It isn’t very pretty. She’s joined a monologue about a man, one of the girl’s father’s friends. Using the kind of language that would earn Lottie a smack upside the head from Clara and a night in her room without supper, the girl is describing the most pornographic of fantasies about this fellow. Lottie wouldn’t repeat what she’d heard, and I don’t see any need to improvise, but the girl’s inventions made her cheeks burn. Nor is that the worst. From lust, the girl moves to anger. When she’s finished describing what she’d do with the older man, she starts in on her sisters. They’re younger, and has the girl ever stopped loathing them? From the first moment her mother had announced her pregnancy, there was that much less of her and the girl’s father for her. The birth of her first sister made a bad situation intolerable. Her second sister’s appearance, the following year, poured salt in a gaping wound. She, who had had nothing to do with these babies’ creation, no say in the decision to bring them into the world, was expected to act as their third parent, to surrender her life to her sisters. She never lost the sensation she’d experienced holding them when they were infants, the maddening awareness of their delicacy, their fragility. Their paper-thin skulls, the soft-spots gently throbbing, had offered her an almost unbearable temptation, kissing-cousin to what she felt handling her mother’s fine china, that urge to hurl the teacups against the wall, smash the saucers to the floor, watch it all burst into fine shards and powder. It was that same feeling, but magnified, intensified to the tenth power. Cradling her sisters in her arms, she sensed herself standing at the edge of a precipice, one step away from a lunge that would ever end. That sensation, that awareness of the violence trembling at the edge of her fingertips, was delicious. It was like drawing your nails slowly over a patch of skin that was itching, so that you felt it in the back of your mouth. There was the same mixture of pleasure and agony. As her sisters grew, so did the possibilities for harm. How often had she let her hands linger on their necks, trailing over their soft, downy skin, imagining what it would be like to slide her fingers around them and squeeze? How often, when she was drying the dishes, had she tested the heft of one of the sharp knives, imagining what it would be like to press the point against their throats, watch the skin dimple around it, then push until it slid all the way in? How often, playing with them, had she shoved a little too hard, pinched a little too fiercely, passed off as accident what was purest intention? How often had she stood at that precipice, one foot raised, balancing, feeling the emptiness in front of her beckoning, calling her as intimately as any lover? All it would take to send her plummeting was a sudden breeze, and how she prayed that breeze would come.
With a shock, Lottie realizes that the girl she’s been listening to is herself. That’s her mouth saying those horrible things. That’s Gretchen and Christina whose lives are being threatened. That’s Italo playing lead in that x-rated fantasy. Glancing about, she sees that she — the other one, I mean — is surrounded by her family, Clara, Rainer, and her sisters forming a tight circle around her, her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents encircling them. Everyone’s face is frozen in the same, blank stare, and everyone is carrying on their own monologue. None is any nicer than what Lottie hears her other-self saying. Quite a few are worse. Here’s Clara, regretting that she never brought that tinker who came around the house every other week up to her bedroom. He was tall, and his hands and feet were big, not to mention that nose. Maybe he’d have been able to satisfy her. Here’s Rainer, bemoaning the idiots who surround him, the buffoons he’s forced to spend his days beside and who wouldn’t understand the least of his thoughts, who understand only the satisfaction of their animal urges. Although, to be honest, none of his wretched family is as smart as even the dumbest of his co-workers, but what can you expect, with a house full of women? Here’s Gretchen, wishing she were strong enough to hold the pillow over Christina’s face until she could be the youngest again. Here’s Christina, wondering what it would be like to set fire to that dog that scares her with its barking every time she walks past it — and while she’s at it, why not set fire to the old woman who owns the dog and laughs at her fright? And so and so on out from there, everyone uttering their most secret depravities.
Lottie feels her skin crawling, as if the words she’s heard are ants scrambling across it. Her head spins. She claps her hands over her ears, but it’s too late. Those ants have already found their way into her head and are running madly round and round her brain. She pulls away from the scene, lowers the telescope, so to speak, until she’s back above the highest waves. The roar of the ocean, she understands, is the accumulated voices of this multitude, of who knows how many monologues of rage, pain, and frustration. She hangs in space, still listening to Helen speaking in the darkness, and the sea begins to churn beneath her. When the Schmidts crossed the Atlantic, Lottie had stood at the railing on the front deck watching the sea froth as the ship sliced through it. Now the water below bubbles and foams in much the same way, as if it’s a giant pot under which the gas has been turned to high. The people floating there are tossed in all directions; despite which, as far as Lottie can tell, they continue talking. Something is coming. Lottie can feel it rising beneath her, shouldering the ocean aside as it ascends from unimaginable depths. Something is coming. Lottie hears Helen’s voice rising, feels the bag of slivered almonds pressed against her breast. Something is coming. Lottie can see its outline forming in the water, a rounded shape larger than any object she’s ever seen, larger than the ship that brought her to America, larger than Brooklyn Bridge, larger than the dam her father is helping to build. It’s drawing closer, increasing in size as it comes, until it breaks the ocean’s surface and Lottie sees that it’s a mouth, a titanic maw ringed with jagged teeth the size of houses. It continues to rise toward her, waterfalls streaming down its sides, waves crashing against it, hundreds of people sliding down into its cavernous gullet. It’s like the mouth of an inconceivably huge snake, one of those monsters you read about in ancient myths, so big it wraps around the earth and holds its own tail in its mouth. Lottie sees that it’s closing, that its edges are rising to meet one another, and that when they do she’ll be caught within them, dragged down to wherever it is this thing calls home. Lottie tries to withdraw further, to raise herself to a safer distance, but it’s no use. She’s as high as she can go. Helen is shouting, the enormous jaws climbing with each guttural cough and grunt. Lottie feels herself overwhelmed. The sheer size of this thing — it’s as if the immensity alone threatens to extinguish her, blow her out the way a strong wind would a candle. Faced with that mouth, that throat leading down to endless depths, Lottie feels herself flicker. She tenses, pushing the bag of almonds into herself so fiercely it actually hurts, and in that momentary flare of pain she’s saved. Without really thinking about it, she clutches the bag, wheels back her arm, and throws the bag as hard as she can at the sound of Helen’s voice. The jaws are scaling the sky to either side of her, each one taller than any building, when the bag of slivered almonds strikes Helen full in the face.