To start with: her ankle boots, their leather weathered by time and their soles too heavy. Mie unlaces them the way she would at night, sitting on the end of the mattress. She has hidden her notebook recording her quest beneath it. On the floor are the drawings of the family tree she has made in the dust.
The laces are stiff with dirt and salt. It’s always a chore to untie their knots. When the lace gives, crusts of dried mud fall onto the floor and break into sandy crumbs. The Old Woman would tell her to get the broom and sweep it up, but she isn’t here, so Mie blows on the dust in order to scatter it more evenly across the floor. Her boots smell of wet leather; she likes the odour, pokes her nose under the tongue, inhales deeply, then throws them by the door. They land in a cloud of grey powder.
Her socks have turned red at the toes and around the heels. The irregularly shaped stains remind her of the maps Noé has drawn in her cabin. Mie takes the socks off one by one, rolling them down from her knees until they form two tight coils at the ends of her feet. She studies her toenails, tries to clean them with her thumb, twists her leg to smell the sole of her foot: not that bad.
She stands up, paces a little around the room. The great heron on the window ledge watches her with a bemused expression. She wishes she knew what order women normally follow when they undress. Might that have been something her great-grandmother taught the Old Woman before she slept with the Old Man? “First your blouse, then your skirt.” Or, “First your skirt, then your blouse.” What about her underwear? Fold it, lay it out, hide it away?
At night, she usually pulls her clothes over her head and leaves them balled up on the floor till the next day. Everything except her camisole and underpants. She doesn’t remember ever being fully naked in the lighthouse. Whenever she changes her underwear, first she puts on a slip, and whenever she changes her dress, she keeps her undergarments on.
She starts by taking off her skirt, folds it once, twice, against herself; the waist shrinks, the sides are still the same length. She lays it over the back of the chair. For the longest time, she stands by the window. They are two — she and the heron — examining her legs, ankle to knee: young maple saplings, as blond and downy as new branches.
Next, she takes off her woolen sweater, which she plans to fold and lay on the rocker over top of the skirt. Osip likes to rearrange Noé’s clothes and contemplate their interplay of colours and textures before concentrating on her skin. Mie has constructed an image in her mind: her clothes in a neat pile and her body beneath the sheet. She has imagined Osip discovering her clothing first — fall cotton and red knit — then her. She has convinced herself that the perfect pyramid of her clothes will change the way her uncle views her, but she isn’t able to fold her sweater right; it’s shrunken and shapeless, its neckline limp, distended under one arm, mended under the other. It doesn’t look like anything at all.
The heron keeps jabbing its beak in her direction then turning back to the sea. Mie imagines it’s making fun of her, or that maybe it wants to help. She asks, “Are you laughing at me?” and the bird shuts its eyes, stretches its wings even more.
Eventually, she rolls up the sweater in the bottom of a trunk and glances at the skirt — she likes it, at least — laid carefully over the back of the chair. She likes the way the grime fades from the hem to the waist. The fade in the fabric seems deliberate, so much has the dirt been absorbed by the cotton.
Wool underpants cover her thighs to the knee. The tail of her blouse hides a bit of her behind and the elastic in her skirt has left a mark around her waist. She has grown a lot this summer — her blouse gapes between the buttons. She has trouble undoing them without tearing the fabric, has to pull the sides together, suck in her belly and push each button through its hole.
Folding her blouse is easier. She smooths the collar down and makes sure it can be seen from the doorway.
Suddenly, she’s worried Osip will prefer the smell of Noé’s dresses to this tidy pile. She has often seen him plunge his nose into her mother’s clothes. She leans over her own that smell of nothing but wind and skin. She opens the Old Woman’s trunk, rummages among the scarves and shawls and finds, rolled up in a grey silk square, the pink perfume bottle she has seen her use from time to time. Carefully, she unwraps it, scrutinizes the vial, touches the atomizer — a long tassel of black thread hangs from the end of the spray pump. She pulls the pile of clothing over and gently presses down on the pump. Its fragrant mist shimmers like noon snow and then disappears, absorbed by the fabric. Mie buries her nose in the clothes. The perfume’s fragrance must have diminished with time. She pumps again, once, twice. Then stops, afraid the Old Woman will notice.
She wanders around in her camisole and underpants. Other than as a distorted reflection in rippling ponds, she has never seen herself from head to toe. She doesn’t know how her body looks and believes it to be more like Noé’s than it actually is. She’s aware that she’s not as tall and is slightly broader than her mother, but can’t quite manage to superimpose these differences on Noé’s appearance.
She approaches the window opening onto the sea. Red and grey ships pass close to the lighthouse and salute her uncle with a blast of their foghorns. She has never thought of him as a man of importance before. And yet he must be if these people from afar interrupt their routine to send him greetings.
The scent of the perfume makes her head ache.
She can’t bring herself to shed the camisole. She sifts through the summer linens to find the diaphanous fabric she thought she’d cover herself with, then stretches out on the mattress, envelops herself in the translucent material and only then decides to remove the yellowed top that hides her body. Wrapped in gossamer, she gauges the transparency of the fabric by checking to see if the brownish circles of her breasts, her navel, and the hair below show through.
The heron has slid its head under one wing, whereas she, enveloped in the gauzy linen, keeps her eyes wide open.