The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

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СКАЧАТЬ and then earth, and roots. Around the roots, copper and iron threaded through the insides of rocks. Daddy said so and proved it with his cairn of polished stones on the parlor mantel. Veins of copper and iron ore ran through those stones. The copper tugged gently at the iron, and according to him, the iron responded, bowing toward its true mate, copper. These two together, Daddy said, made the power of a magnet.

      “Are you listening to me?” Dale asked. “I’ll find the shawl after we eat. We have to go downstairs and help with supper.”

      “Did they find him?”

      Dale had her hand on the doorknob.

      “Find who?”

      “The Devil.”

      “Hush, you.” She shook her head and shut the door behind her. Her footsteps tapped down the hall and receded down the stairs.

      “Well amen, then,” I said, but only to the door. My washrag swung slightly on a peg, mocking Dale’s pull on the handle. I reached into my blouse and extracted the shawl she had been looking for. I shook it out, folded it into a little square, and lay it neatly in the hatbox.

      The sky was sickly green by the time we sat down for dinner. My ears popped, even though I worked my jaw and tried to shake my head clear like a rained-on dog. When rain fell while the sun shone, people always said, “the Devil’s beating his wife.” I couldn’t imagine who a Mrs. Devil might be, or how she and the Devil might have courted.

      Momma dished up second helpings of ham, squash, bread, beans, and pickled tomatoes, a warning in her smile. Eat all of this. For Dale, we would show no struggle in planting the food or keeping it alive, no strain in portioning it out for the table. When we were alone, Momma tallied up prices like they were my fault. A sack of corn cost one dollar sixty cents, and five pounds of dry beans a quarter. A gallon of kerosene cost the same as five pounds of beans. Money was scarce as blood from a turnip, she said. On a rare night, we ate possum.

      “Once you’ve had possum,” my father liked to say when he had his plate, “you won’t go back to squirrel.”

      He had it backward: squirrel was all right. Some nights we ate cornbread and syrup, and I gave Leo a sweet rag to suck so he could think his belly was full. He knew better but pretended along with the rest of us.

      With Dale at our table, the chat was about a fellow over by Aragon who’d stopped his wagon to have a smoke and burned up his bushels by accident. Daddy was sympathetic to the man’s loss. Momma called the disaster the fellow’s own fault.

      Dale cleared her throat and patted her mouth with her napkin.

      “Uncle Will, do you plan to open more acreage?” She was breathy and childlike, a fluttery Dale, not the cousin who last year had screamed about a grape.

      Please hush, I warned her in my head, but she couldn’t hear me. Sitting across from her, I couldn’t reach under the table to pat her arm and take her attention away from the disaster she was igniting right here at the table.

      She wouldn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t get to Dale. I cut into my ham, wishing it were her flesh, or mine.

      “I would think by now you’d just go ahead and move back to town. I mean to say that you ought to give up,” Dale said.

      My forked shrieked across my plate. My cousin, with her perfect hair and womanly shape, had shot flames from her mouth.

      “Living out here while the town’s going on,” she continued. She might as well have spit ash. “Momma says Aunt Sally will fade away from indigence.”

      Momma paled and didn’t speak. Rude as anything, Dale pointed to my mother, in case we hadn’t understood who her Aunt Sally might be. Maybe the floor had opened, and Dale was the Devil.

      I wiped Leo’s chin and put a sliver of ham into his hand. I was teaching him to eat with his fingers in the interest of dexterity.

      “More water, please,” Daddy said, tapping the rim of his glass. He spoke as if Dale hadn’t said a word. Momma stood to get the pitcher from the sideboard. She had to have been relieved to turn away.

      Dale had spoiled dinner, and she was pleased. She was so pleased, in fact, that when I sat back from helping Leo with his ham, she looked straight at me, claiming a win. That was my chance, and I took it. I stared right back into her pale eyes. The sounds of Daddy pouring his water, of Leo chewing, of Momma’s anxious picking at the tablecloth faded into a dull hum. Dale wanted to pull away, but I held her like I did that fox and Mr. Campbell. Not until my father safely stood to leave the table, patting his stomach with an elaborate motion, did I let her go.

      That night Dale took the pillow, leaving me with the edge of a blanket under my cheek. With her in the bed I couldn’t lie corner-to-corner the way I liked. With her in the bed, my feet hung off the end into the open air. Dale was the guest and taking up space was her prerogative. She fell asleep fast, mewing like a kitten. Beside her, I watched the starless night. My mattress stank, and I wished for Dale not to smell the sickness in it.

      Momma’s father had lived his last months as an invalid on this mattress. He had died on it. When I became what Momma called a “little girl getting her big girl’s bed,” she pulled out the worn feathers and stuffed the mattress with empty feed sacks. She swaddled the stained mattress in oilcloth, since I was, after all, still a little girl. The mattress never entirely lost the stink of illness. When the sour smell got too bad, I rolled to the farthest edge and lay on my side, putting as much of me off the mattress as I could get.

      Dale’s bedroom wouldn’t smell like old waste and varnish. I imagined her bed as soft and wide, with crisp sheets that smelled like perfume. I inched closer to the window and pushed it up for some fresh air. Blue and white streaks lit the distance. Outside was alive with a heady odor like fading sparks.

      I’d been stabbing at that hard-edged mattress with pins for months, harder than when I slid a needle into my skin. When the sharp pin broke through the cracked fabric, my mouth watered from the anticipation and release. Small rips at the pinholes would expose my deed if anyone saw them, so I held the sheets under the soapy water when I helped with the wash. Wooden clothespins on the line covered the growing rents in the fabric.

      Stabbing a pin through the thick cloth and feeling it pop through to the burlap inside satisfied an itch behind my knees and along the edges of my teeth. The relief in pushing through the mattress’s resistance, probing its depths, and that discrete little sound of completion when I pulled the pin away quelled my craving to scratch, or bite, or scream.

      Dale didn’t seem to feel so mislaid in her life. Everything was dresses and cake to her. She slept beside me. My uncovered feet shone a dim blue with each lightning flare outside. Downstairs, my parents slept, and my brother slept. I rolled onto my stomach. Dale wheezed in her sleep, a deep sucking sound. Lately, what I wanted and what was right weren’t always the same.

      A flash of lightning lit my bedroom walls. When the skittery brightness vanished, my hand crept toward the nest of hairpins on my bedside table. I found the one I liked best: a pin with a little metal fan at the top. That delirious moment when the sharp tip in my hand perforated the blunt mattress was so near. Lightning flashed once more in the heavy air, and thunder rolled as I counted ten. Ten miles away. In my mind, I watched the lightning strike a dead tree in a dry creek bed, starting a fire that would die out harmless and alone.

      The pin made a hollow pop when it ruptured the mattress. I sucked in my breath and held it to СКАЧАТЬ