The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  Only that wasn’t how it happened. Although I continued to face Helle, it was as if my own womb had inside it a tiny compass, its needle indicating correct orientation: the pole’s tug was to my left, where Sam now stood, biting into a pear he’d taken from the bowl on the sideboard. The needle swung around, fluctuating briefly as I found myself recalling the beat of the neon sign on the roadhouse roof—OASIS scrolled in lurid red across the bright green fronds of two palm trees, their trunks bright yellow. On, off, on, off. When it was off, you could see the stars, evidently equal in number to the souls of men. Did I really want a drink? We were the only car parked on that side of the building, near the exhaust fans and dumpsters; a fat boy in a white T-shirt emerged from the kitchen door with a pail of garbage, but aside from that we were alone. Maybe this was what I wanted? This?

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sam’s wrist—just a segment of it, the pale underside where the veins were. “When I was a girl,” Helle was saying, “there was still such a thing as dichotomy. Real dichotomy. No wonder we’re doomed.”

  Were his eyebrows lifting again? I could smell the pear, hear the little pfft pfft as he spit the seeds into the palm of his hand. What if I’d gotten out of that house then and there and never come back?

  “Helle thinks that synthesis is amoral,” Sam told me. “She blames everything she doesn’t like on Plato, including sex.”

  “Mom, when are we going home?” Ruby called out, and she sounded plaintive, weary.

  Though the air coming in through the windows was still cottony and mild, the temperature in the room had dropped. Was it possible that one old woman, unlocking and locking so many doors in her brain, could generate a breeze of her own? Maybe it wasn’t the breeze of thought but the breeze of departure, the first hints of Helle’s plan to leave us forever, to disappear around the world’s edge like one of those tigers stuck to the rim of its metal wheel in a shooting gallery.

  Part Two

  DET OMFLAKKENDE

  MØL

  I

  HELLE TEN BRIX began composing Det omflakkende Møl (The Errant Moth) in 1909, a year notable for many events: in 1909 Halley’s Comet returned to draw its fiery red tail through the blue-black skies above the Great Bog; Anders remarried; workers went on strike all over Europe; Richard Strauss was hearing the first notes of Der Rosenkavalier, a work requiring that the part of Octavian, the juvenile lead, be sung by a woman dressed up to look like a man. Hosenrolle, or trouser parts, had been an operatic convention for many years—think of the winsome Cherubino, one of Helle’s great favorites—but this time Strauss, his turned-up nose forever sensitive to any whiff in the air of cultural change, had twisted the convention, giving it a purposely indecent edge. For there can be no doubt about the fact that when Octavian passionately hurls himself down onto the Marschallin’s confection of a bed, tangling there with her among lace-edged linens and a profusion of pillows, we’re meant to accept the possibility that it’s actually two women who are embracing.

  I suppose Strauss had read his Krafft-Ebing; even Dr. Ten Brix had a copy of that notorious book hidden on a shelf in his examining room behind the jars of pickled fetuses, relics from his days in medical school whose presence was no doubt calculated not so much to instruct his patients as to remind them of the Circean origins of his art. I know this because Helle admitted to having noticed the book one day when her father had called her in to check her weight; as she stood on the scales she could see its tooled binding peeking out from behind the largest of the jars, into which was crammed the slippery gray body of what looked like a blue-eyed, shell-less snail. But hadn’t she told me that Anders was a gamekeeper? Understand, you could never catch Helle in a lie; she would just stare at you blankly and shrug, the implication being that you were a fool to waste your time with such details. Whereas let a mezzo embellish too freely on a coloratura passage and she’d be jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. In any event, although Anders probably assumed that his daughter would never find the book, much less page through it with the wild eyes and thumping heart of the fledgling deviant, he was wrong.

  In the original staging of Det omflakkende Møl the juvenile lead was played, likewise, by a girl. In fact Helle had created the part of Prince Carissimo with a particular girl in mind: Inger Nissen, the eldest of Ove Nissen’s ten children and the first real love of her life. Sensible Inger, whose hair was long like Helle’s, although it was light and made by an attentive mother to crown her stunningly round skull in plaits; whereas Helle’s hair was black like the cloth the magician places over his fist, and her brain bunched like the fist beneath it.

  Their friendship had been secured during the year following Ida’s death, when most of the other children at school had taken to avoiding Helle. They kept their distance, but sneaked little glances; worst of all, when they did speak it was with the excessive politeness that children generally reserve for the very old, or for priests. How were they supposed to know that the reason why she sat so stiffly at her desk was to protect them? One false move, she thought, and the leathery wings which had sprouted from her shoulder blades would unfold, ripping open the starched back of her blue dress. One false move and Death itself—the Bog Queen in her grimmest, most secret aspect—would be set loose to flap around the room, plucking up a girl here, a boy there, taking them home with her like pets.

  At first, when her mother had started to cough up blood, Helle tried conceiving of the problem in more general terms: there was too much movement in the world. For even though the sixteenth-century merchant who’d built Krageslund was said to have chosen its remote and windy site in a vain attempt to satisfy his young bride’s longing for the Lapp tundra, where she’d been born—and even though the villagers still tended to steer clear, just as their ancestors had, of Krageslund’s queer mistress—it seemed that no sooner had word gotten out that Ida was dying than there was always some visitor, a neighbor or shopkeeper, tiptoeing stealthily as a thief up the stairs. It was as if the world generated its own current, a persistent thick arm of air whose purpose was to sweep away the souls of the weak.

  But Helle also knew who it was who’d thrown her mother’s boot into a peat hag; she knew on whose body the raveling thread of her mother’s soul had been snagged. How cautiously she’d enter the sickroom, how fearfully she’d accept each kiss and hug! Her mother’s fingertips felt hot, as did her lips. Sometimes she would ask Helle to brush her long brown hair and pin it up with tortoiseshell combs; but this was hard to do, because the hair was dry and stiff, breaking off like straw from an old broom. On the other hand, there was no need for rouge; in those days Ida’s cheeks were bright pink, an improvement over her formerly pasty complexion. Indeed, the disease which was killing her had set the standard for female beauty all over Europe. Across the Continent women aspired to look waiflike and candescent, their eyes wild but trusting. The only difference was that those women didn’t leave brown stains on their pillowcases, on the pleated bodices of their nightdresses, on their lips, your lips. “Don’t leave, darling,” Ida would say, and Helle would back out the door, the thread trailing behind her. The air in the room was sour and hard to breathe; on the bedside table was a porcelain teacup, but the tea was always cold and a few tiny dark sticks floated on its surface.

  Oh, Helle was stiff all right—rigid with guilt. A plaster-of-Paris replica of a child, an object that would set your teeth on edge if you touched it, she sat there at her desk trying to read as all the while her eyes skidded this way and that like a dog on ice. Like Viggi Brahe’s dog, to be precise, which she now saw almost everywhere she looked, its oversized, owlish head fastened to a skinny body, its eyes—one blue, the other brown—staring off placidly into space as it shat on the frozen schoolyard lawn. How lonely she felt! All around her was the sound of paper sliding across wood as notes were passed, of quick whispers and hiccoughs of swallowed laughter, the crisp rustle of paper wrappers, the sucking of illicit candies.

  Meanwhile, the whole world turne
d to ice. Off the tip of Jutland, where the waves of the North Sea meet those of the Kattegat, a frozen ridge extended all the way to Oslo. If Helle had been allowed—if Fru Pedersen hadn’t perversely forced her to sit, day after day, at the one desk situated so close to the schoolroom stove that even an overeager and sycophantic student would’ve grown drowsy—then Helle might have walked along that ridge; taking in deep breaths of clear cold air, she might have made it all the way to that hall where the king of Norway lounged among his bears, picking his teeth with a raven’s wingbone. If, on the one hand, Helle desired nothing more than the admiration of her schoolmates, on the other she wanted to run away to a place where her name would be so foreign that not a single inhabitant would be able to pronounce it. Undoubtedly this accounted for the unsettling mixture, later in her life, of a need for recognition combined with an impulse to hide. Fame, of course, provides for this complicated balance. According to Helle, it was a metaphor for all things adolescent and, consequently, to be reviled.

  But she didn’t know that then. All she knew then was the dense boredom of the outcast, the smell of wood smoke permeating every cell of her body while, on the other side of the classroom, Inger Nissen sat near the door. “Inger,” Helle told me, “was a girl of snow, while I was something you’d get sick of eating, like a ham.” As she watched, Inger’s white fingers were busy braiding the hair of the girl sitting in front of her—Ellen Randers’s hair—and how Helle hoped Inger would find nits in it! Or maybe Fru Pedersen would become bored with beating time against the wall and would direct the strokes of her willow switch at the top of Torben Toksvig’s head in an attempt to speed him along in his recitation of “Balder’s Death.” Inger’s eyes were so bright they looked as if they’d been polished. They were the bright eyes of a girl who got up at five o’clock every morning and went out into the barn to feed her ducks. The whole school knew that Inger was raising eider ducks and saving the money she made selling their down for her trousseau.

  What kind of a world was this, in which Helle was forced to watch Torben Toksvig surreptitiously scratch his crotch as he stood declaiming lyric poetry, in which the heavenly fingers of Inger Nissen disappeared into the greasy meshes of Ellen Randers’s hair? For a while now, since the summer of 1906, Helle had been taking piano lessons with a woman in the village. Gamle Clara everyone called her—Old Clara—and even though she was deaf as a post and, as Ida had described her, “musically oblivious,” every Tuesday afternoon Helle went to that house smelling of boiled rutabagas and urine; she did so because Clara had a gramophone on which she would play operas, recordings as scratchy as the area around Clara’s mouth which Helle was forced to kiss on her way in and out the door. But it was worth it. “The first time I heard Melba it was in Clara’s parlor,” Helle told me. “She was singing the Queen of the Night’s aria—‘Du! Du! Du!’—from Zauberflöte, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. The voice of a star passing away into the infinite, as someone said. Or maybe I’m thinking of Tetrazzini. Of course it helped that it was a recording. Melba was as big as a whale.”

  If only the schoolroom ceiling would suddenly lift open like the lid of a box, letting in tides of dark, swirling sky; if only the Queen of the Night would suddenly descend, balanced in the crook of the crescent moon, her hair swarming with silver stars! The clock on the wall kept ticking, but the minute hand stuck in one place and then jumped ahead all at once, as if time itself were being held in thrall to the rhythms of Torben’s recitation. In an opera it might take the heroine forever to die; but that’s a matter of time pooling, not of time jamming up. In opera, as Helle liked to point out, it’s the women who die. A fool like Torben would be relegated to the edge of a crowd.

  But when Helle glanced back across the room she saw that Inger was smiling at her, beaming across the sea of desks like a small, competent sun. And later, in the schoolyard, when Karen Holst sidled up to Helle and whispered, “Is it true what my mother says, that your mother was a whore?” it was Inger Nissen who jumped to her defense. Karen stood very close as she spoke, so close that Helle could see the frost beginning to turn her short white eyelashes whiter still; she could feel the frost growing on her own lashes, and it didn’t make any sense that two spirits as dissimilar as hers and Karen’s would be housed in bodies so similar in their workings. “Leave Helle alone,” Inger said. Pink blotches were forming on her cheeks and forehead, a sign that her wrath, a condition as virulent as it was uncommon, had been aroused. “Why should I listen to you?” Karen replied. “Everyone knows your family sleeps with cows.”

  The other children gathered around, near enough to see what was going on, but far enough away so that if Fru Pedersen should suddenly loom up, they’d be taken for nothing more than innocent bystanders. It would have been mid-afternoon and already dark. All along the hem of the sky the winter planets were shining, more sharply focused than the lights of town, floundering off to the east within the branches of the beech trees.

  According to Helle, Inger had no imagination; justice was her motivation, not romance. When Inger looked down and saw in the snow at her feet the silver tip of what Helle took for a wand, like a gift from a malevolent fairy, she recognized it for what it was: one of the metal sticks the littlest girls used in the spring, tapping their hoops across the pale green grass. The little girls would race after their hoops, and the little boys would make fun of them. Inger Nissen picked up the stick and wiped off its encrustation of old snow and blackish leaves. “We don’t sleep with cows,” she said softly, and as Karen was opening her mouth to correct her, Inger jabbed her in the stomach.

  Later Inger and Helle walked home together down the Six Bridges Road, their arms across each other’s shoulders. They’d sworn their undying friendship, sealing the pledge by pricking their thumbs on a thorn bush and tasting each other’s blood. “My idea,” Helle said. “The whole thing was my idea.” She told me that Inger’s blood tasted sweeter than her own, and was a brighter shade of red. Wasn’t such idolatry the basis of many of the friendships that spring up between young girls, providing a useful apprenticeship for marriage?

  Unimaginative, opportunistic Inger. Helle could feel her shoulders, slightly pudgy even then, moving beneath her own bony arm. The first in a series of bad choices, culminating in me, Francie Thorn, arguably the worst. “Did you see the look on her face?” Inger asked. “Did you see it?” She reminded Helle of her passion for sweet rolls, the ones shaped like boats. No doubt she was already thinking about supper, about the yeasty smell of her mother’s kitchen and the budlike, chewing faces of her brothers and sisters, especially the youngest girl, her favorite, whom she’d nicknamed Bodie. “Maybe some macaroons?” she added as, on a slight rise off to the left, her house came into view. The Nissens lived in a single-story farmhouse, apricot-colored with dark green timbers, surmounted by a roof of thatch out of which, in summertime, grass and bluets would sprout, upon which the eider ducks would roost, preening their valuable feathers. But now the thatch was covered with snow, and smoke rose straight out of the chimney in a thin line, the way it did when the air was very cold.

  Inger had to cross the second of the six bridges to get to her house. While Helle stood there on the stream bank, chilled and immobile as a statue, Inger slipped out from under her arm, leaving behind on the sleeve of her black coat a single strand of golden hair. How dark it was getting! Still, like a detail in a repeating nightmare, Helle kept seeing the eyes of Viggi Brahe’s dog drifting among the frozen swordlike reeds that grew at the base of the bridge, dislodging from the cigar-shaped crowns of the cattails a cloud of beige fluff. She told it to go home, but the creature apparently couldn’t hear her. Meanwhile, on the other side of the stream, Inger Nissen stood tightening her knapsack across her wide, strong back. Girl of snow: white and pink and gold. Those were the colors of Inger Nissen. After an ice storm those were the colors that the sun could cause to spring up out of tree branches, as if fire could actually be coaxed from ice.

  In De
t omflakkende Møl Prince Carissimo’s costume is white and pink and gold, and his main attribute is a sword which when plunged into even the coldest of hearts, causes that heart to burst into flame. Watch your step, Frances, I can hear Helle saying. Watch out! Can you find anything in Mozart’s childhood to explain the idiotic plot of La finta semplice? But Helle’s dead and I’m alive. The ball, as my father would say, is in my court. Thus, despite Helle’s fiercely held belief that invention had nothing to do with cause and effect, I refuse to ignore the correlation here between life and art, just as I refuse to ignore the fact that the opera’s organizing event—the metamorphosis of Princess Falena into a moth—can be traced back to an actual occurrence one Saturday morning in 1908, the spring of Helle’s eleventh year.

  A week earlier, the third anniversary of Ida’s death had come and gone, evidently without notice. Or at least Anders hadn’t invited Helle to kneel with him by the grave, nor had he left any token of his grief to wilt on the granite slab pressed flat into the dirt among Ida’s rosebushes. Indeed, if anything, he’d been more boisterous and good-natured than usual, whistling as he stood drinking coffee by the open kitchen window, encouraging Helle to go outside for some fresh air. The milk pot, she noticed, had been left overnight on the table, and no one had bothered to put on the cover. If you wanted, you could strain the milk through cheesecloth, but still it would taste like dust.