Carmen Maria Machado
WHEN Lucy thinks back to her childhood, she knows she’s getting close to the memory—not even just the memory, the words—when her pulse picks up, a fat bluebottle fly bumping around a lampshade, urgent and lost. If she doesn’t stop, it gets worse; a string being pulled away from the guitar’s neck. Her blood feels alive, alien, spooked as horses. She knows if she looks in a mirror she’ll see her throat humming its own crazed tune. So she doesn’t look. Would you?
* * *
It’s strange, the knowing-not-knowing. It twitches like something that won’t die. When china shatters. When someone offers her milk. She feels like she’s drifting away, like she’d simply disappear if not for the inconvenience of her limbs and organs.
She thought, for sure, that these spells would leave her when childhood did—that she would outgrow them, as she did night terrors and an allergy to cats. And it’s true that they changed—became less about broken ceramics and dairy products and, inexplicably, quaint roadside restaurants—and became odder, more diffuse. More of a mood than a fear; a sense of oncoming doom, like the seconds before death by drowning.
It got truly bad just before the wedding—well, the almost-wedding— when she and Pete’s mother visited the rental hall. The owner offered her tea, which she accepted; as they walked, discussing the space, she sipped. When it was over—when she drained the final swallow—she saw a design of Cassiopeia on the bottom of the cup. Then, a wave of nausea and panic, a darkening around the edge of her vision. Then, a whisper dropped into her ear.
Don’t do it. Once they have trapped you—
When the vignette faded, she asked the property manager if he had a telephone. That was how Pete’s mother knew she was leaving Pete before Pete did.
She thought Pete’s mother would be angry—furious, even—but when they got into the car Pete’s mother grabbed her hand and said, “I wish I could have done the same,” and then turned on the radio. They sang the whole way back, windows down. (Months later, tangled up in Meredith, she considered that that was it—she knew on some level that to submit to Pete’s bed, sweet and gentle a man as he was, was unthinkable. But why that moment at the wedding hall? Why not when Pete kissed her the first or fifth or fiftieth time?)
Shortly after, Lucy began seeing a psychotherapist, a shriveled little German woman named Dr. Krämer who conducted her appointments from the top of her desk, cross-legged on a zabuton. She was very interested in the story; kept making Lucy return to it, examine it from new angles. Was it simply the reality of the wedding intruding on the fantasy? The knowledge of marriage as yoke, and a larger sense of what was being lost? Or was it the realization no amount of ceremony could make Pete to Lucy’s liking, not in the necessary way? Or was it—she said this carefully, pointedly—the cup, with its scrolled handle and thin lip and delicately rendered constellation?
You will never see it again. Don’t do it.
But that would be insane, Lucy thought, releasing her skirt from her white-knuckled grip, smoothing it over her knee. It would be insane if it was just the cup.
* * *
A few weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Lucy took off with Meredith for a long weekend. They laughed as the city receded behind them and were in Niagara by sundown. This was three years after Liberace held the button to little Debbie Stone’s nose to detonate the dynamite, three years before little Roger Woodward survived a barrel-less plunge over the falls. (Polio had frozen Debbie, and fate had saved Roger; even back then, nothing was fair.) They rode the Maid of the Mist, ate too many hotdogs, made love in a motel lousy with honeymooners.
On the way home, they stopped for lunch at a little inn somewhere near Syracuse. As soon as they crossed the threshold, Lucy realized something was wrong, terrible. She collapsed into the chair and held the napkin against her cheeks; she traced the velvety contours of the fork at her place setting. Meredith was feeling tired and irritable and had no time for one of Lucy’s moods. When the waitress came over to see if everything was all right, Lucy stared at her with such naked—well, naked something, not desire, but an expression so open and vulnerable that Meredith stood up in exasperation. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said. Lucy ate in a daze (refusing milk, of course) and after that they drove home in total silence. They broke up just before they reached the city, and the next time Lucy saw Meredith, she was hanging off a blonde at the Bag and looking like a million dollars.
After that, Dr. Krämer asked Lucy if there was something special about the inn, the table setting, the waitress.
“Nothing,” Lucy said. “I mean, nothing that I put my finger on.”
“A memory, maybe? Perhaps you went there as a child?”
“It’s possible. We took trips all over, my mother and father and brother and I.”
Dr. Krämer didn’t say anything but watched Lucy over her bifocals.
It wasn’t that Lucy had a bad childhood. She knew people who did, who wore their past miseries like a winter coat, subtly altering their shape. But no—her parents were good people. She had never been beaten or neglected. She never went hungry, she always had shoes that fit. Her mother’s death—well, she was technically an adult when that happened, wasn’t she? And sometimes such things could not be helped. Her father was a content if lonely widower, her brother in love with his new wife.
Dr. Krämer asked her to think back—relax her mind, come to the moment cautiously, like you’d approach a dog that bites.
Brave girl. Wise, brave girl.
“I wouldn’t approach a dog that bites,” Lucy said.
Dr. Krämer held up her pen like a switchblade. “Then how do you know it’s a dog at all?”
* * *
A few days into her thirties, Lucy woke up in the middle of the night already sobbing, as if she were rounding off a two-day post-heartbreak bender. She put on her mother’s old mink and took a walk. It kept her warm, and every time the wind ruffled the fur she thought about how it was unfair that inheritances so often hinged on death. Why did people choose to wait?
The sky was the color of milky tea and scattered with a handful of stars. She walked past street vendors, drunks, people pouring out of jazz clubs and bars; over puddles and vomit and grates ejaculating steam. She walked until dawn began to thin out the darkness; until waitresses were pouring coffee through the restaurant windows; until shopkeepers unfolded sidewalk signs with a clatter and a sigh.
Sometime after the sun was fully up, she found herself in front of a Gimbels. She hadn’t been in a department store in years, and it was breathtaking—as if she’d entered some dusty, crowded market in Baghdad. She fiddled with some gloves, examined some scarves. She wandered into the perfume department and touched her fingers to the bottles and stoppers. She uncapped a lipstick and twirled it free, then bent to a mirror and circled her mouth with the wax.
It was there that she spotted the child—across the room, rosy cheeked, wrapped in a smart white coat.
The child’s mother was trying to decide on a watch for her husband. She was examining them closely, asking questions, holding them up to the light. She was distracted because she did not want the clerk to know how little she knew about watches. It was very easy to lure the girl away.
* * *
The police were called. They thought they were looking for a small child who had wandered from her mother, which is why they didn’t notice Lucy at first, kneeling in the corner of the shoe section on the third floor, whispering something frantically to the girl. The girl was not squirming away—she was, in fact, listening with a solemnity and intent her own mother would not have recognized—and so she did not stand out. It was only when the manager recognized the girl in the white coat that they were separated. The girl waved goodbye to Lucy, and Lucy waved back.
When they were reunited, the rescuing officer assured the mother that the eccentric woman did not appear to have been harming the little girl in any way. She appeared to be merely speaking to her, telling her something. He almost ended with another word —telling her something urgent—but he stopped himself. He didn’t know why. The mother crushed her daughter to her breast; didn’t noticed the way his sentence trailed off.
The police took Lucy to their station. She told them she simply needed the little girl to understand. To understand what, they asked her, but she had fallen asleep in her chair. She stayed asleep for three days.
When the little girl in the white coat became a woman, she would, on occasion, think back to her own past and come across the memory of the department store for reasons she did not fully understand. Her mother. The watch. Her own reflection in a glass case. Only when she looked at it sideways would she remember that it held something else entirely: a hulking, sorrowful creature—red-mouthed and sleek as an otter—extending her hand and whispering the thing she needed to hear.