“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”
Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”
“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”
“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”
Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”
Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”
“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have yall been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”
When neither child answered, she said: “Now, I want you to be sure and remember to go down and do that first thing Monday morning. And a tetanus shot, too. Swimming in cow ponds and running around barefoot all summer long …”
She trailed off, pleasantly, then resumed eating. Harriet and Allison were silent. Neither of them had ever swum in a cow pond in her life. Their mother was thinking of her own childhood and muddling it up with the present—something she did more and more frequently these days—and neither of the girls knew quite how to respond when this happened.
————
Still in her daisy-patterned Sunday dress, which she’d had on since the morning, Harriet padded downstairs in the dark, her white ankle socks gray-soled with dirt. It was nine-thirty at night, and both her mother and Allison had been in bed for half an hour.
Allison’s somnolence—unlike her mother’s—was natural and not narcotic. She was happiest when she was asleep, with her head beneath her pillow; she longed for her bed all day, and flung herself into it as soon as it was decently dark. But Edie, who seldom slept more than six hours a night, was annoyed by all the lounging around in bed that went on at Harriet’s house. Charlotte had been on some kind of tranquilizers since Robin died, and there was no talking to her about it, but Allison was a different matter. Hypothesizing mononucleosis or encephalitis she had several times forced Allison to go to the doctor for blood tests, which came back negative. “She’s a growing teenager,” the doctor told Edie. “Teenagers need a lot of rest.”
“But sixteen hours!” said Edie, exasperated. She was well aware that the doctor didn’t believe her. She also suspected—correctly—that he was the one prescribing whatever dope that kept Charlotte so groggy all the time.
“Don’t matter if it’s seventeen,” said Dr. Breedlove, sitting with one white-coated haunch on his littered desk and regarding Edie with a fishy, clinical stare. “That gal wants to sleep, you let her do it.”
“But how can you stand to stay asleep so much?” Harriet had once asked her sister curiously.
Allison shrugged.
“Isn’t it boring?”
“I only get bored when I’m awake.”
Harriet knew how that went. Her own boredoms were so numbing that sometimes she was sick and woozy with them, like she’d been chloroformed. Now, however, she was excited by the prospect of the solitary hours ahead, and in the living room made not for the gun cabinet but for her father’s desk.
There were lots of interesting things in her father’s desk drawer (gold coins, birth certificates, things she wasn’t supposed to fool with). After rummaging through some photographs and boxes of canceled checks she finally found what she was looking for: a black-plastic stopwatch—giveaway from a finance company—with a red digital display.
She sat down on the sofa, and gulped down a deep breath as she clicked the watch. Houdini had trained himself to hold his breath for minutes at a time: a trick that made many of his greatest tricks possible. Now she would see how long she could hold her own breath without passing out.
Ten. Twenty seconds. Thirty. She became conscious of the blood thumping hard and harder in her temples.
Thirty-five. Forty. Harriet’s eyes watered, her heartbeat throbbed in her eyeballs. At forty-five, a spasm fluttered in her lungs and she was forced to pinch her nose shut and clamp a hand over her mouth.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Her eyes were streaming, she couldn’t sit still, she got up and paced in a tiny frantic circle by the sofa, fanning with her free hand at the air and her eyes skittering desperately from object to object—desk, door, Sunday shoes pigeontoed on the dove-gray carpet—as the room jumped with her thunderous heartbeat and the wall of newspapers chattered as if in the pre-trembling of an earthquake.
Sixty seconds. Sixty-five. The rose-pink stripes in the draperies had darkened to a bloody color and the light from the lamp unravelled in long, iridescent tentacles which ebbed and flowed with the wash of some invisible tide, before they, too, began to darken, blackening around the pulsating edges though the centers still burned white and somewhere she heard a wasp buzzing, somewhere near her ear though maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was coming from somewhere inside her; the room was whirling and suddenly she couldn’t pinch her nose shut any longer, her hand was trembling and wouldn’t do what she told it to and with a long, agonized rasp, she fell backward on the sofa in a shower of sparks, clicking the stopwatch with her thumb.
For a long time she lay there, panting, as the phosphorescent fairy lights drifted gently from the ceiling.
A glass hammer pounded, with crystalline pings, at the base of her skull. Her thoughts spooled up and unwound in complex ormolu tracery which floated in delicate patterns around her head.
When the sparks slowed, and she was finally able to sit up—dizzy, grasping the back of the sofa—she looked at the stopwatch. One minute and sixteen seconds.
This was a long time, longer than she’d expected on the first try, but Harriet felt very queer. Her eyes ached and it was as if the whole ingredients of her head were jostled and crunched together, so that hearing was mixed up with sight and sight with taste and her thoughts were jumbled up with all this like a jigsaw puzzle so she couldn’t tell which piece went where.
She tried to stand up. It was like trying to stand up in a canoe. She sat down again. Echoes, black bells.
Welclass="underline" nobody had said it was going to be easy. If it was easy, learning to hold your breath for three minutes, then everybody in the world would be doing it and not just Houdini.
She sat still for some minutes, breathing deeply as they had taught her in swimming class, and when she felt slightly more herself she took another deep breath and clicked the watch.
This time, she was determined not to look at the numbers as they ticked by, but to concentrate on something else. Looking at the numbers made it worse.
As her discomfort increased, and her heart pounded louder, sparkling needle-pricks pattered quickly over her scalp in icy waves, like raindrops. Her eyes burned. She closed them. Against the throbbing red darkness rained a spectacular drizzle of cinders. A black trunk bound with chains clattered across the loose stones of a riverbed, swept by the current, thump thump, thump thump—something heavy and soft, a body inside—and her hand flew up to pinch her nose as if against a bad smell but still the suitcase rolled along, over the mossy stones, and an orchestra was playing somewhere, in a gilded theatre ablaze with chandeliers, and Harriet heard Edie’s clear soprano, soaring high above the violins: “Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep. Sailor, beware: sailor, take care.”
No, it wasn’t Edie, it was a tenor: a tenor with black brilliantined hair and a gloved hand pressed to his tuxedo front, his powdered face chalk-white in the footlights, his eyes and lips darkened like an actor in a silent movie. He stood in front of the fringed velvet curtains as slowly they parted—amid a ripple of applause—to reveal, center stage, an enormous block of ice with a hunched figure frozen in the middle.