1910 #3
There, in her small kitchen, by the light of two candles, she studied Jagr’s formulary like her mother had once studied the Bible.
Each formula was numbered and beneath the number he’d listed its uses.
Insomnia. Fatigue. Heart disease. Nervousness.
Sadness. Menstrual problems. Gout. Hysteria.
Pain. The pages were annotated, describing his processes, his experiments, his mistakes.
Formulas had been worked and reworked, each calculation neatly transcribed by his hand.
He’d marked beneath each formula with his initials, so small it could have been a drip of ink.
She turned to the formula for emotional disorders.
Hysteria, Jagr once said, is a social disease.
He’d once treated an entire family of sisters—eight in total—who all suffered convulsions, but he could find nothing medically wrong with them.
Jagr believed the mere suggestion of illness was enough to bring on symptoms in another.
And symptoms are not always evidence of disease.
Jagr had prescribed each convulsing sister two capsules a day. Soon after, their symptoms disappeared.
But what did Jagr know of emotional symptoms?
Opal began with Jagr’s formula but then added to it the ingredients she’d known to work in such cases, ingredients she herself took for pain or unusual episodes, though minus the narcotics.
She made a list: milk of licorice and common nettle.
Motherwort and skullcap. Black cohosh and valerian root.
Lavender and lemon balm. In the morning, she visited the medical botanist on Court Street.
She scoured the fields just outside the city for familiar shrubs.
And later, in her small kitchen, she filled pots and set them to boil.
When she was done, she turned to a blank page in the formulary and recorded the ingredients, the measurements, her process.
A few days later, at her station on the floor of the Earthshine Factory, she interrupted her working rhythm—fold, flip, tuck—to pass the pills to Maria. She’d stored them in a scrubbed sardine tin. Maria pocketed them in her apron, then dropped a handful of coins into Opal’s lunch pail.
“What do you call them?” Maria asked, opening the tin. She sniffed tentatively.
Opal hadn’t considered naming the medicine until this very moment.
Jagr had only ever used numbers to designate his cures.
Now, she thought of Swirling Spray and Mourning Spray.
She thought of the comet—Halley’s Comet—named after the man who, knowing he’d not live to see it, first theorized this celestial object would return again, then again.
She thought of Madame de Fleur’s most recent letter: I think the comet will save us, not destroy us, in the end.
It was the in the end that now seemed hopeful to Opal, the unspoken in the beginning behind it, the idea that something must be destroyed to be saved.
WOMEN HAVE A MODE OF distributing private information without newspapers or switchboards or telegrams. Mouth to ear, the old way. The girls at the Earthshine factory began whispering about Opal as they walked by her station to distribute empty crates or replenish her stacks of overwrap.
“What do they call you?” one girl had asked. Her name was Amanda Mahooney. She was young with plump skin, unmarred by age, and she sat a few rows back.
“They?”
“The other girls. When you sit with them. You know, your spiritualist name, like a stage name or something. Something with a little mystique.” She didn’t seem to be skeptical of Opal, but she was certainly no believer.
Of course she thought of M in this moment, of Madame de Fleur. She’d wondered if the M stood for Madame—or if it was her first initial. Mary, Martha, Maggie, Mabel. None of these seemed to fit.
“Madame Doucet,” Opal said to Amanda. She pronounced it like Maria had—Do-Say. It sounded French.
Madame Doucet.
She sat with Betsy, next, in the lunchroom.
As they conversed, Betsy flattened her bangs against her forehead.
The burn on her arm had left a white scar that resembled a bicycle, two large circles connected by a bridge.
She was pregnant after less than a year of marriage.
Her stomach pushed against the fabric of her uniform dress like a small round of bread concealed in a sack.
She twisted the bottom of her apron as she described how at night she cried, sobbed so hard it was like she was expelling something from her body.
The sobbing and the darkness provided some sort of relief.
On occasion her husband would wake and ask her what was wrong, and Betsy would tell him she was just so happy, so excited to become a mother, but it’d all been a lie.
I’ve been pregnant once before, she whispered. A soldier.
Victoria felt on edge, nervous all the time.
Ruth’s anger manifested as an appetite, and she’d gained ten pounds the past six months alone, stuffing herself with any sugary treat she could find.
Gilly sometimes experienced lethargy so deep, so penetrating she couldn’t make it to work, and the foreman had given her a final warning.
She said she’d lie there in her bed, her limbs heavy as tree branches, and a tree can’t very well go to work.
Pearl described herself as alternating between crushing anxiety and intense joy.
Up and down and up and down. Some days she wanted to crawl out of her skin from terror.
Other days she felt she might explode from the beauty of the world.
She was exhausted by it. “I have nobody to talk to about this. Nobody to tell me if it’s normal or not. ”
“And when did your symptoms start?” Opal asked. It was that deeper voice that asked it.
“Last year. Not long after I started working here.”
“Have you reported it to the foreman?” Opal asked.
And to that, Pearl doubled forward and laughed and laughed.
There was an intimacy to it all—the holding of hands, the whispering, the way their voices fused as they hummed.
In the cave-like lunchroom, they could speak candidly, say things one might not say aloud otherwise, tell the stories as though observing some oddity or curiosity apart from themselves.
Back at their stations on the factory floor, the Earthshine Girls resumed their distance. Later, Opal would pass them the cure.
In the kitchen of her rented apartment, Opal opened a window and set a pot to boil.
The tenant upstairs had complained of the smell, and her landlord had given her a warning.
Three more and she’d be evicted. Opal hadn’t a Bunsen burner or beakers or a pill press, so she made do with her stove and a casserole and some glassware.
Steam from the boiling pans dampened her skin.
When the concoction thickened, she strained it and let it cool.
She’d been tinkering with the formula to improve upon it.
An eighth of a gram more this. A fourth of a gram less that.
Jagr’s formulas continually evolved. Good medicine, he’d said, requires persistence and humility.
Precision meets failure. Adjust accordingly.
While she waited, she made the necessary notations in the formulary.
Then, at the top of the page she wrote it out—not a number, like Jagr had assigned each formulation—but a name: Comet Pills.