The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  Really? Is she yours?

  He stares at me more intently now, with a fierce, hard, pale stare, interested, yet devoid of feeling, as if I am one more specimen among my grandfather’s variously arrayed exotica.

  She’s a big girl. Awfully damned red, ain’t she? Ain’t she?

  My mother ignores this. She says, Carlotta, this is Mr. Treanor. He is an explorer. He is coming with me to the Gulf of Mexico to look for my Papa.

  Mr. Treanor says, God, Tildy, ain’t you got any luggage? It’s a frightful long journey, you know. You might want to change out of those things.

  He smiles a wicked smile, revealing strong bright teeth among the golden hedge of his mustache.

  My trunk is upstairs. It’s terribly heavy.

  Not to worry. I’ll send Samuel up for it. From among the folds of his overcoat he produces a watch, which he examines critically. By God! We’ll be late if we don’t look out! Samuel! Get up here and shift Mrs. Dell’oro’s trunk! Come on, Tildy. Don’t want to miss the damn boat after all this.

  My mother doesn’t look at me. She has never looked; she isn’t going to start now. She stands at the center of the room, carefully pressing her fingers into the fingers of her calfskin gloves. Then she says, I’ve left your father a note, Carlotta, and I see that it’s true; there’s an envelope on the mantel, leaning against the terra-cotta head of a goddess.

  Be a good girl, now.

  She bends to kiss the air above my forehead.

  • • •

  Then, suddenly, with a clatter of boots, she is gone.

  Mr. Treanor, though, lingers. He stands, taut with attention, at the top of the stairs, toes over the edge, like a man getting ready to jump; except he looks back at me, speculatively, and he doesn’t jump. I say, Tildy, is it awright to leave like this? The kid? Tildy?

  Tildy? Then: Well, by God!

  Thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, he jangles off down the stairs.

  Then the servant comes, and takes away my mother’s trunk.

  The house shudders; I hear the springs of the cab in our yard quaking beneath the weight of my mother’s luggage, the snap of the cabman’s whip, the sharp urgent ring of hooves against icy cobblestones. The spark struck: then off.

  • • •

  In the harbor the Emerald Isle has come alongside the wharf. She is tied fast, shored against the buffeting sea. The gangway is lowered. Soon enough the cab will disgorge them, my mother, Mr. Treanor, the servant, the luggage. And they will board. Boarding with them, on this foul day: A farmer bound for Hull, with his lunch wrapped up in a cloth napkin. Two spinsters recently departed from the Ravenscar Hotel, now bound for Colchester, each carrying a soft-sided, paisley suitcase. Their black terrier bitch, long nosed and indifferent in a plaid traveling coat.

  In other towns others unknown to me will join them, and together with my disappearing mother will endure bump of wave, shift of tide. While I remain behind, on Bridge Street, waiting for my father to come home.

  • • •

  It will seem like a very long time. A long time, to contemplate the distances of ocean she is putting between us. And I, paralytic on the sofa by the cold, black hearth. Sea fans spread out on the floor at my feet. My grandfather’s notes my only company. Gorgonians. Holoxonia. Ticking of clock.

  • • •

  I will have a long time to contemplate the distances of her ocean. A lifetime. During which she will never stop drawing away from me, distance growing greater, growing unbridgeable, growing unfathomable, becoming unbearable. Never ceasing to grow.

  It is a long time. But I don’t know that yet.

  • • •

  I think: I could have prevented it, but I didn’t. I should have said something. Yet I both hoped and feared that she would go, and so I said nothing. Now it will be my job to break the news. I don’t look forward to that. Maybe I will never hear the footsteps in the hall. This is what I hope, then fear, as the morning draws on. I wander lightly through the empty house. It is hard at first, then easy; I have done this before; this is how I imagined it. So many times my mother has gone, drawing on her gloves, her boots, her shawl, her muff. Leaving me alone. Crouched among my grandfather’s seashells and stones, his pressed leaves and pinned butterflies. This is usual.

  Then I remember. Sudden waking. Opening of the distance. The Birdcage empty and strange, and I, too, in it, strange and empty.

  At one o’clock the snow resumes, at first sparse, tentative, then heavier, insistent. Now my father will come home—must come home. Enveloped in the sparkling, suffocating caul. Even so it takes a while. It’s after two when I finally hear clank of gear in the yard, stomp of frozen boots in the kitchen, voices drifting upward.

  Damn cold in here, ain’t it?

  Damn cold!

  The stove’s out. She let the stove go out again.

  Clotilde!

  The unanswered call. Soft laughter. Scrap of conversation tossed up above the roar of the river.

  … off on another one of her adventures.

  Is that so?

  Murmurs. Rattle of coal in the scuttle.

  I imagine them downstairs, snow-burdened coats stripped off, grimy, wet boots puddling on flagstones, wet scarves steaming. Red palms slapped together for warmth. Nape of neck goosepimpled, laid bare to unexpected cold. Raw smell of ice. Specimen bags encrusted, glittering, shedding their wintry second skins.

  Clotilde! Carlotta!

  You’d think she’d have lit the fire, at least, before she went.

  I listen as if from very far away. I am far away. I am on the third floor, in the bedroom, sitting on the stale, unmade bed, surrounded by my mother’s turned-out dresser drawers, the clothes scattered, rejected, left behind among the sheets, on the pillows, on the chair, on the rug.

  I, too, left behind. Scattered.

  Squandered.

  Clotilde?

  He is working his way up, through the house; he hasn’t seen her note; walked past it; stands on the threshold, gazing down at me. At me and then past me, at the mess she’s made.

  From the glazed, anguished look in his eye I know he knows it. I don’t have to tell him. The chaos tells him, the crumpled stockings, the dumped camisoles, the emptied dresser. Without a word he turns away.

  Leaden footsteps on stairs.

  She’s g-gone.

  Gone? Good God! Are you sure?

  There is a silence; some shuffling.

  She’s t-taken her father’s book!

  • • •

  Muffled voices, descending toward the kitchen.

  I am forgotten. I have slipped through once again. I sit on the bed, shadows stretch out across the room, a finger of winterkilled vine scratches at the window, snow sluices down, filling the casements, stilling the vinescratch, the outside world begins to disappear, bridge, street, harbor, sky, all consumed in a torrent of white, edged with lozenges of crystal. The only sound in the house is the sound of the river: hollow, mindless boom-broom! of water, storm maddened, tumescent.

  • • •

  My mother is on the sea.

  My mother is not on the sea.

  She has put on her boots, her gloves, her shawl, her hat, her muff. She has gone downstairs, into the parlor; into the kitchen; out, into the yard, the shed, the street. She has gone into town, walked down to the churchyard, the marketplace, the dressmaker’s shop. She is lengthening her orbit, moving away from me.

  She is not coming back. She has taken her Papa’s book.

  She is coming back. I am confident of it.

  She has never left.

  My mother is and is not on the sea.

  Meanwhile I am waiting. Snow is whispering. I am alone and at sea myself, adrift in the storm.

  • • •

  The silence in the house is also a tension that must not be broken. I sit very still so as not to break it. The slightest movement might shatter everything: then we will fly apart, all of us, like improperly cooled glass.

  Ev
entually I dare to go downstairs, silently, so as not to break the tension, which is all that holds us together. As I pass through the parlor I see the envelope my mother left on the mantel. It leans against the head of a goddess. My father hasn’t seen it, not yet.

  I should tell him, but I don’t. He is in the kitchen, sitting in front of the stove. He is deeply sunk in his chair, chin on chest, legs extended; deeply sunk into himself. He doesn’t look up when I come in. Because his posture repels contact I do not go to him as I would like to do. Instead I go to the settle, sit. We are paralytic, both of us. Harry Owen is the one who moves: energetically, around the kitchen, producing bread, butter, cocoa powder, milk.

  You must do something—must look for her—find out, at least, where she has gone—

  My paralytic father doesn’t reply. His chin sinks lower.

  —why she has gone, what she thinks she is doing—

  It’s funny, isn’t it? That they don’t ask me? That I don’t say? We are in collusion, we three.

  Abruptly my father says, I’m going out.

  And then he does, putting on his boots but neither hat nor coat nor gloves, slamming out into the storm, a fringe of snow entering in his wake, scattering wavelike across the kitchen floor. A subsequent creaking of hinge informs us that he has entered his shed. The lamp he lights there, which my mother once sought in a moment of trouble, is a dulled spark, waxing and waning behind swirling clots of white.

  In silence Harry Owen and I consume buttered toast with cocoa.

  • • •

  He will emerge from his shed only sporadically in the days to come, entering snow shouldered, silent, disinclined to interact with either one of us.

  Harry Owen says, We must do something!

  To which my father replies, savagely, I am doing something!

  • • •

  What is he doing? He is in his shed. He has taken apart, left splayed out on his bench, Thomas Argument’s gifts to my mother. All the delicate innards exposed, mirrors and springs and coils, guts, butchered remains, glistening offal. And he is making glass. Manganese and cobalt fused with sand and lead oxide at 2,500 degrees; violet shading to white, amethyst shading to red; initials formed in gold enamel around the delicate turning of the unimaginable mouth: CGD’O, CGD’O, CGD’O.

  Lamp and furnace, furnace and pot and lamp and lehr.

  • • •

  He hasn’t seen the note on the mantel. It stands as she left it.

  The sea fans, too: still spread out on the floor, just as they were in the moments before I fell asleep. A line of demarcation. This is how the world used to be. Now the parlor is a room to pass through, hurriedly, on the way to somewhere else. Scene of an accident nobody wants to revisit. The wrong touch could shatter everything.

  Though we’ll have to clean it up eventually.

  • • •

  Harry Owen’s beard is sharp with urgency. You must do something about Clotilde. You must find out where she’s gone, with whom, to whom—she could be hurt, in danger, ill, needing our help and our intervention, our, our aid—you should at least tell somebody, report it—check the station, the harbor, the constabulary—

  • • •

  I think about the rough sea, and my mother on it. The distance between us opening up, opening wider. The black waves, the depths beneath. And what inhabits them.

  This is exciting.

  • • •

  My father, though, is obdurate—rising from his chair, deigning at last to put on his large coat, which he wears rucked up carelessly in the back. He is returning again, compulsively, to the more certain warmth of his furnace and lamp, to the glass that is more responsive to his loving ministrations than his Clotilde could ever be.

  He is ready now. His work, his real work, is about to begin.

  • • •

  He can do amazing things with glass, turn the rod in the heat of the flame until it grows soft, caress it with his tools to form the bulb, the bud, the first perfect, translucent body upon which he will practice his art, from which he will conjure, with a series of small but eloquent gestures, other bodies, other forms, embedding as he does, within each of them, her initials.

  • • •

  It doesn’t matter. It’s useless, all of it.

  • • •

  Harry Owen wonders, gesticulates, grows emphatic, spastic. Froths at the mouth practically. My father says nothing, nor do I.

  We are in collusion, we two.

  Finally, painfully, Harry Owen stops asking, sharpens his beard instead over books by the stove.

  • • •

  Her absence has become a wound nobody wants to look at.

  Meanwhile the snow is replaced by a sullen, dark dripping; the sea reclines on the horizon, an indolent, silver-scaled beast, cold thickened, slithering slowly: forward, back; forward, back; into the harbor, out; into the harbor, out. I am lethargic, too, my numbed fingers awkwardly fumbling the buttons of my dress in the frigid bedroom where nobody bothers to light a fire anymore.

  Nor is there a fire in the parlor.

  Nor are the lamps lit.

  The fifteen corners of the three pentagonal rooms of the Birdcage are stale, contain, suddenly, strange, unexpected pockets of abandonment that hover like ghosts, cling damply to the skin when passed through. Smelling of dust, of fur, of feathers, of formaldehyde; of unbrushed hair, unswept fingernail clippings, unread books, undrunk tea, uneaten food, unriddled cinders.

  • • •

  In this way, it seems, we are haunted.

  It is a reverse haunting, though: instead of a presence, an absence. Trembling of air. Attempts at conjuration fail: descending the spiral stair I see her from above, sitting at the table. I hear her: footstep in the pantry. Voice—a single word—short, sharp, impatient, imperious: Carlotta!

  But I am mistaken. It’s just a shadow. Vinetap on windowpane. Snippet of dream. I wake up; she isn’t there; things fly apart: the molecules will not cohere.

  My mother is gone. She isn’t coming back.

  • • •

  Finally though, one day, after many days of tense silence, through a blue filigree of frost I do see a figure after all, dimly familiar, lurking at the gate, indistinct in the sleeting; from its slouching, clowning manner I realize it cannot be my mother, yet just the same I feel a sense of relief, of breath inheld released: I have been waiting for this, too, without realizing. It’s Hip. How long has it been? Long enough: he won’t know she’s gone. There’s relief in that. Wrapped in a thick, greasy parka, tongue protruding teasingly from the gap between his teeth, colorless as ever, his breath white upon the grey-white freezing air, he is a shadow, unlike others, that grows in solidity as I approach. It is easy enough for me to slip out to meet him, to disappear, myself, into this monochromatic world; to slip between; nobody, after all, is looking. In the shed the bellows respires, smoke rises greyly through roof vent into grey sky, this is my father at work; Harry Owen, reclined by the fire, has buried his spade of a beard deep in the pages of a book and will not be aroused. So I slip past, slip through. What is one more disappearance, after all?

  Quickly I cover my hair with a shawl, and become invisible. A ghost myself, gladly conjured.

  I won’t tell him she has gone. In our shared world, she’s still here. This is magic.

  • • •

  I am barely through the gate when he says, You got to see this!

  Again?

  Yeah. You got to see.

  This is how it is with us, it is as if no time has passed since the last time. Time with Hip is a single blink, or several parallel worlds he is interweaving. Only he can see the thread.

  What is it?

  Of course he will not tell me. He never tells. Surprise being of the essence. I know this, in itself it is no longer surprising. The thing he shows me, that is what will surprise.

  Come on!

  He touches my hand lightly, ghost tap on ghost flesh, distantly apprehended.

  Naw. Ho
ld up. It’s too cold. I don’ wanna go.

  C’mon. Why not?

  I don’ wanna, that’s why.

  Nonetheless, of course I’ll go. This is what I do, what we do, he and I, together. Beneath us is the Esk, boiling and freezing simultaneously, dousing us with its cold contempt.

  At the corner of Bridge Street we turn, head down the hill single file, unspeaking. He grows indistinct in the sleet, as if vanishing behind a scrim. Then pausing to wait for me he grows solid again at my approach, a veil is lifted, it’s like a game, molecules flying apart, coming together.

  I can depend on this.

  • • •

  I won’t tell him she has gone. In this way she can accompany us, a ghost among ghosts. I feel her absence at my back, it is loyal, like a thing on a leash, tugging lightly, playfully, though Hip can’t see it.

  He senses it, perhaps, my silence giving shape to that which is missing. I know this but can’t help myself, having nothing to say.

  Fortunately he is magnanimous, has no wish to unmask me.

  So we will descend, three ghosts together, into the warren.

  • • •

  The sleet is so thick that today even this is abandoned, mean figures and mean, low buildings emerging darkly from ice and wind, then sinking away again, the streets narrowly turning back upon themselves and each other in a circuitous dream of stucco and stone that has for its accompaniment the rhythmic, angry music of the sea.

  • • •

  It is right below us here. The ground trembles with it. We are a heartbeat away from the wave that could dash everything to pieces, all of it, all of us, ghosts then, in the sea.

  Instead we turn another corner, and another, this is Hip’s territory, the sea’s an impersonal menace, it does not care about us, and I myself am lost, getting in deeper with every turning.

  Imagining her there, on the sea. Distance growing greater.

  Though at the same time she is with me.

  My mother is and is not on the sea.

  Come on. This way. Over here.

  How does he find these things? When has he the time? His master, if there is such, is certainly a lenient one. Somehow Hip has memorized these streets, follows them by touch or smell or some other sense uniquely his own, by the cobbles beneath his feet, perhaps, the cant of them, the curve, the rough and smooth spots, or, like a jungle creature, by a trace he left the last time he was here, undetectable to all but himself. Me he leads with gentle touches, hand on wrist, hip, shoulder, this is palpable enough.