm suit, too-tight collar chafing just beneath his ears; weaves in and among and past the shop fronts and fishmongers’ carts, through shouts of bakers’ boys and potboys, past sweet shop and Punch and Judy, is among but not of it, removed by his demeanor (absorbed, distant, off-putting) and his clothes (strangely formal, yet in disrepair). He has taken on the general aura, which has now become typical of him, of wanting to be left alone.

  I don’t know if it’s really what he wants. Or merely what he conveys.

  But he is left alone. He descends, unharassed, to Harbour Road, then turns sharply right, onto the Scaur. Though it is a hot clear day, the heavy, green sea exhales coldly upon him, breath reeking rot of tide. His feet remember, instinctively, the twisted spine of rock. Despite the constrictions of suit cuffs and collar he climbs the rough stone ably, sure-footed as ever, eyes cast automatically, habitually, downward. Instinctively searching.

  • • •

  The Scaur is the same but also not the same. The rock itself is unchanged, though new cliff-falls pock the cliff face, exposing striated layers of sandstone and marl, seams of jet, seams of bone. But there are bathers here now, in their frilly costumes, and among the jetties on the cliffs: fossil hunters with picks and hammers, pith helmets, bulging bags, the instruments of amateurism. This is different.

  This is Felix Girard’s doing. It has been like this ever since Felix Girard excised the Whitby Beast from the face of the cliff called Black Cap. Whitby has become a destination. Wealth in a new form now mounts upward, from the seafront, into the town.

  My father, though, is not particularly interested in this. His gaze is downward, his focus myopic, his stride, even on that rough ground, is purposeful, if slow. He is heading toward the Black Cap. Occasionally he pauses, stoops, reaches. He is gathering ammonites, their shells, just as he remembers from his boyhood, turned to brilliant amethyst, garnet, pyrite, smoky quartz. He thrusts them absently, almost automatically, into the pockets of his not-quite-shabby suit. It is almost like he is a child again, exercising the habits of his childhood: to stoop and to search, to gather, to collect. To hoard.

  In this way he progresses slowly along the Scaur, pockets bulging with rocks. He in his rusty old suit, with his abstracted air.

  He’s trying to distract himself. He doesn’t want to think about me. That’s difficult, of course. I am omnipresent, although I do not yet exist. I am paradoxical in this.

  When he reaches the foot of the Black Cap he stops. And for the first time in many years, dares to look up.

  • • •

  The old wound is still there—the wound he could not bear to look at, when he was a boy—the gap where the cliff face came down. The wooden stage is still there, too, long abandoned now, where Felix Girard gave his first lectures on the Whitby Beast. The beast itself, of course, is gone: surgically excised, taken away to London. Leaving behind a massive scar on the face of the Black Cap. A scar within a wound. Sliced out of the slick, dark rock.

  My father gazes upward, at the place where the tree roots still dangle, exposed, black, snaking arteries, the still-living trees green and precarious but still clinging to the cliff’s edge. That is the churchyard up there, St. Mary’s; the coffins that were also unearthed, and hung exposed like ragged rotting teeth, are gone now—rescued—replanted somewhere safer.

  • • •

  This is where my parents met. Not so very many years ago. But also a lifetime ago. She up on a scaffolding with her darling Papa, assisting in the excavation of the Whitby Beast; Leo down below, in the rocks, with his pencil and sketch pad, watching. Her golden hair. And her mocking cry. Papa! Who is that ridiculous bo-oy?

  • • •

  My father bends down, hefts a rock, despite the unhelpful constrictions of his suit throws it at the cliff face, watches, with silent satisfaction, the cascade of shale produced thereby. Then disgorges, from within his right front pocket, a small ammonite, the coil perfect, of fool’s gold. Turns it over in his palm. Admires this, the living tissue turned to stone. Stopped in time.

  If only I could make them in glass.

  Petrels fumbling moodily in the updraft.

  • • •

  Meanwhile I, who have been approaching for many pages, am about to arrive.

  • • •

  In an act of fateful serendipity, my mother is no longer lying on the sofa. She has gotten up; she has even, in my father’s absence, put on a frock; has even, for the first time in a month, hefted herself awkwardly down the stairs, this a major endeavor for her as she cannot, in fact, see past the vast planet of her belly even so far as her feet—so she feels for the stairs, first with her toes, then with the ball of the foot, then the heel, her palms braced against the walls for balance; edging me sideways past all those belongings of her father’s, past the rolled-up carpets and the specimen trays, the taxidermied alligators and the ocelot, those lifelike, no-longer-living things that occupy so much of the Birdcage’s limited space. She edges and inches until she reaches the fragrant nether realm of the abandoned kitchen, which she prefers not to see or to think about, and then maneuvers herself, with great effort, out, into the yard. Glancing surreptitiously at the shed, into the street. Upon the edge of which she stands, like a beacon, hugely.

  Passersby do not pause, but they do stare a bit.

  • • •

  I’d like to say that she emerged because she knew I was coming—that, prompted by a premonitory pang, she sought help for us both, in the fast-approaching hour of our mutual extremity.

  But this she did not.

  No. It was rather that she happened to spy, out the window, a figure, tall, dark, slightly stooped, passing along the brow of Bridge Street; and this figure she wished to pursue, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her bulging belly.

  In the time it has taken her to edge us down the stairs, though, the object of my mother’s desires has disappeared, up the brow of Bridge Street and into the town. Whether turning to right or to left: unknown.

  My mother is not perturbed.

  She begins—not to run, that is impossible for us now—but to trot, very swiftly, with a sort of rolling motion, a sideways motion, none too smooth, her vast prominence balanced carefully in her palms, hair loose, frock flapping. Thus we make our way tog
ether, she and I, on one of our final excursions of the sort, to the corner of Bridge Street and Grape Lane, where my mother, sensing or, perhaps, even scenting her man, with that uncannily acute perception her pregnancy has granted her, correctly chooses the right-hand turning.

  We arrive just in time to see a tall, stooped figure hovering at the entrance of the Custom House tavern.

  Tom! Tom! my mother calls. There is an urgency in her tone, so much so that Himmelfarb the old-clothes man looks up sharply from beneath his many hats, the acrobats tumbling on their carpet under the Custom House awning pause in their tumbling, Punch misaims his whack at Judy, and Thomas Argument (if indeed it is he), apparently failing to hear, recedes all the more quickly through the tavern door.

  Tom! cries my mother. Tom!

  Angrily this time. There’s an edge to her now.

  She would willingly follow him in—she has already begun trotting again, gaining momentum, palms beneath belly, the entire street crew of onlookers urging her forward—That’s the way! You tell him, missus!—except that now comes the sudden, warm, wet gush between her legs. All at once, abruptly, like a folding chair collapsing, my mother sits down in the street. Under her breath she mutters, so softly that only I can hear it: Beast!

  And then:

  Quick, she says, from her apparently helpless position, somebody fetch Mrs. Marwook!

  It is a credit to my mother that even in this, her most abject moment—big bellied, tear streaked, her frock soaked in amniotic juices, ignored by her lover, down on her nates in the middle of Grape Street—mercilessly kicked, in short, both from within and without—she is still beautiful—more than that—she is compelling. Nor has she lost her presence of mind. Mrs. Marwook! she cries, on the double! And the butcher’s boy, feeling himself commanded by beauty of irresistible aspect, immediately drops his tray of steaks and dashes off to fetch the deft-fingered crone who will, very soon, usher me into the world.