The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ she sent an invitation.

      Everything I did, I did better than right. Counting the stitches as I sewed a hem, I made twenty-four, twenty-six, then twenty-eight, each exactly the same. Always evens, too. No stopping at an odd number ending in a seven or a nine or a one. Even numbers and balanced sets tended to keep me from wanting to jump out of my skin. Same with movement: even numbers. Churning butter was a task where Momma’s “be gentle” didn’t apply. I counted to myself in twos, fours, eights. Collect the eggs, sweep the house, do my schoolwork when I had it. Tell stories aloud to myself and Leo when I didn’t.

      When I did, Daddy told me to hush up. He read the newspaper aloud to Momma, who could read, of course, but liked to hear Daddy while she did her needlepoint in the evening. I sat on the piano bench and spoke quietly to myself about horses who could dance and boys and girls who sailed across the ocean on a slice of toast.

      “Listen to your Daddy,” Momma told me. She didn’t look up from her green thread. She was making a parrot in a jungle.

      My story kept on inside my head.

      “Quit moving your mouth like that with no sound,” Daddy said. The Appeal was in front of his face, but he could see me.

      Tell me the story again, Leo said, inside my head.

      The last time Dale was here, she twittered at Leo. I wanted to slap her for aiming a laugh like that at such a little boy, and her without the sense to see that Leo wasn’t right. Dale dropped fussy French phrases into the most average conversation. She wasn’t right either, talking in a language none of us but my mother understood.

      Momma had sent Dale and me into the woods to pick scuppernongs. Away from my mother’s judgmental eye, I plucked the green grapes from their vines. The fullest grapes radiated pressure from within, like skin swollen by a spider bite.

      “Dale, look, a grape like a swolled-up finger,” I said, presenting her with a fat grape.

      As I expected, she recoiled, which prompted me to bite down on the swollen-fleshed grape, squirting green muck and pale brown seeds in her direction. The grape’s skin was sour and unpleasantly slippery inside, with rough scabs on the outside, but she didn’t need to know that. The mess didn’t touch her—I hadn’t intended that it would—but fell onto the dirt, no bigger than a bird dropping. Dale curled her lip.

      “Mmm,” I said, possessing my field, my grape vines, my peeling house. “Just like popping a good blister.”

      Dale’s shriek didn’t gratify me the way I’d hoped it would.

      While Dale approached us on a train from Tennessee, I waved flies from potatoes and worried that she’d find my book wrapped in a scarf atop my wardrobe. My paring knife skipped and peeled a strip from my thumb.

      Sure enough, when Dale made herself at home in the chair beside my bed, she settled her too-many clothes into left- and right-hand stacks, smoothing the tissue paper between each fold. I didn’t own five dresses to wrap in paper. She kept a broad-brimmed straw hat in a patterned hatbox, and I was certain I’d heard her whisper ‘goodnight’ to the hat the last time she visited. I’d have wished the hat sweet dreams too if it were mine, the way it complemented her petal-white skin and sat just right against her hair. Her hair was black as mine, but smooth and shiny as a crow’s wing.

      I helped her unwrap three dresses from their paper, but the heavy weather made my head throb. I wanted to unbutton my dress and walk around in my cotton chemise and stocking feet, stomping like the dray horse I was, just to annoy someone. Her. Me. The sky drooped like soiled diapers. Faced with a week in Dale’s company, I tossed out a story.

      “The last time the weather felt like this, we had nuts from the hickory tree in the yard come flying in the front room,” I told her. This wasn’t a complete lie. There had been a rainstorm and strong winds. When the front door blew open, nuts scattered off the tree and rolled into the house.

      Dale picked strands of her hair from a brush and made the not-listening listening sound. “Mmm-hmm.”

      I flung myself wide across the bed, circulating the stuffy air.

      “Electrical tree,” I said, delighted by my inspiration. “Electricity flew them in, knocked them around like hailstones. Then they stopped cold and fell to the floor. Me and Momma swept them out, even though they were still sparking.”

      The last part wasn’t entirely a lie, either. We had raked the nuts out the door, lifting the edges of the carpets to find the strays.

      “Keep any?” Dale asked, shaking out a purple and blue checked skirt. “You know it’s ‘Momma and I.’ Don’t act ill-bred or you won’t get the right kind of paramour.”

      Fooling her was deliciously easy.

      “I’d love to hold an electrical nut in my hand, see if it’s still got a jump in it,” I said.

      She clicked the trunk shut.

      “What do you know about electricity anyway, way out here? We saw electric lights in a drawing of Paris up at school in a lecture about great cities of the world. They make streetcars go without horses. They’re bright as the sun, electric lights. You can’t look right at them or they’ll burn out your eyes. On the avenues of Paris, they burn all day and all night and never go out.”

      I didn’t know the first thing about electricity other than what I’d read in the newspaper. The Wizard of Menlo Park was going to do in America what Dale said about Paris. The editor’s column in the Appeal claimed that electricity was an artificial light more brilliant than a thousand suns, and it was dangerous. A person could burn to cinders from touching it. Consider that boy in New York City, fried on a wire.

      Propping myself up on my elbows, I waggled my foot at Dale.

      “I should have kept one! You’re right, that would have been a thing to own. Hold a nut up to a light in France, maybe it would dance again.”

      I would have liked to see an electric light. I hadn’t yet seen one. No one I knew had. Dale alighted on the bed and made the not-listening sound again.

      “Do you have my shawl? I’m sure I set it right there on the chair.”

      I didn’t say anything about the shawl. Instead, I told her that I’d heard from one of the girls at school that electricity is an example of God’s power on his earth. I’d heard no such thing, it just seemed like what Dale wanted to hear, and I wanted her to not sit so near to me.

      The hot dry treetops glared like cut tin. Wind stirred the field across the road, making the trees scrape against each other like giant matchsticks.

      “You know that the Devil isn’t far under our feet,” Dale said. “Below this house, below the fields. Mama told me that years ago there was an earthquake in Tennessee, and the newspaper back then said that if the earth did open for good, the Devil would be free to walk among us.”

      Dale got up and probed through her stacks of clothing while she talked. Finding no shawl, she fussed with her skirt. A stray lock of hair came loose from the twist at the back of her neck, and she threaded it back into the bundle with the thumb and middle finger of her free hand.

      “Uncle Will’s people were from Tennessee, weren’t they?” she asked.

      As СКАЧАТЬ