1986 #2
I bristled. Janie stared at me, unapologetically. Now, I can see she was defending herself—her right to give up her career for her kids. Her life, she was saying, was important, too. But in the moment, I’ll admit, I wanted to slug her face.
“Gene Longworth would murder you for talking at that deposition,” Janie said.
“I know,” I said.
Edith began to whisper something, but right then a man walked into the gazebo.
He was dressed in a baja, like he’d just walked off some California beach.
“Hey, Earthshine Girls,” he said. He pulled a camera from beneath his baja, and the flash made a sound like a bug zapper.
In the photo, Janie hoists her ChapStick midair; Edith leans forward like she’s blowing out candles.
And me? My eyes are wide with surprise, with the words Edith had whispered to me: Madame Doucet.
They called her a witch. She could talk to the dead and divine cures from the Other Side.
But she killed people with her cures, they said.
BY MORNING, OUR PICTURE WAS in the Tempo of the Times, and Mr. Longworth left three messages on my machine. We need to talk, he said. Now. Call me. His voice held the patronizing tone of an angry father considering consequences.
I poured my coffee, then picked up my kitchen phone and dialed Edith.
I wrapped and rewrapped the phone cord around my finger.
She killed people with her cures, she’d whispered, coming in so close that her lip brushed my ear.
They called her a witch. I thought of Samantha from Bewitched, the Wicked Witch of the West, The Witches of Eastwick.
Some good. Some bad. And now Madame Doucet. What kind was she?
In drama, a single detail can reveal the whole of a person—sharp particularity, one of my conservatory professors called it—and I thought of Opal’s signature in that old notebook, the dramatic loops, the t crossed in anger. What had led her to that rage?
You don’t know Bertie Tuttle, Halley said the last night I saw her.
I didn’t know Opal Doucet either.
But I knew Halley. She’d left me that notebook—a message from beyond—because she wanted me to see the name Opal Doucet.
She wanted me to know her, this witch. She had marked the page with our photograph.
I sensed that learning about one woman would help me understand the other.
I took the last sip of my coffee, and there at the bottom of the schnitzel mug Halley had once given me I saw my own reflection, a tiny, ghostly, glistening version of me.
The phone rang and rang. Edith didn’t answer.
So much of how we behave in life comes from movies and television, from roles other people have played.
Maybe I’d seen too many old episodes of Dragnet.
I took the white pages down from the pantry shelf where we kept it.
I opened it like a sacred tome. I know I’d seen this scene before in a movie.
The camera cuts to a close-up of the telephone directory, of a finger scanning down a column of tiny print.
Doucet. Two listings.
I lifted the receiver. Our kitchen phone was an old rotary.
I watched the dial spin. I heard the smooth trilling of the call, like birds.
Wyatt used to love to watch the birds each morning.
He kept the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America on our back porch. So attentive when he chose to be.
Two more rings, then an operator’s voice: This number has been disconnected.
Who did I think I was, Magnum P.I.? My resolve began to falter, but then I thought of the Earthshine Girl, me, wearing a slip, a mud mask.
Me wearing that wedding dress. I thought of me, the Earthshine Girl, as that plumber dressed in white overalls, my hair curved under my cap.
I was a lady plumber—that was the whole joke.
“If she’s a plumber, wouldn’t she be fixing the sink? Unclogging the sink? Repairing the sink?” I remember Linda Gibbons, my roommate from the conservatory, asking. “Didn’t it feel dirty?”
“Soap?” I had said, and the other girls laughed, even though I hadn’t meant to be funny. The lady plumber secretly embodied their fears: They didn’t want to be women trying to make it in a man’s world.
I thought of the Earthshine Girl, me, as a nurse, as a secretary, as a Native American—Use Earthshine in every teepee—me, as a cook, a teacher, a wife, a mother, me, the Earthshine Girl who held a canister of soap toward the camera with two hands, pleading with women to buy it.
Cradling that phone, I was thinking of all the ways the Earthshine Girl had been crafted to be good, obliging, pleasing, deferential, only secretly clever. I was the Earthshine Girl. I’d been trained to neglect my own needs, and that wasn’t virtue. That wasn’t talent. It was fear.
I willed myself to be brave for Halley.
The next call rang five times, and just when I was about to hang up, a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”
I briefly remembered something I’d read, about how Thomas Edison was the one who encouraged the etiquette of saying hello when answering the phone.
How else to address the unknown but to acknowledge it?
Edison was deaf, and he claimed his deafness allowed him to tune out meaningless sound and focus. He considered his deafness a gift.
“Hello?” I said.
The woman on the other end was old. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d just woken up.
I could hear Wheel of Fortune in the background, and I apologized for interrupting, but I was doing a bit of research, trying to track someone down, and I wondered if she had any relation to someone named Opal Doucet.
I listened to the woman’s breathing, heavy, like a smoker’s, the whimsical pinging of letters illuminating on the TV.
“You a Doucet, honey?” She pronounced it like “Do Sit.”
“No,” I said.
“What’s that clicking noise?” she said.
“I didn’t hear it,” I said.
“Maybe my hearing aids. I hate these old things. Too bad you’re not a Doucet. I thought you was kin. Everyone’s all but dead and in the ground.”
“No relation. It’s part of a … history project,” I said.
“A history project, you say. Well, I’m my daddy’s only daughter. Now my father was just as charismatic and loving as can be. Real gentle. Nothing like my husband—ex-husband. Though now he’s dead, too.”
“Oh, gosh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Which part, honey?” I heard an unmistakable flick of a lighter, then a deep inhale.
“All of it,” I said.
“Well, you know how it can be. In the beginning someone can seem one way, and then…” Her voice pitched higher. “Maybe if we all remained strangers we’d be better off. Nice and polite to one another.”
“So no Opal Do-sit?” I tried to pronounce the name as she had, but as my tongue tapped the roof of my mouth, it sounded too harsh.
“There’s that click again,” she said. I’d heard it, too, this time. Like the quick clack of a keyboard.
“Maybe a bad connection?” I offered. “Someone else pick up the line?”
“I live alone, honey. Ain’t you been listening?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Quit saying sorry, honey. Sorry’s a bad habit.
Only say it when you mean it. Anyhow, let’s see: Besides my daddy I had an uncle named Jagr Doucet.
Didn’t know him too well. Tall and gangly fellow.
Big bushy eyebrows. Doctor of some sort.
” Another inhale. Another click click, but she made no mention of it, so perhaps she was just playing with her lighter.
I heard rustling, like she was pulling apart a bag of chips, then the crunching to confirm it.
“He was from Gallipolis. Up the river. That’s where my daddy’s from. You ever been there?”
“No,” I said. My attention drifted to the white pages again. I ran my index finger down the column for a name I may have missed.
“Not much there—except that insane asylum. Guess they don’t call them that now. I never know how to say things right no more. My niece tells me that. Tells me I’m offending somebody, but I’m just saying it like I know.”
“So you do have relatives,” I said.
“Just my niece. My brother’s kid. He’s dead, too.
Anyhow, my father said it was haunted, that hospital.
He should know because his brother sometimes worked there.
When I was a girl, though, I saw people sitting out on the lawn, and they didn’t look sick to me.
Just bored. Just sitting there outside while those attendants watched them. ”
“Is he alive still?”
“My father?”
“Your uncle.”
“Uncle Jagr? Goodness no, honey. Died close to…” I could imagine her counting on her fingers.
“Close to twenty years ago, I’d say, ’67 or ’68.
That was the last time I was back in Gallipolis, for his funeral.
They buried him next to his first wife. Opal Doucet.
So there’s that name for your history project.
” I found my pen and started taking notes.
“Uncle Jagr had some giant monument, and she had this tiny little marker right beside it. I remember thinking that was kind of funny but also sad. Didn’t have much occasion to return again.
Life does that, you know, has a way of creeping up on you till one day you wake up and you’re an old woman who barely recognizes her own self.
I’ve got whiskers, honey. They pop out of nowhere, and I begged my friend Dorrie that when I die, please come over and pluck them out before the funeral. Say, what do you look like?” she asked.
I described myself: brown eyes. Little gap between my teeth. Freckled nose. Hair in two braids.
“You sound like a little girl,” she said. Click click. The line was bugged, or I’d seen too many movies. I was Nona Dixon, not Columbo. “Anyway, don’t know much about Opal. It’s Do-Sit—that’s all I can tell you. Like putting your fanny in the seat of a chair.”