1910 #3
Yet, look at how capable she’d proven herself to be. Look at all she’d accomplished, alone. M had been right: She still had the power of self-determination. And this is how she’d use it: She’d refuse to fill another order of Comet Pills.
At Dowd’s, however, she discovered every last tin of Comet Pills had already been pulled from the shelves.
Clara explained the Tuttle’s lawyer had payed a visit.
He was looking out for the interest of his client, especially after what Dixie Ellison had written.
“You know how lawyers can be—nobody wants litigation, and certainly not me,” explained Clara.
She went quiet for a moment. “He’s bought me out of the contract.
Took all the stock with him—just loaded it up in his automobile—and, honestly, I’m not sure what they plan to do.
Possibly destroy it.” She arranged and rearranged some bottles in the cabinet, then made a few pencil markings in her ledger book.
“It’s only business. Nothing personal. I don’t believe that nonsense in the paper.
Sometimes nature just takes its course,” she said.
“But people want to place blame so they feel safer from the whims of their own mortality.”
Opal struggled to understand. “What about my commission? From what’s already been sold?”
“Didn’t you read the terms of the contract?”
Now she felt foolish. She thought of how much it had cost to produce all those pills—money she’d invested with the guarantee of a larger return.
The cost of doing business, she supposed, and perhaps she shouldn’t wish to benefit at all from the Comet Pills.
The money felt tainted now—plus what would Madame de Fleur think of her?
“If Charles Tuttle cared so much about his Earthshine Girls,” she started to say, “then why wouldn’t he just—”
“That’s the odd part,” Clara interrupted. “The lawyer wasn’t sent by Mr. Tuttle. He was sent by Mrs. Tuttle.”
Mrs. Tuttle. Bertie.
Opal didn’t feel betrayal, exactly, since they hadn’t a relationship to betray. But, still, she had trusted the woman.
And now her own life was reduced to a formula: time over money. She didn’t have enough of either. It costs both to create a new self, which is why more women couldn’t do it. But medicines weren’t her only capital. First and foremost, she was a spiritualist.
Resourceful.
“SHE’S COME THROUGH AGAIN,” OPAL told the Colonel when he’d opened his door. She wasn’t sure what to expect of him since they’d been intimate. He hadn’t called for her again, yet now he invited her in.
The portrait of Hazel above the hearth had been rendered cartoonishly. Her head was small and tilted upward. A ring glinted on her finger. Her lips were parted. The portrait artist had caught her on the verge of speaking.
Like Bertie, Hazel Bloodworth was born into wealth.
According to the Colonel, she showed early musical promise and aspired to become a pianist. Her parents sent her to the Conservatory of Paris for proper training.
There, she met the Colonel. She married, conceived, then died in childbirth.
A woman with talent and ambition is still, first, a woman.
Opal asked the Colonel to play something of hers, and he set the needle to the phonograph.
They held hands and listened to Hazel’s piano arrangement from a performance in England.
Not long ago, capturing such sound would have been impossible to imagine.
Once, when a circus came to Gallipolis, the ringmaster brought a small phonograph into the tent and played a recording of a dog barking.
The audience thought it’d been a trick, that a dog had been obscured with sheets, or perhaps a cage had been hidden beneath a recessed door.
What once seemed impossible was now commonplace.
Opal tried to imagine Hazel’s fingers on the piano keys, and she tapped her own fingers against the flesh of the Colonel’s hand.
When the arrangement ended, he reset the needle.
The world was changing quickly, but not quickly enough.
The two didn’t speak. After the song played for a second time, the Colonel led her to the settee.
Perhaps women are a mystery to men because they’re hidden beneath so many layers of clothing.
He removed her boots. He unbuttoned her dress and untied her slip.
He unfastened her pregnancy corset, loosened the stiff plates that held her stomach in place until she felt the release.
Then he studied her stomach with such tenderness, she thought he might cry. He traced its arc with his thumb. He put his ear to her belly button and tapped her side, listening. Then, he guided her to lie down on her side.
Now, she became Hazel. She watched him undress.
There was a coolness to him. The patch of hair on his chest resembled a thumbprint.
He stood in profile to hide the scar beneath his eye, and this amused Opal, that he’d hide a simple scar while undressing, as though that old wound was more private than his manhood.
Soon they were face-to-face. The tips of their noses touched, and they laughed.
Jagr used to mount her like a farm animal until she’d knock her head against the wall.
Oren had … what had Oren been like in these intimate moments?
The details had faded with time, and all that was left was a nostalgia for something she could hardly remember, except when she’d been with Madame de Fleur.
Had she really believed Oren had come through?
And what did it matter? It was the woman she’d touched.
The woman she still wanted to touch. Now, she touched the Colonel’s scar.
She pulled him close and had the sense she could not pull him close enough.
“I want—” she said, but then he’d pressed his warm lips upon hers.
After the act, the Colonel traced the curve of her stomach, the pop of her belly button, the way, perhaps, he’d done to Hazel the last time they had been together.
He drew his finger along her shoulder. She twisted her body. It was dusk, when the gray sky held on to the light. He searched her eyes. His skin was warm. She felt momentarily safe here against him, like nothing could go wrong, like nobody could find her.
But they would find her.
She tried to think of what Hazel might say.
She considered how she might have told him of her pregnancy the first time: excitement blushing her cheeks, sheepish with the knowledge that part of him had planted itself in her.
They’d speak in euphemisms. She might have told him to ready the chimney for the stork, and the Colonel might have tenderly whispered Hazel Stork into her ear.
But Opal knew that storks were carnivores that ate small mammals like mice and shrews. No baby would be safe with one.
Likely, Hazel had been afraid, for maybe she had known friends, cousins, acquaintances who had died as they pushed a baby into this world, whose lives had been a threshold of a different sort.
“I’m afraid,” Opal said. She hadn’t used that word before—afraid—but she was saying it now, and she couldn’t unsay it. It was out there, like a ball she’d kicked into the sky, and now she was waiting for it to fall.
He began to dress, pulling one trouser leg on at a time.
Now his back was to her, and she felt silly for saying anything, silly for thinking this man could help.
They were playacting. She hadn’t convinced him yet.
He could not love apart from Hazel—for that would be like asking a fish to swim with no water.
The water contains the fish, but gives it freedom, too. That’s the irony of the bond.
She thought again about what life might be like in France. About the Spirit Machine, about totality—how, to look at the sun during an eclipse, you had to first obscure it completely.
“We could go somewhere,” Opal said. Soon, the baby would make it impossible to travel. “Before the baby comes—before it’s too late. Like last time.”
The Colonel stood. “What do you know about last time?” he asked. Now all his movements slowed: the tucking of his shirt, the buttoning of his trousers.
“You lost the most precious thing in the world to you,” she said. She pulled her dress from the floor and covered her chest, suddenly aware of her nakedness. “We could go to Europe. They have the best doctors there. In France, they understand people like us.”
“Like us?” the Colonel asked, and she knew she’d pushed too far.
“There’s a machine. A Spirit Machine. I know someone who can make a spirit incarnate. It can give you answers. That’s what you’ve been searching for, isn’t it? That’s what you want.”
The Colonel glanced up at the portrait of his wife. He finished tying his boots. He put on his hat. “I’ll have my driver take you home,” he said, and she knew she had lost him.
NOW SHE MADE HER WAY through the beer caves in the dark, using her fingertips on the rough edges of the wall to guide her.
Inside, she lumbered up the stairs of the factory.
Her legs felt heavy with her own weight, and she stood breathless on the foreman’s platform overlooking the empty floor.
A metal cart by the entry contained trays of perfect yellow rectangles.
The door to one of the boilers had been left ajar.
Nobody had bothered to sweep beneath the cutting machine, and soap shavings gathered there like dust. From outside came the chanting of protesters, the sounds of sirens in the distance.
To say she always wanted a baby would be untrue. The reality of it startled her: wailing, soiled diapers, a body that clung to hers, wanting for her milk like she was a farm beast.
She’d been doubted so much in her life; she doubted herself. She considered the freedom she’d have without a baby. How could she hope to make it to France, pregnant and alone, when she could barely manage the weight of her own body up the stairs of the factory?
Inside the laboratory, she lit a lamp. The formulary was cracked open, beakers still half full of water, powder in the mixer, tins labeled, empty capsules, cracked.
She lifted the notebook and scanned her finger down the page where she’d written out the formula for her Comet Pills.
She’d only wanted to help, to do something more meaningful than washing laundry or wrapping soap.
She had only one life, and she was tired of waiting for it to begin.
So often she’d almost gotten what she wanted, but only almost. She wished she could be someone else.
Somewhere else. Not just France, but a different time altogether.
A distant future where a woman like her had more choices.
At the bottom of the page she hadn’t initialed her name in tiny letters, like Jagr had done. Now she picked up an ink pen, and she signed it roughly, crossing the t with such force she nearly ripped the page. Her signature felt like a confession. There, now everyone would know what she’d done.
She flipped the pages of the notebook, and then she found it, the formula that had cured so many women of their shame, like she had been cured of hers all those years ago.
She hadn’t been given a choice back then, about the baby or her shame.
She’d been told what to do, and she did it.
Jagr assured her she could never again conceive.
Save her, that voice had said. Instructed.
Ordered. She was sick of being told what to do.
Wouldn’t this baby shrink her world again, its insistence on her milk, its cries to be held?
Maybe Jagr had been right: She was unwell, unfit to be a mother.
Now she only wanted to save herself, and what was wrong with that?
She took off her necklace and tucked it inside the formulary, with the letters from Madame de Fleur she’d kept there.
A woman must never apologize for what she wants or for what she must do to protect herself.
Until she’d met the woman, she hadn’t considered what she wanted.
There in the grass by the river, time had condensed, but space had, too.
She existed in another dimension where she’d collapsed into herself.
Or maybe she’d expanded. If this was the Other Side, how she longed for it.
Was she touching herself or the woman or Oren?
Whose hands had reached for whose hips, whose mouth had covered whose lips?
Her whole body had arched, like she might very well levitate.
But it wasn’t just their bodies.
Now her thoughts were foggy. Exhaustion settled in her ankles, which felt fat and swollen. It’s a curse of the living to tote around a body. How freeing it would be to live apart from one.
She gathered the bowls and the Bunsen burners.
From her apron pocket she withdrew the herbs she’d brought from home, left over from when she’d formulated this very same cure for Amanda Mahooney.
She lit a match, but as she set it to the igniter, the match extinguished.
She lit another and another and another still, but each flame shrank until it was nothing but a hiss of smoke, as though invisible lips had extinguished it.
The baby kicked inside her, and Opal felt a pang not dissimilar to hunger except stronger and deeper.
It didn’t hurt so much as compel her to move, to stretch her back and take a deep breath.
But she couldn’t manage to take in much air; her girl was suffocating her.