She could hear them below, the heavy tramp of feet, boxes set down with a dull reverberant thump, a soft curse, the door slamming. She wouldn’t go down there. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t do anything at all but just sit here until Will came up the stairs with his doleful eyes and penitential face and gave her an explanation, courted her, saw to her needs instead of his own — or just held her, just for a moment. There was the slam of the door again, sharper footsteps, thinner, like the beating of a hammer against a sheet of tin, and then the girls’ voices rising to her in a pitched-high gabble that gave her no comfort at all. Edith said something. Ida responded. Edith went off again. She strained to hear, but the walls and floors distorted the sense of it till she couldn’t tell whether they were as heartsick and disoriented as she herself was or caught up in the novelty of the place and the day and the task ahead of them. There went Edith. There Ida. And then one of them was in the kitchen, a banging there, metal on metal, and it was Ida, it had to be, settling in.
It was only then that she lifted her eyes to the room, to see again where she was, to study the peeling whitewashed boards that ran up the walls and across the ceiling without differentiation, the window cut there like a dark demonic eye, the plain porcelain chamber pot set in one corner in advertisement of its function, the water-stained armoire in the other, its mirrored door dull as a sheet of lead. The next cough caught in her throat and she took a shallow wheezing breath and held it, then pushed herself up and went to the washstand. There was a pitcher of water there beside the basin and a chipped ceramic cup that seemed to have some sort of residue at the bottom of it. She breathed out, then in again, then once more, deeper now, expanding her lungs, and the cough didn’t come. How long the water in the pitcher had sat there she couldn’t say — was it from Will’s last visit? Or had the boy freshened it that morning? No matter. She lifted the pitcher to her lips and drank till droplets spilled down the front of her jacket.
The moment passed and she felt marginally better. She was going to have to get control of herself, will herself to get better and be the sort of wife she knew she could be if she could just get past this sinking feeling that had brought on the spasm as much as anything else because hadn’t she been breathing freely down there at the beach? Less than an hour ago? And wasn’t the air pure, just as Will had promised? That was when she turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. There was a figure trapped there beneath the dull sheen, a figure that mimicked her every motion though it didn’t look like her at all, and that was because the mirror was cheaply made, a pure lens of distortion like one of the mirrors in the fun house at the arcade. The woman staring back at her had a wasted filmy look, the flesh tightened at the jawline and raked back around the orbits of the eyes, and when she stood up straight in her traveling clothes and arched her back and threw out her chest, she saw nothing there, just a pinched descending line from the pale blotch of her face to the fixed hem of her brown twill dress.
She moved closer, ignoring the sounds from below — a clangor, a thump, Will’s voice raised in command — and took a good hard look. And then, without even knowing what she was doing, she was loosening the jacket and unbuttoning the shirtwaist to reveal her camisole and the white tatting that edged it. Her clavicle — was that what it was called? — shone in the weak light as a hard raised slash of bone over flesh so bloodless it might have been the flesh of a veal calf. Fascinated, she peeled the camisole down to the upper edge of her corset — never mind the cold — and there were her breasts revealed. What had been her breasts. Nothing there now but the nipples, as if she were a child all over again. She’d lost weight, of course she had, she’d known that all along. The first doctor had put her on a milk diet and then the second — Dr. Erringer, the one who’d auscultated her and listened and thumped and pronounced the inescapable diagnosis in his soft priestly tones — on red meat, and she tried to eat, she did, but what the mirror gave back was undeniable, unthinkable, fraught and ugly and pointing to one end only because this wasn’t the fun house but the real and actual.
I’ll tell Will, she was thinking, frightened all over again, terrified. Tell him it’s not going to work, tell him I need sun, not gloom, comfort, pampering, civilization, that this is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Tell him I can’t be his wife, can’t sleep in the same bed with him, can’t do what’s expected of a wife because my bones won’t stand it, my lungs, my breasts, my heart, my heart…
When was the last time they’d been husband and wife? Before her hemorrhage. Before December, anyway. And before that, after she’d begun to lose weight and Dr. Erringer had informed her that consumption was not hereditary as people had believed all these years but a disease caused by infectious agents, by microbes that were so small as to be invisible, she’d been afraid for Will, afraid of infecting him, and yet he was needful and she was too and their marital relations went on. With one proviso: she wouldn’t kiss him. Wouldn’t kiss anyone, not even Edith — not on the lips. That was her true terror — not that she herself would succumb, which on her bad days she saw as increasingly inevitable no matter how much Will tried to talk it away, but that she would infect the ones she loved the most.
She turned away from the mirror, buttoned herself up and crossed back to the bed. The chill of the place — of a room in a wind-besieged house that had been allowed to go cold because there was no one there to feel it, because it had been derelict, run-down, cheerless — set her to shivering, and she wouldn’t wrap herself in the filthy bedding no matter if she shivered to death, but she laid herself down on the mattress, using one arm for a pillow, pulled up her legs and curled into herself. Sleep, that was what she needed. If she could just rest a bit, she’d feel better, she knew she would. She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. And the room, with its wheeling drift of dirt and the stained armoire in one corner and the chamber pot in the other, vanished into nothingness.
The Kitchen
She awoke to a distant thumping, as if to the beating of an outsized heart, a heart as big as the house itself. Thump, thump, thump. For the first moment, staring at the unfamiliar walls, she didn’t know where she was, and then it all came back to her in a rush: she was on an island raked with wind, an island fourteen miles square set down in the heaving froth of the Pacific Ocean, and there was nothing on it but the creatures of nature and an immense rolling flock of sheep that were money on the hoof, income, increase, bleating woolly sacks of greenback dollars — or at least that was the way Will saw it. Will, whose footsteps, heavy tread, were coming up the stairs to her, thumping, thumping. She held herself very still, counting off the intervals between her breaths, fighting back the urge to cough because one cough, the first one, would lead to another and then another, till the whole unraveling skein played itself out all over again.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. Then there was a knock and Will’s voice, soft and inquisitive: “Marantha, are you there? Are you asleep?”
She was gathering herself — it was New Year’s Day, they were in their new home, here now and no place else, and they were going to put things in order, celebrate the day, live and breathe and take in the air, the virginal air — but she wasn’t ready yet. She needed a minute. One more minute. She didn’t answer.