And whether because her dark, imploring eyes are beginning to glisten, or because, in the last week or two, my sister’s sunny bungalow has grown truly unbearable, her six happy children constant reminders of my own shortcomings and failures, I feel my resistance fading.
I hesitate, briefly, then exhale—and nod.
“Oh, will you, will you, really?” She claps, she jumps, she pirouettes; she looks all of twelve years old. “But that’s marvelous, marvelous! Come upstairs, we’ll get you fixed up right away. No, leave the broom, it doesn’t matter, really, it will only be trashed again in a couple of hours… Girls, guess who’s coming with us tonight! Bean, will you be a dear and grab the scissors, and you, Theda, bring the silver eye shadow, quick!” They crowd around me, talking all at once, peppering me with questions. “What size are you? Do you like pearls or onyx? Say, do you have a beau? But that’s perfect, we’ll match you up with an awfully nice sweetheart. Don’t be silly, now, everyone wants one, and it’s just for the night anyway, we always like to keep things moving, don’t we, girls?”
And just as I am starting to regret my moment of weakness, they push me into a chair before a three-legged vanity and fall upon me, twittering, giggling, fussing, like a flock of overexcited, maddened children—fall upon me with scissors, tweezers, curling irons, with brushes, perfumes, jars of pomade, with combs, lipsticks, powder puffs—and when, a full hour later, it seems, the frenzy is over and they draw back, spent, I look into the mirror before me and find someone else looking back.
The woman in the mirror is not the thirty-six-year-old mother pining for her children, distraught over her marriage, newly worn-out by the daily labors of scraping off anonymous vomit, her hair tucked away in a somber bun, her face blank like her future. The woman in the mirror is young and enigmatic, her metallic eyelids languid, her bob breathtakingly glamorous, her pink flower of a mouth made for deep moonlit kisses, her whole life in front of her still, one sweet, trembling, mysterious note of anticipation, just like the long, sensuous call of a trumpet that I now hear snaking through the house, emerging I know not from where. Neither do I know how I find myself wearing a cream beaded dress that cascades like shimmering water over my breasts, my hips, rustling and sparkling as I move, my knees defiantly bare; or where I got the high-heeled shoes that produce such delightfully assured tapping when Anita teaches me to dance the Charleston; or how I come to be perched on the piano lid, Greta on one side, Ginevra on the other, our arms linked through, flutes of champagne tipped against our lips, a thin ivory pipe with something dark and viscous inside its carved jade bowl being passed from mouth to mouth.
The smoke smells faintly of burnt flowers, distant lands, and lazy, languorous dreams in which everything unfolds in a warm, hazy, amber-hued harmony, and ever more drowsily, I watch as it curves into flowing shapes—transparent birds, dragons with coral wings, flying arches of medieval cathedrals. But when the soaring stone vaults threaten to rise all around me and my eyelids droop, the chirping children with bright eyes like bits of stained glass and taut mouths of ravenous sinners pull the glamorous young woman who was formerly me out of her reverie and take her up the stairs to the loft and up more stairs to the top of the widow’s tower and, somehow, up more stairs still, the steps luminously, inconceivably, rising through the air into the night skies above—and these skies are nothing like the measured, pale, sensible seaside skies of the world the former me left behind. This world is enchanting, and radiant, and full of whimsy; in this world, the air becomes floral scents become strands of celestial music become multiplying serpentine arabesques like the richest tapestries woven with gold threads become trees with entwined crystal branches become blue starlit clouds become infinities telescoping outward, merging with other infinities become boats that float toward us under light-suffused sails of sheer moonlight—and then I see that these truly are boats, drawing closer and closer.
And I count the boats, for numbers seem solid and sane, and I need to distract myself from the dawning terror of knowing that there is nothing but a void beneath my feet. One, two, four, seven, ten, twelve… Twelve boats—and I can already discern a beautiful youth standing at the heart of each, leaning on an upright oar like a statue posing to be admired, smiling at us, each smile so full of large, dazzling teeth.
“They are coming, they are coming for us!” the girls cry, and in their excitement they bob up and down on the blue heavenly shore, clicking and clacking their heels, all glittering and hard and jeweled like a plague of exotic, gorgeous insects.
“Oh, won’t we dance tonight!” one exclaims, and “Oh, look how hungry they are!” another exhales—and then, turning to the elegant young woman who was formerly me, they all press their hands against their scintillating chests, as if in prayer, and intone together: “Do stay, stay with us forever, we will have dances in the sky every night, it will be glorious, it will be splendid!”
“Please, do say yes,” Theda, the youngest, begs. “We will love you, you will take care of us, you will be like a mother to us!”
At this, I sway a little, then totter down one rung of the luminous ladder. Edna’s alarmed face is thrust close to me as she struggles to pull me back up.
“No, no, she means sister,” Edna whispers. “She means like a sister. A slightly older sister.”
But the words have been said, and as their meaning slowly sinks to the bottom of my soul, all the magic of the night seems to catch on their blunt, dull edge and slide sideways off the world. The boats waver, the intense blue of the stars starts to fade, and my desire to have mindless fun, to shrug off my past, to forget my future, if only for a few wild, careening hours—the desire to be young again leaks out of me, and I see myself through the multifaceted, glinting eyes of the insect girls, the girl-insects, I see myself as I really am, a lonely woman on the cusp of middle age, an anxious mother who has already made all her choices, all her mistakes. And now, once again, I remember my children, my own children, my flesh and blood, my daughter who used to love my bedtime stories, my son who used to spend hours conquering imaginary lands with his army of silver forks, my Angie, my Ro, deprived of my love, of my care, for so long, and the thought is like a sharp blade slicing cleanly through the fabric of this illusion, of all the illusions—and as the truth sinks in, so, too, heavily, inevitably, does my heart in my chest, and so do I, sinking, sinking back down through the air, the golden sky ladder disappearing above me rung by rung, the impassive insect faces of the eleven dancing princesses hanging over the edge of the cloud, staring after me, before vanishing out of sight, blinking out with the stars, with the magic.
The gray house meets me with the rickety floorboards of the balcony. I tear off the ridiculous high heels, then run down the widow’s watch tower, down past the loft, down past the second floor with its mutilated plant corpses. The first-floor parlor enfolds me in its dim, drafty silence. My head spinning, I hasten to find my old sensible shoes, to gather my bucket, my rags, when a woman’s voice sounds behind me.
“You,” the voice says, sadly, “are wearing my favorite dress.”
I drop the bucket just as a light flares up by the window, and there she sits, unmoving and prim, in the only hard-backed chair in the entire house, dressed all in brown, her hands set in resigned stillness on her squarely placed knees. The sight of her pierces my heart with the recognition of a kindred loneliness; but when I approach, I see that she is not like me, that she is still young, only a little older than the girls in the skies. Her face is heart-shaped and white, her eyes wise with grief. She reminds me of Angie, but something about her seems broken. I stop a few paces away, as my breath dies in my throat: a thin silver chain binds her wrists to the wall, and another chain binds her ankles.