The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  Certainly it made her furious to have to reveal to me her growing weakness, when even a simple task like removing the lid from a jar of herring would leave her gasping, bent over, her face blue and pleated with deep ugly wrinkles. “Go away, Frances,” she would gasp, “get out of here.” Only I wouldn’t. Instead I would unscrew the lid, crank open the windows, fetch the pillows, wheel in the oxygen canister. For the truth is that my initial aversion to Helle, my horror at the thought of actually having to be in the same room with her, eventually had been replaced by a need for explanation. Or at least that’s the way, over time, I came to understand my otherwise suspect behavior. I wanted Helle to explain the events of that night in such a way that I’d be left with no doubt about the nature of my complicity. I needed to hear it from her own lips: Would it have made a difference if I’d told her not to shoot? And if not, was it still on my account that she’d pulled the trigger?

  That was what I wanted, but, unfortunately, Helle refused to cooperate. “You’re blameless, Frances,” she insisted over and over again. “Why can’t you get that through your head?” I was a hopeless case, she complained. Here was a chance to escape and I was throwing it away. If only she’d realized the depth of my involvement. Was I in love with Sam? My eyes, my eyes! All she had to do, she said, was say his name and my pupils dilated. Even now. Look at yourself. Feh! Besides, hadn’t the tribunal already passed judgment? And if I wasn’t satisfied with the results, then wasn’t that the usual price we paid once we let men decide that the tribunal was preferable to chaos? Or what men called chaos. Her face dreamy, wrinkled, and bluish-gray—not unlike the washcloth with which the public health nurse would cheerfully subject her twice a week to the indignity of a sponge bath—Helle would lie there on her back, the pile of pillows under her hips, and fix her dreamy gaze on the trailer ceiling.

  No, it wasn’t always like this, she told me. Once upon a time, before the fake elegance of the tribunal, there was genuine elegance, the elegance of chaos. Huge stars would drop through the black hood of night, slipping right through God’s fingers, illuminating the place where the Furies leaked up out of the bog as ignis fatuus, taking on the form of animals and plants, men and women. As mutable and diverse as we were taught to believe the human soul was, Helle said. She would watch them, study their sly imitations of human activity. They would pretend to eat, to defecate, to speak, to copulate, to give birth, to die—acts they clearly found ridiculous by comparison with their own seething, unindividuated grace. Of course sooner or later they’d have to return to the bog; they couldn’t stand our air. Although, Helle went on to explain, being lungless they weren’t in any danger of developing, as she had, what was called a “marching cavity” in the lungs. “My own version of chaos,” Helle explained. “One day you’ll show up with your pretty dilated eyes and all that will be left of me will be one big hole.” Then she sighed, her sigh turning into a gasp, her gasp into a wheeze, her wheeze into great rattling coughs, each of which was scooped up out of the very center of her, as if to begin the final process of excavation.

  At first I stayed because I wanted explanations, and then I stayed because she was dying. Maybe I was still in the thrall of that choice I’d made on the opera house steps; maybe, once having assumed the role Helle claimed to have invented for me, I couldn’t make my exit until she was no longer around to prescribe whatever last-minute adjustments she thought necessary. So I stayed in Canaan, living on unemployment checks, doomed to watch the twins’ daily contention with their own assigned parts as outcasts, those roles it was my punishment to know had been thrust on them by the wages of adult corruption. Of the two, Ruby’s suffering was the more obvious, her friendly and sociable spirit shocked anew by every taunt, by the variations on popular songs she was forced to hear whenever she went out into the schoolyard—“Minnie the Moocher” transformed into “Francie the Smoocher,” for example. She missed William, who together with Maren had vanished from town not long after the trial, the rumor being that they’d moved back to Denmark and were living in Frederikshavn with Niels and his wife. Which, in fact, turned out not to be the case. Some time in October a birthday card arrived in the mail, addressed to both of the twins and postmarked Boston. Signed WILLIAM BLACKBURN. No message. “I wish I was dead,” Ruby told Flo as they sat side by side on the dust-clouded, sock-littered living room floor, looking at the card, feeding Lily the crusts of their sandwiches. “Everyone hates me.” “No they don’t,” Flo replied. “They’re mixed up. They act like something’s wrong with you, but that’s because they’re letting the grown-ups push them around the way kids always do. But they don’t hate you. They like you. Everyone’s always liked you.” It was only a matter of time, Flo reassured Ruby, and she’d be the most popular girl in the fifth grade, just as she’d been the most popular girl in the fourth. “Really?” Ruby asked, and Flo nodded her head vigorously, her lips pressed into a tight, judgmental smile. A doubtful advantage, you could tell Flo was thinking. “I wish—” Ruby began, and Flo put her hand over her sister’s mouth. A bad idea to wish, Flo said. Look at where it got Mr. Blackburn. Did she know I was right there, on the other side of the partly closed kitchen door, listening? Look where it gets you, Flo added, fiercely.

  For Flo, on the other hand, seemed dedicated to the development of an increasingly autonomous persona. It was almost as if her presence that night on the stream bank had released her from what would have proved in the end to be the pitiless grip of a dangerous and overpowering mentor. She reviled the Dukketeatre as “childish,” the task of designing sets for another person’s opera as “slavery.” Art made on behalf of anyone except the artist herself, Flo said, wasn’t art. One day I found the colored pencils Helle had given her in the garbage; shortly thereafter, with the money she made doing odd jobs for the Kinglakes—the only people in town, aside from Kosta, who remained sympathetic throughout the ordeal—she bought a set of oil paints. At first she concentrated on self-portraits. Hundreds of self-portraits in turpentine-diluted umber on ripped-open bags from the supermarket—she pinned them to her bedroom walls and, when she ran out of space, all over the house. Underpaintings, she explained, the traditional method of laying in the basic form before applying color, glazes, and scumblings. Shadows translucent, Flo said, lights opaque. That was the rule. She’d borrowed a book called Materials and Techniques for the Artist from the Canaan library, and was studying it with characteristic thoroughness. Precision, she announced, was at the heart of all creative endeavor.

  In a way, it was a relief to see these rapidly accumulating aspects of Flo’s grave and silent face all around me, to recognize within the severity of her gaze some hint of what I wanted from Helle, but which Helle steadfastly denied me. Indeed, so long as I remained at home I felt as if the world might actually be governed by a set of rules as precise as those governing my daughter. It was only when I stepped outside and wandered down through the meadow, past Officer Spot and into the trailer, that I’d feel the floor quaking under me, moist and bottomless, a great shifty pudding dotted here and there with the bodies of the anonymous dead, their acquisitive arms and mouths, their blank and avid eyes. Understand, I hadn’t yet gotten the courage to assign names. Even now, remembering that period, I falter, retreating instead to images of routine activity: I see myself at the trailer stove, boiling chicken, making pot after pot of chicken soup.

  For despite the strange eating habits Helle developed over the last few months—chiefly craving raw clams and oysters, although occasionally she would request rollmops of herring, steak tartare—the nurse left strict orders that she was to adhere to a bland diet. Her digestive system, the nurse said, was a mess, but that was a frequent symptom of the disease. Each day I’d cook her a fresh pot of nourishing soup, strain the broth through cheesecloth, cool it in the refrigerator and skim off the fat, secure in the knowledge that I might still be capable of sustaining, rather than destroying, another person’s life. It wasn’t until my last trip to the trailer, on a sunny morning in
June almost exactly two months after Helle’s death, that I found the pile of shells on the ground behind the louvered kitchen window. A kitchen midden such as any archaeologist would be excited to discover: oyster shells corrugated on the outside, pearly within; the smooth shells of cherrystones, the rough shells of littlenecks; empty jars which had once contained cocktail sauce, capers, hearts of palm—everything shining in the sunlight, winking bits of glass and pearl visible within a shining, buzzing cloud of flies. How did she do it? I wondered. How did she manage to pry open all of those hundreds of shells? Not to mention the even greater mystery of where the things had come from in the first place. Officer Spot? But when I confronted him, he merely shook his head and looked away. A stubborn old woman, Officer Spot said fondly. You had to hand it to her. They didn’t make them like that anymore.

  II

  OF COURSE once she was dead there was nothing left to keep me from leaving. Was it in fact that same June morning, when I found that noisy, winking monument to Helle’s deceit, that I finally knew it was time to go? Or was it the intrusion into my bathroom, several mornings later, of a noiseless, spectral chord, that impelled me? The opaque layers of snow and ice with which winter plated the hillsides had been replaced by spring’s delicate smear of yellow-green; the school year was over, and the estate would clearly be stuck in the courts for months, if not years. It didn’t take long to pack, the idea being that in addition to Lily we could each bring one essential possession, Ruby choosing Marybell; Flo, her paints. I hesitated, settling at last on the waxed carton, just as I think I’d known all along I would, even though it seemed anything but essential while I was struggling to fit it into the trunk of the car. It was almost as if I were trying to shove in Helle herself, the compressed rectangular shape of her earthly remains, a container filled with hints and lies and the dozing vapors of her ghost. Where were we going, Ruby asked, and I told her I wasn’t sure. We’d drive due east, I said, thinking it would be just as I’d imagined that day last summer in the high-school classroom. Only now the lilac branches were plunging under the weight of their heavy purple flowers, each cluster sweet and humming with bees; the world looked fresh and rain-washed. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of incipience, of possibility—a mindless hunger for life made sharper, more stinging, by its undercurrent of desperation.

  We drove until we got to the coast, and then—because this town at the end of the road resembled too closely the one we’d just abandoned, the same lilacs framing the doorways of trim clapboard houses, the same tulips bright with the achievement of having recently clawed their way up from deep in the ground, the same late-afternoon light that transformed everything into golden icons, inert and legendary—I turned left and headed north. The thinly hammered sheath of clear blue sky broke apart into mist, a haze of teeming gray particles, and I drove with my headlights on, the windshield wipers flapping to and fro, while the twins played cards in the backseat, Lily between them, panting, steaming up the windows. “Ferry to Canada,” Flo read from a signboard planted in a clump of wind-tossed, violently waving bulrushes. “Are we going to Canada?” Why not? I wondered aloud, and suddenly it occurred to me that to cross a stretch of water, to consign ourselves to a ferryboat and leave land behind, might serve, as traveling the seemingly endless thread of highway had not, to at last sever that thread. Nor was I daunted by the presence on the boat of a group of Connecticut ornithologists, attired in oilskins and huddled along the blunt prow among coils of rope, their binoculars raised in a uniform gesture, one with which I’d become wearily familiar. “Dovekies to port!” someone shouted, and they moved together in a glistening yellow mass, the drizzle beading up and dripping off the yellow beaklike visors of their hoods. “How can they see anything?” Ruby asked, to which Flo replied, “They can’t. They make it all up. Lunatics to port!” she said loudly, and one of the ornithologists, a dark-eyed young man with long black curls, whirled around and smiled at her—smiled at my wild, tall daughter standing there with her head tilted back against the roof of our car, staring at the sky.

  We eventually ended up in a town called Alma, on the Fundy coast. Kind of a funny name for a town, Ruby said—like the school nurse, Alma Snyder. Only Alma meant “bountiful” in Latin, Flo explained, unlike that old skinnybones who checked their heads for lice twice a year. Keep your shirt on, she told me when I regarded her with surprise, she’d read it in one of those dumb Chamber of Commerce pamphlets she’d picked up in the information booth at the border. The truth is, we ended up in Alma because that was where my money ran out, and because when I pulled over to the curb in front of the Fundy Hotel to consult the map, Ruby noticed a WAITRESS WANTED placard in its restaurant window. So it happened that once again I found myself ministering to the appetites of others, although this time my uniform was aqua rather than orange, the plates I carried were usually filled with seafood rather than sandwiches, and the people I waited on tended to be families of tourists rather than single farmers, truck drivers, teenagers. Or college teachers.

  After we’d been living in Alma for almost a month, a man appeared at lunchtime and ordered tuna on rye toast with ginger ale; I heard what he said and nodded, but it wasn’t until I actually saw the words taking shape on the order pad that I felt a stifled thickness in the place just behind my eyes, a thick feeling as if the backs of my eyes were being pressed on with cotton wool. “Is anything the matter?” the man asked. No, I told him, turning quickly to suggest that my attention had been caught by something, a trawler perhaps, inching across the far-off horizon, faintly visible through the salt-fogged windows facing the bay. “Sorry,” he said. Actually, nothing was visible through those windows, the entire coast swaddled in a heavy fog that wouldn’t burn off until mid-afternoon, revealing the steep cliffs of the Fundy headlands where they rose up out of the damp gray sand. Did I by any chance know the schedule for the tidal bore? he asked. A nondescript man in a green windbreaker, his brown hair cut unstylishly short, his ears small and pink, his eyes a watery shade of blue similar to my uniform. Little teeth, little fingers. The cashier’s desk, I said—she had the schedule. But the nearest place to see the bore was at the tip of Shepody Bay, in Moncton, at least a three-hour drive. Or Truro, Nova Scotia, even farther. The man consulted his watch, which he wore on the underside of his wrist, then asked when I got off work; maybe we could see that bore together. Maybe I could dump this water over your head, I thought. The next day I wore Sam’s ring to work. My husband was a sailor, I would explain. Sailing the China seas.

  During that period we lived in a large, drafty apartment, four rooms and a kitchen, on top of Lucy’s Bakery, about three blocks down Main Street from the hotel. Furnished, as our landlady, who happened to be Lucy herself, apologized, with things she’d found cast up on the beach after storms. She was exaggerating, although the furniture did have a worn, vaguely waterlogged look to it: chairs and sofas with puffy, shapeless cushions, their upholstery raveling at the edges as if stirred by deep, submarine currents; lamps made from buoys, ashtrays from shells; tables bleached to the bony whiteness of driftwood. Lucy Feeny was a young woman from Newfoundland with a raucous laugh, long red braids, silver granny glasses. If the twins made an unexpectedly rapid adjustment to life on the Fundy coast, this was due in large part to the influence of Lucy, who allowed Ruby to help her in the bakery, who posed as Aphrodite (on the beach, her bathing suit draped with seaweed) for Flo. Just as you might say that it was Lucy Feeny—or at least the warm, yeasty smells she caused to float up into my bedroom from the bakery ovens immediately below my bed—who helped me divest myself, once and for all, of the gray hazy garments of my depression.

  I was lying there, languid, depressed, flat on my back, when the smell of baking bread suddenly came to me like a previously unexplored idea. I knew that the smell was coming from downstairs, but somehow my experience of it was different, as if the bread were above me, drifting slowly toward me from above. Why wouldn’t it be a mistake, I thought, to step on a loaf of bread? Certainly n
ot merely because an old Danish lesbian decided that bread was a symbol of female oppression. Gifts and creatures, I remembered reading in the Book of Common Prayer—gifts and creatures of bread and wine. Probably it wasn’t a good idea to step on something another person had labored over, even if that person was yourself. So I imagined it, a large round loaf of bread—one of those feather-crumbed, faintly honey-flavored loaves, Lucy’s specialty—sifting slowly down through layer after layer of peat. Creatures, the Episcopal minister had explained to our confirmation class, referred to the yeast, mysterious granules that would swell into life if properly nourished, like the human soul. The bedstead was narrow, made of white-painted iron; its mattress and sheets and light green, anchor-printed coverlet smelled of salt and mildew, of shady, damp places conducive to the breeding of lethargy, despair, and silverfish. Indeed, what I found when I finally roused myself from bed to crouch on my hands and knees and slide the waxed carton out from under it, was a spill of them—a shimmering effluvium of those silver-scaled, segmental insects, primitive and wingless, their hideous tails bristling, their long feelers twitching brainlessly—draining through the closed surface flaps, over the sides of the carton and onto the floor. Not a moment too soon, I thought, for I knew that the silverfish thrives in the damp and the dark, and that it’s dedicated to the destruction of books and paper. But the notebooks I was looking for, the five spiral-bound composition books containing The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, were still at the bottom of the carton; and although the pages had thickened slightly in the damp salt air, Helle’s notation remained perfectly legible.