The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  The first sister, who is in fact Bluette, continues to hunt for eggs; the second, Viola, takes the basket on her lap and continues counting. As they do so the parents, arms linked, commence their own duet, its melodic line echoing that of the children. This time, however, the key modulates from A to A-sharp, and the resultant half-tone shift upward creates an uneasy, anticipatory mood. Is something about to change? How sweet the children look, sings the father; how sweet their faces, sings the mother. How radiant the dyes, sings the father; how sly the hiding places, sings the mother. It soon becomes obvious that each parent thinks it was the other who engineered the egg hunt. Then, at the moment when Bluette stands on tiptoe and lifts from a hole in the trunk of the beech tree an egg as large and dully colored as a cannonball, the key shifts back again to A. Was the interlude in A-sharp a “false” modulation? Did it hold forth promise of further shifts in key, only to insist, finally, on the permanence of the original? The full orchestra joins in, the parents sing in unison: “The virtues of concealment, the virtues of concealment, cannot be overlooked, cannot be, cannot be, cannot be overlooked.”

  Now we find ourselves in the kitchen, supper preparations under way. A drop cloth—its painted expanse of black and white tile surrounding one small viewless window—bisects the stage laterally, suggesting that the previous set’s depth of perspective might have been illusory. Stage center stands Cook, a tall woman in white wearing a tall white chef’s hat, as if a part of her has risen above the walls of its container like a soufflé. She is assisted by two white-robed scullions of uncertain gender, one seated on a stool, stage right, peeling potatoes, the other standing nearby at a large worktable, eviscerating a hen. The downstairs maid and the valet play cards at a smaller table, stage left. They are both dressed in black, the maid in a black dress with a little white apron, the valet in a black suit. Two dimensions, two colors—such is the limited canvas of servitude.

  “Candle the egg before you break it,” sings Cook, thus beginning a quintet in which the kitchen’s occupants not only describe their activities to each other in a drawn-out parody of the bel canto style but also reveal their secret thoughts, sussurrando, directly to the audience. For instance, Cook’s reference to candling the egg causes the downstairs maid to let the audience in on the fact that she’s pregnant, and that while she suspects the valet might be the father, she isn’t sure. It might be someone else in the house, she suggests, pointing upstairs. Then she turns back to the valet. “Three of hearts,” she sings, playing a card, “go ahead and take it.” The valet confesses his desire for the seated scullion, who is, at the same time, worrying about forged immigration papers; the standing scullion works out the details of a plan for blackmail involving an intercepted billet-doux from the mistress of the house to Cook. In this quintet the important information is delivered piano, the unimportant, forte, a strategy by which Helle hoped to emphasize the deterioration of the latter into mere doggerel: “Candle the egg before you break it; Three of hearts, go ahead and take it; Cunning, my dear, but I wanted the four; Look at the peel curling down to the floor! I get the liver, the cat gets the lights; One bowl for yolks and the other for whites.”

  All at once the cat, appearing from nowhere to pounce on the proffered treat, jostles Cook’s elbow just as she is tapping the final egg open; the yolk breaks and spills into the wrong bowl. Ruined! the cook sings. They’ll never form peaks now. And shall we have you instead? she wonders, grabbing the cat in one hand, a knife in the other. Shall we have custard surmounted by a mound of fur? O cruel feline! For there are no more eggs, and everyone knows that Easter supper will be incomplete without its traditional dessert of oeufs à la neige, served in the mistress’s favorite cut-glass bowl. Her anguished recitative terminates in the famous cavatina “More has broken than you know,” a very tender song, andante molto in B-flat. Cook is disconsolate, but the valet proposes a solution. He happens to have noticed that in the basket of eggs collected by the little girls there was a very large egg of mysterious derivation, the contents of which, when he picked it up and shook it, seemed not to have been blown out or hard-boiled. If Cook will just wait, he’ll get it for her.

  The minute the valet is gone, everyone remaining in the kitchen starts to dance, hoisting one another high into the air, revealing kicking legs and undergarments. In this fashion we see that the seated scullion is in fact a young man, although his immigration papers would suggest otherwise, and that the standing scullion is in fact a young woman, who is wearing under her bloodstained robe the black net stockings and black lace garter belt of a whore. The downstairs maid is clearly pregnant, her belly straining against the fabric of a voluminous pair of knickers; Cook is stark naked. More and more frenzied, the dancing continues for the duration of the valet’s absence, and then, the minute he returns to the kitchen, the music stops; order is restored. In absolute silence the valet hands the egg to Cook, who regards it speculatively. In absolute silence the first act ends.

  Of course, because the world in an opera is primarily composed of sound, such silence is profoundly unsettling. In an opera, sound precedes everything; it is the point of origin. Without her voice, what is Cook? Her tall white hat, her long naked legs, her fellow servants, the kitchen itself—all of these things have derived their form and life from the music. Without her voice Cook is reduced to an image painted on a drop cloth, to a painted face, its voiceless mouth open in astonishment or horror, staring at us through the kitchen window, stage rear, as the curtain lifts on the second act. We are once again outside the house, only this time we are looking back at it through a screen of leaves and branches, through the crisscrossing upper limbs of a huge tree which we see, extremely close up and from an elevated angle, as if we might be hovering in the air just beyond it, preparing to perch. Helle’s intention was that the actual trunk of the tree exist as mere implication, a vast column forking at a point just beneath the stage floor, providing the crown with its two main structural elements. Some kind of an elm, perhaps? The bark furrowed and gray, spring’s first little flower clusters fanning out from the tips of its twigs? Of course you wouldn’t be able to pick out such details immediately, because the stage would be dark, the only point of brightness the far-off yellow square of the kitchen window. And then, little by little, a silver light from the fly galleries, meant to represent the moon, strengthens in intensity; it glints off the edges of the leaves, sharp, oval blades of thinly hammered metal. Little by little we see that there are creatures roosting in the tree. Little by little we watch the advance, from stage rear, of another creature: something large flies toward us, landing on the foremost of the two main branches.

  Part man, part bird. The face and neck and torso of a young man, the head covered with a cap of brown feathers, each arm with a neat brown wing, the plumage extending down from the scapulae along the back, culminating at the coccyx in a short russet tail. Like water bubbling from an underground spring, the sound fresh and bell-like, Nightingale’s characteristic song wells up from that human throat: chook-chook-chook, repeated several times, followed by a series of delicate notes, piu piu piu, at first slow and then increasingly rapid, rising to a crescendo of heartbreaking sweetness and clarity. Chook-chook-chook; piu piu piu—or such, Helle told me, was Dresser’s transcription in his nine-volume masterpiece, Birds of Europe, what T. S. Eliot rendered merely as jug jug and Hans Andersen as klukke klukke klukke zizizi. Although no one, she said sadly, could ever hope to furnish the words for an essentially wordless language.

  Twelve birds are roosting in the tree at the start of the second act—thirteen when joined by Nightingale—each introducing its own musical motif, the text for which is, at least initially, a similar series of nonsense syllables. Only when these separate songs begin to intertwine—creating a “polyphony verging on cacophony,” to quote Olin Downes—does meaning replace nonsense. Nightingale’s chook-chook-chook; piu piu piu becomes, for example, joke joke joke’s on you you you; Shrike’s scratchy, halfhearted queedle queedle; tsurp-
se tsurpsee becomes we’ll we’ll see see or, alternately, cheat all cheat all usurpers. Magpie immediately develops an extensive vocabulary—chak chak chak chak, talk talk talk talk about the jewels I’ve seen, flashing emeralds in her hair, winking diamonds on her fingers, milky pearls everywhere—whereas Bee-Eater, vain and dim-witted, never progresses beyond a single noisy chirrup. In addition to Nightingale, Shrike, Magpie, and Bee-Eater there are, in the tree, Cuckoo, Kite, Chaffinch, Rook, Yellowhammer, Wren, Snowy Owl, Sparrowhawk, and Sparrow. A dubious grouping, as Dame Marjory Huxtable-Bins pointed out in Ibis, the quarterly publication of the British Ornithologists’ Union. “One not only feels compelled to direct Ten Brix’s attention to her obvious gaffe in causing a sparrow to perch beside a sparrowhawk, but also to her less obvious misrepresentations, among them the elevated placement of the ground-dwelling wren.”

  Needless to say, it wasn’t Helle’s aim to create a realistic environment. Indeed, it seems clear to me that what she tried to do in each of her operas—even in Fortune’s Lap, which took for its setting the recognizable precincts of a large corporation—was to create landscapes that duplicated the conditions of the human soul, fantastic landscapes that could embody the twin possibilities of captivity and escape. Maybe a sparrow would never perch beside a sparrowhawk in the real world. The important thing was that both sparrows and sparrowhawks actually existed, and that whatever separated one from the other in the real world was a very delicate thing, as illusory and randomly deployed as a drop cloth. For while the drop cloth we see hanging stage rear at the beginning of Fuglespil’s second act is apparently solid, its little window merely painted on, we’re led to believe that it was, earlier, an actual window, providing Nightingale with a way out of the kitchen, just as, earlier still, Cook had provided him with a way out of his shell. In each of Helle’s operas there’s always a loophole in the most tightly knit fabric, a wolf in the music. Even the body, she said, offered points of exit, the problem being that it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference between disease and imagination, between the brain’s desire to shut off completely or to go somewhere else for a change.

  AND WAS THAT WHY, despite Dr. Kinglake’s lectures and Maren’s stern predictions, despite all the dictates of good sense, Helle continued to smoke? Was it actually possible that she saw in her disease evidence of the imagination’s triumph, that the harder it became for her to breathe, the more deeply she felt she was sinking into the moss-stuffed world of her last opera? Once a week you would see parked in the weeds outside the trailer a dark green panel truck, sent by the medical supply company to replace the previous week’s empty pale-green oxygen canister with a full one; once a week the driver—a thin young man whose upward-tilting, puzzled eyebrows, Helle said, might mislead you into considering him inquisitive, until you heard his loud and domineering voice—would explain not only that the oxygen was pointless if Helle didn’t stop smoking, but also that she was in danger of blowing herself and the whole trailer to kingdom come. Thales was right, Frances, she would say; the first principle, the ousia, of all things is water. The seeds of all things, including the soul, are moist. Then, as if to contradict herself, she would start to cough what had by now become a dry, hacking cough, and we would sit there on the stoop, embarrassed and guilty, waiting for the coughing to stop, watching two ghostly white threads of smoke issuing from the clamshell ashtray. According to Helle, Thales held that there was no difference between life and death. Well, then, why don’t you kill yourself? a friend asked, to which Thales, imperturbed, replied, Because there wouldn’t be any difference.

  Eventually she would decide to transform Thales, along with Anaximenes and Anaximander—the so-called Milesian philosophers—into the three hunters who ride across the frozen surface of the bog on snowmobiles during the first act of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, turning their trio into a discussion of the ousia, with Thales arguing in favor of water, Anaximenes of air, Anaximander of what he referred to as “the unlimited,” by which he meant time. Typical, Sam said when I told him about the trio. It was just like Helle to reject Plato’s clarity and embrace instead the pre-Socratics, primitive thinkers who devoted their lives to worrying about where the blue went when the sky changed color, or where the glow went when you extinguished a candle. It was just like Helle to be charmed by Anaximander, who claimed that every existing thing was a “usurper,” believing that during the course of its existence it “committed injustice” by preventing its opposite from existing. In fact she probably thought the whole bunch of them were proto-feminists, never realizing that among the three blessings for which Thales daily thanked Fortune was the fact that he’d been born a man and not a woman. Thales, Sam said. Give me a break. I’d be doing Helle a favor, he said, if I told her how her hero, when a servant was leading him through the fields one night so he could observe the stars, tripped and landed in a ditch. How can you expect to understand the heavens, Thales, the servant is reported to have remarked, when you can’t even recognize what’s lying right under your feet?

  Of course that summer we were all ignorant about what was lying under our feet. Or at least the adults among us managed to remain ignorant, notwithstanding the children’s attempts to open our eyes. Children, after all, are always bent over in rapt study of the ground. Following a rain, for instance, they’ll spend hours playing in the driveway, floating twigs down the muddy rivers pooling in the tire ruts. They’ll make deals—if my stick gets to the bottom of the driveway before I can count to a hundred, then I’ll have long golden curls, then my mother will stop going out on dates with Mr. Blackburn, then Helle will stop smoking, then I’ll get a horse—and because the deity with whom these deals are struck tends to reveal itself through signs, children become, of necessity, unusually observant. An hour earlier the rain might have been clear, funneling like liquid glass through the cleft hearts of the lilac leaves, but now the yellowish foam bunching from the ruts’ muddy lips—the yellow foamy place where the stick gets caught—serves as a herald of disaster.

  Days came, days went, a procession of hot, dry summer days which, if you subscribed to Anaximander’s system, was essentially telic, providing evidence for a moral order in the universe, like the rise and fall of nations, the life and death of organisms, the perpetual alternation between good and evil, success and defeat. Hot, dry summer days—the truth is, it was uncharacteristically hot and dry. Lyle Judkins planted his corn, and although the almanac would have it knee-high by the Fourth of July, what I saw poking up from the powdery gray dirt of his field, as the Elks Club fireworks opened their blue and red hands in the sky above it, was no higher than Ruby’s anklebones. Everyone’s crops failed, but Judkins seemed to take the drought as a personal affront. Dwarf corn, dwarf wheat, as meanwhile weeds flourished, the mullein erecting its tall, flannelly towers along the roadsides, the burdock putting forth its huge elephant-ear-like leaves, the fibrous fingers of witch-grass roots reaching out to choke the tender threads sent down by dying carrots, dying peas, dying beets in the town’s dying vegetable gardens.

  For the first time there was an advantage to my job: at the end of the previous summer Kosta had gotten a bargain on a used air conditioner, and although at the time I’d scoffed—that summer having been essentially cold and wet—it turned out to have been a good idea. In upstate New York, you didn’t expect a diner to be air conditioned; now everyone wanted to come in. People wearing Bermuda shorts knew they could sit in the booths without worrying about their thighs sticking to the leatherette upholstery. Cool cool leatherette, cool Mediterranean azure! People could rest their arms on the cool white Formica tabletops and sip the cool drinks of summer, iced tea, iced coffee, lemonade; they could feel the sweat drying on their temples, on their upper lips. The smell of french fries cooking in fat, which is unbearable in an overheated, claustrophobic kitchen, became immensely appetizing. The place was always full of customers, all of whom ate a lot, after which they tipped generously. They smiled, they laughed, happy to remain in that cool white an
d azure world forever.

  So I was unprepared for Patti Judkins’s attack one morning in mid-July. Meek Patti Judkins, as I’d always thought of her, a woman who had been at one time a pretty girl, whom Lyle had knocked up in high school, turning her prematurely sour and prim—I found her sitting in a corner booth, one sunburned arm clutching a summer pocketbook of dark blue straw, the other extended across the table to page through the heavy metal-and-plastic pages of the miniature jukebox mounted below the window. You could see the hot bodies of the cars parked in a brightly colored row along the front of the diner, with here and there the more sober colors of the pickup trucks mixed in. Patti Judkins’s pickup, for example, was black. I filled her water glass and then, to be neighborly, said it must be discouraging to have to rely for your livelihood on something so fickle as the weather. There was nothing fickle about God’s will, Patti answered, still paging through the jukebox. Her neck was curved away from me, her hair pulled back into a French twist, revealing bug bites on the tender place behind the ears. I took out my pad and pencil. A cup of coffee to begin with? The specials were blueberry pancakes and western omelettes. Did she need a moment to think about it? No, Patti said, she didn’t. That is, she didn’t want anything, except to tell me that she wasn’t a fool like Maren Blackburn. If I kept on flirting with Lyle I’d better start packing my bags right away, because she, Patti Judkins, was going to see to it that my life here was so miserable I’d have to move somewhere else. Her voice was thin, girlish, and she had the adolescent girl’s habit of letting her sentences end on a rising note as if they were questions. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. I’d never flirted with her husband, I said, resisting the impulse to tell her that the mere idea filled me with disgust. Oh, sure, Patti said, her voice getting louder, sure. That was why I always sat around on my front steps dressed like a whore, just waiting for him to drive by. Worse than a whore, she shouted, because at least a whore covered herself when she wasn’t fucking a client. The four teenaged boys in the adjacent booth had stopped blowing straw wrappers at each other and were sitting in rapt silence; a family of tourists got up from the booth across the aisle, leaving their breakfasts untouched and, as Kosta told me later, unpaid for, the mother and father herding their two toddlers ahead of them out the door.