18

As for how Nessarose thinks and feels, it’s not as easy to guess as it is for some of the others in the mission. True, Nessa isn’t locked into silence as a deaf-mute person might be. But something inscrutable wraps around her in a way it doesn’t, quite, wrap around her sister. Elphie has interiority, to be sure, and this will swell inside her to the point of making her practically eligible for an asylum, but she will never be anything but entirely readable. Elphie will have little control over the way her unspoken opinions flash through her expressions, even her body language—the ways she walks, stomps, pushes, dashes off. Nessa, whose deformities are so apparent, inhabits her Nessarose-ness with the continence of porcelain. Smooth, no purchase.

Here she is at her weekly bath. Nanny and Boozy set her in the tin tub that doubles as a sink for soaking laundry. When balanced, Nessa can now squat upright. She closes her eyes as Boozy dribbles lukewarm water over her hair and shoulders. She doesn’t mind being touched, perhaps because she can’t touch herself, not with hands. Nanny uses an old sponge. A scent of vanilla in the water—vanilla is in rich supply here. Elphie is standing nearby, thinking—

—but this is Nessa’s small moment. She closes her eyes. Where is she in there?

We can at least imagine what she is hearing. Birdsong, if you can call it birdsong. Not every utterance of a bird is melodic, or joyful. There are alarums, raking shrieks, coughs that stutter and finish in a falling tone, plangencies evoking regret or despair. The stands of reed conceal flocks who squabble, sex up, dispute territory, and try to ward off predators. A noisy operation, to live by water, both for fowl and for humans. Nessa has to have noticed such aural commotion. Is she ever tempted to shriek like the birds, yearning for liftoff? She who has no arms with which to swim may wish for wings. To get away, to get anywhere. The birds circle and gossip and settle. Nessa is among them, but is she of them—

But no, this is an experiment that isn’t taking. Nessa is imperturbably confined in herself.

Elphie watches her, imagines the shawl of water cascading over the shoulders. For Elphie it is a nightmare. She can’t look away though. Elphie’s own ablutions are conducted by Nanny, too. For the older sister, the conscientious woman whisks up an unguent out of a few drops of palm oil and some gooey white froth she wrings from the inside of aloe leaves. She uses a stiff browned pod like a strigil to scrape the excess oil and dirt off Elphie’s skin. It leaves the girl feeling scoured, but in a good way. Her hair gets shampooed in oil and egg white. Comes out glossy and smelling a little like lunch. But it is clean. Messy, but clean. Nessa’s hair, however, is rinsed in water. In revulsion, Elphie shudders, and so does Nessa, but in another kind of mood—an appreciation of sensuality. “Enough,” says Nessa, when she can’t take another frisson of trickle. Then Nanny pulls out the softest of cloths from the famous trunk with which Melena eloped, and Nanny towels Nessa dry, up and down.

Here Elphie does look away. As she doesn’t personally like people to touch her, she doesn’t get a sisterly pleasure out of seeing Nessa lean back into the flannel with such abandon.