by Lori Baker
• • •
I will not dwell on the details of the birth—the extended battle between me and my mother, lasting the better part of eighteen hours, fought in the big bed in the small pentagonal bedroom on the third floor of the Birdcage—nor mention how it galled her, in the thick of it, to feel beneath her thigh, through the scrawny mattress, the hard jabbing edge of the traveling trunk she never got to finish packing. I think that even then, even as I was making my struggling, strangling, stumbling way down the birth canal, my mother was mentally packing that trunk—six dresses, two corsets, three petticoats, five pair of stockings, gloves, evening gloves, blue hat with an egret feather, black hat with a maroon lace, cambric hankies, dress boots, waterproof boots … No surprise that there developed, during certain moments in the struggle, a controversy as to whether she was trying to keep me in, or thrust me out—Push, missus! Ye’re distracted!—which Mrs. Marwook, prodding sharply with words and hands, urged her to resolve as quickly as possible, and in the right direction.
• • •
My father, coming up from the Scaur with his pockets full of fossil ammonites, hears the screaming, and retreats to his shed. He will spend the entire night there, nervously sketching sea urchins in nearly impossible detail—the fragile test, the inching tube feet, the purple anus, the mouth (Aristotle’s lantern), the hollow black spines, pinching pedicellaria—occasionally thrusting his head out the door, then ducking just as quickly back when he hears her: screaming still.
• • •
I must emerge, of course, in the end, despite my mother’s reluctance. When I do arrive, finally, noisily, at around half past eight in the morning, I am grasped by the head, tumbled brusquely upside down by the capable Mrs. Marwook, dabbed in every pit and orifice, and swiped between all my digits with a rough wet cloth, then swiftly wrapped in swaddling clothes. Thus properly cleansed and restrained I am set to nurse, despite the warning in my mother’s hostile eye.
It’s a large barne, Marwook says, not entirely without sympathy, pulling the swaddling clothes tighter, as if by binding she can shrink me. A girl. Ginger hair.
Clearly Marwook does not entirely approve of ginger hair or large girls, together or singly, but neither does she disapprove—not entirely—or so her tone, one of mild restraint, implies.
Put it in the cradle, says my mother, wearily. She does not bother even to glance at whatever is upon her breast. Maybe she is afraid to look. Then, too, she can still feel the edge of her traveling case through the mattress, pressed hard against the back of her thigh, and she isn’t too tired, yet, to resent it.
So Mrs. Marwook takes me up, and lies me down.
• • •
It is only later, when all has been silent a while, that my father deems it safe to enter the bedroom and examine me.
It resembles Felix Girard, he says contemplatively, laying his index finger gently upon my tightly swaddled chest. My mother, sleeping, does not hear him. Which is unfortunate, since it might have been a consolation to her to learn that I did not resemble somebody else.
As for me, I am unconcerned. I know that I resemble nobody but myself, that I am the eating, sleeping, shitting, screaming center of the universe—Carlotta omphalos.
• • •
Red! Over here, Red! Walk my way!
• • •
Except that I’m not. The universe being larger, and more complicated than I can, at this moment, comprehend.
• • •
I express myself—a first, tyro’s effort—and from my mother receive no reply.
I think it needs to be fed, my father says, removing his finger from among my swaddling in response to certain noises I have made.
It is a first time, but it will not be the last, that it is my father, not my mother, who responds to my utterance. My mother never seems to hear, or maybe she cannot understand me. It is only after my father has applied his Rosetta stone to my vocal hieroglyphs and produced an interpretation (It is hungry—it is wet—it is tired—it is bored) that my mother acknowledges my efforts with a grudging Very well, and presents her breast, which is not the less beautiful—pink as it is, warm, and engorged with milk—for being begrudged.
(In one of those odd inversions that she manages so well, my mother seems to move farther away the closer she comes, so that when I am placed at her breast I suck, along with the milk, the hollow sensation, unidentifiable as yet by me, that presages not her living presence, but her impending absence; and not knowing what it is that I have swallowed, I am lulled to sleep with uneasy dreams of things I have never yet experienced: the weirdly elongated shadow of a pheasant perched on a stile at sunset in a silent empty field; the dead carapace of a crab, tossed and tangled with seaweeds; a chair abandoned in a cobbled yard, with a single glove resting on its seat.)
I wake fretting.
Red! Over here, Red!
You see I am desired. Just not by her.
• • •
I think it needs to be changed, my father says.
He has to repeat himself several times before my mother hears, and then finally he gives up, and changes me himself. His hands, though rough, are deft and precise; he turns me over carefully, unwraps me and then wraps me up again, neatly, every detail in place, as if I am a piece of glass he is forming at his lamp, while my mother, who is sometimes nearby—in the same house certainly, sometimes even in the same room—wonders how much longer before she can get back into her strictest corset. Not too much longer now. She is a beautiful woman; she has kept her figure. The mirror is back, its cover removed. We are reflected in it together—here we are: she, smoothing her dress down tight over her narrow waist, turning from side to side, blond curl pendant over bare, white shoulder. I am behind her, a blur in the cradle. My mouth is open wide, oral apparatus on display, tongue first, tonsils behind. In reflection no one can hear me screaming. The reflected me is the one my mother much prefers.
She is usually someplace nearby. Almost always in the same house. Sometimes in the same room.
Out in the yard, sometimes.
Although I am the omphalos, the center, I am sharply aware of my mother in all her peregrinations, those orbits that take her in a series of ever-widening gyres away from my cradle—at first, harmlessly, just downstairs, into the sitting room; then, from my perspective more unnervingly, two floors down, into the kitchen; then, more ominously yet, through the door and out into the yard; then, inevitably, into the shed where my father is working; then, at last, terrifyingly, out of the yard, into the street—foreign place of neighing ponies and rattling cart wheels, of roaring river, from where, despite all, above every other squeak and whistle and rattle and thump, above every catcall and cry, above the passing songs of balladeers and barrel organs, I can hear the distinctive ring of my mother’s bootheel on the cobblestones as she recedes up the street.
I don’t know where she is going.
Away. Away from me.
Still fresh in the memory of an earlier time, a time when she would, by necessity, have taken me with her everywhere, I grieve at being left behind. The physical tether binding us has dissolved, only to be replaced by a tangible, finer, yet equally strong filament of connection; and I am exquisitely sensitive to every tug upon it. Yet it seems that, in spite of all, she is free of me. I am bound, but she is free. With what carelessness she shifts her orbits, moving farther and farther away from me.
I rage, loudly, at the unfairness of life.
My father, putting his mild finger inside my wrapper, says, I think it is wet, and proceeds to unfurl me—finds me dry, and furrows his brow. He doesn’t know what’s ailing me—let alone that it’s the same thing that ails him.
When she is nearby we are both aware of her, we two; exquisitely aware. There is her scent: the perfume, yes, but beneath it, more importantly, the earthier odors of her body, the sweet commingling of sweat and milk, armpit, neck nape, and cunt. We are always aware.
• • •
My mother. His
wife.
She is moving away from us. Downstairs. Outside. Out into the street.
• • •
Birthing me has hardly changed her at all. She is, if anything, more beautiful than before. Unlike me, she sleeps soundly every night, the gentle, white curve of her brow unperturbed by the various songs I have composed for the purpose of gaining her attention. She is unconscious, slumbering. My father gets out of bed and slips my coral into my mouth. For a while I will suck on it, this hard thing, calcified exoskeleton surrounded by four jolly bells that jingle and jangle softly as I suck, ring-a-lingling-a-ling-ling! My mother does not wake; undisturbed, she sleeps on, sleeps profoundly. Ring-a-lingling-a-ling-ling!
I think it is hungry, my father says at last.
My mother awakens then and is cross. Her nipples are red and sore. It’s biting me something awful, the beast.
At last she feeds me, briefly, before laying me back down and returning to bed herself.
• • •
As is true of all things distant and desirable, the farther away she moves, the more we want her back. We are in the bedroom, my father and I, amid the chaos of disheveled sheets and squandered pillows, sunlight and rose vines knitting a shadow trellis up the wall—my father is at the window, looking out—a silhouette against the windowpane. Where is she? Where can she have gone? Another day: I am in my pram, she has tucked me in herself, her hands gentle but uninterested, her curls tickling my face, her perfume my nose; she parks me on the cobblestones in the yard, just outside the back door, and then she recedes, hands and curls and perfume disappearing into the periphery of my swaddled vision, which has no real periphery, no side to side or back, only an above, straight above. I gaze up into the sky. Her figure receding, receding, gone.
A seagull passes.
Another.
Another.
Many in succession.
Eventually Leo emerges from his shed, sees his baby left alone in the pram in the center of the yard, and wheels her back into the kitchen.
• • •
A hot day in August. Roses wilting on the vines.
• • •
Clotilde, later, is petulant, grows vague when scolded.
I’ve been to Mr. Kiersta’s. Nothing fits me anymore.
But you left baby in the yard.
Did I? Did I do that?
Blinking rapidly, in confusion, her delicate blond lashes.
I’m sure I wouldn’t, Leo. I wouldn’t do that.
• • •
She did do it; but we forgive her. Like a planet, distant and revered, she has moved away from us for a while; her orbit has taken her away; this is only to be expected; now she has returned. Supplicants that we are, we dare demand no more. Indeed, we are grateful. My father subsides in his scolding; my mother takes me up into her cool, noncommittal hands, loosens my wrapper just enough to see that I am not sunburned, then puts me back down. Turns away. Turns her back.
And is forgiven.
• • •
Where will she go, my mother, in the new dress of yellow lace that Lars Kiersta is going to make her? Where is she going, her bootheels ringing on the cobblestones, as she retreats up Bridge Street, away from us, toward the town?
• • •
It’s a mystery. Throughout my childhood it will remain so. What I remember is a constant game of hide-and-seek, seek and find; even now, when I think about her, she retreats before me, memory itself is rendered unstable, is itself a thing sought and not found. In memory I pursue my mother through the three small pentagonal rooms that comprise my world, searching her out among the remains of my grandfather’s collection, which, increasingly, migrate out of the shed and into the house. My mother is always hiding: receding behind a stack of specimen trays, or the tawny ocelot with its fierce eyes of yellow glass, or else she is sifting with her pale, elegant fingers through a tray of ancient Persian amulets in semiprecious stone, or arranging on our dining table, as if she thinks she can reassemble them, shards of Roman terra-cotta decorated with a fish, an octopus, a lion, a goat. She is caressing the remains of her father’s world, willing them into coherence with gentle feather-strokes of her cold, elegant fingers. Like me, she is trying to reassemble the past. But the pieces don’t fit, won’t cohere. She lives among them in my memory as if in a museum, surrounding herself, as closely as she can, with the artifacts of her father’s world, as if these things, beautiful and cold as she is herself, can compensate her for her double loss—the loss of her father, and the loss of her hopes of leaving Whitby in search of him.
She finds them an insufficient compensation.
• • •
I am her most tangible artifact: as my father was the first to observe, I look like Felix Girard, the resemblance becoming more striking as I grow. But my mother does not caress me, nor does she seem to find, in me, any compensation at all.
Instead, she looks away.
I make her uncomfortable, the same way the ocean did, once.
She regards me, whenever possible, narrowly, from the corner of her eye.
It is getting so frightfully large, she says. I can’t lift it anymore, Leo, it hurts my back so!
I will lift her, my father says, grasping me by the armpits, hoisting me up and out of a box of my grandfather’s old books, which I have found, and opened, and climbed into, and rummaged through, and bent, and torn, and otherwise rearranged to suit myself.
It is hurting my Papa’s things! Why must it always hurt my Papa’s things, the beast!
She doesn’t mean to hurt them. She’s just a child.
How big it is! Look at its feet! So ungainly!
Meanwhile slipping into her own very delicate shoes.
Or:
It is like a giantess, she says, as she puts on her petite grey gloves, one slender finger at a time. I was never like that at her age. Will it ever stop growing, do you think?
• • •
It’s true: I am not like my mother, with her graceful, slender neck, lithe body, golden hair. Even at this early stage I am an ungainly, large-footed creature. I alarm myself as I outgrow, one after another, each of my childhood frocks. One day my blouse fits; the next day I thrust in my arm and burst a seam. I can’t fit my feet into my shoes, my neck into my lace collars, my rump into my pantaloons. My toes poke out through shoddily mended stockings. And I have, what’s more, a wild, curly mane of ginger hair that licks behind me like fire when I run. And I do run—as often as I can—on my long, sturdy, fast-growing legs: up and down and around those spiral stairs, from the kitchen to the parlor to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the parlor to the kitchen, and again, leaving in my wake butterflies off their pins, upended orchids, despoiled carpets, the terra-cotta heads of gods and goddesses rolling, wide eyed in surprise, all around the parlor floor.
Qu’est-ce qu’un sauvage! my mother cries. She has dropped her pearl earrings, a gift from Thomas Argument. They have fallen beneath the vanity in the bedroom; she cannot find them. She is on her hands and knees in her new yellow lace with her golden curls loose, unpinned. She is crying. And it is my fault—always my fault.
Go! Get away! Go bother your father for a change!
• • •
At least, that’s how I remember it. I don’t know if it’s true. Memories are tricky things.
• • •
She ought not be blamed. She is so unhappy.
• • •
Down there on the floor, looking for her earrings.
• • •
Later, though, she’ll go out again. That’s always the way. She’s gone out! She’s gone! She’s put on her gloves. She has taken her umbrella today, because today it is raining. She has put on her veil because today it is sunny. It is hot. It is cold. She has put on her boots, because there is snow. She is wearing her shawl. She’s forgotten her muff. Where is her hat? She’s gone. Again.
Where does she go, in the evenings, when she leaves us? The sound of her bootheels echoing on the cobbleston
es, echoing, relentlessly, til it dies away altogether, the sound along with her receding up the brow of Bridge Street.
Such an unhappy woman.
• • •
For a long time I try to find her in the boxes of her father’s books, or, if not there, then somewhere else … among the crates of fossils from Mongolia, lately opened, in the center of the room that serves, in the Birdcage, as dining room and parlor both; or else in the closets, the drawers, the cupboards, even in the great, cold, black, cast-iron belly of the neglected claw-foot stove. From which I emerge, covered in ash.
• • •
It is fruitless, of course. All fruitless. My mother is not there. She is a planet, moving away from me. I track her orbits; I trail behind. I am the fiery red tail of her comet. I come close sometimes; but very seldom do I touch. Less and less often, as I grow.
• • •
And so I try to win her by charm.
(What would come naturally to any other child isn’t natural to me; charm rests uneasily upon my broad, red brow. But I try.)
Four and twenty tailors went to kill a snail, the best man among them durst not touch her tail …
In response to which song my mother turns away with a sigh, retreats, wringing her hands, into some other part of the house.
• • •
It’s no use, no use, any of it. The singing, the trying to keep my feet in, keep my pleats straight. Beside the point, all of it. It is all avoidance, changing the subject.
• • •
Here I am, Jumping Joan, when nobody’s with me I’m always alone …
• • •
No matter. No matter. Her back is turned. Head inclined. White nape of neck exposed, hair swept up, bound tight. She isn’t listening. This isn’t the kind of music she likes. She likes music played on a spinet, on a darling little piano. Accompanied by one voice only. There’s only one she can hear; could hear—ever.
• • •
Oh, Leo—can’t you make it be quiet? I’ve got such a dreadful headache!
