1986 #2
Some years ago a bystander took a picture of me dining at an outdoor café where slick black grackles were begging for scraps of food.
I tossed my bread crust to one, but the camera caught me midthrow.
In the frozen frame, printed in Tempo of the Times, my arm is pitched forward.
My jaw clenched. The bread crust looked like a weapon of assault, and I resembled Lyssa, goddess of fury.
Photographs separate the moment from context, time from space, which is how they can lie.
While a director could use lighting and music and a montage of images to set the tone, I only have words, and sometimes words fail us.
Isn’t that what art is about? Saying what can’t be said, knowing we’ll never be able to say it right, though we keep trying anyway?
Art is optimism in action. The news won’t give us that.
Now my fingertips were inky with newsprint.
I considered that the ink was seventy-six years old, about Charlie’s age, born the night of the fire.
The fire—that’s what I was looking for, I reminded myself.
The Earthshine fire. Bertie had told that story in The Juggernaut: The factory was burning.
Everyone was looking toward the sky in anticipation.
Some thought it was the end of the world, but for Charlie, it was just the beginning.
The chaos caused Bertie’s water to break—an early labor.
She was dragged away from the fire. Before midnight, Charlie was born.
Someone tapped my shoulder. The librarian stood in front of me, holding a stack of books.
Her dress was cinched at the waist, and she wore glasses, and she resembled Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set, that movie about a librarian named Bunny who falls in love with the computer guy who’s come to automate her job.
Critics say Hepburn’s Bunny had too strong a personality.
Now the librarian in front of me smirked.
“I know where I know you,” she said.
“Oh?”
“You died. Poor Stella,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t being serious.
“You don’t strike me as a fan of the show.”
“The billboards are everywhere. The commercials, too. A prime-time wedding in a few days. That’s very exciting,” she says.
“Brought to you by Earthshine.”
“And you on the canister.”
“Not me,” I said quickly. “I sold my likeness. It was theirs to keep.”
“Oh? You’re someone new now? Someone who’s interested in history?”
I didn’t respond, just went back to sorting through the papers in front of me.
“Do you believe them? Those Jane Does?” she asked.
“Because…” Here she took off her glasses and folded them, and she didn’t look a librarian any longer, just a regular woman.
“Because, I’ve wondered about it myself.
And everything I’ve read, all the interviews I’ve seen …
I know a lot of women like that, with stories.
And I … when I’ve used the soap, I felt—I know this will sound crazy—an overwhelming sense of …
I don’t know. Maybe ennui isn’t the right word. ”
“I don’t know,” I said, harsher than I intended.
“Maybe I just don’t like cleaning.” She put her glasses back on.
“Anyway, I found a few more Inquisitors,” she said.
“All the comet frenzy. Everyone wants to know about the last time, when they thought the world would end. It was on the Xerox machine,” she said.
She placed the paper on the table in front of me.
I stood again and stretched my arms. Below, that black sedan still idled, its flashing blinkers keeping time. I knew my answering machine would be full of messages from Gene Longworth. I wondered if Carol had told Charlie I’d called. What would I say to him when he finally reached out to me?
The fire.
I imagined what it’d be like to be burned alive—quicker than being buried alive and more painful. But what difference does it make? We die, anyway, then become organic matter or stardust or rocks.
Stella died of oxygen deprivation.
Cancer claimed my mother.
Halley, she took pills. But despite taking her own life, despite her own suffering, she saved me. She saved others. She gave me purpose. She gave them proof. But I’m ahead of myself.
The fire.
On the front page was a photograph of the burning factory.
The fire drew attention to the shapes of the building, square windows, high slanted roof, large rectangular door.
It was almost like looking at film negatives.
Dark appeared light. The factory glowed.
I knew what that article would tell me—the story I’d heard hundreds of times—and it did.
I saw the names of the workers who died in the fire, the same women listed on that plaque.
I studied those names, let my eyes slowly drift over each one as though to say to their ghosts: I’ll remember you.
I sat at that table in the Mercantile Library, and I closed my eyes, and I placed my palms face down and pressed them against the smooth grain.
I practiced the breathing technique I’d been taught, up through my toes, out through my head.
I tried to imagine Opal Doucet. My lips became a circle.
My eyes widened, like in that picture of her.
Then, I heard it again, so clearly this time. That warble of noises, that preverbal cry I’d been hearing. Some people will call me crazy, but crazy doesn’t mean I’m not right. I felt something in that room, a haunting.
If this were a movie, the director would cut to my hands as they turned to Dixie About Town and I read the headline: “Earthshine Workers Strike a Match; Several Perish.”
Though I’ve made no uncertain claims about my feelings on the place of women in the workplace, I pray the souls of the Earthshine Girls rest in peace until delivered to their Maker.
Before she could be taken into custody for her involvement in starting the fire, Madame Doucet displayed the pre-telling signs of childbirth, and thus she was escorted by Mrs. Charles Tuttle, with the assistance of others, into a police wagon. May God save that child’s soul.
My mind trained on Madame Doucet, on her pregnancy. She’d gone into labor, that night of the fire. Bertie was with her. But Bertie had gone into labor that night, too—that’s what I’d read in The Juggernaut. That’s what Bertie told me herself.
What I’m about to tell you is the truth, all of it: As I thought about Opal Doucet, there at that table, my legs weakened.
My ankles felt swollen and fat with water.
My body was heavy. My forehead felt tight.
I thought I felt a kick inside me, then a cramp worse than any I’d ever experienced.
I felt like I was in labor, like all the pressures of gravity, the forces that keep us tied to the earth, had come to focus in my core.
My entire body seized. The pain terrified me, sitting there in that library. I thought I might be dying.
But I didn’t die.
I opened my eyes—mine, Nona’s—and the sensation was gone.
Some things are unexplainable, and this was one of them. I can’t tell you how I knew, only that I knew. For a moment, I wasn’t reading about Opal Doucet or thinking about Opal Doucet. I was Opal Doucet.
My therapist once told me it didn’t really matter if an experience is real or not real. Real or not real is the wrong question to ask. One can get stuck because there is no answer. We live in multiple realities. Instead ask: Knowing this, how do I proceed? How can I keep moving forward?
I steadied my breath. I was okay, I told myself. I was tired. Over-stressed. My eyes darted around the room. The librarian click-clacked on her typewriter. Newspapers spread out before me; I could smell them. The man in the wingback chair was now asleep.
Maybe Halley had been right—maybe the factory was haunted by those women.
But Opal Doucet didn’t haunt the factory; she haunted me.
She’d gone into labor the night of the fire, not Bertie Tuttle.
I touched my abdomen, the flatness of it.
The emptiness. I’d never have a child of my own—but for a moment too brief to be counted, I felt it, that baby alive inside me, that baby heading for the light.
What happened to the baby?
Outside, dusk was falling. I’d read enough to make the connections. Bertie knew Opal Doucet. She’d been with her the night of the fire. It was Opal Doucet who’d gone into labor that night. It was Opal Doucet who’d given birth.
You don’t know Bertie Tuttle.
I admit it—I didn’t.
We always do this, don’t we? We berate our younger selves for not knowing what we should have known, for not seeing things with the same clarity as our future selves.
How could we have been so foolish? If only we’d done something different.
We look back and regret decisions we didn’t make, actions we didn’t take, a life that could have been lived.
But by the time we realize this, it’s too late.
A midlife crisis. A midlife chasm. A division of selves.
In that moment, I felt cheated. Used. The anger came easily. The hard part was grief. Mourning the idea of something but not the thing itself. Would I have been happier, then, in a life without Bertie Tuttle? Would I have become someone else?
Real or not real?
There are no answers.
Rage thumped at my fingertips. I had the sudden urge to move my body, like I might spontaneously combust if I didn’t.
Halley had been right: I didn’t know Bertie Tuttle.
But now I blamed her for what happened to me—for what happened to all of us. I was angry and full of grief, yes, but I was something else: I was willing to act.
There’s nothing more dangerous than a woman with nothing to lose.